vol VII: Notes
2012
Notes
[Sunday 20 May 2012 - Saturday 21 May 2012]
[Notebook: DB 71 Israel]
[page 162]
Sunday 20 May 2012
An analysis of religious risk: Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia
We are all the time trying to figure out our place in the world and each of these scenarios carries a certain amount of risk. The view that it is all 'just for us' and we can exploit it as we wish now seems to be putting us on the road to extinction. What would Goldman's do?
RISK <--> SECURITY
We have to embrace the whole spectrum from surf sex and sun to famine, war and disease. Natural religion can do this without invoking Satan. Satan - Wikipedia
[page 163]
Global financial crisis : global religious crisisFinancial security : make conflicting interests (trying to get energy = cash) orthogonal.
The foundation of true religion is that in the end all our interests coincide.
Bruce Gregory Inventing Reality: Physics as Language Gregory
Monday 21 May 2012
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Our experience of ourselves and other people suggests that physically observables have some metaphysical motivation,. The reason why these two are kissing all the time suggests that they are 'in love', an internal state which I have observed within myself and tend to extrapolate to others. This scenario is a prototype of science, observe, hypothesise (guided by personal experience) test (are you two in love, or perhaps just in lust?).
Special relativity: the real action is in relative motion [space-time process]
Mass is potential energy.
A dynamic system at equilibrium looks stativ so while we se mass as a static potential, it is in effect the sum of the (kinetic) energies of all the porcesses within it.
[page 164]
Gravitation is a representation of the algorithms of differential geometry which describe a flow constrained only by consistency and a conservation law which arises from a symmetry = meaninglessness.
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Scale invariant creation and annihilation : what works for photons works also for planets and people, and al makes sense in a network.
Eureka Street: On reimagining the sacred
Theological and climate denialists have both fallen for the idea that there are areas of knowledge beyond the reach of science, ie experience.
Field: continuous statistical approximation to a discrete set of events, the shape of a population.
Weisskopf in Gregory page 227: 'It is the existence of well defined specific qualities [an alphabet] of which nature abounds, that runs counter to the spirit of classical physics.
Classical physics is totally blind to the discrete nature of events in the Universe, except at the level of thermodynamics, which is the door to statistical mechanics, classical and quantum, and this in turn leads us to the theories of computation and communication which are the deterministic and probabilistic foundations of a true theory of everything, theology.
[page 165]
The problem of universals is solved by the genetic nature of the Universe. We begin with symmetries (eg identity of electrons) and then watch the symmetries breaking to give the variegated Universe we see, which is a language comprising an alphabet of symmetries [eg instances of electron].
Reading: an imagined conversation with an author.
Wigner Gregory page 119: "Part of the art and skill of the engineer and of the experimental physicists is to create conditions in which certain events are sure to occur.' The Role of Invariance Principles in Natural Philosophy. Wigner: Symmetries and Reflections
Energy
momentum
angular momentum -- phase
Communication occurs when the communicants share the same language. In quantum mechanical terms this means share the same orthogonal basis so that operators in the two communicating spaces commute. Wojciech Hubert Zurek: Quantum origin of quantum jumps
Gregory page 128: 'A force arises when virtual gauge particles are exchanged.'
Dirac, Gregory page 15: 'In atomic theory we have fields and we have particles. The fields and the particles are not two different things. They are two different ways of describing the same thing -- two different points of view. We use one or the other according to convenience.'
Weinberg: The particle is nothing else but the representation
[page 166]
of its symmetry group. The Universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups. Crease and Mann. Crease & Mann
Physicists scale by energy, but is this Right> Here we scale by complexity, and this scale may not have the same order as the scale by energy. Electrons seem to be simple than quarks, and yet they have a much lower energy. Neutrinos are approximately the same complexity as electrons but very much less energetic and photons (which may be the simplest particle of all) come in an infinite range of energies.
Gregory page 168: 'The Universe would be what the vacuum produces when left to itself.'
Did we discover God or did we invent it? We discovered it because it existed before us and made us. We invented the language to talk abut God because once there were no humans and even after we came into existence it was probably a long time before we invented language to talk about God.
Instead of scaling by energy we scale by entropy, and we believe entropy is created by communication, ie differentiated copying. So we have layers like the transfinite number each new layer created by permuting the layer beneath it.
Thursday 24 May 2012
Survival is the ultimate epistemological test.
Gregory 0-age 183: 'Dirac found that we can talk of electrons and positrons as being created out of nothing but energy and being reduced
[page 167]
reduced to nothing but energy.' He is wrong here because all observed events are generated in the context of the Universe and so are constrained by it, so we should say 'using energy and a possible permutation of the local environment, eg the Large Hadron Collider'.
'Context' has its effect through communication. I am created out of 'nothing but energy' but shaped by every interaction throughout my history stretching back through a thread of action to the initial singularity == classical God.
My model of God is effective insofar as it forms part of the environment of action for myself and people I influence.
Event == revelation. The event 'hits the tape first' revels the winner of the race.
Have stopped working on the website and back to the notebook -- perhaps because a major rearrangement of the website is in progress. Making a book a la Summa Theologiae part I, working a way through the hierarchy of questions beginning with 'what is theology?' and ending with 'what does this mean in practice?'
Aquinas proceeds 'per sic et non' building a path through a binary tree of possibility from God to the leaf called the Catholic Church.
A New Religion embodied in the catholic church, ie a church broad enough to hold the whole Universe, ie God (as I cannot help but write again and again).
We have been gradually displaced from our position at the centre of the Universe by our growing awareness that our powers are not unique but distributed throughout the system.
Gregory page 186: 'There seems to be no already made world to be discovered.
Stupid, try the 'kick the stone (barefoot)' test.
'The struggle between Galileo and the Church was a struggle over the procedure to be used in determining the truth of certain statements. The resolution of that conflict consisted in distinguishing two domains of inquiry, religion and science each of which has its own procedure for determining truth. In the realm of most religions the appeal is to authority; in the realm of science the appeal is to observations and experiments.'
The ultimate authority is God, and we know God through observations and experiments ie by science, and so science becomes the source of religious truth.
Ting: 'Science is one of the few areas left where the majority does not rule' -- divine dictatorship.
Scientists do not agree so much on conclusions as procedures.
PROCEDURE = TRUING MACHINE + NETWORK INPUTS
The procedures by which we build theories are identical to the procedures by which the world builds itself, and the way we build ourselves, continuously searching the space of possibilities for our next action, in my case turn on the pump, check for leaks and go on building the new shed. Back in an hour or so.
Laplace 190.
[page 169]
Gregory page 191: The word electron refers to a process with certain fixed points.We don't need rich people to make the economy grow. We have banks to assemble large numbers of small accounts into larger ones and finance large works if necessary.
Friday 25 May 2012
All the effort represented by these notebooks is work toward fulfilling the promise of my youth, the discovery that the Universe is divine. My task since then has been to elaborate this point of view and bring it to a form which attracts others. How universal is the Universe?
Is theology a science? The popularity of the Bible and other ancient classics is probably due to their ? of human experience, a mixture of hope and despair, war and peace, pleasure and pain, hunger and plenty,. Insofar as this is true, these works may be called scientific hypotheses open to testing.
A bankable hypothesis. Mendelssohn page 58: 'The great pioneers of modern science, such as Maxwell, Planck and Einstein have often been deeply religious men, because they felt that this beauty of simplicity experienced by the human mind reveals a divine creation of the Universe in which man himself is an integral part (1976, ie 36 BP). MendelssohnSIMPLICITY <== GENETIC ORIGIN from omnino simplex.
The only article of scientific faith -- consistency ==> simplicity
[page 170]
Religion, simplicity, unity, consistency, intelligence, care.
Mendelssohn page 61: 'There are no accidents in science; the solution may be delayed a little, or it may be reached by a lucky throw ahead of time, but only a little.
We are trying to communicate with the Universe. The quantum theory of observation (Zurek) tells us that this requires that we and the Universe share a common basis of orthogonal symbols, which can be placed into one to one correspondence, to composing a message compatible with both the Universe ad ourselves, the scientific community.
The founding myth of science is that there was a scientific revolution against the Church, but in truth religion and science did much to encourage and support one another (?). There are many interpretations of the evidence of history, mostly contemporary written records that have survived. We might see things differently if we had time to read all the records that have been lost.
The Higgs boson is a bankable hypothesis. If we fail to find it what then? Move to logical continuity.
Theology - science:
1. Fixed point theorem : answer to Parmenides, Plato and Aquinas - invriance. Noether, Einstein + intervals.
2. Logical continuity
3. Information theory
4. Theory of computation
[page 171]
4. Quantum mechanics, eigenfunctions, computable, logic
6. The transfinite transition / Cantor Symmetry / scale invariance
7. Layered network
8. Limits: Cantor, Goedel, Turing, Shannon
9. Initial singularity -- classical God
10. Trinity, quantum measurement, communication, language.
11. Fit hypothesis to reality a) quantum mechanics; b) everyday experience.
. . .
My mission is to convince the world that GOD == UNIVERSEMendelssohn page 68: '. . . Copernicus looked for reason ion God's wisdom. While accepting it he wanted to know why the Almighty has made the planet move in just this particular way. In other words he was looking for the theory God had used. Scientists know that it is usually more difficult to ask the right question than to give the correct answer. Copernicus's question constituted the fundamental intellectual sep out of the Middle Ages into the modern world.'
Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Hamilton, Hilbert, von Neumann . . .
We look for an all embracing understanding of the forces of nature. Everything is moved by information as Aristotle saw -- something stays the same (matter, environment), something changes (form).
[page 172]
page 74: "Copernicus, Tycho and Kepler had done more than record and calculate the motions of the planets. They has acted with the clear aim of discovering the fundamental mechanism of the Universe and of the phenomena making up our physical world.'page 104: 'It is the unambiguous mathematical equation that constitutes a true law of nature and it therefore cannot be formulated until the necessary mathematical techniques have been invented first..'
So mathematical theology (theory of everything) depends on Goedel, Turing, Cantor, etc etc.
page 104: 'All progress that was to come was based on the achievements of the seventeenth century. The "century of genius" as it has often been called set the stage, but the action of the drama to be performed on it was as yet unknown. This turned out to be the complete subjugation of the world, and its means was the harnessing of the forces of nature that had just been discovered. Employing them to produce power for man's own use and at his bidding became the ultimate key to world domination. Power production was to be the greatest triumph of the scientific method.
page 142: '. . . the white man's domination was not primarily due to his cruelty or his aggressiveness, but to the long and patient development of his own natural philosophy.'
Which gave more effective expression to cruelty and aggressiveness.
How do we explain Maxwell's equations as computation?
[page 173]
Feynman vol II page 1-11: 'From a long view of the history of mankind -- seen from say ten thousand years from now -- there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged to be Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil was will pale into insignificance in comparison with the important scientific event of the same decade.'Saturday 26 May 2012
The fundamental insight: all the mathematics of physics can be realized by Turing machines: eigenfunctions are Turing machines, ie universal machines whose symmetry is broken by being programmed in a certain way.
