Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 31 December 2006 - Saturday 6 January 2007]
[page 59]
Sunday 31 December 2006
Physical theology 2006 subject to instant rejection [by Science] , the same phrasing as Nature 20 years ago: we do not publish that sort of material.
Disappointing, but it also seems too much to ask to have such a radical change in scientific outlook after only 40 years of part time work by a not too bright worker. One can see why some people resort to suicide to get a hearing, but there is no chance of that here. Each year of work brings me greater confidence and motivation. This year has yielded the computable manifold as the physical layer of the transfinite network and given me a much clearer idea of the relationship between network communications and general covariance. I feel now that I have covered the ground creatively and now merely have to convert my
[pages 60-61 accidentally blank]
[page 62]
sketch of an opera house into a practical and realizable design, something that I can do in the building trade and hope I can do in the formal trade. Obviously the big prize is to quantize gravity and although the project seems to me awesome, I am almost prepared to begin physics again as an undergraduate to achieve it. The important direction to go is toward concreteness and application now that we have reached a suitable level of abstraction. I would not know what to do with myself if I gave this project up as hopeless, so, as ever, press on in the luxurious knowledge that if I do not make something if it, someone else will.
The hypothesis is that general relativity reflects the global structure of the universal network whose details are described by quantum mechanics. To demonstrate this, we need to construct a model network which obeys both Einstein's field equations and the equations (constraints) of quantum mechanics, what amounts to a logical field theory of everything.
Monday 1 January 2007
Energy and entropy are linked by meaning, the ratio of information to energy in a given structure. To begin this study we can turn to Hawking's work on the entropy of black holes.
Tuesday 2 January 2007
Wednesday 3 January 2007
Rumpole: An advocate's job is to cast the actions
[page 63]
of the accused in a frame of reference that yields 'guilty' or 'not guilty' depending on whether the advocate is prosecuting or defending. This requires emphasizing and deemphasizing various points in the evidence by attributing different meanings to them, in other words, modifying the operator through which the court views the accused. The same may be said of scientific efforts to understand a body of data, the correct theory as Agatha frequently points out, finding a comfortable place for all the facts.
PHYSICS = CARDINAL = PHYSICAL LAYER
??? = ORDINAL = USER(n) LAYER
PEER LAYER = {USERS OF PEER -1}
MTW: Tensor is a linear machine (= deterministic machine?)
NON-LINEAR = NON-DETERMINISTIC?
The insight that the Universe is a symbolic system and therefore subject to symbolic logic has the same role in physical theology as Kirchoff's discovery that black body radiation intensity is a function of temperature and frequency (energy), yielding as a result a count of photons in each energy band.
The amount of memory (entropy) needed to represent a tensor with n indices in a space of m dimensions is mn.
How does the Universe remember this? Each value in
[page 64]
each memory location is a magnitude (a measure, a cardinal [, a scalar]). A magnitude [is] a count of something countable. The finest grained countable is measured in quanta of action, ie measures of happening, ie measures of communication or exchange.
Rewrite 'physical theology' for Theological Studies.
Bernard Lonergan did a magnificent job of rephrasing the 'perennial philosophy' in the language of the early twentieth century, thus exposing these ancient ideas to modern criticism. This criticism reveals that there are no scientific grounds for the ancient distinction between god and the world. Here we use an exegesis based on modern formal mathematics and logic to develop this conclusion in 'Lonerganese' and so hopefully make it intelligible to philosophers and theologians fluent n that language.
The empirical foundation for this article is my personal experience of the Catholic faith and the paradigm shift made necessary when (with Lonergan's help) I saw that that faith was in no way secure enough to ground my life.
The names of variables like mass, energy, momentum etc are in effect the names of different accounts (memory locations) between which physics attempts to establish arithmetical relationships.
Wald, Black holes and Thermodynamics Robert M Wald
Thursday 4 January 2007
Covariance (laws of physics are the same in every Lorentz reference system, which is equivalent to the geometric view of physics. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, page 80
heavy mathematical machinery is rather like travelling by train, it gets one quickly from a to b, but totally removes the freedom to stop and eat the flowers. The geometric (continuous) view of the Universe thus obscures a large amount of detailed structure in the Universe.
The primary metaphysical fact in the 'perennial philosophy' is the fact of knowledge. If we did not have the power of knowledge we would not be connected to one another or the Universe. One of the primary facts about knowledge is that is is communicable. That is why children gradually learn the language and customs of their human environment. Knowledge is communicable and learnable. Another feature of knowledge is that learning and communication take time. I have had over twenty years of formal education in my life, and every moment is another step in my informal education.
Insight, as described by Lonergan, is the act of receiving a communication, [testing it for veracity] and storing it as knowledge.
[page 66]
Lonergan's physics is essentially classical, and he lies firmly in the [metaphysical and theological] tradition that partitions reality into an unmoved mover and the moving world. This tradition dates back as least to Parmenides and can be traced [through Plato] to Aristotle, Aquinas and thence to Lonergan.
Saturday 6 January 2007
The root of Lonergan's error (which he holds in common with a large portion of the physics community, is that the Universe is continuous. This is not the case in biology, where it has long been assumed that all biological processes are the results of discrete encounters between discrete molecules (in the abstract view, discrete symbols). We know that the alphabet of life is a small set of some twenty elements and the communication protocols between then that bond them into molecules containing somewhere between two [02] and a billion [DNA] atoms.
We are already seeing an abstract representation of the Universe. We are concrete, but all our knowledge is abstract, ie the result of observation.
EMPIRICAL RESIDUE = CONTINUUM
Not so much 'that the Universe is a continuum' as how we understand a continuum.
[page 67]
How does insight happen? Lonergan has no answer. He does not even ask the question. He tacitly accepts the ancient belief that the mind is a spiritual entity whose nature is beyond the mind of mankind. [The human] Mind, in other words must accept that it works, without asking itself how. The schoolmen accepted that in the act of insight the agent intellect, using data in the imagination as input, impressed an intelligible form on the passive intellect. Now anyone familiar with the terminology would interpret this statement as pretty close to a tautology, telling us nothing.
We see no reason why mind should not investigate mind, and when it does so I believe it sees that its mechanism is ubiquitous throughout the Universe and its action is what is known in communication theory as 'coding a message' [and in physics as a 'transformation'].
Cantor was on the cusp, trying to investigate classical continuity with logical continuity, the art of mathematical proof whose first major application was Euclid's geometry. Cantor, Heath
Geometry raises the question of the continuum. We conceive of a point as having position but no magnitude, by which we mean the sort of extension that allows us to draw geometric figures on blank surfaces, clay, wax tablets, marble, paper and so on.
The mapping of numbers onto geometric objects is one of H. sapiens' greatest theoretical discoveries, no doubt the work of builders, engineers and surveyors measuring
[page 68]
lands and structures.
The discovery and proof of Pythagoras theorem led to the further discovery that the mapping between extensions and numbers was not complete. There are points in the geometrical continuum that cannot be represented by a whole number or any ratio of whole numbers. Thus the reals were postulated, unrepresentable numbers that lay between the representable rational numbers.
The next step in the relationship between geometry [and arithmetic] came with the discovery of calculus, a theory that had its roots in antiquity, but did not become the foundation of physics until its discovery by Newton and Leibniz [and its application to physical problems by Newton and Leibniz. Cohen
Reduction of the wave function is equivalent to intellectual (or more generally mental) abstraction insofar as they pick just one out of a superposition of states.
