vol 7: Notes
2007
Sunday 29 July
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: DB 61 Warm]
[Sunday 29 July 2007 - Saturday 28 July 2007]
[page 109]
Sunday 29 July 2007
The Lord's day. A good Dominican studies four hours per day. Dominicans I have certainly kept that up, and the poverty, although chastity and obedience have been very desultory. The target is a long way off, although it no longer feels so weird to say the universe is divine. Certainly I have seen enough of quantum mechanics and relativity to believe that it is big enough to merit the description and creative and complex enough too.
Quantum mechanics works with the directions and angles of vectors in infinite dimensional Hilbert space.
BIOLOGY - ENTROPY
[page 127]
Error correction by mass : protein (large body, small active sites to suit relatively small molecules O2 H2O, sugars, alcohols, amino aids etc.)
Davies page 6: The uncertainty principle arises from the uncertainty in counting waves and determining frequencies. Davies
The world is full of glamour, excitement, spin and pure bullshit, but these are just the flowering of a set of fundamentals. The getting of wisdom is to learn not to deny the flowers, as idealists, Puritans and Fundamentalists often do, but to see through the gloss to the fundamentals. Surowiecki New Yorker 23 July 2007 page 25. Surwiecki
Individuals and societies (= sets of correlated individuals) that ignore the fundamentals are pretty much doomed to crash. (Collapse, Guns Germs ad Steel) Diamond
Trouble is caused by the sudden release of stored energy. Some technologies (like steam boilers) require large amounts of stored energy. Engineers must then make certain that it is not released explosively and can be released safely if necessary (by safety valves etc)) Where energy builds up by unnecessary constraint, the only safe way to deal with it is by gradual release. In the human sphere this means increasing the bandwidth of communication. Dalrymple
[page 128]
BIOLOGY THERMODYNAMICS --> STATISTICAL MECHANICS
Another layer of resolution.
. . .
The superposition is a trial (the rolling dice) and the particle emitted (ie observed) is the outcome.
Everett III p 144 OBSERVATION ==> MEMORY Everett III
Maybe quantum mechanics does not conserve entropy, it conserves probability, that is it conserves energy in that the local universe always executes aleph(0) operations per time interval. When we come to statistical mechanics and biology, we are concerned with the conservation of entropy, that is the application of knowledge to the transfinite Hilbert spaces of quantum mechanics, so inventing the Hilbert oscillator which takes us from the simple harmonic universe of black body radiation to the complex universe of life.
Christianity is bases n a monstrous falsehood: the non-reality of death. This is possibly true of most of the ancient religions, where immortality is often replaced by reincarnation, ie having children.
About / caveat lector
Dinner is beyond gorgeous. But lust must be controlled by
[page 129]
my limited need and capacity for nutrition. Just one more little bite!
Monday 30 July 2007
de Witt page 158 'von Neumann's catastrophe of infinite regression. de Witt
Continuous functions may become discontinuous at certain points, like tan(pi/2).
If we go public, at least we are dealing predominantly with sophisticated investors, unlike some churches who take money of their customers on the basis of impossible promises.
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Phys? superposition. Wave mechanics and stringed instruments. Fourier integrals and representations of complex [= high entropy] function.
Superposition = local addition = local arithmetic.
A server can be considered as a superposition of all the files that it can serve, and if we look at our internet statistics, we can read off the a posteriori probability that a given file will be served. [files can sometimes be served by computational expansion of a compressed 'kernel' rather like the expansion of a differential equation into all its solutions].
SUPERPOSITION <==> SPACE
[page 130]
Periodic functions = random / ordered.
random: = incomputable (no data, no algorithm)
ordered = computable [on an ordered domain]
The mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics are built on eighteenth and nineteen century efforts to model waves with periodic functions. One of the greatest discoveries was that the periodic functions are solutions to a differential equation known as the wave equation. Wave equation - Wikipedia Further, a complex wave can be modelled by a superposition of simple waves, the idea behind Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis - Wikipedia
From a physicist's point of view, the sound of an orchestra is represented by the function of time which models the pressure on a listener's eardrum. A skilled listener can pick out he various instruments, notes and overtones, the simple ingredients that go into the overall mix.
Those particles which annihilate upon interaction can be said to have no capital. This is the realm of physics [ie physical layer of universe], creation and annihilation as such, without reference to the permanent structure of the which these actions are a part. It all comes down to frequency of creation an annihilation, 10 -x to 10 x seconds -1.
Each high entropy wave is built from a superposition of eigenfrequencies with probabilities (squared amplitudes) p giving H(wave) = -SUMi pi log pi.
[page 131]
That physicists are desperate men is shown by their continuing to work on theories that contradict one another by giant factors.
Life - anything with mass?
Wednesday 1 August 2007
Biology: from global to local.
Physics is ubiquitous; life is localized, point like in effect, in 3-space, or linelike in 4-space.
We want to model the universe with a layered software network built on a physical layer. The physical layer is universal but it is already a layered system, the layers parametrized by the '
energy scale'. The maximum of this scale is the energy of the big bang and the minimum is asymptotic to zero (we assume here).
Different phenomena occur at different scales by a process which physicists call symmetry breaking (which some call 'complexification').
Bonding is essential to life, explained by quantum mechanics as a quest for lower energy.
Thursday 2 August 2007
This tale all started when I read Insight, an attempt to rephrase many of the [psychological insights of the perennial
[page 132]
philosophy. Lonergan
How much evidence do we need? It depends how much risk we want to take. Different people have different ideas about this. Some like riding motorcycles over canyons. Others are afraid to go outside their circle of guards. This tradeoff is know to biology as the k - r spectrum of reproductive strategies - profligate with little chance of success, careful and controlled with correspondingly higher chances of success. r/K selection theory - Wikipedia All this worked out by cardinal number of various subspaces of a universal space, ie topology, what we might call 'meaningless cardinality'.
Classical statistics defines flat probabilistic space - the probabilities of complex events given that there is no control. Probability axioms - Wikipedia In other words all degrees of freedom are independent. This flat space enables us to detect the 'curvature' introduced by quantum mechanics. By entanglement, particles that have communicated are more correlated than complete independence predicts.
BELL'S INEQUALITIES Bell Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia
One makes the transition from hatred ('smash capitalism') to understanding and hopefully the development of paths to improved systems.
Democracy is built around the renormalization group, gradually decreasing the resolution until we see the whole system in one pixel, so to speak. Renormalization group - Wikipedia
[page 133]
One hopes of course, to use the network model to explain the various excellent features of Christianity and to also explain and guard against the errors common to authoritarian religions which tend to be maintained by vested interests.
We are all of course vested in our own interest, but there are symmetries of interest where working in common yields results unavailable to any individual (except perhaps an effectively absolute dictator which can probably be proven not to exist).
'Enlightened self interest' ie a knowledge of how the system works. There is much truth in the Roman Catholic Story but its foundation is false.
'The enlightenment project has failed' (?)
The standard explanation : the low entropy energy form the sun brings the entropy of the system down enough for us to exist. What do we say now :
What I can do is put up a gutter which leads water from the sloping corrugated iron roof to the rainwater [tank]. Despite the enormous complexity of the universe water inevitably runs downhill.
Christie, Parker Pyne: Manipulating the odds by causality. Christie
Consciousness makes us phenomena to ourselves, that is in effect messages from ourselves to ourselves.
Building structures with a pen and an alphabet of words.
[page 134]
Saturday 4 August 2007
We are riding a number of tigers that have got bigger since we climbed on.
8 Love: God is love, initial singularity, energy is eternal delight. This is a model of something unspeakable, whose existence we have to accept because we are here, and when we look back we look down a long corridor of time whose beginning seems to be a point.
Decoding visual problems and decoding intellectual problems [have] many symmetries, all those things which are symmetrical with respect to complexity, ie all the things that are common to every layer of processing. We flit from layer to layer with such facility that we hardly notice the change because our existence is built on all these layers of software, executed by the single cosmic processor.
Love: the paradigm of love must be liberated from ancient ownership.
Culture : all culture are peers. Developing culture from power. Religion:
The initial singularity is the initial degeneracy. The Cantor universe is a model of how many distinct states there would be of this degeneracy (symmetry) was fully broken.
[page 135]
abc, acb, the a state is a symmetry of the other two, a symmetrical context that nevertheless gives the ordering of a and b a meaning by establishing a background space to name them from b near a, c further from a . There is no way to distinguish the permutations xab, xba etc until x itself has a context, ie a higher layer.
In the symmetric network each higher layer serves as a space to give meaning to the layer beneath it.
Maybe my intellectual power has just lasted long enough to sort my own head out and now I can fade happily into oblivion. But first, because I like it so much, I want to get it all down before I die. Not so much the new understanding of physics but the possibilities that I see for peace in the creation of large new and self extending spaces of human spiritual development which will in turn [lead to even greater developments]
I am my own user, and have a best partial control of myself. Throughout history, people have also tried to use (ie control) other people by stick or carrot. Sticks are de facto unjust, and some carrots may be so too if the carrot supplier has undue power. We would like to see the human use of human beings deprecated however, so that we all eventually interact as peers, freely contracted to one another. Our need to continual input, however, gives excessive power t those who control essential resources, ... so resource sharing must also be part of justice.
For any peer layer heaven (god) is all the layers higher and earth is all the layers lower. Not good but vaguely right.
[136]
Entanglement is a resource because it lowers entropy, ie establishes correlation. The initial singularity is 100% correlated with itself and has zero entropy. It is to be detected as an element of every event (god is everywhere and all the time)
ACTION = VOLUME OF SPACETIME
Natural religion is the biggest (and perhaps last) step in making ourselves less special, just a part of the divinity like everyone else. All this was not made just for is. We came into existence because we were both possible and sufficiently probable, and we will go out of existence of our probability drops to zero, impossibility,
With consciousness comes criticism. What or who can be trusted? The foundation of trust is common purpose, common meaning, common view of the world. Here comes the difficulty, however, because information requiring encoding and decoding travels slowly. peace and control come from headroom, the bandwidth in the control system to keep ahead of events, to follow the ball the move the bat so as to achieve a safe sweet impact.
Hitting balls and hitting economic and political targets are the same process at different scales of complexity.
Physicists scale in energy; theologians in complexity
LOVE : FREEDOM : MINIMIZING ERROR
[page 137]
As a parent I maximize my children's chances of success, ie favourable outcomes from their endeavours.
The effect of corruption in a process is to move it away from best practice by unnecessary symmetry breaking, ie nepotism, bribes etc. LEVEL PLAYING FIELD = BUSINESS SYMMETRY.
The bank of earth : the human ground state. people may remain in their ground states or acquire sufficient energy to get themselves into excited states.
The ratio between energy and action in an event depends on the potential guiding the event.
Phys 12: why like this ; de Maupertuis, action, fitness, evolution.
Energy is easy to measure to quanta of energy (eg photons) may be used as symbols for communication, parametrized (like musical notes) by frequency.
Further reading
Books
| Bell, John S, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987 Jacket: JB ... is particularly famous for his discovery of a crucial difference between the predictions of conventional quantum mechanics and the implications of local causality ... This work has played a major role in the development of our current understanding of the profound nature of quantum concepts and of the fundamental limitations they impose on the applicability of classical ideas of space, time and locality. Amazon back |
| Christie, Agatha, Parker Pyne Investigates, HarperCollins Publishers 2003 Amazon Editorial Review Book Description 'Agatha Christie is more than the most popular mystery writer of all time. In a career that spans over half a century, her name is synonymous with brilliant deception, ingenious puzzles, and the surprise denouement. By virtually inventing the modern mystery novel she has earned her title as the Queen of Crime. Curious? Then you're invited to read....PARKER PYNE INVESTIGATES. The personal ad posed a simple question: Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne. The answer is a resounding no for a jealous wife who suspects her husband of infidelity....for a lonely widow driven to assume a new identity....for a distraught mother whose son has been kidnapped....and for the fiancee of a strangely reclusive bride-to-be. But what sort of detective would solicit in the personals? The sort who has a knack for investigating affairs of the heart. For therein lie the darkest motives for murder. And they are proving most lucrative for the hopelessly romantic-and highly suspicious Inspector Parker Pyne.' Amazon back |
| Davies, Paul C W, and David S Betts, Quantum Mechanics, Chapman and Hall 1994-1995 Jacket: 'Quantum mechanics is the key to modern physics and chemistry, yet it is notoriously difficult to understand. This book is designed to overcome that obstacle. Clear and concise, it provides an easily readable introduction intended for science undergraduates with no previous knowledge of quantum theory, leading them through to the advanced topics usually encountered at the final year level. Although the subject matter is standard, novel techniques have been employed that considerably simplify the technical presentation. The authors use their extensive experience of teaching and popularizing science to explain the many difficult, abstract points of the subject in easily comprehensible language. Helpful examples and thorough sets of exercises are also given to enable students to master the subject.. Amazon back |
| de Witt, Bryce S and Neill Graham (eds) , and Hugh Everett III, J A Wheeler, B S DeWitt, L N Cooper, D van Vechten, N Graham (contributors), The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton UP 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book is developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics", and a far longer exposition of his interpretation, entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function", never before published. In addition, other papers by De Witt, Graham and Cooper and van Vechtem provide further dicussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.' Amazon back |
| Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W W Norton and Co 1997 'Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without favor, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.' Amazon.com Amazon back |
| Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Scoieties Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Adult 2004 'As suggested by its title, this book is about societal collapses - past, present and future - and the factors that cause human societies to fail. ... [Diamond's] primary mission is to determine the ecological, political and cultural conditions that lead to collapse and to contrast these with the conditions that favour success. ... Collapse is based on a series of detailed case studies. ... Diamond then provides a fuller exploration of the many rich parallels between these historic cases and select modern societies. ... What emerges most clearly from [his] analysis is the central role played by environmetnal decay in undermining human societies. ... In the end, [his] painstaking toil in the deep mines of history rewards him with sufficient nuggets of hope that he emerges 'cautiously optimistic' about the human prospect. ... The most important lesson to be drawn from Collapse is that resilient societies are nimble ones, capable of long term planning and of abandoning deeply entrenched but ultimately destructive core values and beliefs. This, in turn, requires a well informed public, inspired leadership and the political will to go against the established order of things. ... ' William Rees, Nature 433:15, 6 January 2005. Amazon back |
| Everett III, Hugh, and Bryce S Dewitt, Neill Graham (editors), The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book has developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relativge State' formulation of quantum mechanics" and a far longer exposition of his interpretation entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" never before published. In addition other papers by Wheeler, DeWitt, Graham, Cooper and van Vechten provide further discussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, and Robert M. Doran, Frederick E. Crowe (eds), Verbum : Word and Idea in Aquinas (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan volume 2) , University of Toronto Press 1997 Jacket: 'Verbum is a product of Lonergan's eleven years of study of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The work is considered by many to be a breakthrough in the history of Lonergan's theology ... . Here he interprets aspects in the writing of Aquinas relevant to trinitarian theory and, as in most of Lonergan's work, one of the principal aims is to assist the reader in the search to understand the workings of the human mind.' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' Amazon back |
| Nilsson, Nils J, Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis, Morgan Kaufmann 1998 Preface: This introductory textbook employs a novel perspective from which to view topics in artificial intelligence (AI). I will consider a progression of AI systems or "agents", each slightly more complex than its predecessor. I begin with elementary agents that respond to sensed properties of their environments. Even such simple machines allow me to treat topics such as machine vision, machine learning and machine evolution. Then by stages I introduce techniques that allow agents to exploit information about the task environment that cannot be immediately sensed. ... Because the progression follows what plausibly might have been milestones in the evolution of animals, I have called the approach evolutionary artificial intelligence. I intend the book to be as much a proposal about how to think about AI as it is a description of AI techniques. Examples will be used to provide motivation and grounding.' p xix. Amazon back |
Papers
| Dalrymple, William, "Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage: Challenges for the Nation's Future", The New Yorker, 83, 20, 23 July 2007, page 26-35. 'Imran Khan, the country's great sporting hero, who retired from cricket to enter politics and founded a party called Tehrik-e-Insaaf, or the Movement for Justice, in 1996, initially believed that Musharraf seriously intended to reform the system. But he has joined the lawyers. "This is the first time in our history that the judiciary has asserted its independence", he told me. "Normally. it just sides with whoever is in power. Change is irreversible. You can't have prosperity without genuine democracy and an independent judiciary."'. back |
| Surwiecki, James, "The financial page: Fuel for thought", The New Yorker, 83, 20, 23 July 2007, page 25. ' ... between 1984 and 2002 the average vehicle got twenty percent heavier and its zero-to-sixty acceleration improved twenty-five per cent, while fuel efficiency stagnated. (By contrast, between 1975, when fuel-economy standards were first introduced, and 1984, average fuel economy improved sixty-two percent, without any decline in performance.) This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. it is because the automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas-mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that they're unhappy with the collective result of the choices they made as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.'. back |
Links
| Dominicans Dominicans: Order of Preachers 'WWW.OP.ORG is the official international Web site of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). The branches of the Dominican family are multiple: brothers, contemplative nuns, congregations of contemplative and apostolic sisters, lay persons in fraternities or secular institutes, secular priests in fraternities. "Each one has its own character, its autonomy. However by taking part in the charism of saint Dominic, they share between them a single vocation to be preachers in the Church (Chapter of Mexico, 1992)."' back |
| Fourier analysis - Wikipedia Fourier analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Fourier analysis, named after Joseph Fourier's introduction of the Fourier series, is the decomposition of a function in terms of a sum of sinusoidal basis functions (vs. their frequencies) that can be recombined to obtain the original function. That process of recombining the sinusoidal basis functions is also called Fourier synthesis (in which case Fourier analysis refers specifically to the decomposition process).' back |
| Harmonic analysis - Wikipedia Harmonic analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Harmonic analysis is the branch of mathematics that studies the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves. It investigates and generalizes the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms. The basic waves are called "harmonics", hence the name "harmonic analysis," but the name "harmonic" in this context is generalized beyond its original meaning of integer frequency multiples. In the past two centuries, it has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as signal processing, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.' back |
| Jean le Rond d'Alembert - Wikipedia Jean le Rond d'Alembert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Jean le Rond d'Alembert (November 16, 1717 - October 29, 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.' back |
| Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Joseph-Louis Lagrange, comte de l'Empire (January 25, 1736 - April 10, 1813; b. Turin, baptised in the name of Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia) was an Italian mathematician and astronomer who made important contributions to all fields of analysis and number theory and to classical and celestial mechanics as arguably the greatest mathematician of the 18th century.' back |
| Leonhard Euler - Wikipedia Leonhard Euler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Leonhard Paul Euler (pronounced Oiler; . . . (April 15, 1707 - September 18 [O.S. September 7] 1783) was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist, who spent most of his life in Russia and Germany. He published more papers than any other mathematician in history.' back |
| Probability axioms - Wikipedia Probability axioms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In probability theory, the probability P of some event E, denoted P(E), is defined in such a way that P satisfies the Kolmogorov axioms.' back |
| Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems' back |
| r/K selection theory - Wikipedia r/K selection theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Typically, r-selected species exploit empty niches, and produce many offspring, each of whom has a relatively low probability of surviving to adulthood. In contrast, K-selected species are strong competitors in crowded niches, and invest more heavily in much fewer offspring, each of whom has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood.' back |
| Renormalization group - Wikipedia Renormalization group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In theoretical physics, renormalization group (RG) refers to a set of techniques and concepts related to the change of physics with the observation scale. It was initially devised within particle physics (in the guise of the beta-function and the Callan-Symanzik equations), but nowadays its applications are extended to solid-state physics, fluid mechanics, cosmology and even nanotechnology' back |
| Wave equation - Wikipedia Wave equation - Wikipedia. the free encyclopedia 'The wave equation is an important partial differential equation that describes the propagation of a variety of waves, such as sound waves, light waves and water waves. It arises in fields such as acoustics, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics. Historically, the problem of a vibrating string such as that of a musical instrument was studied by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.' back |
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