natural theology

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Notes

[Sunday 4 May 2008 - Saturday 2 February 2008]

[Notebook: DB 63 ATheology]

[page 168]

Sunday 4 May 2008

The physical layer is continuous; all the others are digital!

SMH GW 3 May '. . . New York based employment consultant Catalyst showed gender imbalance could affect the company's profitability. The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women's Representation on Boards reported that over a four-year period the Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards did significantly better on three crucial financial measures, return on equity (net profit divided by shareholders' equity), return on sales (pre-tax profit divided by net sales) and return on investment (net profit divided by investment costs.' Saville, Catalyst

[page 169]

Once I get the physical foundation in place, building a layered network with gods as users and God as the ultimate user seems to come naturally.

On rebasing the Catholic Church (restumping, refounding)

In terms of lifetime x set of influence, the two largest human corporate entities on earth [are the Roman Catholic Church and the China]. China has had many revolutions and conquests, as has the Church, but both have clocked up something in the vicinity of a trillion person-years of influence . . . .

The hierarchy of the church are responsible for how they manage God.

Although the Church likes to model itself as a monolithic eternal and infallible entity like the God which it markets, it has a very human social and political history and has made a number of changes in direction. Among the most recent has been to close down under the impact of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Modernism and assert ever more stridently its absolute authority. Even after the second Vatican Council, the breath of fresh air was soon stale as the executive reclaimed local power, sidelines the Bishops and closed the windows again.

The executive body of the natural religion project has as its first task refounding the Roman Catholic Church, changing its name to catholic church and promoting the idea that we and our world are divine. The close held [monopoly on God must be broken and God returned to us all].

Refounding religion project first job: the Roman Catholic Church. If we pull that off, other business should be easy to get.

toward natural religion == refounding religion. A new founding fiction, from Trinity to (transfinite) community.

Like a boy, I have been bashing away at the Roman Catholic Church with various sized hammers since it let me go, but so far all of them either bounced off or stuck on (like the tar baby) and I have got nowhere. Now, however, I have got the initial singularity to stand on and can see that it is the physical layer of God [God's body], corresponding to the mystics' view, but fitted with a logical scheme of internal differentiation which gives us the world we inhabit while in no way reducing the unity of God, since the divine energy flows through every event in the Universe.

The evolution of the Universe is equivalent to breaking general covariance by establishing certain invariant mappings like the structure of the Hydrogen atom which has energy arranged in a particular structure which constrains general covariance.

The symmetric network is a fully covariant vacuum from which all else is built by the process of symmetry formation (the establishment of peer groups, ie closed networks of communication). Given a peer group symmetry, we can permute the elements of this symmetry to get a more complex symmetry = more equivalent states.

[page 171]

GROUP = NETWORK (?)

How do we write the Lagrangian of the initial singularity? It describes the bifurcation from pure action to energy.time . . . This gives us an energy / period hyperbola for the Universe, of we represent pure act by scalar 1, to energy = frequency = 1/period, so energy.period = 1. period = t = lifetime.

. . .

Now action = integral Lagrangian dt = integral (kinetic energy - potential energy ) dt = S

Potential energy = F.s, force by distance.

E = dS / dt ie the time gradient of action. This gradient gives an irreversible direction to time? We can see a gradient of action in space also, p = dS / dx, given that p = h / lambda, where lambda is spatial wavelength.

Lagrange showed how to apply the Lagrangian to Newton. Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia Dirac and Feynman showed how to apply the Lagrangian to quantum mechanics. Dirac, Feynman How do we apply the Lagrangian to a network?

Spacetime is pixellated by pixels of action, but the pixels themselves go deeper that spacetime in a way

[page 172]

analogous to the pixels on a display screen are the memory locations in the computer connected to each pixel.

Beale and Jackson Neural Computing. Beale & Jackson

page 3: 'The approach of neural computing is to capture the guiding principles that underlie the brain's solution to these [immensely parallel] problems and apply them to computer systems.'

page 4: '. . . we want the right architecture for the right job.['

page 7: 'Learning is thought to occur when modifications are made to the effective coupling of one cell to another.'

This is of general application. The wave functions in the quantum network describe the strength of coupling (amplitude) between two states: coupling = <state one | state two >.

page 10: MENACE (Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) Chesnokov Yuriy

Going into debt and paying back later occurs at all scales and is a continual situation underlying this project. Somehow it is related to symmetry breaking (we go into debt to develop a new product in the hope that it will pay off). So the cost of borrowing is a second order constraint on what symmetries can be broken (cost of borrowing = failure rate, ie ventures that make a loss). Local loss making must be sustained by global profit, as in social security,

MENACE: 'When the game is over , the output is fed back into the machine . . . . Learning . . . occurs by adding a bead of the

[page 173]

same colour to boxes representing a successful series of moves or by removing a bead of the colour that led to defeat.

Beale page 16: 'The fundamental objective for pattern recognition is classification.'

The fundamental requirement for error free communication is packets that can be unambiguously classified.'

page 53: Rosenblatt: '. . . given that it is possible to classify a series of inputs, then a perceptron network will find that classification. Perceptron - Wikipedia, Rosenblatt

God is a human scientific fiction (hypothesis) which has been appropriated by the ruling class to bolster their position. Nowhere has thus been taken further than in the papacy that claims such a strong bond with an infallible God (a model with corporate approval) that it claims infallibility for itself.

The purpose of natural theology is to liberate God from the greedy clutches of this ancient fundamentalist dictatorial regime and get it into our greedy clutches.

The state of NSW is paying big $ to party with a throwback to ancient Rome, a man both politically and intellectually from before the Dark Ages. He comes to impart his ancient imperialist and authoritarian ideas to our children. Why? One can't imagine our government wanting him unless they thought it was good for them. It hardly seems likely that the operation will show a profit, so Why?

[page 174]

Monday 5 May 2008

A stationary point may often be a turning point, a point of inflection that suggests a collision or the action of a force, the receipt of a message.

Elastic vs plastic collision.

The variational method draws a curve that represents the action and then looks for stationary points on the curve. A stationary point is something that stays the same while something else changes. In the quantum world, where continuous curves are only an approximation, we can imagine that the stationary point is the boundary between actions. [like keystrokes]

Fourier's theorem: By superposing n waves with varying frequency, amplitude and phase, we can construct a [continuous] curve that passes through n given points.

With gravitation in place (at least till it breaks out) we have completed the meaningless message free physical layer of the Universe. Now we turn to biology and the evolution of life as we know it, in theological terms the creative power of the living God.

We see two business models, the creative and the predatory which are in fact closely linked. Human creativity ultimately grows from food, which we obtain ultimately by predation on plants, which redate, in turn on the sun.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

[page 175]

The Universe has fixed points because it maps onto itself and so (?) fulfills the conditions for fixed point theorems to become effective.

ie A theorem becomes effective (or maybe just possible) when its conditions are fulfilled. Each layer of determinism fulfills the conditions for a new layer of theorems, that is a new set of Turing machines.

We begin with Parmenides principle. Only stationary points can be written.

On the transfinite oscillator page we try to sum up the rather wandering track through the first 12 pages of this chapter.

N letter: Modelling the Universe with a transfinite oscillator

ie the dynamics of the scientific method.

Deterministic = one-one correspondence (not necessarily reversible? quantum mechanics is? One to one [and onto] is by definition reversible . Then we have one - many and many - one, expansion and contraction.

The transfinite oscillator can go into action when the conditions are fulfilled for the Cantor, Gödel and Turing theorems. Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia, Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, Turing machine - Wikipedia

The symmetric Universe is a maximal address space which grows from 2 to practically infinity in a few steps, 2, 22 = 4, 24 = 16, 216 = 65 536, 265 656 = infinity.

[page 176]

COMPUTABLE = COMPRESSIBLE. All other functions are incompressible. Here we have the E=Theorem. Khinchin

The quantum oscillator. An essay on E = hf starting with a pendulum and a weight on a spring. Atomic structure and spectra.

There are ants on the firewood. I am trying to get them to save themselves by providing a bridge and only putting one end [of the wood in the fire]. The bridge also contains ants and the net movement seems to be toward the fire. Perhaps they are deceived by the situation, or have no means of dealing with the situation. A few of them come onto the bridge. Others are looking toward the fire and turning back. They'll probably find a bit of food on the floor left by a recent baby visitor.

To construct a more complex system than gravitation we need more fixed points that the initial singularity. But we assume that the Universe, like the classical model of god, is able to map itself onto itself, and tradition has called this mapping the world of God.

An important survival strategy is to face hardship to get out of danger, like running through a surrounding fire.

We will go as far as we can go and generously accept any financial rewards that may be forthcoming for the good of our local world.

Heracleitus' principle: the world continually mapping onto

[page 177]

onto itself guided by a Logos.

Quantum mechanics models the generation of the world as observation.

Superposition: many clocks going at different rates.

What does god do? Sustains our lives. What does the environment do? Sustains our lives. Therefore let god = environment.

Small print at the top: This site is a bit of a mess and I would like to have the resources to improve it. So please click on the ds, Some of them are quite interesting.

The basic network resource is bandwidth available and the actual traffic. will depend on the attraction of the site. Search engines are attractive because they provide a path to other attractors / attractions.

An attractive site: revenue = f(traffic), traffic = f(value), [revenue = f(value)] We measure attraction in connections per time [= coupling constant]

Plato's forms - the world of god
Aristotle-s matter - the route to communicating with god, via material senses.

Wednesday 7 May 2008

The 'concrete' world of experience is all messages.

[page 178]

Thursday 8 May 2008

So far the network model yields no interesting numerical results and we may be wrong to expect any. Given the continuous nature of energy and gravitation, it is hard to find any way to fix constants like h or c. With the advent of structure and the need for error free communication quantization and the quantum of action appear, and we can say that quanta are countable (like sheep) without attributing a particular 'size' to them. The advent of space-time gives meaning to the idea of velocity, and so we suspect that the velocity of light is a primitive unity, like the quantum of action, establishing a relationship between space and time. Like the quantum of action, c is a relativistic invariant and so can be imagined to predate most of the currently observed spatial structure of the Universe, since both are local.

Hornblower Aristotle page 167: '15. Throughout his work Aristotle is intensely concerned with experience, including the record of experience contained in what people say. ... Although we may find fault with his treatment of one or another previous thinker, he was the first Greek thinker to make engagement with the books of others a central part of his method.' Hornblower

Among the tragedies of the commons is the privatization of God by the Roman Catholic Church.

Hornblower page 168 : 'In Metaphysics 12, Aristotle articulates his idea of god as an eternally active and unaffected substance, whose activity is thinking and who inspires movement in the

[page 179]

heavenly spheres by being the object of their love.'

Modern physicists' theory of everything describes in Aristotle's sense the 'material' explanation of the Universe without saying anything about the formal, efficient and final causes.

page 168: 23 eudaimonia = 'human flourishing'.

Pascal the punter. What odds would the bookies place on the Pope's heaven coming in a winner.

While we are defining privacy,. we are also defining publicity. Roads are public, railways are public, all communication networks.

The Pope is not just a harmless old potentate, a legend in his own mind. He is a legend in a lot of minds. People believe what he says, which is scary. Can you really believe that if you do what the Pope and his mob tell you, you will enjoy an eternal life of blissfully contemplating the glory of God. If you do, so be it. I did once too ... .

The Marist Brothers wanted results, because that's how schools were judged in those days. Marist Brothers - Wikipedia They beat our science into us (and I did well in maths and science) and they beat our religion into us, but they did not tell us much about how they fitted together, except the principle that if they seemed to be in conflict, the dogma rules. To learn the dogma, read the creed, or (if you want more depth) Denzinger's compilation of [Creeds, Definitions and Declarations on matters of Faith and Morals] Denzinger But we also learned about Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor - Wikipedia

I think I must have been a revolting child, but I went along

[page 180]

with my education, reading a book under my desk and keeping an ear on the teacher in case of sudden calls to attention. I became convinced that I had a vocation to the religious life blah blah.

So in the end the Pope dispensed my vows and I was free to leave and I did [with a new suit]. That was forty years ago. Much water has flown under various bridges since then, but now I think I can see what is going on. It is the tragedy of the commons over again. The Roman Catholic Church has enclosed God, a public person, for their own use.

Now let us take the Razor to the Church, and its business plan. Everything revolves around a monopoly on God, claimed by an institution ie a (reputed) corporations with a defined corporate structure and a Constitution, Canon Law. Holy See

The transformation from resource based to service based economy allows us to live more profitably by trade than by war, rape, plunder, occupation, taxation and so on .

The physiology of the 'humanosphere', homosphere?

Homossphere. human sphere.

As God is a captive of the Churches, so too theology. God can only reenter the commons when theology becomes a real science, not interpreting old books but looking the real world in the eye. It is amazing enough, because it is divine. And if the world is divine, theology, by observing the world, can

[page 181]

become an evidence based science.

After gravitation, electromagnetism, also massless. How many degrees of freedom does it take to define spacetime, or all possible transformations of spacetime. gmn = 10 independent transformations.

The Fourth Element N: 453:42 Tour & He

Cannibalism, burnt offerings and the Eucharist

Vatican Roulette at Randwick Racecourse.

The only leaders that will lead us to eudaimonia is ourselves.

The Pope insists, however, that we are broken and need leadership. Not only that but we must follow his lead with blind faith

Poetry (Divine Poetry) 'The Sculpting of Jupiter's gossamer rings by its shadow. N 453:72. Hamilton & Kruger

'Magnetic fields do no work' page 73

All measurements are ratios, and the fundamental units in the Universe appear to be h and c. Both are local, so everyone measures the same in his.her rest frame (everything, its)

In my experience the Roman Catholic Church is a terrorist organization, promising (and delivering) untold pain to those who do not conform to its views.

Friday 9 May 2008

[page 182]

All real relationships involve communication, which in turn [differentiates the communicants].

Augustine de Trinitate: page 123: 'This . . . is my faith, inasmuch as it is the Catholic Faith'. Augustine

He considers it as given and not open to question. Science considers it an hypothesis or assumption, whose credibility will be measured by its relationship to all our other experiences. It is a basic human right to be autonomous, that is to criticize the milieu. This is suppressed in the Church: do what you are told, do not answer back, like children. If sister punished us for playing with the girls behind the shed it was no use denying it, even if we knew perfectly well that we had been smashing windows in the old house next to the school at the time of the alleged offense.

The Church is not the only offender here. It asserts its authority straightforwardly and expects to be obeyed. Many governments to the same, even democracies, through secrecy, denying their stakeholders any knowledge of what is being done and so suppressing criticism. The current crop of imperialist democracies are clearly proficient at this, citing various paper tigers that allegedly threaten national security.

Theological studies: On the expansion of the Trinity. a) 1 God; b) 3 Gods; c) natural theology; d) One god = whole Universe.

The Roman Catholic Church has since the beginning been at pains to place God as far from us as possible in order to emphasize

[page 183]

the importance and uniqueness of its role in communicating with God.

Vatican Roulette at the Racecourse. My principle (sic) gripe is that the Roman Catholic Church holds theology in an iron grip that must be broken if the world is to make any theological progress at all. This grip, formalized at Vatican I, is the doctrine of infallibility.

A bit like General Motors decreeing that Newtonian dynamics to not hold for its products.

As a structure I am a set of stationary points of the dynamics of my life. The hierarchy of stationary points that outline my dynamics is explained by the hierarchic network model.

Clauset et al N 473:47, 98 Clauset, Moore & Newman

The network model enables is to extrapolate our dramatic understanding of our relationships with one another to all relationships in the Universe.

We have two approaches to a network: to see the nodes as fixed and the messages as variable, or to see the messages as fixed and the nodes as variable. Since we can see the messages much more easily than the nodes (whose dynamics must be interpreted from their messages) we take the messages as fixed and seek the dynamics of the nodes. As this text is fixed and you will use it as a means of getting to the dynamics of the writer.

The development of our ideas of our place in the world over the last few thousand years has in some way followed the same course as our individual psychological world, starting solipsist,

[page 183]

seeing everything in relation to myself to social, seeing that everyone has a point of view and that a peaceful society must be open to all peaceful points of view. The Roman Catholic Church is at the toddler stage, seeing everything in terms of itself, denying any rights to the wider world.

Augustine, Hill page 26: '[Augustine] had to go on looking for God in the confident knowledge [?] that God was looking for him, and that he would find himself in the quest, and find God in finding himself.'

The Incarnation is a first mythologized step which must be brought down to earth by acknowledgement that we are all gods, independent sources of action.

The Papacy has frozen theology.

In Christian history, God is coming closer, and the next logical step is to dismiss the intermediary and recognize that god is here, local, and that we are parts of it.

Infallibility implies that the Pope is effectively God. All based on 'You are Peter . . . ' (Mt 16:18-19) Matthew

By making theology the tool of an absolutist institution they have trashed it.

Hill (Augustine) page 31: 'The name 'God" which for us is nearly always a proper name, and which we do not therefore use very much as a predicate by which to describe and classify a subject, was originally a common or generic noun like 'man' or 'cat'. In

[page 185]

the Hebrew Bible it is mostly used in its plural form Elohim, as a proper name. But this use implies that the revelation of monotheism us already complete, and that there is only one being to whom this common name properly belongs; and there is evidence that this revelation was not fully acquired or clearly grasped until fairly late in Israel's history.'

The Bible is revelation, and so is every other message from Gd. Given His goodness and total control, we must accept that every event in the Universe (of which the Bible is an infinitesimal part) is revelation of God. Christians can not deny this unless they attribute some sort of trickery to God. In other words, theology can get a lot more data about God from the whole world of experience that it can get from a very small shelf of literature, the Bible (lit. collection of books).

In a world that is finely balanced between absolutism and democracy, the absolutist weight of the Roman Catholic Church is significant.

The Church is some sort of cross between a corporation, a nation, a benevolent society and a club, in other words a distinct entity with a distinct constitution, intellectual property and modus operandi, which is basically to bullshit people into thinking that they need it, like the old time vendors of patent remedies. Shermer

One becomes a member by being baptized into the Church, as I have been and membership is for life. Baptism cures original sin.

As far as we can see, the world of our distant ancestors was full of gods, public and private, whose role was to guide some set of events ranging from romance to childbirth and beyond into the economy, war and society.

The privatization of the commons. The Catholic sequestration of God is paralleled by our governments selling off our forests to loggers for a few dollars royalty per hectare. The forests are treated as worthless. God is treated as a weapon to beat people over the head with to male them conform. Too strong? Sustainable. The Roman Catholic Church is an obstacle to human unity precisely because it is authoritarian and solipsist, mistaking itself for God.

What I am thinking now is that it is easy to make a quantum mechanical model of God by considering her as an isolated system whose interior is a transfinite dimensional Hilbert space undergoing reversible unitary evolution. This should satisfy those who want a mysterious (unobservable) or subjectively meaningless) Gd. An important feature of quantum mechanics is that it is indifferent to the complexity of the states which it describes. Cantor's transfinite numbers give us a formal coordinate system onto which we can map states of unlimited complexity [onto which we can map the stationary points of states of unlimited complexity].

Now we put ourselves inside the structure and study what it looks like to a small part of itself. Once again we draw on the quantum mechanical theory of observation, putting individual observations into a network that comprises every event in the world in their causal (temporal) sequence.

We are accustomed to looking at God from the outside.

[page 187]

I have always been puzzled by the relationship between the propositions God is everything and the created Universe is something other than God. I prefer the simpler position, the Universe is God. Since we are definitely in the Universe, we are definitely in God, and it is high time the theologians began to investigate this situation.

Saturday 10 May 2008

[Insert page 198]

[page 198]

On the (non) quantization of gravitation page 161, Wednesday 30 April.

The Roman Catholic Church business is built on the fairytale that once life for people on earth was easy and painless. And then the Woman fell for the Serpent and blotted the human copybook to such as extent that God changed the human environment so that work and pain became commonplace. We have since learnt that survival is hard work for every living thing. It is not a punishment. It is the way things are.

STABILITY - ERROR CORRECTION - COPYING

leads to

STRUCTURE - FIXED POINT THEOREMS - RECURSIVE (PERIODIC) FUNCTION THEORY (Fourier analysis).

Can we say Any Turing machine can be represented by a superposition of recursive functions.

[page 188]

We are saying that creation occurs because the error correcting power of a morsel of structure is sufficient, is used wisely, to keep that structure intact (able to resist error) for a lifetime. So my life, and the life of an atom. There is no reason why adequately robust structures should not last forever, particularly those like pure act that so fills the realm of possibility that it can not go wrong. We can first grasp this idea by looking at the simple end of the complexity spectrum.

The idle rich (if there are any), may make a lot of ars gratia artis and knowledge for its own sake, but practical science is driven by pathology.

The Roman Catholic Church has enslaved theology and God as any absolutist ruler tries to do, calling the heavens to witness his legitimacy,

MEMORY = something that stays where you put it, ie a non-terminating process, a self renewing cycle.

Augustine / Hill page 54 '[Augustine] does not conceive of the image of God in us as a static datum to be discovered and analyzed, but as a thing we are responsible for constructing. . . . '

Our being in God's image is not just something given, like having two ears, it is more a kind of program which we have to execute.

page 55: interior intime meo, de Trinitate book XIV.

PROCESSION = CREATION

[page 189]

Energy is the universal language spoken by action.

Robinson Honest to God Robinson

Faith is promulgated by authorities who wish to maintain their authority by, on the one hand, rendering some valuable service, and on the other, concealing the disparities between their assertions and reality: we're an empire now, we make our own reality. Reality-based community - Wikipedia

God is an entirely human scientific construct. Linguistics and theology are the first science.

I am sorry I made man Genesis 6:7 Genesis

Seek his face always (Psalms 105:4) Psalms

Dissipated.

Translations between natural languages are not linear because meaning endows some symbols with more weight than others. At the physical level all symbols are meaningless and carry the same weight. The weight of a symbol is the entropy of the space that it inhabits. The minimum entropy is 1, a space of two states.

'Unless you believe you will not understand (Isaiah 7:9) Isaiah No, unless you imagine (hypothesize) . . .

Jerusalem Bible: 'If you do not stand by me, [do not believe in me] You will not stand at all.

All the trouble comes from being forced to take sides. Nazareth. Nazareth - Wikipedia

[page 190]

God may be hard to understand but it is no way hidden. God is open for us all to see, and what we see is up to us, depending on how we look.

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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!)

Augustine, Saint, and Edmond Hill (Introduction, translation and notes), and John E Rotelle (editor), The Trinity, New City Press 1991 Written 399 - 419: De Trinitate is a radical restatement, defence and development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Augistine's book has served as a foundation for most subsequent work, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas.  
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Beale, R, and T Jackson, Neural Computing: An Introduction, Adam Hilger 1991 Jacket: '... starts from basics and goes on to cover all the most important approaches to the subject. ... The capabilities, advantages and disadvantages of each model are discussed as are possible applications of each. The relationship of the models developed to the brain and its functions are also explored.' 
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Canon Law Society of America, Holy See, Code of Canon Law: Latin-English Edition, Canon Law Society of America 1984 Pope John Paul XXXIII announced his decision to reform the existing corpus of canonical legislation on 25 January 1959. Pope John Paul II ordered the promulgation of the revised Code of Canon law on the same day in 1983. The latin text is definitive. This English translation has been approved by the Canonical Affairs Committee of the [US] National Conference of Catholic Bishops in October 1983. 
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Denzinger, Henricus, and Adolphus Schoenmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Herder 1963 Introduction: 'Dubium non est quin praeter s. Scripturam cuique theologo summe desiderandus sit etiam liber manualis quo contineantur edicta Magisterii ecclesiastici eaque saltem maioris momenti, et quo ope variorim indicum quaerenti aperiantur eorum materiae.' (3) 'There is no doubt that in addition to holy Scripture, every theologian also needs a handbook which contains at least the more important edicts of the Magisterium of the Church, indexed in a way which makes them easy to find.'back
Deutsch, David, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes - and its Implications, Allen Lane Penguin Press 1997 Jacket: 'Quantum physics, evolution, computation and knowledge - these four strands of scientific theory and philosophy have, until now, remained incomplete explanations of the way the Universe works. ... Oxford scholar DD shows how they are so closely intertwined that we cannot properly understand any one of them without reference to the other three. ...' 
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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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Genesis, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.' (I, 1-2) 
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Hornblower, Simon, and Anthony Spawforth (editors), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford University Press 1996 Jacket: 'The ultimate reference work on the classical world. . . . Over 6 200 entries illuminate every facet of life in ancient times to provide a gold-mine of factual information and a host of fascinating thematic entries. Most entries give plentiful and detailed references to ancient sources and all but the shortest of entries have extensive cross-references and are followed by full bibliographies.' 
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Isaiah, and (Alexander Jones, Editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Prophets: 'The prophet Isaiah was born about 756 B.C. In the year of king Uzziah's death, 740, he received his prophetic vision while in the Temple of Jerusalem. His mission was to proclaim the fall of Israel and Judah, the punishment of the nation's infidelity. ... The prominent part played by Isaiah in his country's affairs made him a national figure, but he was also a poet of genius. Brilliance of style and freshness of imagery make his work pre-eminent in the literature of the Bible; he wrote a conciae, majestic and harmonious prose unsurpassed by any of the biblical writers who were to follow him.' 
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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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Matthew, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels: '[Matthew is] a dramatic account in seven acts of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. 1. The preparation of the kingdom in the person of the child-Messiah. ... 2. the formal proclamation of the charter of the Kingdom ... i.e. the Sermon on the Mount ... 3. The preaching of the kingdom by missionaries ... 4. The obstacles that the kingdom will meet from men ... 5. Its embryonic existence ... 6. The crisis ... which is to prepare the way for the definitive coming of the kingdom ... 7. The coming itself ... through the Passion and resurrection.' (12) 
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Psalms, The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Psalms: 'The Pslter is Israel's hymn-book. The Temple, as we know, had its cantors from the beginning, though they are not mentioned until after the Exile. . . . The Psalter was tghe hymn-book of the Temple and the synagogue before it was adopted by the Christian Church.' page 7820 
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Robinson, John Arthur Thomas, Honest to God, Westminster John Knox Press 1963 Jacket: 'Bishop Robinson's work, Honest to God, for all its seeming radicalism, was a work of preservation. The task he set for himself . . . was to address this question: How is one to assure the survival of belief in God in a world where such belief is increasingly rejected, not so much because it is incredible as becasuse those who articulate the belief often make it seem incredible. This book is in the form of a via negative, historically a highly respectable enterprise. . . . It was not so much the 'radicalism' of the book that disturbed the readers, it was the honesty.' Joseph William Goetz, The Christian Century 
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Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press 1997 Jacket: 'The Story of Spin, as told by Sin-itiro Tomonaga and lovingly translated by Takeshi Oka, is a brilliant and witty account of the development of modern quantum theory, which takes electron spin as a pivotal concept. Reading these twelve lectures on the fundamental aspects of physics is a joyful experience that is rare indeed.' Laurie Brown, Northwestern University. 
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Papers
Clauset, Aaron, Cristopher Moore, M E J Newman, "Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing lings in networks", Nature, 453, 7191, 1 May 2008, page 98 - 101. Abstract: 'Networks have in recent years emerged as an invaluable tool for describing and quantifying complex systems in many branches of science. Recent studies suggest that networks often exhibit hierarchical organization, in which vertices divide into groups that further subdivide into groups of groups, and so forth over multiple scales. In many cases the groups are found to correspond to known functional units, such as ecological niches in food webs, modules in biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) or communities in social networks Here we present a general technique for inferring hierarchical structure from network data and show that the existence of hierarchy can simultaneously explain and quantitatively reproduce many commonly observed topological properties of networks, such as right-skewed degree distributions, high clustering coefficients and short path lengths. We further show that knowledge of hierarchical structure can be used to predict missing connections in partly known networks with high accuracy, and for more general network structures than competing techniques. Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.'. back
Dirac, P A M, "The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics", Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, 3, 1, 1933, page 64-72. 'Quantum mechanics was built up on a foundation of analogy with the Hamiltonian theory of classical mechanics. . . . there is an alternative formulation of classical dynamics provided by the Lagrangian. This requires one to work in terms of coordinates and velocities instead of coordinates and momenta. The two formulations are, of course, closely related, but there are reasons for believing that the Lagrangian one is the more fundamental.' Reprinted in Julian Schwinger (editor), Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics, Dover, New York, 1958.. back
Hamilton, Douglas P, Harald Kruger, "The sculpting of Jupiter's gossamer rings by its shadow", Nature, 453, 7191, 1 May 2008, page 72 - 75. Abstract: 'Dust near Jupiter is produced when interplanetary impactors collide energetically with small inner moons, and is organized into a main ring, an inner halo, and two fainter and more distant gossamer rings. Most of these structures are constrained by the orbits of the moons Adrastea, Metis, Amalthea and Thebe, but a faint outward protrusion called the Thebe extension behaves differently and has eluded understanding. Here we report on dust impacts detected during the Galileo spacecraft's traversal of the outer ring region: we find a gap in the rings interior to Thebe's orbit, grains on highly inclined paths, and a strong excess of submicrometre-sized dust just inside Amalthea's orbit. We present detailed modelling that shows that the passage of ring particles through Jupiter's shadow creates the Thebe extension and fully accounts for these Galileo results. Dust grains alternately charge and discharge when traversing shadow boundaries, allowing the planet's powerful magnetic field to excite orbital eccentricities and, when conditions are right, inclinations as well.'. back
Rosenblatt, Frank, "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain,", Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Psychological Review, 65, 6, 1958, page 386 - 408. 'Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron in 1957 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in an attempt to understand human memory, learning, and cognitive processes. On 23 June 1960, he demonstrated the Mark I Perceptron, the first machine that could "learn" to recognize and identify optical patterns.' (From Perceptrons: An Associative Learning Network by Michele D. Estebon http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Perceptrons.Estebon.html#3). back
Saville, Margot, "Welcome on Board", The Sydney Morning Herald: Good Weekend, , , 3 May 2008, page 23 - 28. 'Even when [women] are placed in a senior role, they often get paid less than the nearest man. In January the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) released a report that examined the pay structure of the five most highly paid executives in Austrlia's 200 largest (stockmarket-listed) companies. Only 80 out of those 1136 positions (7 per cent) were held by women, and when a female became chief financial officer or chief operating officer, she earned half the wage of her male equivalent, while female CEOs earned two-thirds. Even in human resources positions, where women are more common, the pay gap was still 43%.'. back
Shermer, Michael, "JAMA and the Mountebank", Nature, 451, , 7 February 2008, page 628-629. Review of Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him and the Age of Flim Flam, by Pope Brook. '. . . faith in anecdotes can make us easy to exploit. Any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful testimonials. Enter John R. Brinkley, one of the most notorious medical quacks of the first half of the twentieth century, and his nemesis Morris Fishbein, the quackbusting editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Their long struggle throughout the 1920s and 1930s, wonderfully retold in a gripping narrative by Pope Brock, brings to life this tension between folk and scientific medicine.'. back
Tour, James M, Tao He, "The fourth element", Nature, 453, 7191, 1 May 2008, page 42-43. 'Almost four decades since its existence was first proposed, a fourth basic circuit element joins the canonical three. The 'memristor' might herald a step-change in the march toward ever more powerful circuitry.'. back
Links
Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In elementary set theory, Cantor's theorem states that the power set (set of all subsets) of any set A has a strictly greater cardinality than that of A. Cantor's theorem is obvious for finite sets, but surprisingly it holds true for infinite sets as well. In particular, the power set of a countably infinite set is uncountably infinite. The theorem is named for Georg Cantor, who first stated and proved it.' back
Catalyst Knowledge: The Bottom Line 'THE BOTTOM LINE: CORPORATE PERFORMANCE AND WOMEN'S REPRESENTATION ON BOARDS Women Board Directors (WBD) Align With Strong Performance at Fortune 500 Companies1 Financial measures excel where women serve' back
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In mathematical logic, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are two theorems stating inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest..' back
Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia Joseph-Louis Lagrange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Joseph-Louis Lagrange, comte de l'Empire (January 25, 1736 – April 10, 1813; b. Turin, baptised in the name of Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia) was an Italian mathematician and astronomer who made important contributions to all fields of analysis and number theory and to classical and celestial mechanics as arguably the greatest mathematician of the 18th century.' back
Marist Brothers - Wikipedia Marist Brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Marist Brothers are a Catholic religious order of brothers and affiliated lay people. The order was founded in France, at La Valla near Lyon in 1817 by Saint Marcellin Champagnat, a young French priest of the Society of Mary (Marist Fathers). Worldwide, there are more than 4500 brothers working in 77 countries on 5 continents. They directly share their mission and spirituality with more than 40,000 laypeople, and together educate close to 500,000 children and young people in schools, and minister to the spiritual and material wellbeing of countless others.' back
Nazareth - Wikipedia Nazareth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Nazareth . . . is the capital and largest city in the North District of Israel. It also serves as an Arab capital for Israel's Arab citizens who make up the vast majority of the population there.[2] In the New Testament, the city is described as the childhood home of Jesus, and as such is a center of Christian pilgrimage, with many shrines commemorating biblical associations.' back
Noel S McFerran Toleration Act, 1689 'Forasmuch as some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion may be an effectual means to unite their Majesties Protestant subjects in interest and affection: ... ' back
Occam's Razor - Wikipedia Occam's Razor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", or "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". . . . Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim (rule of thumb) that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity, often or especially in scientific theories.' back
Perceptron - Wikipedia Perceptron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedianotesm05d04 'The perceptron is a type of artificial neural network invented in 1957 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt. It can be seen as the simplest kind of feedforward neural network: a linear classifier.' back
Reality-based community - Wikipedia Reality-based community - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush: The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' back

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