Auyang (1995), Sunny Y., How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?, Oxford University Press 1995 Jacket: 'Quantum field theory (QFT) combines quantum mechanics with Einstein's special theory of relativity and underlies elementary particle physics. This book presents a philosophical analysis of QFT. It is the first treatise in which the philosophies of space-time, quantum phenomena and particle interactions are encompassed in a unified framework.' 
Amazon   back

Hawking (1975), Steven W, and G F R Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Cambridge UP 1975 Preface: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity . . . leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to our universe. Our discussion is principally aimed at developing these two results.' 
Amazon   back

Le Carré (1984), John, Little Drummer Girl, Hodder and Stoughton 1984 Jacket: 'In this master storyteller's most powerful most heart-stopping novel yet, the scene is England, West Germsny, Greece, Israel and the Palestinian camps. The hunter is the fiercely passionate Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence officer. His quarry is a Palestinian, cunning, ruthless, stateless and nameless, whose primitive bombs have slaughtered across Europe. Between the hunter and the hunted the snare is laid. She is Charlie, a young English actress, perilously alone on a mission to the heart of international terrorism.' 
Amazon   back

Lonergan (1992), 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

Rovelli (2017), Carlo, and Simon Carnell & Erica Sere (Translators), Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Allen Lane Penguin 2017 ' Be prepared for your intellectual foundations to be vaporized . . . Carlo Rovelli will melt your synapses with this exploration of physical reality and what the universe is formed of at the very deepest level . . . Quantum gravity is so new that there aren't many popular books about it. You couldn't be in better hands than Rovelli, a world expert.' Tara Shears, The Times Higher Edcation 
Amazon   back

Teller (1995), Paul, An Interpretative Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Princeton UP (1995) ' Paul Teller presents the basic ideas of quantum field theory in a way that is understandable to readers who are familiar with non-relativistic quantum mechanics. He provides information about the physics of the theory without calculational detail, and he enlightens readers on how to think about the theory physically. Along the way, he dismantles some popular myths and clarifies the novel ways in which quantum field theory is both a theory about fields and about particles. His goal is to raise questions about the philosophical implications of the theory and to offer some tentative interpretive views of his own. This provocative and thoughtful book challenges philosophers to extend their thinking beyond the realm of quantum mechanics and it challenges physicists to consider the philosophical issues that their explorations have encouraged.' 
Amazon   back

Wilczek (2008), Frank, The Lightness of Being, Basic Books 2008 ' In this excursion to the outer limits of particle physics, Wilczek explores what quarks and gluons, which compose protons and neutrons, reveal about the manifestation of mass and gravity. A corecipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilczek knows what he’s writing about; the question is, will general science readers? Happily, they know what the strong interaction is (the forces that bind the nucleus), and in Wilczek, they have a jovial guide who adheres to trade publishing’s belief that a successful physics title will not include too many equations. Despite this injunction (against which he lightly protests), Wilczek delivers an approachable verbal picture of what quarks and gluons are doing inside a proton that gives rise to mass and, hence, gravity. Casting the light-speed lives of quarks against “the Grid,” Wilczek’s term for the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, Wilczek exudes a contagious excitement for discovery. A near-obligatory acquisition for circulating physics collections.' --Gilbert Taylor  
Amazon   back

Aaron Tang, Opinion | The Supreme Court Is Infected With the ‘Most Damaging’ Human Bias , back

AJLabs, Visualising the 2,056 nuclear tests conducted since 1945, ' Seventy-eight years ago on July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin, the United States conducted the first nuclear test explosion some 340km (210 miles) south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Known as the Trinity test, the plutonium bomb was detonated over the New Mexico desert, initiating a chain reaction that released 18.6 kilotons of power. It marked the beginning of the Atomic Age. Less than a month later, the US dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 100,000 people instantly. Thousands more died from their injuries, radiation sickness and cancer in the years that followed, bringing the toll closer to 200,000, according to the US Department of Energy’s history of the Manhattan Project. To raise awareness of the effects of nuclear weapons testing and achieve a nuclear-weapons-free world, every year on August 29 the United Nations marks the International Day against Nuclear Tests. According to the Arms Control Association, at least eight countries have carried out a total of 2,056 nuclear tests since 1945.' back

Al Jazeera (2023_08_27), ‘Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic’: Holocaust historian, ' Amos Goldberg, a leading professor of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has published a scathing retort saying that describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid” is not anti-Semitic, in a guest post in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Felix Klein, Germany’s commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism, said using “apartheid” in such scenarios is “an anti-Semitic narrative” in an interview with Die Welt, one of Germany’s most-read newspapers. The Israeli government, Goldberg stated, fights against human rights, democracy and equality and propagates the opposite: “authoritarianism, discrimination, racism and apartheid”. “Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic. It describes reality,” he said. ‘The elephant in the room’ Goldberg’s standpoint was not an outlier, he urged Klein to understand. Rather, it represented a growing chorus of voices, including leading Israeli academics propagating the term apartheid to describe the treatment of Palestinians by the current regime.' back

Alec Lo, Why so many nations suddenly want to become part of Brics, ' Measured by purchasing power parity, Brics+ will account for almost half of the world’s population and 37 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP). That will eclipse the G7’s roughly 30 per cent of world GDP, produced by about 10 per cent of the world population. Brics+ will also account for most of the world’s natural resources, over which the West has long exercised control. Why the success? . . . . America’s post-9/11 wars caused at least 4.5 million deaths, displaced 38 to 60 million people – according to a study conducted by the Cost of Wars project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. Economic warfare such as sanctions may be more cost-effective, even if they too can kill by choking off an economy. . . . Using US Treasury Department data up to 2021, the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that US sanctions have increased by 933 per cent in 20 years. Almost a third of the global economy and one in four countries are sanctioned by the US in one form or another. . . . .. The linchpin of US economic warfare is the weaponised dollar, which hangs over developing countries like the sword of Damocles. If nothing else, Brics+ offers an escape route, with more members the better.' back

Alex Lo, Today’s India and Israel are like two peas in a pod, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, by Azad Essa. God, it turns out, is not dead. Outside of western Europe, it (gender-neutral here) is quite alive, actually in rude health. In fact, it has been so radicalised in different religious guises that its followers, regardless of the colour of their skin or what name or names they call their god(s), would likely be extreme religious nationalists nowadays. While the world was mesmerised by 9/11, the “war on terror” and radical Islam, we have missed or wilfully turned a blind eye to the rise of what can only be described as radical Hinduism, or Hindutva; and radical Judaism, or religious Zionism. Today, the leading political parties, and their leaders, in India and Israel respectively, derive much of their legitimacy and appeal to voters from their religious-nationalist ideologies. In a new book, author and journalist Azad Essa offers a timely account of these two religious-political movements, and how they have drawn the two countries ever closer together. This evolving relationship, on Essa’s telling, is not only because of mutual national interests, but also based on their religious or ideological affinities. . . . .. The two countries have enough common practical interests, especially when it comes to weapons and repression, that they hardly need religion to justify their relationship.' back

Alex Lo (2023_09_01), ' The sun has already set on the nation they call Great Britain, ' Alex Lo SCMP Columnist My Take by Alex Lo The sun has already set on the nation they call Great Britain Neither Asia nor the rest of the world needs British input to right itself. Instead, people nowadays debate whether it is a failed or failing state Alex Lo Alex Lo Published: 11:16pm, 1 Sep, 2023 Why you can trust SCMP When your own house is on fire, would you ignore your own very real existential crisis and instead, keep lecturing how someone else should run his own household? Do British lawmakers really think they matter to the world? This week they issued a report that describes Taiwan as “an independent country” for the first time. Published by the cross-party British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, it coincided with British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s visit to Beijing. The report repeats the same claim, even the vocabulary, of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and her secessionist Democratic Progressive Party that the island “is already an independent country under the name Republic of China”. It also criticises the Chinese Communist Party – note the nomenclature – but not China or Beijing, for threatening peace in the region. [British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state. Photo: dpa] British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state. Photo: dpa Two Chinas? Presumably that’s not the position of the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak. Otherwise Beijing wouldn’t have received Cleverly, but would have recalled its own ambassador. Still, do Cleverly and his boss Sunak want to have the report published – to play a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine with Beijing? Or do they actually not want it released, but are powerless to stop it? Either way, it means the current British government has neither credibility nor durability. When’s the next election? '; Somehow, British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state, and whether it now qualifies as “a basket case”. I just read that more than 100 schools across England have been ordered to shut down because their buildings and classrooms are at risk of collapse from crumbling concrete. Many hospitals under the National Health Service (NHS) – once Britain’s pride and joy and the closest thing Britons have had to a civic religion – now have fewer beds per person than Mexico or Colombia, according to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The number of NHS patients who died while waiting for treatment doubled last year to more than 120,000, from five years ago. In other words, the British public health service is now comparable to some middle-income countries in the developing world.' back

Boson - Wikipedia, Boson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, bosons are particles with an integer spin, as opposed to fermions which have half-integer spin. From a behaviour point of view, fermions are particles that obey the Fermi-Dirac statistics while bosons are particles that obey the Bose-Einstein statistics. They may be either elementary, like the photon, or composite, as mesons. All force carrier particles are bosons. They are named after Satyendra Nath Bose. In contrast to fermions, several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. Thus, bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space.' back

Cole S. Aronson, Ukraine’s Most Powerful Spiritual Force Faces a Choice, ' The Orthodox Church of Ukraine — to which Fathers Hovorun and Kovalenko belong — is now Ukraine’s most important spiritual institution. Long governed by the Russian Orthodox Church, it was granted independence (called “autocephaly”) and equality with Moscow in 2019 by the patriarch of Constantinople — who is first among the equal heads of the Orthodox churches. Orthodox Ukrainian priests have played a patriotic role in their nation’s post-Soviet history; they led prayers during the Maidan uprising in 2014 and now supply more chaplains to Ukraine’s military than any other church’s clergy. The OCU’s patriotism is coupled with its conservatism — it opposes civil unions and the since-ratified Istanbul Convention against Domestic Violence (for using the word “gender,” which offended church teaching about the sexes). For all its centrality to Ukraine’s spiritual life, however, the OCU is an ecumenical church — it does not lead a state religion, and frequently works with Ukraine’s many (and quite traditional) Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews.' back

Fermion - Wikipedia, Fermion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, fermions are particles with a half-integer spin, such as protons and electrons. They obey the Fermi-Dirac statistics and are named after Enrico Fermi. In the Standard Model there are two types of elementary fermions: quarks and leptons. . . . In contrast to bosons, only one fermion can occupy a quantum state at a given time (they obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle). Thus, if more than one fermion occupies the same place in space, the properties of each fermion (e.g. its spin) must be different from the rest. Therefore fermions are usually related with matter while bosons are related with radiation, though the separation between the two is not clear in quantum physics. back

Gospel, John 1, And the Word was made flesh , ' 14: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. back

Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Hylomorphism (Greek ὑλο- hylo-, "wood, matter" + -morphism < Greek μορφή, morphē, "form") is a philosophical theory developed by Aristotle, which analyzes substance into matter and form. Substances are conceived of as compounds of form and matter.' back

Meinard Kuhlmann (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Quantum Field Theory, ' Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is the mathematical and conceptual framework for contemporary elementary particle physics. In a rather informal sense QFT is the extension of quantum mechanics (QM), dealing with particles, over to fields, i.e. systems with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. (See the entry on quantum mechanics.) In the last few years QFT has become a more widely discussed topic in philosophy of science, with questions ranging from methodology and semantics to ontology. QFT taken seriously in its metaphysical implications seems to give a picture of the world which is at variance with central classical conceptions of particles and fields, and even with some features of QM.' back

Philip Pullella, Ukrainian fury after Pope Francis tells Russian Catholics they are ‘heirs to great empire’, "Vatican City: Pope Francis has came under criticism for telling Russian youths to remember that they are the heirs of past tsars such as Peter the Great, who President Vladimir Putin has held up as an example to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine said the comments, which Francis made on Friday in a live video address to Catholic youths gathered in St Petersburg, were “deeply regrettable”. . . . .. “It is precisely with such imperialist propaganda, the ‘spiritual ties’ and the ‘need’ to save ‘great Mother Russia’ that the Kremlin justifies the killing of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukrainian cities and villages,” Oleg Nikolenko, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said on Facebook. “It is deeply regrettable that such notions of being a great power, which contribute, in essence, to Russia’s chronic aggressiveness, are voiced by the Pope, either knowingly or unknowingly,” Nikolenko said. Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of Ukraine’s Eastern Rite Catholic Church, said in a statement that the Pope’s words had caused “great pain and worry” and feared they could “inspire the neo-colonial ambitions of the aggressor country”. He asked the Vatican for an explanation.' back

Robert Phiddian, How cartoonist Bruce Petty documented the Vietnam War – and how his great satire keeps finding its moment, ' After seven decades as a visual satirist provoking Australia as it is and might be, Bruce Petty passed away at 93 on April 6 this year. His career as a political cartoonist started with a trip to London in the late 1950s, then a stint at young Rupert Murdoch’s afternoon paper in Sydney, the Mirror. . . .. Throughout the decades, he moonlighted as an animator and author of books we might now call graphic essays or even novels, always at the cutting edge of thought and technology. Inevitably, profiles stress he won an Academy Award for animation with Leisure (1976), but his deepest cultural intervention in the story of post-Menzies Australia came during the Vietnam War years. Australia changed and he was one of the major prophets of change. With a handful of others like Les Tanner and George Molnar, he woke editorial cartooning from a sleepy period telling fairly anodyne jokes and turned it into a mode of serious – if also often hilarious – satirical commentary on politics and society.. back

Samuel Johnson, How swarming animals can help humans and AI make better decisions , ' Artificial life expert Craig Reynolds revolutionised the study of swarming in 1986 with the publication of the Boids model computer simulation. The Boids model breaks down swarming into a simple set of rules. The Boids (bird-oids) in the simulation, like avatars or characters in a video game, are instructed to move in the same direction as their neighbours, move towards the average position of their neighbours, and avoid collisions with other boids. Boids simulations are strikingly accurate when compared with real swarms.' back

Stone-von Neumann theorem - Wikipedia, Stone-von Neumann theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematics and in theoretical physics, the Stone–von Neumann theorem refers to any one of a number of different formulations of the uniqueness of the canonical commutation relations between position and momentum operators. It is named after Marshall Stone and John von Neumann. back

Theory of Forms - Wikipedia, Theory of Forms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract (but substantial) forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form or idea is often capitalized. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge; thus even apart from the very controversial status of the theory, Plato's own views are much in doubt. Plato spoke of Forms in formulating a possible solution to the problem of universals.' back

Thermodynamic limit - Wikipedia, Thermodynamic limit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In statistical mechanics, the thermodynamic limit or macroscopic limit, of a system is the limit for a large number N of particles (e.g., atoms or molecules) where the volume is taken to grow in proportion with the number of particles. The thermodynamic limit is defined as the limit of a system with a large volume, with the particle density held fixed. In this limit, macroscopic thermodynamics is valid. There, thermal fluctuations in global quantities are negligible, and all thermodynamic quantities, such as pressure and energy, are simply functions of the thermodynamic variables, such as temperature and density. For example, for a large volume of gas, the fluctuations of the total internal energy are negligible and can be ignored, and the average internal energy can be predicted from knowledge of the pressure and temperature of the gas.' back

Unruh effect - Wikipedia, Unruh effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Unruh effect (also known as the Fulling–Davies–Unruh effect) is a kinematic prediction of quantum field theory that a uniformly accelerating observer will observe a thermal bath, like blackbody radiation, whereas an inertial observer would observe none.[1] In other words, the background appears to be warm from an accelerating reference frame; in layperson's terms, an accelerating thermometer (like one being waved around) in empty space, removing any other contribution to its temperature, will record a non-zero temperature, just from its acceleration. Heuristically, for a uniformly accelerating observer, the ground state of an inertial observer is seen as a mixed state in thermodynamic equilibrium with a non-zero temperature bath.' back