natural theology > notes

Notes

[Notebook: DB 61 Warm]

[Sunday 20 May 2007 - Saturday 26 May 2007]

Sunday 20 May 2007

Monday 21 May 2007

Tuesday 22 May 2007

Wednesday 23 May 2007

[page 73]

Thursday 24 May 2007

Doldrums. Could the network model be true? Philosophical arguments . . . Theological arguments . . . All the way through to biology, sociology etc to religion. This is the Development section of naturaltheology.net which is long overdue for an overhaul.

. . .

Some biologists act as though the genes are the only contact between generations, but in fact they are but a point in a spectrum running from the laws of physics to the protocol of a specific family in a specific local culture at a specific time.

There is a lot of denial about the evolutionary history of human nature because some people wish to maintain a spurious uniqueness about humanity and our relationships with our environment = god.

[page 74]

Friday 25 May 2007

Objection: mechanism, answer Gödel, Chaitin et al.

Although often praised for its spirituality and beauty, the heart of mathematics is rigid logical mechanism. Gödel, Chaitin, Stewart

Open string: occurrence of letters b strings random and uncorrelated, ie maximum entropy and stationarity?

Closed string: scheme of recurrence (Lonergan). Lonergan Paradoxically the classical emphasis on determinism is based on the notion of continuity, as in Einstein's equations and the ongoing belief, despite the existence of quantum mechanics, that the true explanation of the world is a spacetime continuum, a subset of the more general category 'logical continuum'. Transformation: saying the same thing in different words, ie a different basis.

Quantum mechanics, by integrating over the whole of spacetime, obliterates most of the detain in the functioning of the Universe [or perhaps at the quantum mechanical level of resolution, this detail is not visible].

SHANNON - MATHEMATICS - MECHANISM - CANTOR - Gödel & CO - NETWORK - TURING MACHINE - AMALGAM OF DETERMINISTIC AND NON-D. SPECIAL - GENERAL RELATIVITY - QUANTUM MECHANICS - QUANTUM FIELD THEORY - CREATION & ANNIHILATION.

[page 75]

Infinitesimal = 1/aleph(n), depending on the complexity level, n, at which we are working.

Our Universe is inherently dynamic because we live in spacetime.

Saturday 26 May 2007

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

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Chaitin, Gregory J, Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory, World Scientific 1987 Jacket: 'Algorithmic information theory is a branch of computational complexity theory concerned with the size of computer programs rather than with their running time. ... The theory combines features of probability theory, information theory, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and recursive function or computability theory. ... [A] major application of algorithmic information theory has been the dramatic new light it throws on Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem and on the limitations of the axiomatic method. ...'
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Feynman, Richard P , and Albert P Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, McGraw Hill 1965 Preface: 'The fundamental physical and mathematical concepts which underlie the path integral approach were first developed by R P Feynman in the course of his graduate studies at Princeton, ... . These early inquiries were involved with the problem of the infinte self-energy of the electron. In working on that problem, a "least action" principle was discovered [which] could deal succesfully with the infinity arising in the application of classical electrodynamics.' As described in this book. Feynam, inspired by Dirac, went on the develop this insight into a fruitful source of solutions to many quantum mechanical problems.
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Gödel, Kurt, and Solomon Feferman et al (eds), Kurt Gödel: Collected Works Volume 1 Publications 1929-1936, Oxford UP 1986 Jacket: 'Kurt Gödel was the most outstanding logician of the twentieth century, famous for his work on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypotheses. ... The first volume of a comprehensive edition of Gödel's works, this book makes available for the first time in a single source all his publications from 1929 to 1936, including his dissertation. ...'
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Stewart, Ian, Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry, Basic Books/Perseus 2007 Jacket: ' ... Symmetry has been a key idea for artists, architects and musicians for centuries but within mathematics it remained, until very recently ,an arcane pursuit. In the twentieth century, however, symmetry emerged as central to the most fundamental ideas in physics and cosmology. Why beauty is truth tells its history, from ancient Babylon to twenty-first century physics.'
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