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Notes

[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]

[Sunday 21 January 2007 - Saturday 27 January 2007]

Sunday 21 January 2007
Monday 22 January 2007

[page 79]

Tuesday 23 January 2007

Finkbeiner. Jasons. Finkbeiner

Relationship both unites and differentiates, as we see in the

[page 80]

Trinity, and this is digital. We start with one god, which duplicates itself as the Word of God and goes on in this vein. There is not much more to be said, and it is certainly more logically palatable than a being which is the fullness of being creating something outside itself when there is no possibility of anything existing outside itself except by a miracle, ie a contradiction.

Continuum physics has no way to explain how the initial singularity differentiates into the countable infinity of particles we find running around in the universal network.

Wednesday 24 January 2007
Thursday 25 January 2007

Jasons: become more irrelevant as government information requirements diversify from nuclear weapon design and deployment through biological warfare to the sociological and political problems underlying war. Finkbeiner characterizes jason as patriotic and worthy of security clearance from the US government, ie as something which considers the US and the politics it implies as beyond question. In other words, while they might be scientifically impartial, there are from from humanly impartial.

Clearly, the last sixty years have seen the fundamentalist capitalist and christian side of the US in conflict first with fundamentalist communism and now with fundamentalist Islam. If jason is to regain its impartiality it must rise above these fundamentalisms. The route I offer is via physical theology. While

[page 81]

physics is the study of symmetries which are common to every element of the Universe, theology is the study of the whole, and so is less concerned with symmetry than diversity. In the accompanying essay I unite physics and theology by assuming that physics describes the fundamental communication protocols of the universal network, whereas theology deals with the limitless diversity of the messages that can be transmitted using these protocols.

Theology and physics are unified by this paradigm, which takes advantage of the fact that the mathematics of quantum mechanics, through the phenomena of tensor product and entanglement, shows that the possibilities of the Universe are as great as can be possibly imagined. The Universe may therefore be taken to be big enough to be divine, and so a theology may become scientific and evolve toward unity as the other science have done.

The very loose rein on universal phenomena prescribed by quantum mechanics gives the lie to the vast amount of gratuitous control exercised by governments and other repressive organizations. Quantum mechanics gives us a model of political freedom which the physicists of jason seem to have honoured among themselves while providing the technology to the US government to repress such freedom among the general public by surveillance of communications of all sorts. Today this is done under the guise of combatting terrorism and amounts to a complete victory by the terrorists over a society claiming to be free and now subject to the same sort of authoritarian controls [arbitrary arrest without charge etc] which the theocratic ally minded terrorists seek to impose.

[page 82]

The foundation for the application of quantum mechanics is the notion of symmetry with respect to complexity.

Friday 26 January 2007

N 445: 1. Quantum mechanics and relativity describe the 'stem structure' of the Universe before it is differentiated into different specific structures. Like the initial singularity, this stem structure is present in every event in the Universe but constrained by the differentiation of that event.

Scholasticism claims that materia prima' differentiates otherwise identical forms. We say that every form is a unique leaf on [the universal tree] with a unique path through the tree of differentiation right back to the undifferentiated root.

N445:9 PLoS 'We are trying to make a journal where papers not the end point but the start point of a discussion. Nature

. . .

If the logical model of the Universe is true, we would expect the structure of events in the Universe to reflect processes selected for their efficiency, ie those that lead to stable 'schemes of recurrence' should be more common than those hat fade out by not supporting themselves. Such a scheme would be inherently non-linear, something we observe in gravitation.

In other words we are seeking a mechanistic (logical) explanation of the structure of the Universe. Cantor showed how to apply logic to the continuum by following the

[page 83]

Euclidian paradigm of considering a line as a dense set of points and applying a 'continuous' symmetry(based on the Archimedian property of numbers) in the form of epsilon-delta arguments and the like. Because of this symmetry, however, continuity tells us nothing - all information is carried by discontinuities. So we are led to a 'core wars' view of the differentiation of the initial singularity, the first hint of which is to be found in the Thomistic theology of the Trinity.

The tree of life. Below the root of the tol is the tree of physics, whose root is god or the initial singularity.

Physical Theology: an hypothesis --> PLoS.

ABC 7.30 report: interview with ex Islamic activist Ajaan Hirsi Ali. Ajaan Hirsi Ali

God made man is a metaphor for invariance with respect to symmetry: god us no more in control of its life than we are, or an atom is, at least at any intelligible level; although we define God and the Universe as 'nothing outside' and therefore as systems which are at least in principle in control of their own destiny because they are subject to nothing else.

Nina Simone . . .

Saturday 27 January 2007

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty


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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Finkbeiner, Ann, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite, Viking Adult 2006 Amazon Editorial Review: Publishers Weekly 'If necessity is the mother of invention, then the U.S. government's midwife for much of the Cold War was a small, brilliant and fiercely independent cadre of physicists who assembled each summer to make scientific reality out of pie-in-the-sky ideas. Ingenious problem-solvers to a man (they were, for decades, an all-boys club), "the Jasons" (a nickname of uncertain origin; it's either taken from the Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts, or an acronym for the months of July through November) agreed to help the government-and cash its checks-on the condition that their work be free from political influence; if the Pentagon or White House proposed a project the group found absurd or ethically reprehensive, they would say so in their typically blunt, intellectually arrogant manner. However, the smartest people in the room weren't always the savviest, and the Jasons found their work manipulated by the military to suit its own purposes. At least that's the story as told by Finkbeiner, who spent two years interviewing dozens of Jasons past and present and doesn't hesitate to give them the benefit of every doubt that's arisen in the group's shadowy, five-decade history, particularly those dealing with the Jasons' involvement in Vietnam. Nonetheless, Finkbeiner offers a rare and valuable look at the intersection of world politics, military strategy and scientific discovery.' Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 
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Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity, Oxford University Press 1995 Preface: 'As I will argue in this book, natural selection is important, but it has not laboured alone to craft the fine architectures of the biosphere . . . The order of the biological world, I have come to believe . . . arises naturally and spontaneously because of the principles of self organisation - laws of complexity that we are just beginning to uncover and understand.'  
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Khinchin, A I, 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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Pears, Iain, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Random House 1997 Jacket: 'Anyone who reads this will want to tell their friends about it ... This novel combines the simple pleasures of Agatha Christie with the intellectual subtlety of Umberto Eco ... don't let it pass by unread.' Sunday Times 
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Pierce, John Robinson, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols Signals and Noise, Dover 1980 Jacket: 'Behind the familiar surfaces of the telephone, radio and television lies a sophisticated and intriguing body of knowledge known as information theory. This is the theory that has permitted the rapid development of all forms of communication ... Even more revolutionary progress is expected in the future.'  
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Papers
Nature, Editorial, "News: Open-access journal will publish first, judge later", Nature, 445, 7123, 4 January 2007, page 9. 'A radical project from the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the most prominent publisher in the open access movement, is setting out to challenge academia's obsession with journal status and impact factors. The online-only PLoS One, which launched on 20 December, will publish any paper that is methodologically sound. Supporters say the approach will remove some of the inefficiencies associated with current peer-review systems -- but critics question whether a journal that eschews impact factors will manage to attract papers. . . . '. back

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