natural theology > notes > 17 october 2004

Notes

[Notebook: Language DB 57]

[Sunday 17 october 2004 - Saturday 23 October 2004]

[page 4]

Sunday 17 October 2004

St Andrews Prize for Environment 2005

Submit the Toward Natural Religion Project.

. . .

Monday 18 October 2004

Tuesday 19 October 2004

Trading as a learning process, the most abstract, since one is basically working an arithmetic model of commercial reality. Commerce is already quite noisy, since it depends on all sorts of noisy things like the weather and consumer preferences, which themselves depend on noisy things like molecular motions and human emotions. It is surprising that there is any signal to be found art all. If one is to increase one's 'number' by trading on normalized ( ie constant) index) market, one must be able to predict (to some degree) which securities are going

[page 22]

to rise and which to fall. An operator completely ignorant of the market can do no better than trade at random. On the other hand, a 'divine' trader equipped with full knowledge of everything would be able to win consistently. The only 'divine' trader is the Universe as a whole which does exactly what it is going to do. It has an abstraction level of 0. The totally ignorant agent has an abstraction level of 1. It knows only that the market exists. The rest of us lie somewhere in the interior of the space [0, 1] and as we become more experience our degree of abstraction goes down and our success rate goes up.

This is relevant to the Theology Company, which is trying to fund itself by

a) selling shares in itself for cash or kind; and
b) earning money for itself by selling books, winning prizes (?), grants (?) etc etc.

An important error in many moral systems is that self interest is contrary to community. In fact the benefits arising from community are so great that rational self interest favours the formation of a community.

St Andrews Prize: If we think in terms of the leverage that abstract ideas have over human action, this project is the single most potent act that we can take to improve the fit of the human world with the rest of

[page 23]

the divinity. We are here dealing with the most significant symbol in the series (vector) which determines the human future.

The development section of the site is an attempt to formalize the model in which the notebooks are played out.

How strongly should my life interact with other people's lives?

Every enterprise exists to fulfill a human need (= desire) and as the need has both physical and spiritual dimensions, so does the enterprise that effectively fulfill the need (meets the desire).

Wednesday 20 October 2004

Thursday 21 October 2004

There is much evil in the old religions, belittlement of the physical world, belittlement of women, the attribution of sin to newborns and us all. All these are politically motivated distortions of the truth. They survive because despite their error they form a functional protocol which underlies a fit society. Survival and justice are not always isomorphic., but our hypothesis is that the maximum probability of survival coincides with the maximum of justice, which is also the maximum of entropy.

We see the divinity of the Universe in the mathematical line that runs through Cantor, Hilbert and von Neumann. Cantor, Hilbert, von Neumann To describe even the appearances of the material world we need transfinite formalism. Mathematical

[page 24]

existence and physical existence occupy same space. The density of occupation of any formally defined point in this space is defined by quantum mechanics, relativity and minimum action (survival of the fittest).

The most immediate database is sexual/family (reproductive) politics, the intrusion of the selfish gene into human relationships.

Do the greenies really understand wilderness?

Friday 22 October 2004

Saturday 23 October 2004

The only constraints in wilderness are the formal properties of communication : channel capacity and coding.

Arbitrary linear transformations scaled (multiplied by a number) and rotated (operated on by an operator)

Beyond linear is non-linear (non-deterministic, allowing for catastrophes)

The set of all possible codes is the set of all possible Turing machines?

Our foundation is a mathematical definition of wilderness. A wild system is one that is maximally unconstrained; minimally constrained. Constraint arises from communication, so we may guess that minimally constrained mean minimal

[page 25]

communication. This would tend to suggest a wilderness as a mass of independent particles. But only one particle can exist independently, the Universe as a whole.

'. . . ordering energies arising from interactions. . . ' Nature 431:666 7 October 2004 Babaev

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'
Amazon back

Casti, John L, Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, John Wiley and Sons 1996 Preface: '[this book] is intended to tell the general reader about mathematics by showcasing five of the finest achievements of the mathematician's art in this [20th] century.' p ix. Treats the Minimax theorem (game theory), the Brouwer Fixed-Point theorem (topology), Morse's theorem (singularity theory), the Halting theorem (theory of computation) and the Simplex method (optimisation theory).
Amazon back

Dirac, P A M, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (4th ed), Oxford UP/Clarendon 1983 Jacket: '[this] is the standard work in the fundamental principles of quantum mechaincs, indispensible both to the advanced student and the mature research worker, who will always find it a fresh source of knowledge and stimulation.' (Nature)
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Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. ... In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.'
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Mead, Margaret, Blackberry Winter, Peter Smith Publishers 1989 Amazon: Editorial Review 'During her lifetime, Margaret Mead (1901-78) was the world's most famous anthropologist. In this insightful memoir, she recalls her childhood, her place in her family, and how the lessons learned and ideals instilled then shaped her life. ... In Blackberry Winter, she reflects on her life and work, through three marriages and ground-breaking fieldwork in eight cultures. But perhaps her most fascinating revelations are the "gathered threads" of her own experience of childhood, motherhood, and grandparenthood. From her observations of sex roles, childhood, and parenting styles in other cultures, her appreciation of her own upbringing, and her shift to single, working motherhood after the break-up of her third marriage, she anticipated and pioneered a new model for family life. ... ' Lynne Auld
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Pétrement, Simone, and Raymond Rosenthal (translator), Simone Weil: A Life, Schocken 1988 Jacket: 'A French Jew who broke with Judaism and wavered on the edge of Roman Catholicism, the daughter of a respected physician, the sister of one of the century's greatrst mathematicians, Simone Weil devoted her life to the search for truth and God amid the poverty and misery of the poor.

Since her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Simone Weil has become a person of legend. T>S> Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Coles spoke of her as the saint of the twentieth century who lived the contradictions of our era more intensely and continuously than anyone else.'
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Reid, Constance, Hilbert-Courant, Springer Verlag 1986 Jacket: '[Hilbert] is woven out of three distinct themes. It presents a sensitive portrait of a great human being. It describes accurately and intelligibly on a non-technical level the world of mathematical ideas in which Hilbert created his masterpieces. And it illuminates the background of German social history against which the drama of Hilbert's life was played. ... Beyond this, it is a poem in praise of mathematics.' Science
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Tymoczko, Thomas, and (Editor), New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology, Princeton University Press 1998 Jacket: 'The traditional debate among philosophers of mathematics is whether there is an external mathematical reality, something out there to be discovered, or whether mathematics is the product of the human mind. ... By bringing together essays of leading philosophers, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists, TT reveals an evolving effort to account for the nature of mathematics in relation to other hman activities.'
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'
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von Neumann, John, and Robert T Beyer (translator), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1983 Jacket: '. . . a revolutionary book that caused a sea change in theoretical physics. . . . JvN begins by presenting the theory of Hermitean operators and Hilbert spaces. These provide the framework for transformation theory, which JvN regards as the definitive form of quantum mechanics. . . . Regarded as a tour de force at the time of its publication, this book is still indispensible for those interested in the fundamental issues of quantum mechanics.'
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Papers

Babaev, Egor, Asle Sudbo, N W Ashcroft, "A superconductor superfluid phase transition in liquid metallic hydrogen", Nature, 431, 7009, 7 October 2004, page 666-668. Abstract: 'Although hydrogen is the lightest of atoms, it does not form the simplest of solids or liquids. Quantum effects in these phases are considerable (a consequence of the light proton mass) and they have a demonstrable and often puzzling influence on many physical proerties, including spatial order. ...'. back

Links

Käthe Kollwitz - Wikipedia Käthe Kollwitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities back

Moses Mendelssohn - Wikipedia Moses Mendelssohn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Moses Mendelssohn (6 September 1729 – 4 January 1786) was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) is indebted. He has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature and from his writings on philosophy and religion came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Germans and Jews. He also established himself as an important figure in the Berlin textile industry, which was the foundation of his family's wealth. Moses Mendelssohn's descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and the founders of the Mendelssohn & Co. banking house.' back

Nicholas Bourbaki - Wikipedia Nicholas Bourbaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935. With the goal of founding all of mathematics on set theory, the group strove for rigour and generality. Their work led to the discovery of several concepts and terminologies still discussed.' back