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Notes

Sunday 19 December 2021 - Saturday 25 December 2021

[Notebook: DB 87: Cognitive Cosmology]

[page 134]

Sunday 19 December 2021

Back to von Neumann Introductory Considerations. Since we live in Minkowski space, out attempts to understand the world begin with observations in this space so 'in both [the Heisenberg-Jordan and Schrödinger] theories, a classical mechanical problem is initially proposed which is characterized by a Hamiltonian function [of position and momentum].' John von Neumann (2014): Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanicsp7

'Primarily, therefore, we must determine the possible energy levels and then find out the corresponding "stationary states" and calculate the "transition probabilities" etc.'

Von Neumann page 17: 'The fundamental problem of the matrix theory is the solution of the eigenvalue equation ν hμν xν = λ . xμ.' This is to a achieved by both physicists and nature.

[page 135]

in the cognitive world we identify this as an 'insight', the reduction of a cardinal n to the cardinal n - 1. Jeffrey Nicholls (1992a): An essay on value §§73 sqq Knowledge.

The fundamental equation of the wave theory is (q1, . . . qk) = λΦ(q1, . . . qk).

. . .

General covariance means that all viewpoints are the same this is equivalent to saying that nobody, not even the universe, is looking at itself and it is not until the emergence of quantum mechanics that the world begins to observe itself and to generate fixed points, particles.

Here in a sense is a recipe for diplomacy whereby general covariance is equivalent to no prior positions which opens the way for general attraction [love, gravitation] and unification of the body politic.

All the technical stuff in the first eight sites of my would be canon is just a prelude to the final three on faith, hope and charity which embody my attempt to create a religion based on the divine reality which I see in the universe, The plan to go to the US and do a PhD in the Graduate Theological Union has thankfully fallen through and now I can settle in and do my own thing, which is to spend the nest two years writing my home made PhD on the nature of god and then the rest of my writing life developing the religious ideas which were in my original plan, to be the second half of [the Development volume of] naturaltheology.net, the religious technology corresponding to the scientific theology of the first half. I have been down and out of a lot of rabbit holes since I made that plan, but the flow of useful insights has been steady. Jeffrey Nicholls:

[page 136]

Monday 20 December 2021

I marvel at the massive full moon drifting weightless through the sky. Einstein's 'happiest thought' was that in free fall he would not feel his own weight. Newton found that the moon and the apple both fall under the influence of gravitation the moon kept on course by the balance between the centrifugal force of its circular orbit and the gravitational attraction of the Earth. The Einstein alternative is that there is an inertial path through the gravitationally curved space which the moon follows. I am trying to incorporate gravitation into the quantum initial singularity by claiming that it is the result of the fact that the initial singularity, like god and the universe, is the totality of being with no possibility of an outside observer to establish a context for it. [This] is a consequence or an intrinsic property of general covariance which makes it look the same to every observer which is equivalent to having no observer. In some way [this] brings us close to inertial motion and the via negativa - inertial motion is the path of nothing happening. This idea suggests that gravitation in in effect the shell of nothing in which action creates structure which leads to interaction (observation) which brings the particles of the universe to be. In a sense I feel that this is the ultimate expression of symmetry and continuity, the realm of nothing happening which is inhabited by god [since, by definition, nothing happens in god's environment, which does not exist]. This conclusion seems to be the work of a navel gazing monk but also an answer to the old question why is there something rather than nothing: because the god of pure action acts. What we are seeking is a close coupling between pure action, gravitation and quantum mechanics which lies at the heart of my theory of everything. In a sense the section on gravitation is the climax of cognitive cosmology and, like Einstein's perception of weightlessness and Aquinas's perception of simplicity gives us an unconstrained staring point for theology, where unconstrained means free of contradiction. Is this the happiest thought of my life?

[page 137]

Feynman page xxxvi: Hatfield:

It was no secret that combining quantum mechanics and gravitation was going to be a struggle. When a field is quantized, each mode of the field possesses a zero point energy. Since the field is made up of an infinite number of modes, the vacuum energy of the quantum field is infinite. This infinity is quickly disposed of by the normal ordering of the field operators. The justification for doing this is that we are just redefining the zero point of the energy scale which arbitrary to begin with. However, since gravitation couples to all energy, when we add gravity we can no longer get away with this.
Richard Feynman (2002): Feynman Lectures on Gravitation

So the cosmological constant problem, which means the infinite number of modes of the fields, is wrong. This error arises because we are distributing the field over Minkowski space and allowing multiple copies of each mode, whereas in Hilbert space there is only one copy of each mode represented by an orthonormal ray which acts in effect as an item of software which may be executed endlessly in more complex processes, like Wheeler's notion communicated to Feynman that there is only one electron [ie only one electron field, represented by a certain superposition of basis vectors in Hilbert space which can be interpreted as the fourier transform of the internal process that determines the nature of the electron]. One-electron universe - Wikipedia

The upshot of all this is that the quantum field theory is demonstrated by gravitation to be wrong. This critique is a bit too esoteric for scientific theology but finds a natural place in cognitive cosmology which incorporates the essay e35_path_2_toe_Oct2021 which should probably change its name to . . . _Feb2022. First draft of this goes into cognitivecosmology.com.

The evolutionary origin of the 4D Minkowski space seems to make sense but how is it implemented and fixed, in other words how is the spacetime / gravitational structure remembered or is it created anew at every event in the universe? A broader, or perhaps a narrower question is how do the other 60 or so fundamental particles remember their structure, or are they dynamical products also [remembering that the evolution of the wave function is supposed to be deterministic, but every observation is in effect a restart (I suppose), or perhaps it just picks just one of the superposed states and then continues to go its own way, although they do say that an immediate second observation will yield the same result]. Here we may perhaps think of Lagrangians as the underlying symmetries and extremalization as the application of symmetry.

[page 138]

Feynman page xxxviii: Hatfield, ' One mode of oscillation of a string is a massless spin-2 state that can be identified as the gravitom hence the string theory necessarily contains quantum gravity. How? Maybe Kaku can tell us. Michia Kaku (1998); Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory

Django Django (2017 Film) - Wikipedia

Tuesday 21 December 2021

The Christmas holiday seems to be forcing itself upon me in the sense that my work has come to a standstill in a sea of doubt. I am reliving the idea I expressed in 1992 which I called the Hilbert oscillator to describe the intellectual cycle of doubt and uncertainty leading ultimately to certainty and clarity. I am trying to express the theological idea or the creation of the divinity in the simplest possible terms. It seems to be working well but I am aground on gravitation. For a while I have been putting pressure on myself but now I am happy to relax and cruise through my usual annual holiday from Christmas to my birthday. Jeffrey Nicholls (1992): An essay on the divinity of money [2022 revision forthcoming]

Wednesday 22 December 2021

My theoretical life is messy, making incremental progress on many different fronts which I can farm out to one or other of my 11 websites as they seem relevant, maintaining a process of real time documentation which will only finish with my death. The progress is what keeps me going, a tautological definition of hope which only fails when one reaches a terminal dead end. Increasing money and increasing readership also lure me on.

Thursday 23 December 2021

Energy, action and money. From a quantum mechanical point of view, once we have got energy we can do anything. This is based on the notion that

[page 139]

energy is the rate of action and no cloning demands that actions be orthogonal. The pursuit of knowledge and possibility is fundamentally a search into the unknown and energy and action plus the no-cloning theorem facilitate this search because every new action must be orthogonal to all the previous actions and is therefore a look in a new direction which means that instead of going repeatedly over the same stuff the system by its nature is forced to explore new possibilities so the chances of discovery are increased. From the transfinite point of view, given a body of knowledge (orthogonal statements) whose cardinal is m we are searching in the space m + 1 to find an element in the permutations of m which is equivalent to new knowledge. For Einstein, m is Newton and his task, given that Newton's work is a subset of a differentiable manifold, was fo find a general characterization of the differentiable manifold which is a compatible permutation which contains Newton as a special case.

The Hilbert oscillator incorporates the P - NP problem since the search for knowledge is not computable but once we find it the solution is computable and can be checked computably.

Friday 24 December 2021

We may see each permutation of a set as a sequential path through the elements of the set which specifies a particular oder. So given a, b, c we can go from a to b to c and back to a or a to c to b and so on, giving six separate paths. When we superpose these paths the result is a network coupling every element of the permuted set to every other and, following Cantor, we can then permute these permutations to act on an even more complex set, and so on without end. This process creates a layered structure in the universe which contributes to its intelligibility since we can dismantle cells into molecules, molecules into atoms and atoms into fundamental particles each of which has a specialized form of action rather like the set of codes we use to instruct a processor to perform particular tasks. In the world of binary logic, we can do everything with a nand gate. In the world of quantum

[page 140]

mechanics we can do everything with elements of the ring of linear operators which have been identified by the quantum computation community as a set of "universal" gates operations which can perform any possible computation by analogy to the Turing machine. Many believe quantum computation is exponentially more powerful than Turing computation, at least in theory, so that much effort is going into devising systems that can extract results from quantum processes. Fredkin gate - Wikipedia

Saturday 25 December 2021

The roots of a false frame [ie the Christian History of Salvation] - a role for jeffreynicholls.net. [there is absolutely no evidence that we are "wounded by sin", this is the false claim at the centre of the Church's false raison d'etre] Catechism of the Catholic Church: Chapter 3: God's Salvation: Law and Grace

The God of the Hebrew Tanakh fell silent when they were revealed in the Book of Job as a vicious tyrant who set out to win a beauty competition with Satan, their dark side, by torturing Job to show that his fidelity could not be broken. Jack Miles (1996)" God: A Biography, chapter 10.

The writers of the New Testament, the Fathers of the Church and finally the Emperor Constantine and the Bishops of Nicea built a happy ending to the Old Testament beginning with the birth of the Anointed One Jesus of Nazareth and ending with his torture and murder by his Father. This they held to have appeased the Old God for the insult delivered by the first people and made everything good again. We are saved from a non existent paper tiger. First Council of Nicea - Wikipedia

The whole story is both literary genius and complete rubbish, as Darwin revealed to us, but it is so powerful and well established that the very idea that the Universe could be Divine and Theology be a Real Science struggles to gain traction in the Halls of Academia, but we will never be truly saved until it does. This is my dream, which I will carry with me until I die, and do what I can do to break out of the ancient delusion into the true light. Charles Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

[page 141]

The [old] Christian God is not a true lover. They are a vicious tyrant, the shadow of all the ancient and modern tyrants who multiply their own glory by enslaving, torturing and killing their subjects. This god is all power and no compassion, like a typical modern government, a remnant of the zero sum consciousness that sees the world as passive matter rather than creative action.

The New Testament authors did not neatly break out of the ancient frame. Their vicious God had to kill his own Son to grant humanity, like Job, some form of recompense for the evil they had wrought upon them, a shoddy salvation which has entrenched the power of the evil ancient God in the Catholic Church, a direct imperial child of the Roman Empire.

The Christian Churches have gained notoriety in the last few decades by ongoing revelations of child sexual and institutional abuse, but the abuse at the root of their whole business plan lies in perverting the minds of young children to believe in their false framing of human reality. They achieve this through a vast, global and often publicly subsidized education industry which claims religious freedom to perpetrate its falsehoods. Kieran Tapsell (2014): Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse

Three thousand years of Judaeo-Christianity have confined theology into such a tight frame that many people think any alternative is unthinkable. My ambition is to escape from this box, an escape made possible by Darwin and modern cosmology.

Do I sound too bitter? Nothing moves without a bit of force and I must learn some of the art of fighting in the intellectual milieu by making a clear statement of the errors I see and the solutions I propose. My story is that the Universe is not a passive and arbitrary creation of an imaginary god, but is God, playing all the roles traditionally belonging to the creator not just of us

[page 141]

but of itself because, as Aquinas says, it is pure actuality.

If I want to call Christianity a cancer in the body politic I must make a sharp distinction between the Christianity of the heart and institutionalized Christianity. The first comes from the life of Jesus which was primarily characterized by compassion with a little bit of Old Testament style fire and brimstone. It is hard to tell from a distance how much of the New Testament is a true reflection of Jesus and how much arises from the agends of the various authors of the Testament which we now have which shows the hands of many authors, commentators, translaters and editors for about a century after the crucifixion and ascension that it describes. The transition of the life of Jesus into an active and expanding business begins very soon and it began to assimilate the ideas of empire from its Roman milieu culminating in the work of the Christian bishops coopted by Constantine and his contemporaries and successors.

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Further reading

Books

Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett, and David E Schults, S T Joshi (Editors), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, University of Georgia Press 2001 Amazon customer review: 'Ambrose Bierce, in this hilarious book, satirizes all aspects of human behavior. This lexicon that he has created provides often true insight in to the tacit meanings of otherwise benign words. For example, PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. This book is a must-get.' Doshi 
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Christie, Agatha, Endless Night, William Morrow Paperbacks 2011 'The Queen of Mystery has come to Harper Collins! Agatha Christie, the acknowledged mistress of suspense—creator of indomitable sleuth Miss Marple, meticulous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and so many other unforgettable characters—brings her entire oeuvre of ingenious whodunits, locked room mysteries, and perplexing puzzles to Harper Paperbacks…including one of her own ten favorite novels, the classic thriller Endless Night
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Darwin (1859), Charles, The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Cambridge University Press 1859, 2009 'It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable. . . . Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence—on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal—that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement Mary Ellen Curtin 
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Feynman (2002), Richard, Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, Westview Press 2002 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. . . .. Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the principle of equivalence.' 
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Kaku (1998), Michio, Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory (Graduate Texts in Contemporary Physics), Springer 1998 ' Called by some "the theory of everything," superstrings may solve a problem which has eluded physicists for the past 50 years -- the final unification of the two great theories of the twentieth century, general relativity and quantum field theory. This is a course-tested comprehensive introductory graduate text on superstrings which stresses the most current areas of interest, not covered in other presentation, including: string field theory, multi loops, Teichmueller spaces, conformal field theory, and four-dimensional strings. The book begins with a simple discussion of point particle theory, and uses the Feynman path integral technique to unify the presentation of superstrings. Prerequisites are an aquaintance with quantum mechanics and relativity. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout.' 
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Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory (translated by P A Silvermann and M D Friedman), Dover 1957 Jacket: 'The first comprehensive introduction to information theory, this book places the work begun by Shannon and continued by McMillan, Feinstein and Khinchin on a rigorous mathematical basis. For the first time, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, cyberneticists and communications engineers are offered a lucid, comprehensive introduction to this rapidly growing field.' 
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Miles (1996), 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.' 
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Tapsell (2014), Kieran, Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, ATF Press 2014 Back cover: 'For 1500 years the Catholic Church accepted that clergy who sexually abused children deserved to be stripped of their status as priests and then imprisoned. . . . That all changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issues his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that created a de facto 'privilege of clergy' by imposing the 'secret of the Holy Ofice' on all information obtained through the Church's canonical investigations. If the State did not know about these crimes, then there would be no State trials, and the matter could be treated as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with in secret in the Church courts.' 
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Watson, Don, Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant & Management Jargon, Knopf/Random House Australia 2004 Jacket: 'If you are curious to know what 'plausible deniability' and 'asset footprint' actually mean - or if you want to mock the very idea - this is the book for you. An essential reference for victims and saboteurs, Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words is a serious weapon in the struggle against those whose words kill brain cells and sink hearts. Sobering, scathing and wickedly funny, this companion to the bestselling Death Sentence flushes out political and managerial weasels and their hollow words, lampoons linguistic abuse and strikes a much needed blow for truth and clarity.'back

Yourgrau, Wolfgang, and Stanley Mandelstam, Variational Principles in Dynamics and Quantum Theory, Dover 1979 Variational principles serve as filters for parititioning the set of dynamic possibilities of a system into a high probability and a low probability set. The method derives from De Maupertuis (1698-1759) who formulated the principle of least action, which states that physical laws include a rule of economy, the principle of least action. This principle states that in a mathematically described dynamic system will move so as to minimise action. Yourgrau and andelstam explains the application of this principle to a variety of physical systems.  
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Links

Al Jazeera and Agencies, Gabriel Boric wins Chile’s presidential election, ' Gabriel Boric, a left-wing legislator who rose to prominence during anti-government protests in Chile, has been elected the country’s next president. With almost 99 percent of polling stations reporting, Boric won 56 percent of the votes, compared with 44 percent for his conservative opponent, Jose Antonio Kast. In a model of civility that broke from the polarizing rhetoric of the campaign, Kast immediately recognised defeat, tweeting a photo of himself on the phone with his opponent congratulating him on his “grand triumph”. Meanwhile, outgoing President Sebastian Pinera – a conservative billionaire – held a video conference with Boric to offer his government’s full support during the three-month transition.' back

Alex Lo, Resurgent Russia reclaims its status as a great power, ' “The Great European Plain opposes few obstacles to frost and wind and drought, to migrant hordes and marching armies,” he wrote. “In earlier centuries the plain was dominated by vast Asiatic empires, Iranian, Turkish, Mongolian. As the last of these melted away, Muscovy expanded to take their place, expanded steadily though several centuries until it became the largest continuous land empire in the world. Like the tide over limitless flats, it spread with elemental force over an endless stretch of forest and steppe, sparsely settled by backward and nomadic peoples.' back

Anthology - Wikipedia, Anthology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The word entered the English language in the 17th century, from the Greek word, ἀνθολογία (anthologic, literally "a collection of blossoms", from ἄνθος, ánthos, flower), a reference to one of the earliest known anthologies, the Garland (Στέφανος, stéphanos), the introduction to which compares each of its anthologized poets to a flower. That Garland by Meléagros of Gadara formed the kernel for what has become known as the Greek Anthology. Florilegium, a Latin derivative for a collection of flowers, was used in medieval Europe for an anthology of Latin proverbs and textual excerpts. Shortly before anthology had entered the language, English had begun using florilegium as a word for such a collection.' back

Azmat Khan, Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes, ' Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. . . . The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. ' back

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Chapter 3: God's Salvation: Law and Grace, ' 1949 Called to beatitude but wounded by sin, man stands in need of salvation from God. Divine help comes to him in Christ through the law that guides him and the grace that sustains him: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.' back

Django (2017 Film) - Wikipedia, Django (2017 Film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Django is a 2017 French drama film about the life of Django Reinhardt, directed by Étienne Comar. It opened the 67th Berlin International Film Festival. Reinhardt's music is performed in the film by the Rosenberg Trio. back

First Council of Nicea - Wikipedia, First Council of Nicea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The First Council of Nicaea was a council of Christian bishops convened in Nicaea in Bithynia (present-day İznik in Turkey) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in A.D. 325. The Council was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom.' back

Fredkin gate - Wikipedia, Fredkin gate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Fredkin gate (also CSWAP gate) is a computational circuit suitable for reversible computing, invented by Ed Fredkin. It is universal, which means that any logical or arithmetic operation can be constructed entirely of Fredkin gates. The Fredkin gate is the three-bit gate that swaps the last two bits if the first bit is 1.' . . . It has the useful property that the numbers of 0s and 1s are conserved throughout, which in the billiard ball model means the same number of balls are output as input. This corresponds nicely to the conservation of mass in physics, and helps to show that the model is not wasteful.' back

French Voyages, Discovery to Australia, ' Could Australia ever have been French? The English certainly thought so. Through revolution, empire and restoration, late 18th and early 19th century France maintained an unwavering commitment to research and discovery in the Pacific region and in Australia. More interested in science than in new colonies, these early French voyages, led by commanders like Bougainville, Lapérouse, D’Entrecasteaux, Baudin, Freycinet, Duperrey and Dumont d’Urville, were the first to name, describe and beautifully illustrate many Australian species. England may have colonised Australia, but for many years it was France that understood it best. This richly illustrated short documentary film brings to life our fascinating and colourful French history and reminds us of a time when scientific research involved intrepid voyages in tall ships on the high seas, battling scurvy and storms, insects and rats, and hostilities both on board and on shore.' back

James Oaten & Som Patidar, In India, gay, lesbian and trans people can face witchdoctors, exorcists and 'corrective rape', ' Ensuring conversion therapy is outlawed across India could be a long and arduous process. Creating laws in India is the realm of parliaments, but high courts, which sit below the Supreme Court, can make such a ruling by determining that the said ruling is upholding the country's constitution. In the case of Shusha and Sheema, the judge referred to Article 14, "equality under the law", and Article 15, which forbids discrimination based on religion, caste, sex, or place of birth. "This judge used the word 'sex' and expands it to read in sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity," Mr Manuraj said. The judge also referred to a landmark Supreme Court case in 2018, which overturned British colonial-era laws that criminalised same-sex relations, stating that homosexuality was not unnatural, nor a "mental disorder or a disease".' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1992), An essay on the divinity of money , ' The rise of science questioned revelation and the churches as sources of truth, but they have remained in existence because science still lacks the power to ask or answer the fundamental questions of life and death that concern theology. Here I outline a new scientific theology whose model of god derives not from ancient text but from the mathematical theory of text and communication itself. I propose that this model describes the universe of our experience, which is therefore fittingly called god. I then interpret this model using elements of current physical theory. These ideas are then applied to money. The movement of money is an abstract representation of the the activity of society as a whole, just as the flow of momentum in space-time is an abstract representation of the physical universe. My hypothesis is that proper understanding and political control of public cashflows is necessary and sufficient to obtain peaceful civilisation.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1992a), An essay on value, ' 1 We must kill to live. The question before is is whether or not to kill some fraction of the old growth forest (OGF) in the Wingham management area (WMA) in order to keep the sawmilling operation at Mt George alive. Religion 2 Although the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as we have it, is a document based largely on resource, commercial and employment considerations, I believe the Commission is facing a religious issue, and will have no peace until it realizes that fact. 3 Matters of life and death are questions of religion. For those who have power over life and death, deciding what to kill is a question of value. The value system of any organism is determined by the history of its survival. 4 If the decision is good, the benefit from killing will exceed the value of what is destroyed, yielding a profit and enhanced probability of survival. A wrong judgment of value leads to the opposite result.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2021), Essay 30: Cognitive Cosmology, ' Since ancient times philosophers, physicists and astronomers have sought a comprehensive model of the universe. The current modern model comes in two incompatible parts, the general theory of relativity and the standard model. If the universe is one and consistent, and began with a single initial singularity, it should be possible to unite these two pieces. Success has been elusive, however, casting some doubt on progress so far. Further, while current attempts to create a unified model of the universe concentrate on fundamental particles, it seems that a comprehensive model should embrace all stages in the emergence of the current universe from it initial state: it must explain creation, the most interesting property of both the universe and human psychology.' back

John von Neumann (2014), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ' Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann translated from the German by Robert T. Beyer (New Edition) edited by Nicholas A. Wheeler. Princeton UP Princeton & Oxford. Preface: ' This book is the realization of my long-held intention to someday use the resources of TEX to produce a more easily read version of Robert T. Beyer’s authorized English translation (Princeton University Press, 1955) of John von Neumann’s classic Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (Springer, 1932).'This content downloaded from 129.127.145.240 on Sat, 30 May 2020 22:38:31 UTC back

Keith Bradsher & Michael Forsythe, Why a Chinese Company Dominates Electric Car Batteries, ' CATL [Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited] has given China a commanding lead in electric car batteries, a technology central to the broader green revolution. The company already supplies batteries to almost all of the world’s automakers, including G.M., Volkswagen, BMW and Tesla. CATL has emerged as one of the biggest winners of the electric car boom, along with Tesla. back

Liza Rozovsky, Starvation and Cannibalism: The Ukraine-Russia War on the Holodomor Intensifies , ' Every year, on the fourth Saturday of November, Ukraine bows its head and remembers the victims of the Holodomor – meaning roughly "mass extermination by starvation," in Ukrainian. This tragedy has become one of the country's most important and symbolic events, assuming a similar status to that of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. It has also become part of a battle with Russia over historical narratives.' back

Michael Kofman & Andrea Kendall-Taylor, The Myth of Russian Decline Why Moscow Will Be a Persistent Power, back

One-electron universe - Wikipedia, One-electron universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman: I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" ' back

The Last Duel (2021 film) - Wikipedia, The Last Duel (2021 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Last Duel is a 2021 epic historical drama film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon, based on the 2004 book The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France by Eric Jager. Set in medieval France, the film stars Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight who challenges his former friend, squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) to a judicial duel after Jean's wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), accuses Jacques of raping her. The events leading up to the duel are divided into three distinct chapters, reflecting the contradictory perspectives of the three main characters.' back

Tribune News Service, US teen killed by stray police bullet while trying on dresses in store , ' The victim, 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, was struck by a round fired at an assault suspect, who was also shot and killed by officers. The victim, identified as Valentina Orellana-Peralta, was in a changing room with her mother when an officer fired a round through a wall near the assault suspect, striking her and killing her at the scene, according to preliminary information from police.' back

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