vol 7: Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 26 December 2010 - Saturday 1 January 2011]
[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]
[page 136]
Sunday 26 December 2010
The Christian story is a wonderful story, but like many a wonderful story, it has no roots. It needs to be rooted in reality, and this requires a few modifications.
Motivation II possibility / breakthrough
The big mistake in Christianity is that it places creation outside rather than inside theology. Natural theology says we are inside God, and because we are in the know, we experience God's personality in all our experiences.
From omnino simplex to omnino complex - Jech, Turing Jech: Set Theory, Alan Turing
Mundaka Upanishad 'Brahma was before the gods, the Creator of all, the Guardian of the Universe. Juan Mascaro, Penguin The Upanishads 1965-74.
[page 137]
Bhagavad Gita page 7.Anonymous: The Upanishads
I have said: Ye are gods . . . Psalm ? Psalm 82
Bhagavad Gita page 8: 'In theory, an Upanishad could even be composed in the present day. A spiritual Upanishad would draw its life from the One source of religions and humanism and apply it to the needs of the modern world.
The Catholic Word is corrupted by the institutional lust for power.
page 8: Latin Upanishads Anquetil-Duperron Paris 1802
page 9: Vedas 'There was not then what is nor what is not. There was no sky, and no human beyond the sky. What power was there? Where? Who was that power? Was there an abyss of fathomles waters? There was neither death nor immortality the. No suns were there of night or day. The ONE was breathing by its own power in infinite peace. Only the ONE was: there was nothing beyond.
Brouwer's fixed point: 'Unless a feeling [motion, emotion, passion] of reverence independent of the barriers of names can be felt for the ineffable, the saying of the Upanishads is true: words are weariness', the same idea expressed by the prophet that 'of making many books there is no end'.
page 11: 'The Upanishad doctrine is not a religion of the many; but rather the Spirit behind all religions is their central themse repeated in such a wonderful variety of ways.'
[page 138]
Bhagavad Gita 'When one sees eternity in things that pass away [ie stillness in motion] and infinity in finite things [motion in stillness], then one has pure knowledge.'
'Pure knowledge' seems meaningless. 'True' is what we want.
Air France pitot tubes. Clive Irving
No one can deny that the Bible, honed by thousands or tens of thousands of years of oral tradition,, is, like its peers from around the world, great literature.
Monday 27 December 2010
Tuesday 28 December 2010
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Thursday 30 December 2010
Friday 31 December 2010
From Trinity to Quantum mechanics via scale invariance - creation and annihilation.
Saturday 1 January 2011
Personality / quantum mechanics
While physicists look for a theory of everything in the output of their accelerators, I think the proper place to look is cybernetics. We have previously noted that quantum field theory is essentially a theory of a communication network. At the finest level, every quantum is a message, a quantum of action and a quantum of information, for information is carried by change. A blank sheet of paper (a total whiteout) tells us nothing. As on this page, the information
page 139]
comes from the contrast between the colours of ink and paper as we scan out way along the line.
Making a way from the authoritarian to democratic social organization.
Equiprobability is our model of nothing [symmetry].
Entropy after cybernetics. Entropy is not free and it is not evil.
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Copyright:
You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.
Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Anonymous, and Juan Mascaro (translator), The Upanishads, Penguin Classics 1965 Amazon.com Review
'The poetic backbone of Hinduism, the millennia-old Upanishads transcend time. The selections offered here illuminate a path that is as "narrow as the edge of a razor" but pregnant with freedom and bliss. Through vivid metaphors and timeless prose, learn how the path of yoga leads beyond the treacherous web of karma to the final, blissful union of the personal soul, atman, with the universal soul, Brahman.'
Amazon
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Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics'
Amazon
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Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the FoundinCantorg of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'
Amazon
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Davis, Martin, Computability and Unsolvability, Dover 1982 Preface: 'This book is an introduction to the theory of computability and non-computability ususally referred to as the theory of recursive functions. The subject is concerned with the existence of purely mechanical procedures for solving problems. . . . The existence of absolutely unsolvable problems and the Goedel incompleteness theorem are among the results in the theory of computability that have philosophical significance.'
Amazon
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de Soto, Hernando, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else, Basic Books 2000 'The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended more than a century of political competition between communism and capitalism. Capitalism stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally organise a modern economy. . . . As a result, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Third World and former communist nations have balanced their budgets, cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and dropped their tariff barriers. Their efforts have been repaid with bitter disappointment. . . . In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. . . . The poor . . . do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. The have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from paper clips to nuclear reactors, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic captialism work.' pages 1-7
Amazon
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Descartes, Rene, Rules for the direction of the mind: Discourse on the method, Encyclopaedia BritannicaB0006AU8ZG 1955
Amazon
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Galilei, Galileo, and Stillman Drake (translator), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including the Starry Messenger (1610 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina), Doubleday Anchor 1957 Amazon: 'Although the introductory sections are a bit dated, this book contains some of the best translations available of Galileo's works in English. It includes a broad range of his theories (both those we recognize as "correct" and those in which he was "in error"). Both types indicate his creativity. The reproductions of his sketches of the moons of Jupiter (in "The Starry Messenger") are accurate enough to match to modern computer programs which show the positions of the moons for any date in history. The appendix with a chronological summary of Galileo's life is very useful in placing the readings in context.' A Reader.
Amazon
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Jech, Thomas, Set Theory, Springer 1997 Jacket: 'This book covers major areas of modern set theory: cardinal arithmetic, constructible sets, forcing and Boolean-valued models, large cardinals and descriptive set theory. ... It can be used as a textbook for a graduate course in set theory and can serve as a reference book.'
Amazon
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Joachim, Howard H, and Errol E Harris, Descartes' Rules for the Directionof the Mind, Thoemmes Press: New Ed edition 1997 Product Description:
Taken from the original manuscripts of Joachim's lectures on the Regulae of Descartes, this volume was reconstructed after his death from notes taken by his pupils Errol Harris and John Austin. A critical examination of the main rules for the direction of the mind and the expositions by which Descartes explains them, the work contains commentary on five main topics: the power of knowing, the nature of the intellect, Descartes's account of induction and deduction, Descartes's method of analysis and synthesis, and the notice of vera mathesis. Joachim then goes on to criticize Descartes's method and to expound his own doctrine of philosophical analysis. The last chapter offers his own concrete organic unities in opposition to the Cartesian complex natures.' Amazon
Amazon
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Mascaro, Juan, and (translator), The Bhagavad Gita, Penguin Books 1962-1968
Amazon
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Papers
| Barasch, Jonathan, Kiyosho Mori, "", Nature, 432, 7019, 16 December 2004, page 811-812. 'Bacteria have many ways of stealing iron from the organisms they infect. But this thievery is not one-sided, and a newly discovered device in the mammalian tool kit does a good job of keeping bacteria in check.. back |
| Dobson, Christopher M, "Chemical Space and Biology", Nature, 432, 7019, 16 December 2004, page 824-828. 'Chemical space - which encompasses all possible small organic molecules, including those present in biological systems - is vast. So vast in fact that so far only a tiny fraction of it has been explored. Nevertheless, these explorations have greatly enhanced our understanding of biology, and have led to the development of many of today's drugs. The discovery of new bioactive molecules, facilitated by a deeper understanding of the nature of the regions of chemical space that are relevant to biology, will advance our knowledge of biological proceses and lead to new strategies to treat disease. '. back |
| Narashima, Roddam, "Essay Concepts: Divide, conquer and unify", Nature, 432, 7019, 16 December 2004, page 807. 'Werner Heisenberg said that Prandtl had "the ability to see the solution of equations without going through the calculations". Prandtl demurred, "No, I strive to form in my mind a thorough picture . . . the equations come only later when I believe I have understood . .. [and are] good means of proving my conclusions in a way that others can accept." His papers have a simplicity and directness born of supreme self-confidence. They do not trumpet their success or criticize others, but just get on with solving the central problems using all the tools available - observation (plenty of it), mathematics, calculation and modelling. Prandtl's methodological eclecticism set the style of fluid dynamics reseach in the twentieth century. No wonder G. I. Taylor called him 'our chief' and helped nominate Prandtl for the Nobel prize he never won.'. back |
| Shannon, Claude E, "The mathematical theory of communication", Bell System Technical Journal, 27, , July and October, 1948, page 379-423, 623-656. 'A Note on the Edition
Claude Shannon's ``A mathematical theory of communication'' was first published in two parts in the July and October 1948 editions of the Bell System Technical Journal [1]. The paper has appeared in a number of republications since:
• The original 1948 version was reproduced in the collection Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory [2]. The paper also appears in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers [3]. The text of the latter is a reproduction from the Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, a series of monographs by engineers and scientists of the Bell System published in the BSTJ and elsewhere. This version has correct section numbering (the BSTJ version has two sections numbered 21), and as far as we can tell, this is the only difference from the BSTJ version.
• Prefaced by Warren Weaver's introduction, ``Recent contributions to the mathematical theory of communication,'' the paper was included in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1949 [4]. The text in this book differs from the original mainly in the following points:
• the title is changed to ``The mathematical theory of communication'' and some sections have new headings,
• Appendix 4 is rewritten,
• the references to unpublished material have been updated to refer to the published material.
The text we present here is based on the BSTJ version with a number of corrections.. back |
| Turing, Alan, "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2, 42, 12 November 1937, page 230-265. 'The "computable" numbers maybe described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost as easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integrable variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique. I hope shortly to give an account of the rewlations of the computable numbers, functions and so forth to one another. This will include a development of the theory of functions of a real variable expressed in terms of computable numbers. According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine'. back |
Links
| Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron - Wikipedia Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (7 December 1731-17 January 1805) was the first professional French scholar of Indian culture. He conceived the institutional framework for the new profession. He inspired the founding of the Ecole francaise d'extreme orient a century after his death and, later still, the founding of the Institut francais de Pondichery.' back |
| Alan Turing On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem 'The “computable” numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique.' back |
| Alan Turing On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back |
| Claude E Shannon A Mathematical Theory of Communication 'The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.' back |
| Clive Irving Air France 447 Report: How the Plane Went Down 'A new report mostly blames pilot error for the tragic 2009 airplane crash. Clive Irving asks why pilots should be faulted for having to cope with serious technical failures.' back |
| Ecclesiastes Ecclesiastes 12:12: . . . of makingmany books there is no end 'King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.' back |
| Justin Romberg Nyquist Theorem The Connections Project, Rice University: 'The fundamental theorem of DSP [digital signal processing]' back |
| King James Bible Psalms 82:6 I have said . . . 'Viewing the 1769 King James Version. Click to switch to 1611 King James Version of Psalms 82:6
I have said, Ye [are] gods; and all of you [are] children of the most High.
- 1769 Oxford King James Bible 'Authorized Version' back |
| Laurence Frost & Heather Smith Air France Crash Criminal Probe Shows Scope of Crew Errors 'Air France Flight 447’s crew reacted badly to an autopilot shutdown and misread instruments showing the plane’s rapid descent before it plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people aboard, a report shows.' back |
| Psalm 82 Psalms, chapter 82 6I declare: “Gods though you be,*d
offspring of the Most High all of you,
7Yet like any mortal you shall die;
like any prince you shall fall.” back |
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