Notes
[Notebook: DB 61 Warm]
[Sunday 15 July 2007 - Saturday 21 July 2007]
Sunday 15 July 2007
[page 102]
Monday 16 July 2007
PROPER DISTANCE = PROPER TIME How many paces from here to the shop? how many action (= how much time) does it take to build a house?
The value of capital is that it allows one to do things (like washing up clothes) in less time. In addition, by fixing strings of action, it brings new possibilities into action, like flying and growing our own food. [this is done by fixing and exploiting meanings, ie mappings. Capitalism relies on the mapping between money and value; Divinity of Money]
Capital decreases apparent distance [eg bookmarks]. We want to equate capital with space, consumption with time.
In the communication network, we measure distance by round rip delay, 'pinging'. Ping - Wikipedia
Tuesday 17 July 2007
Accurate accounting + good model --> optimization.
[page 103]
SELECTION --> OPTIMIZATION (what is optimum is determined by the selector)
We begin with time alone hidden in the initial singularity, with a frequency of ℵ0 cycles per something. Since there is nothing else, frequency has no meaning, and we can attribute eternity to it, ie interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. Aquinas 45
Quantum mechanics interprets messages as state functions.
relativity = network properties
quantum mechanics = entity properties.
State function is an operator. A message results from a transformation in the transmitter and induces a transformation in the receiver. 'I must tell you | that dad is dead.
phys01spacetime
phys02light [now 1: time; 2: spacetime; 3: light. . . . ]
Perfectly coded message has maximum entropy and therefore the symbols are equiprobable.
Peacock 219: 'It is generally believed that all the interactions of nature are described by fields that are introduced to allow the operation of various gauge symmetries.' Peacock
'Wrote an ecstatic British contemporary "If ever the enterprising spirit of our merchants shall succeed . . . it will be by making
[page 104]
the Christian missionary his Pioneer. (Miscellaneous Papers Relating to China, Sir G. T. Staunton, London, 1850) Townsend page 96
Entropy: Our description of the Universe will be in terms of information and information processing rather than energy and energy processing, as in classical physics and engineering. Although information and entropy may seem conceptually different, they are both measured by counting. Simply, the amount of information carried by any point in a certain space is equal to the entropy of that space.
In physics, the energy per degree of freedom, and therefore per unit of entropy is a pure count.
Information theory adds a weighting to this count:
When all the [probabilities of the states, symbols or letters] pi are equal, H is at a maximum and the two equations become the same.
In statistical mechanics the energy per degree of freedom is a constant. [at a given temperature, = 1/2 kT Huang p 149]
Townsend page 100: 'The Church had become a partner in Western imperialism and could not well disavow some responsibility for its consequence.' (A History of Christian Missions in China, Kenneth Scott Latourette, New York, 1932 Latourette)
page 102: 'In the suppression of the T'aipings, however,
[page 105]
eighteen provinces were devastated, an estimated twenty million lives were lost, and men, markets and capital scattered.
page 114:'The Chinese intellectual was the privileged heir to the immense cultural heritage of several thousand years, to which a complicated written language crossed barriers of time and dialect to give unity and continuity.' [rather like Latin in the Roman Catholic Church]
The Roman Catholic Church has huge momentum and will not be turned around in a hurry,
MOMENTUM = ENTRENCHED (self maintaining) STRUCTURE
Townsend page 116 '[1911] A Chinese Republic was proclaimed and Sun Yat-sen, in America at the time, was hurriedly called to Peking and proclaimed president.'
Wednesday 18 July 2007
Townsend page 145: 'Getting rid of the landlords could have been done for the peasant. The landlords could have been summarily dispossessed, those guilty of gross offenses or blood crimes imprisoned or shot, and the land parcelled out and delivered to him on a platter together with a title deed. To have done so would have loosed the peasant's bonds. It would not have cut them. He would have remained bound, mind, hand, foot, prey still to fear and subject to rumour and passivity. Instead it had to be done by him. And the cadre's task was to inject his heart with courage and so guide him, without pushing or pulling, that he would 'spit out his bitterness' openly and unafraid.'
[page 106]
This we must do against all the entrenched and deceptive belief systems in the world that underpin the breaking of human symmetry.
Thursday 19 July 2007
One of the longest running debates in the history of physics surrounds the question 'is the Universe continuous or discrete?' Atomists, whose literary record goes back to Democritus, opt for discrete. Sylvia Berryman Others. like Aristotle. opt for continuity. Aristotle - Physics Even then, we might say that the agreed answer is both, for the Atomists' atoms moved in a continuous space.
The situation is pretty much the same now. Physicists see a continuous space inhabited by a continuous field (or set of fields, since they have not yet been unified) whose excitations appear to us as particles.
But there is a distinction to be made here. When we observe the Universe, we see only discrete events. Modern experimental physicists set up elaborate structures to 'prepare' the fields in a certain way, and then count the particulate events that result. We do not observe the continuous space or the continuous fields; they are products of our mathematical imagination created in an effort to obtain a logically satisfying explanation of why we observe the particles that we do.
As we move back in time toward the initial singularity, the modern theory suggests that the smooth
[page 107]
space - observed particle picture breaks down at the Planck length when particle become so energetic that their Schwarzchild radius is comparable to their de Broglie wavelength. Peacock page 257. One needs to know quite a lot of physics to make sense of this statement. We will follow two parallel courses, explaining the physicists' view of what is going on behind the scenes and using this picture to map our transfinite network model onto the observations. Model
Everything we observe, that is every message we receive from our environment, is encoded in discrete particles. So we fall in love by exchanging photons, phonons, and various atoms and molecules like pheromones. These physical events are processes by our sensory, nervous and hormonal systems to finally yield the sort of feelings represented by the words 'I'm in love', 'I love you', and so on.
We will deal with the processing of observations later. Psychology Here we are concerned with the physical particles which are exchanged. All these exchanges are discrete, and the unit of exchange is the quantum of action, introduced by Planck in 1900 to remove an infinity from the classical continuous calculation of the interaction between matter and radiation. The quantum of action is in a sense the fundamental unit of physics.
The quantum of action precedes space and time
Time is a count of actions.
The quantum of action is the basic unit of scale in physics. We are accustomed to scaling (measuring) things in terms of either space or time, but I suggest
[page 108]
here that the quantum of action is a natural measure that was fixed before the advent of space and time. In terms of an expanding Universe, the quantum of action came into existence before the Universe reached the Planck scale. It in fact determines the Planck scale.
Phys02Spacetime
We have given ourselves an initial singularity whose life is parametrized by time and nothing else. The frequency of the clock marking the time is E/h, rather like a photon. Each cycle of the clock is a quantum of action, and we map this setup onto the natural line considered as a numbered and ordered series of ticks of no particular 'distance' apart. This 'line' can be constructed by an entity (a 'Peano machine') that simply adds 1 to its history at each cycle.
Now we introduce space and the idea that a system can step through space in the same way that it steps through time. While the temporal stepping is measured by energy, the spatial stepping is measured by [momentum] In physics space is orthogonal to time, and without a time dimension may be considered eternal. Space functions as memory.
Space is subject to Newton's law: it does not move unless it is moved. We may thing of a treelike system of action penetrating layers of space and changing them. A space is a memory changed only at points subject to action, ie
[page 109]
read/write.
Space comes into existence when there are more states available than can be modified in a cycle, to that some of them become permanent by failing to change. Given the size of the transfinite network and the limited power of Turing machines, we expect space to be common and to grow in size x duration as the size increases and processing power (= energy+ remains constant, ie invariant with respect to t.
Peacock: 'in full quantum gravity, the very notion of a classical background spacetime ceases to exist. This is why it has not so far been possible to go beyond the case of quantum fields in a curved background.'
COMMUNICATION ==> EQUILIBRIUM
Friday 20 July 2007
Memory - a set of locations where values can be stored which is the same as Hilbert space, each dimension being a location (imagined as a point in the domain of a function) and the value of the function at that point being stored n the location. A similar data structure may be represented in an infinite series, where each index of the series addresses a memory cell and a computer in the cell determines the value of that term of the series.
