vol 7: Notes
2005
Sunday 29 May
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: DB 57 Language]
[Sunday 29 May 2005 - Saturday 4 June 2005]
[page 149]
Sunday 29 May 2005
Writing is a technology, a means of changing elements of the world.
Zee: A field is a function of spacetime (and so just like a table, an object in (function of) spacetime. Zee But whence the spacetime in the first place? We need a deeper theory, and I suppose really I am proposing the transfinite network as an alternative. What is the transfinite network a function of? Itself. The transfinite network both creates a vast symbolic space and shows how that space is created, by the generation of meaning, which allows us to formally permute (talk about) things that are too 'heavy' to move around themselves. So we may rearrange the furniture in a room by drawing diagrams that represent the furniture in various configurations. A lot easier than actually dragging the furniture itself into a set of possible configurations.
The fundamental manifestation of the transfinite network is gravitation (that is if we can map the general theory of relativity convincingly onto the network). Some features:
a) communication delay (special relativity)
b) particles and error prevention (Shannon)
c) 'collapse' of wavefunction, ie 'encoding as a particle'
d) decoding a {particle} is "preparing a state'.
e)creation
f) selection gravitation?
[page 150]
PEER = no proprietary right: all interactions are contractual between sovereign parties with the right to withdraw (subject to contractual conditions) at any time.
A complex function is a physicists way of mapping a change, transformation or motion, to which detail has been added over 2500 years to give us quantum field theory (which embraces special relativity) and gravitation. Like oil and water, these to areas of theory refuse to mix, even though they function together perfectly in reality.
We propose to use the network model to unify gravitation and quantum field theory. In field theory a field is a function of spacetime. The game is to find the functions that correspond to various observable processes. A table, we may imagine, is also a function. It is a space, sure enough, but a space populated with atoms arranged as wood, glue, screws, paint and so on. We can 'explain' most of this with Quantum Electrodynamics, but what about spacetime itself, ie gravitation? What is spacetime? What determined the spacetime structure of the universe? Spacetime is an attribute of every process. Gravity sees energy/momentum. So what are these? Process = communication process = evolution of a function (Turing, quantum ...)
Monday 30 May 2005
Tuesday 31 May 2005
Wednesday 1 June 2005
Thursday 2 June 2005
Star Wars (with K). Lucas The dark side is error, moral, immoral or amoral. The answer is Shannon,
[page 152]
applied anew at every transfinite peer level. Ultimately what counts is the 'meaning' of a communication, which we take to be the action which the communication inhibits or excites, to love, to war, to whatever at whatever scale.
The transfinite numbers give us a perfect complexity scale. Every communication is meaningful because resources are limited./. Integer = symbol fulfilling the 'Shannon condition' of distinguishability (at some level of error, zero in the transfinite limit). We distinguish the transfinite layers by the alphabet/word (set/permutation) dichotomy, equivalent to word/sentence ... element/permutation.
A amplitude is a product of propagators - path integral : back to Veltman. Veltman
Insofar as a protocol is stable, it has a procedure to deal with every eventuality, partitioned into the classes of normal operation and errors, where normal operations must exist to deal with all errors. As an error gets closer to the root, so rootier processes have to be used to deal with it.
A path integral is a limiting form of a network, the infinite number of sheets with an infinite number of holes.
Already we have a problem (perhaps akin to set paradoxes) that if god is everything how can there be something more, ie 'creation'?
[page 152]
'Sanity' manipulates the probabilities of social events in the same way that wavefunctions manipulate the probabilities of physical events. 'Wave function' taken in full set theoretical entropy, is another name for spirit. So we must consider the 'transfinite wave functions' which arise from the tensor products of Hilbert spaces of transfinite dimension.
Arithmetical weight vs abstract symbol: is 2 bigger than 1? Arithmetically, yes, symbolically (abstractly) no. A permutation is a matter of order not size although we can easily imagine ordering things by size. We can also order with a lookup table, which we enter with two elements and which tells us how they relate. There is no 'nobility' associated with this order, only difference of function in an overall system.
Veltman page 35: 'Of course, whatever we postulate, it will be in the framework of Lorentz invariant quantum mechanics. Only a limited degree of freedom is left.' Veltman
Although they may contain abstract or metaphysical theories, most of the old religions are modelled by various human-like personalities, such as the father, son and spirit of Christianity together with Jesus, Adam, Moses and the other personalities of the Bible. Miles
The entropy flow is (?) conserved in a network as an incompressible fluid (probability) flowing through a plumbing system.
Veltman page 40: 'One may truly be thankful to nature for this: limiting itself to something we can compute.'
Friday 3 June 2005
[page 153]
Wilde: Picture; 'It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things' Yes, but not just human expression, but all communication, which tells us what is going on inside, ie all observables. Wilde
What keeps me moving? a) energy (eternal delight, desire to make things) b) stress, ie the need to get things done to bring an end to (some) evil, eg hunger (personal or social), genocide etc. Can I really launch a new theological paradigm? I seem to think so, but it is not ready yet. Planned launch date 12 January 2010! Something to work towards, to pace (steady) myself.
The real case against Christianity is that there god is stupid: given omnipotence and omniscience, he still had to kill his only beloved son to get things right.
Wilde Picture page 147-8: '[The Roman Catholic Communion] ... stirred him as much by its rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.'
page 148: 'Mysticism, with its marvelous power of making common things strange to us. ... '
Faith seeking understanding. The network model seems intuitively good, but how to express it in the language of both science and theology. Both are based on pragmatism: what is real is what happens. Why is open to speculation.
[page 154]
We discuss quantum systems in momentum, energy or spin representations. Momentum corresponds to spatial detail, energy to temporal detail and 4-momentum to spacetime detail, how spatially resolved times how fast. What we are doing is mapping energy and momentum onto spacetime. But what are they in themselves? Dynamic ordered sets whose cardinal measures are the scalar time frequency and the vector space frequency. For every given 4-momentum (cardinal number p) we have p! ordered sets.
We act to change the frequency of events. Simple events, like the firing of an engine cylinder, can be made quite reliable. The same event occurs again and again with a probability close to one. Even more so in electronic and quantum stationary states, that are many orders of magnitude more predictable than internal combustion engines, which wear, sicken and eventually die, unless regularly overhauled, but even this has its limits.
Trying to control a human system is a different situation again. Here in the end, the would be controller must talk the people into following him because there is a practical limit to the violence of the administration beyond which it is not possible to have a viable economy. In effect, a violent society starves itself to death with auto-immune disease.
Momentum and energy are both names for information (entropy) flow. In the thermodynamic regime the relationship between energy and entropy is governed by temperature S (= H = I) = integral( dQ/T), ie high temperatures
[page 155]
reduce the entropy (and information) carrying capacity of energy. In the quantum regime, energy and momentum are directly related to frequency by Planck's constant, so that we may count the amount of information in a quantum message as Et/h, ie a scalar.
I'm no Einstein, so what I have to present is a dream, not a fait accompli.
What to we have to do to a network to make it look like quantum field theory, ie emit the same messages (particles) as the real world does under the same circumstances?
PARTICLE = MESSAGE = SET OF PARTICLES
Veltman page 183: 'For all practical purposes the Feynman rules represent the content of a theory.' So map Feynman rules onto network rules!
Faith = working hypothesis. A 'pure hypothesis' may in a sense be anything and carry correspondingly little weight. Life must go forward, however, so that we must make considerable investments in 'working hypotheses' (prototypes), which because of this investment become loaded with faith (insofar as they have worked so far) and hope (that the current investment will pay off). Of course the working hypothesis may turn out to be wrong, leading to loss of faith in it and hope for it and the need to find a new working hypothesis. This may explain why religious hypotheses are so sticky relative to pure scientific hypotheses whose truth or falsity are irrelevant to the future wealth
[page 156]
of the scientist (although plenty of ordinary human feeling revolving around the desire for success may be involved.
The world is a network of stable states and transitions between them. If there were no stability, the universe would be over in no time. As it is, some things stay the same for millions or billions of years as a backdrop for events measured in nanoseconds and attoseconds.
Partnership: parallel processing toward a common aim. Maximum speedup 2x, x = ?
Tomonaga page 60: Dirac: 'It appears that the simplest Hamiltonian for a point-charge electron satisfying the requirements of both relativity and the general transformation theory leads to the explanation of all duplexity phenomena without further assumption.' Tomonaga
Page 61: 'Thus Dirac has derived everything about electron spin through Lorentz invariance and that the wave equation must be first order without using a model at all.'
page 62: 'classically indescribable"
Natural theology accepts that we have a deep historical past, which from a practical point of view stretches back to the big bang. Many details of this history have been erased but many of the forces we experience appear to have remained pretty much the same for very long periods. Life, for instance, has worked on the same biochemical principles (and many
[page 157]
of the same molecules) for two or three billion years. The emotional attitudes of an organism, like ourselves, living in a milieu with limited resources, are also likely to be quite common: avoid death, find food and reproduce. Those organisms that did not pull off this trifecta are lost in history, whereas a system that reproduces itself lives on in its children. So wealth (the paraphernalia of fitness) feels good, food, a mate, a home, children, money in the bank, growing investments, all feel good. This is almost tautological, but also fundamental if we are to manage ourselves in a peaceful and effective manner.
Saturday 4 June 2005
Books
| Lucas, George, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, 2005 DVD:Amazon.com editorial review: '... After setting up characters and situations for the first two and a half movies, Episode III finally comes to life. The Sith Lord in hiding unleashes his long-simmering plot to take over the Republic, and an integral part of that plan is to turn Anakin away from the Jedi and toward the Dark Side of the Force. Unless you've been living under a rock the last 10 years, you know that Anakin will transform into the dreaded Darth Vader and face an ultimate showdown with his mentor, but that doesn't matter. In fact, a great part of the fun is knowing where things will wind up but finding out how they'll get there. The end of this prequel trilogy also should inspire fans to want to see the original movies again, but this time not out of frustration at the new ones. Rather, because Episode III is a beginning as well as an end, it will trigger fond memories as it ties up threads to the originals in tidy little ways. But best of all, it seems like for the first time we actually care about what happens and who it happens to.. ... ' Amazon back |
| Miles, Jack, God : A Biography, Vintage Books 1996 Jacket: 'Jack Miles's remarkable work examines the hero of the Old Testament ... from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. ... We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind.' Amazon back |
| Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press 1997 Jacket: 'The Story of Spin, as told by Sin-itiro Tomonaga and lovingly translated by Takeshi Oka, is a brilliant and witty account of the development of modern quantum theory, which takes electron spin as a pivotal concept. Reading these twelve lectures on the fundamental aspects of physics is a joyful experience that is rare indeed.' Laurie Brown, Northwestern University. Amazon back |
| 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. ...' Amazon back |
| Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Random House: Modern Library Paperbacks 1998 Jacket: Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence. He responded that while he was "quite incapable of understanding how a work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint," there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in Dorian Gray'. A few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in him imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde wrote in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I would like to be -- in other ages perhaps."' http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375751513/tnrp">Amazon back |
| Zee, Anthony, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University Press 2003 Amazon book description: 'An esteemed researcher and acclaimed popular author takes up the challenge of providing a clear, relatively brief, and fully up-to-date introduction to one of the most vital but notoriously difficult subjects in theoretical physics. A quantum field theory text for the twenty-first century, this book makes the essential tool of modern theoretical physics available to any student who has completed a course on quantum mechanics and is eager to go on. Quantum field theory was invented to deal simultaneously with special relativity and quantum mechanics, the two greatest discoveries of early twentieth-century physics, but it has become increasingly important to many areas of physics. These days, physicists turn to quantum field theory to describe a multitude of phenomena. Stressing critical ideas and insights, Zee uses numerous examples to lead students to a true conceptual understanding of quantum field theory--what it means and what it can do. He covers an unusually diverse range of topics, including various contemporary developments,while guiding readers through thoughtfully designed problems. In contrast to previous texts, Zee incorporates gravity from the outset and discusses the innovative use of quantum field theory in modern condensed matter theory. Without a solid understanding of quantum field theory, no student can claim to have mastered contemporary theoretical physics. Offering a remarkably accessible conceptual introduction, this text will be widely welcomed and used. Amazon back |
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