Natural Theology

We have just published a new website that develops the ideas of this site. Available at Cognitive Cosmology.com.

Contact us: Click to email

Notes DB 93 Theological Genocide - 2026

Sunday 18 January 2026 - Saturday 24 January 2026

[page 247]

Sunday 18 January 2026

Copy to Susie and Greg: This book is a final rendition of the theological submission to the NPWS which led to your win as an amateur barrister in the LEC in 1994. It is, I hope, the beginning of a series which I hope will continue until I

[page 247]

fade out, which explains how the universe evolved in the initial singularity through the interaction of gravitation and quantum mechanics to give us the divine world of particles (including ourselves) with the qualities of independence and agency governed by the blind adjudication of justice embodied in the quantum mechanical elicitation of energy from the zero sum bifurcation of gravitation into kinetic and potential energy, or words to that effect.

The US president has given up on democracy and is turning the US into a political and cultural desert identical to his own personality and well on the way to becoming the new Iran while China takes on the world supply of renewable energy and begins to provide help for the helpless,

I have noticed, since AM talked me into going on X.com, that I am having a tendency to post abuse of Trump rather than the hope for the future implicit in my book. A bit sad. Time to go positive. The juvenile warfighter Hegseth is not just a dumb lump of protein but a community of 50 trillion individual cells all very woke and protecting one another with skill and care to maintain his life. He could not be alive if violence is the key to life. The truth is in his body. []

Sevigny: ’Anything you study, you see much better than the rest of the world. Suddenly the landscaprs and the rocks, they are all talking to me.’ Melissa L. Sevigny (2026_01_05): How plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of Earth

Khinchin page 80: §3: Complete, symetric and antisymmetric statistics. Khinchin (1960, 1998): The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Statistics

Asymmetrical picks up a minus which Feynman understands

[page 248]

to inert the wave functionb so teo frmions add to zero ie they exclude one another. Khinchin puts this down to the permutation of eigenvetors. Why? We rely on the random appearance of basis states in the initial singularity mapping onto itself for this differentiation which is like the toss of a coin and we expect equal numbers of heads/tails fermions/bosons [and more so if fermions and bosons are formed in complementary pairs which seems to be indicated by the Lagrangian in Minkowski space].

Both these events are unitary solutions to the Schrödinger equation (which really has nothing to do with it because we are talking about superpositions and not differential equations,which belong in Minkowski space and continua. The deal in linear algebra has to do with difference equations,not differential equations [which imply continuity and causality, eg Einstein].

The basic Schrödinger variable is time (in Minkowski space the Hamiltonian) but last night’s insight is that there is no specific periodicity in yhr tosses of a coin (the outcome is always H or T) so one may follow the other in the sequence. This idea first came to me in the little park near thr Ovingham station when I imagined the initial singularity acting at random (since it had no structural control). It was probably some time later that I connectd this to Augustines theory of the Trinity and this fits in loverly with the Aquinas–Einstein sungularity, although the persons of the basis states (effectively orthogonal images of the singularity) are ephemeral.

Living indigenous cultures have a lot in common with science collecting trading and developing knowledge over long periods and we have begin to take notice of them rather than regarding them as ignorant savages. They have been subjected to stressful pressure of adaptation in the presence of invading imperialism over many thousands of years as the number of different cultures has been reduced fron tens of thousands to half a dozen or so.

[page 249]

Since we are operating prior to space-time the basis states are naturally superposed and so hermitian operators are identifying eigenvectors and eigenvalues which we imagine bifurcating local gravitation and naturally acquiring the potential and kinetic energy. All this is acting too beautifully but now how to we stop the process at the known total of [different] elementary particles?

Now we have to couple it to the gravitational control if relationships between the fermions that imports justice and excludes violence and mistreatment. So far we have written down the foundations of the justice essay going into more detail than quantocracy. The constraint must be that gravitation will not give energy to bad actions, ie actins that involve contradiction, in energy terms a mismatch between kinetic and potential energy which will appear in Minkowski space as a violation of Hamilton’s principle [adding weight to my ancient idea that Minkowski space is the operating system of the universe]. This is al fantasy,but a faantasy that I msgine that Feynman [and Aquinas??] would like (and the bes way to defeat an erroneous fantasy is to counter it with a more credible one.

To me field theory is a mistake arising from the printing of Minkowski space [on quantum mechanics] making Hilbert space subject to special relativity [destroying linearity with quadracity. The error is compounded by the assumption that Minkowski space is continuous which has led to the need for renormalization to restore the unitarity of quantum mechanics which is a large scale boondoggle. The alternative is to imagine the emergence of quantum mechanics in [the initial singularity] given that there ids no actual [classical] space present so all the random basis states are superposed [in a mix of complex periods which occasionally vindicate de Broglie and yield a real outcome]. Since

[page 250]

their appearance is random the situation is open to evolution and the only situations that last are those that are capable of managing their own representation: P vs NP again. [This demands structures stable over time to manage the P side of things. The NP is always with us in the form of the random creativity that yields these notes, stable representations of fleeting mental states, a continuous contemporary feature of our world going back to the root].

Feynman was severely constrained [as we can see in his early work with Wheeler] by operating in the standard Hilbert-Minkowski space which we have to get behind. So the question becomes: is the mass shell visible in Minkowski space imposed by quantum mechanics or it it a condition imposed by the existence of the Minkowski metric which we trace to the intrinsic properties of fermions and bosons whose statistical distinction is explained by Khinchin by a permutation of observed states of U, U1, U2? We then have to take up the question of the massive Bosons W and Z and the general question of the quantum interpretation of essay 3 (?) as a consequence of the quantum implementation of justice, agency and freedom in electrodynamics [and do we think that the electroweak era may be a step on the way from EM to the strong force?].

What we are thinking is that hadrons are little universes like atoms, molecules and people the second fruits of quantum mechanics arising from the arrival of complex languages of unitary communication level beyond U(1) which is a sense the expression of the binary language of qubits that has become the technological foundation of our networks of communication encoding everything, like this notebook into binary signals. Atoms cannot come into existence without protons and their auxiliary particles like mesons etc.

[page 251]

We imagine that the development of electrodynamics with the e+ and the e and photons is self sustaining perhaps a consequence of Minkowski space as a consequence of the first bosons and fermions a very basic process requiring a binary permutation of hermitian operations and we assume tis space to exist inside the proton constructed by quarks and gluons which nevertheless constrain themselves by the short distance communication we see in the electroweak process that Wilczek and Behiel may see as a consequence of massless particles gaining mass in superconductors and we imagine that the inside of a hadron is superconducting due to the formation of pairs of fermions as we see in electrodynamic superconductors. Listen to the Behiel lecture again. : Superconductivity and the Higgs field

Think of Cognitive Cosmology as a slab. I have cleared the site of old false theology and physics and poured a slab. Now the real fun starts building the edifice on the slab to some exciting design, consistency, structural integrity and utility.

Monday 19 January 2026

Auntie Rosalie farewell party. [First time drunk since I left Elands]

Tuesday 20 January 2026

Gold price up. Gave book to Angela to give to quantum mechanical PhD son.

Sunday 4 Jan notes complete, add refs and upload.

Behind my mathematical education, there is a story, a theory of accounting, a model that shows how the measurements fit onto a rational model like profit and loss or material properties and flexibility etc. My second book, like the first, will provide a picture into which to slot various mathematical bodies.

Bin day. Took the bins out and locked myself out of the house so get a chance to work on my new persona of being an old bloke sitting on the front verandah and watching the world go by. Also writing on bits of cardboard working on the new book I am about to build on my slab (p 251) so . . .

We go right back to electromagnetism, electrons photons born together e+ and the e both couple to the photon. What does the Dirac equation fit, 4D, creates Minkowski. All this is necessary to build the house on the slab I have laid, elementary particles and gravitation. Did hadrons come first? Too complex. Something will come. We learn languages at birth, e+ and the e & photons live. Speed of light is the appearance of Hilbert symmetry in Minkowski

[page 253]

space.

Gluons are massless, quarks are massive confined by colour [like electrons in atoms]. Colour and anti-colour, ± charges are anti, maybe time backwards, but this makes no sense, time is a product of random events, fermions and bosons are anti, ie permutation of events [Khinchin].

Atom is a closed circuit, ±. The universe is a closed system, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. Yosef Garfinkel1 & Sarah Krulwich: The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking

How do we confine energy in an electron [a photon]? Closed circuit of photons a la Qiu. How does this work in a Hadron? Quantum of action is a state.Universe is a quantum of action mapping so self giving trinity and Hilbert space [all normalized to 1. Qiu-Hong Hu (2005_12_29): The nature of the electron

Threesome makes a closed circuit - circulating gluons.How does atom stay together - potential + photons - limit the range of potential with opposite charges - proton + electron [there is no opposite to gravitation other than quantum mechanics].

All this has got to be very simple. = colour charge sums to white ≡ O, R, G, B + 8 gluons- R, G, B, T.All we have to go on is the data - the theory is all made up and may not be true [historical confirmation bias]. Tetrahedron, quaternion. One depends on chance. What is charge? A propensity to superpose, mate, rhythm driving dancing, [“fit”, conversation, communication]. They say non-linear Yang-Mills does it but we do not like renormalization.

[page 254]

Electrodynamics is the icing on the cake and let us say the source of Minkowski space, the slab on which the world is built. No change, just fermions and bosons the first population noted by Khinchin, then we go to 4, e+ and the e, spin up, spin down, ie the origin of exclusion comes with the next step which is essentisl to 4D space.

Then we go to electroweak and hadrons, quarks and gluons, the eightfold way, strong force, colour charge, the trinity, two working together to make one.

We are looking for a series of bifurcations to make the universe, permutations. First the pendulum, the primordial clock extracting duality out of gravitation.

So we make a universe of bifurcations and permutations, simple multiplications of entropy. The key to the strong force is SU(3), triplicity. Electroweak is U(1), U(2), SU(2) which has a lot to do with spinors, another potential bifurcation. simple multiplications acounting for data, a picture we can hang mathematics on.

Wednesday 21 January 2026

The stratification of complexity: the complex overlies the simple so we start with U(1) electrodynamics in Minkowski space which constructs time and energy, ie special relativity.

The universe is neutral so positive and negative charge annihilate/bifurcate, like up and down

[page 255]

Most of the negative charges are in the electrons and positive charges in the protons. There is no antimatter problem? The positives are all bottled up on the protons - positive and negative charges are arbitrary but opposite [but, we ask, why did the positive end up in the nucleus? To make atoms possible?]. Somehow the electrons do not annihilate the protons because they are in some sense ‘protected’ the flip side of confinement and the free electron all possess asymptotic freedom’. Do these ideas fit the data? Quark - Wikipedia

A night of thought. I am opening up a whole new divine world for myself. In my book I rejected Catholic Theology and quantum field theory. The failure of theology is obvious. It is ancient mythology [theory] rather than science [theory closely supported by public physical observation]. The failure of quantum field theory is documented in Wilczek’s book The Lightness of Being where he admits that his picture of the world is wrong by about 100 orders of magnitude, an echo of the cosmological constant problem which seems to be based on the idea that quantum fluctuations are the source of energy and the theory of the quantum harmonic operator. Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, Frank Wilczek (2008): The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces page 109.

Cognitive Cosmogenesis begins the long process of making theology scientific and replacing quantum field theory with something that fits the data, (eg no infinity). Jeffrey Nicholls (2025): Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic unification of physics and theology

Tweet: Current theology is mostly mythology when it could be science. Quantum field theory is ludicrously off track: look at the cosmological constant problem! My book Cognitive Cosmogenesis is a radical scientific upgrade [for theolgy]. Please have a look.

[page 256]

Thursday 22 January 2026

The quantum computation people have a lot to say about the “hidden information” in a qubit |φ⟩ = α|0⟩ + β|1⟩ which only appears when a hermitian operator manages a superposition where either α or β is one. This invisible process is executed in the dynamic ‘flow’ of complex numbers which may be imagined as the rotation of a normalized complex vector in the complex plane. This is in effect a simple observed fact which in linear algebraic terms says that the characteristic polynomial of the operator has real roots, but what I am looking for in the Justice essay is some sort of meta-ethical, meta-physical meta-?? that tells us what this means in the physical world. Nielsen & Chuang (2016): Quantum Computation and Quantum Communcation, Mark Beeson (2026_01_21): Ruled by engineers: how China gets things done, leaving the US in the dust

In a sense we may say that the hidden information is the parliamentary debate or the argument within or between people which finally leads to a real outcome like a kiss or a bullet in the head. There is an interesting parallel in the pornography of people, particularly women, fighting and then turning from creating pain to creating pleasure in the form of kissing, cuddling and masturbation and intercourse, a not uncommon occurrence in people close to one another. For some reason with a spectrum of outcomes which we might interpret in light of the symmetry of quantum mechanics with respect to complexity and encourage us to look for the role of blind gravitation and justice in this scenario whose resolution requires action by agents in the environment of the lovers / haters, ie peacemaker, judiciary, etc. The opposite of Trump who sees advantage in encouraging people to fight, a fundamental ploy of the social media from ancient gossip magazines to modern ‘socials’.

[page 257]

We might compare this environmental influence to the interactions of charged particles in an atom where we imagine that every interaction between fundamental particles is by definition an [indivisible] quantum of action and we seek to develop a theorem in linear algebra which embodies this constraint and leads logically to the behaviour of hermitian / self-adjoint operators which demand real diagonals as a condition of self adjointivity. Here is a mathematical Ansatz for universal peace and consistency first observed in atomic spectroscopy starting with Bohr and evolving through Dirac etc etc.

There is some confusion in exclusion. Some say no two fermions can occupy the same quantum state, some say that no two fermions can occupy the same space-time point, and in particular no two fermions can occupy the same spatial state. In Minkowski space, spin has direction, like the axis of a spinning object but if it exists prior to spacetime in fermions it is simply a duality that can be mapped onto spacetime in any direction so long as they are opposite. Slowly I have to work through the mass of quantum mechanical and Minkowski spacetime data to separate the contributions of basis states and particles.

God is the root of all evil, drafted for the NY Times - the evil of monotheism and imperialism: I am the Lord your God [obey me or be killed].

QM and information theory have totally changed the world and they both depend on the same idea, unitarity [in communucation].

Placate God by sacrifice, Egypt, Noah, Jesus.

[page 258]

The divine right of murder, theology and genocide.

Friday 23 January 2026

A radical diagnosis: from a century of wars to end all wars back to the old world of blind military power epitomized by the age of empire. My search for a divine universe has given me a point of view from which to see the role of blind imperial violence in bringing us all to the brink of disaster and the path back to safety charted by the ancient wisdom embodied in China’s engineers [and indigenous people in loose contact with reality]. Colonialism and genocide - Wikipedia

My vision of a new world based on scientific theology and the replacement of ancient fictions with the reality of the universe seems very powerful to me but it has opened a very wide vista of new ways of looking at reality which is taking me a while to embrace, particularly the ideas embodied in quantocracy and justice. Essay l4l01: Quantocracy: The universal quantum mechanical foundations of democracy and freedomc; Essay l4l02: Justice: Justice and Accounting: The role of gravitation in the creation and stabilization of the Universe. [forthcoming?].

All I can do is work long and hard, avoid being frustrated by the machinery and keep writing until somebody listens.

I have now got my foot in the door with Cognitive Cosmogenesis which is now my slab, my foundation. Now I have to widen it by taking pure quantum mechanics into the realms of the electroweak and the strong interaction in order to cut through the imperial delusion of field theory into the universal role of unitarity and communication as the core of a theory of everything, the fundamental symmetry binding every language from the initial symmetry of essence ≡ existence to the picture of the linguistic structure of the human world, to serve as the DNA of world peace as my own DNA maintains peace among my 50 trillion independent and cooperating cells. The next

[page 259]

step: Inspiration is part of the physical universe: The cognitive aspect of cosmology. Broadening physics into psychology, politics, philosophy and theology is made possible by the unconstrained variety of Hilbert space and linear algebra.

Saturday 24 January 2026

So back to L4L_e02_Justice

New list of contents:

1. Ancient theological tradition killed by Darwin
2. Scientific history goes back to the initial symmetry
3. The ten steps and commentary
4, Quantocracy: form and action
5. Bifurcation, energy, bosons and fermions 6. Minkowski space, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics
7. The role of consistency and time to extinction
8. Conclusion, modern justice and gravitation

From the heat engine to the quantum engine. Quantum mechanics works rather like the Carnot cycle picking a state of zero entropy (mechanical) energy and rejecting the remaining entropy to the cold reservoir which is the initial singularity at zero Kelvin. There is no zero point energy in the ground state of the universe [this, if anything is a product of the interpretation of quantum mechanics in Minkowski space, leading, apparently to the cosmological constant problem] ie quantum mechanics is built on absolute zero so it can work at 100% efficiency [by collapsing energy from kinetic and potential back to 0].

[page 260]

Tweet to X: Christianity teaches credulous people to obey fictitious authority. Is the Pope infallible? No? Mad King TACO folded again in Iceland?. Clearly if you defy this piece of fluff it will just blow away. Anything credible he ever says is merely a random event in a stream of hot air.

As Hamiltonian mechanics tells us that only stationary Lagrangians (ie ‘orbits’ of constant energy represent reality, but the stability occurs in a system where potential and kinetic energy are equal and opposite, just as cash and debt must be in a stable financial system [with sufficiently small uncertainty].

The big problem now is to produce consistent picture of the electroweak sector and the strong sector based on pure linear algebra, ie quantum mechanics without introducing quadratic Minkowski space, ie we want a description that precedes special relativity. Is this asking too much? [from an entropy point of view no, quantum mechanics has a countable infinity of symbols (basis states) which can be linearly superposed]. We have the ingredients of Minkowski space inside the hadron with a slightly extended set of fermions and bosons, quarks and gluons, and we might be able to get gravitation involved in here too, rather like the pendulum, because the strength of gravitation is not an issue since mass and energy are identical and in gravitational terms fermions and bosons are the same, mass acting on mass [in] the pendulum is the archetypical oscillator where kinetic and potential are clearly equal. Mass is its own ‘force’.

The pendulum works in the field of the massive Earth. How does quantum mechanics enrich this by bringing a new electrodynamic force into play, depending on the fine structure constant. Fine-structure constant - Wikipedia.

[page 261]

There is a mystery here with the zero-sum bifurcation which relates to all four forces in proportion to their strengths, meaning what? How do we deal with asymptotic freedom and confinement?

I’ve got to get these answers to defend my book. Einstein sorted the universe with curvature [which leads to closure]and in a way it is the fore that makes the curve [or is it vice versa? so that the things that are following the curvr , like the moon and the electron, think they are moving inertially in free fall [rather like the way the curvature of Catholic space got me into the Dominican Order].Is the electron in an atom falling freely, asymptotically free but confined?

The clue here is that the fermions and bosons determine the nature of Minkowski space, as Minkowski space determines the nature of gravitation by the mass of the bodies that it holds [which are in effect confined, (curved) energy, and the electric charge in effect determines the metric of the atom and now we want an electroweak metic and a strong metric. Electroweak interaction - Wikipedia

Copyright:

You msay copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Further reading

Books

Khinchin (1960, 1998), Aleksandr Yakovlevich, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Statistics, Dover 1998 'In the area of quantum statistics, I show that a rigorous mathematical basis of the computational formulas of statistical physics . . . may be obtained from an elementary application of the well-developed limit theorems of the theory of probability.' 
Amazon
  back

Nicholls (2025), Jeffrey, Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic unification of physics and theology, Austin Macauley Publishers 12025 ' This book is a personal narrative of those events and a defense of the belief that the universe itself is divine. The central argument is that by embracing this reality and abandoning notions of supernatural deities, humanity can resolve its problems. The universe, it is argued, is self-creating, and a proper understanding of physics leads to a plausible scientific theology. The natural intelligence inherent in the universe, from cellular organization to ecosystems, far surpasses any artificial intelligence. Comprehending this natural order, the author suggests, would make achieving world peace relatively straightforward. The book contends that modern theologians should recognize the physical world, rather than ancient texts, as the foundation for credible theology. It also addresses the historical entanglement of religion and politics, asserting that the model of creation presented herein fundamentally rejects the imperialistic ambitions that have fueled genocidal holy wars.'  
Amazon
  back

Nielsen (2016), Michael A., and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Communcation, Cambridge University Press 2016 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002. 
Amazon
  back

Wilczek (2008), Frank, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, 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

Links

Alex Reiner (2025_11_04), The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers, ' The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.
Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”
Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.' back

Colonialism and genocide - Wikipedia, Colonialism and genocide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Colonialism's emphasis on imperialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural destruction frequently resulted in genocidal practices aimed at attacking Indigenous peoples and existing populations as a means to attain colonial goals. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
The history of Tasmania provides an example where settlers originating from Europe wiped out Aboriginal Tasmanians, an event which is genocide by definition as well as an event which resulted from settler colonialism.[8] Additionally, instances of colonialism and genocide in California and in Hispaniola are cited below. The instance of California references the colonization and genocide of indigenous tribes by European Americans (prospectors and settlers) during the gold-rush period of the 19th century.[9] The example in Hispaniola discusses the island's colonization by Columbus and other Spanish conquistadors and the genocide inflicted on the native Taíno people.' back

Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and theoretical large value of zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory. Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the discrepancy is as high as 120 orders of magnitude, a state of affairs described by physicists as "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science" and "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics".' back

Electroweak interaction - Wikipedia, Electroweak interaction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In particle physics, the electroweak interaction or electroweak force is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very different at everyday low energies, the theory models them as two different aspects of the same force. Above the unification energy, on the order of 246 GeV, they would merge into a single force.' back

Fine-structure constant - Wikipedia, Fine-structure constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In physics, the fine-structure constant, also known as Sommerfeld's constant, commonly denoted by α (the Greek letter alpha), is a fundamental physical constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles. . . . While there are multiple physical interpretations for α it received its name from Arnold Sommerfeld introducing it (1916) in extending the Bohr model of the atom: α quantifies the gap in the fine structure of the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom, which had been precisely measured by Michelson and Morley' back

Jeffrey Bachman (The Palgrave Encyclopefia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Genocide and Imperialism (2021_01_01), ' Now in its second edition, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism is the definitive reference work for students and scholars interested in the theory and history of imperialism and anti-imperialism from the sixteenth century to the present day. Written by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, it provides detailed studies of imperialism’s roots, goals, methods and impact around the world. It also explores the rich and varied tradition of anti-imperialism, focusing on its most significant leaders, intellectuals, theories and social movements. The second edition has been expanded to include a number of topics not covered in the first edition, such as feminism, the environment, crime, international law, imperialism and anti-imperialism in art, literature and poetry, and medicine. In addition, existing entries have been updated and revised to reflect the latest scholarship. Offering a more comprehensive and thorough treatment of imperialism and anti-imperialism, the second edition of this encyclopedia takes a comparative, global approach to challenge and enhance our understanding of today’s world. back

Mark Beeson (2026_01_21), Ruled by engineers: how China gets things done, leaving the US in the dust, Review: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – Dan Wang (Allen Lane)
In modern times, the world’s most powerful and influential states have also had the largest economies. When the United States overtook Britain in the early 20th century, it was only a question of time before it assumed international political leadership too. Indeed, the failure to assume this role is widely thought to explain the duration of the Great Depression and the turmoil of the period between the two world wars.
At a time when American hegemony seems to be in terminal decline and China might overtake the US economically, plausible and original explanations of their relative fates are welcome.
Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, succeeds on both counts. At the heart of this very readable book is Wang’s argument that there is a profound difference between the two rivals: the US is run by lawyers and China is ruled by engineers.
Wang is perfectly placed to unpack this deceptively simple idea, having been born in China and spent large chunks of his relatively short life there and in the US. He is a keen and shrewd observer of both societies, and the book is sprinkled with personal anecdotes and illustrations of his key claims. Consequently, it’s not a conventional “academic” account, but that may come as a relief to many prospective readers.
Lawyers versus engineers
The biggest difference between China and the US today, according to Wang, is not the sort of ideological differences that distinguished America’s competition with the Soviet Union, but their respective abilities to get things done. [. . .]
“The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist,” Wang argues. “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.” [. . .]
Anyone who has been to Shenzhen will have been astounded by its dazzling modernity, which has seemingly appeared overnight. But Wang argues that the city’s less visible role as a centre of innovation is its real strength and achievement. He puts this down to
its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things […] The value of these communities of engineering practise is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology. [. . .]
Impressive and unparalleled as China’s achievements undoubtedly are, all is not well in the People’s Republic, and mainly because the engineers are in charge. Wang cites two sobering examples of what can happen when technocrats and scientists make decisions about social policy: the one-child policy and China’s response to the Covid pandemic.
The one-child policy was instigated to address what was seen, at the time, as a looming crisis of overpopulation. In Wang’s reading it
is one of the most searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights. [. . .]
While China’s leaders may not like being described as having led a successful capitalist revolution, it is not inaccurate. They have, however, prevented what many China-watchers in the US expected to be the consequence of such a structural transformation: the inevitable rise of individualism and the concomitant demand for democratic reform. [. . .]
Anyone who has been to Shenzhen will have been astounded by its dazzling modernity, which has seemingly appeared overnight. But Wang argues that the city’s less visible role as a centre of innovation is its real strength and achievement. He puts this down to its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things […]
The value of these communities of engineering practise is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology. Impressive and unparalleled as China’s achievements undoubtedly are, all is not well in the People’s Republic, and mainly because the engineers are in charge. Wang cites two sobering examples of what can happen when technocrats and scientists make decisions about social policy: the one-child policy and China’s response to the Covid pandemic. The one-child policy was instigated to address what was seen, at the time, as a looming crisis of overpopulation. In Wang’s reading it is one of the most searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights. [. . .}
While China’s leaders may not like being described as having led a successful capitalist revolution, it is not inaccurate. They have, however, prevented what many China-watchers in the US expected to be the consequence of such a structural transformation: the inevitable rise of individualism and the concomitant demand for democratic reform. [. . .]
The key question for many outside observers is what China’s leaders do next. Having largely solved many of the country’s most fundamental problems at “breakneck” speed, how can the CCP continue to justify a role that seeks “to maximise the discretion of the state and minimise the rights of individuals”? [. . .]
But as China’s leaders like to remind us, they have more historical examples to draw on than anyone else and thus far, at least, they have been remarkably circumspect about throwing around their increasing weight, unlike their counterparts in the US.
Let’s hope engineers are as temperamentally averse to destroying things as they are enthusiastic about building them.' back

Melissa L. Sevigny (2026_01_05), How plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of Earth, ' The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, was in chaos when 24-year-old Tanya Atwater arrived to pursue her graduate studies. It was January 1967, and a buzz of frenetic energy filled the air. Long rolls of paper printed with squiggles of magnetic data spooled down the hallways, retrieved from odd corners where they had lain covered in dust. [. . .]
Still — geology. It was, in Atwater’s words, a grubby and obscure field, totally removed from the slick, high-tech satellite dreams that propelled her into science. She had no memory for facts, and geology was allfacts. What forces spit out volcanoes and crumpled mountains? At the time, professors had no explanation, and students drew arrows on their maps like “the hands of a capricious god shortening or extending our landscapes, willy-nilly.” Was this to be her career?m
She dropped out of MIT. She traveled and deliberated. All the while, the mountains kept talking.
“Anything that you study, you see much better than the rest of the world. Suddenly, the landscapes and the rocks, they were talking to me.” [. . .]
THAT AUTUMN, A RESEARCH VESSEL called the Glomar Challenger sailed over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to drill holes and sample sediment. Fossils within the sediment samples they retrieved gave scientists a way to put dates to the bottommost, oldest layers. To everyone’s surprise, Heirtzler’s best guess for the past 85 million years was spot-on.
It was the missing piece. Within months, Atwater had abandoned her official work with Deep Tow and was immersed in the study of the San Andreas. It was the most intense period of her career. “There were nights I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I’d call up my mentor at 2 in the morning.” Her focus was a zebra-stripe pattern off the Pacific coastline that was an oddity. It was entirely one-sided: The pattern on the eastern side of the ridge was missing. The aberration bothered scientists; it looked like a flaw in the case for seafloor spreading.
McKenzie, the napkin-sketching scientist, proposed an explanation. The third plate — the one he revealed to Atwater in the dance hall — was the remnant of an older plate, called the Farallon, which once stood between the Pacific and North American plates. Over time, the Farallon had been pulled, or subducted, beneath the North American plate, carrying with it the missing half of the zebra pattern.
Atwater took up the story from there. Only after the Farallon had vanished, leaving a few fractured pieces behind, could the Pacific plate rub up against the North American, forming the San Andreas. Thanks to the Glomar Challenger research, she could trace every step of this speculative history as far back as 85 million years.
She didn’t need to go that far back, however. Using magnetic data as the key, she unlocked the answer to a question that had dogged everybody. The San Andreas was younger than many had speculated, she determined; it couldn’t be older than 23 million years. And with that piece of information, she showed how the unseen movements of plates shaped the geography and geology of California, thereby proving to geologists that plate tectonics mattered to their work. ' back

Qiu-Hong Hu (2005_12_29), The nature of the electron, ' Through investigating history, evolution of the concept, and development in the theories of electrons, I am convinced that what was missing in our understanding of the electron is a structure, into which all attributes of the electron could be incorporated in a self-consistent way. It is hereby postulated that the topological structure of the electron is a closed two-turn Helix (a so-called Hubius Helix) that is generated by circulatory motion of a mass-less particle at the speed of light. A formulation is presented to describe an isolated electron at rest and at high speed. It is shown that the formulation is capable of incorporating most (if not all) attributes of the electron, including spin, magnetic moment, fine structure constant, anomalous magnetic moment, and charge quantization into one concrete description of the Hubius Helix. The equations for the description emerge accordingly. Implications elicited by the postulate are elaborated. Inadequacy of the formulation is discussed.' back

Quark - Wikipedia, Quark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Quarks . . . are a type of elementary particle and major constituents of matter. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most well-known of which are protons and neutrons. They are the only particles in the Standard Model to experience the strong force, and thereby the only particles to experience all four fundamental forces, which are also known as fundamental interactions.' back

Richard Behiel (2025_08_07a), Superconductivity and the Higgs field, ' In this video, we explore the Higgs field, which has a nonzero expectation value throughout our universe, even in "empty" space. The Higgs field is very much like a superconducting condensate, and so we will use superconductivity as a way of exploring the Higgs field. back

Yosef Garfinkel1 & Sarah Krulwich, The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking, 'Journal of World Prehistory (2025) 38:14 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-025-09200-9 Abstract The earliest systematic depictions of vegetal motifs in prehistoric art appear on painted pottery vessels of the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia, c. 6200– 5500 BC. The motifs are varied, representing flowers, shrubs, branches and trees.
The first part of our analysis deals with four major questions. What was chosen to be depicted? How common were the vegetal motifs? What was the distribution of these motifs? And why were vegetal motifs introduced in this particular era? The second part of the analysis deals with the Halafian skills of symmetry and precise division of space. The depictions of flower petals in the geometric sequence of the numbers 4, 8, 16 and 32, as well as 64 flowers in another type of arrangement, point to arithmetical knowledge. We argue that in the early village communities of the Near East the ability to make precise divisions was relevant to various needs, such as equal sharing of crops from fields that were collectively cultivated by a number of families, or the whole village' back

www.naturaltheology.net is maintained by The Theology Company Proprietary Limited ACN 097 887 075 ABN 74 097 887 075 Copyright 2000-2026 © Jeffrey Nicholls