vol VII: Notes
2012
Notes
[Sunday 19 August 2012 - Saturday 25 August 2012]
[Notebook: DB 73 Spring2012]
Sunday 19 August 2012
[page 44]
Monday 20 August 2012
Why quantized? Why uncertain? Independence is part of growing up. Proof of creation.
It is tautologically true that the Universe has exited always (for all time) insofar as time came into existence at the same time as the Universe, so we can call it eternal like God. We have no more knowledge of the origin of God than we have of the origin of the initial singularity from which the Universe has grown.
Knowledge, fitness : the basic knowledge for survival is of our peers., We have to judge by outwart signals what a person is thinking and devise strategies for getting there to add rather than subtract from our personal fitness. This is a very approximate art, some are good at it, other not.
Mantel, Wolf Hall, Jacket:Moore quote. Mantel
The need to know one's local conspecifics and other relevant species has been with us since bacterial days, and is the foundation of all subsequent knowledge. The historical record is sparse, but we can see Parmenides and Heraclitus as a first step away from imagining the ruler of the world to have a completely unpredictable personality to a more stable and reliable power that began with Parmenides and was developed by Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas and many thousands of others to give us the standard Western Christian model of God.
[page 45]
The gradual relaization that the world has a nature of its own culminates in the belief that the world creates itself.
While Plato would see the world as a pale shadow of a perfect Heaven, Aristotle, his student, begins to bring the forms down to earth, giving the world a fixed nature of its own, open to study,. Aristotle studied it meticulously and produced a body of work that is still debated today. Some say Aristotle delayed the onset of science , but we must credit him with the beginnings of the logic and empiricism that brought us to this point in our scientific evolution.
. . .
The idea that the Universe creates itself without any outside help has deep epistemological ramifications. Traditionally God is pure action, the realization of all possibility. Mathematics suggests that this is impossible, a question we will return to. We shall say that God is subject to no external constraint. The only constraint we can imagine on God is self consistency.
The Christian view, on the other hand, is that this is one of many possible Universes that God could have created. Since is it a particular product it in no way exhausts the space of possible Universes.
Observable / communicable / quantized.
[page 46]
One is not altogether surprized to see that God has given the control of good and evil to the Christians themselves. Rather like the Bush who may have said we are an empire now and we can ignore reality. Reality-based community - Wikipedia
So we ask ourselves, what if this Universe embraces all possibilities, not just the subset of possibilities realized in it by the creator.
Parmenides is on the boundary between the troublesome Gods of the Iliad and the totally perfect being conjured up by Aquinas, 2000 years each side of him.
What was Newton's model of God? Unitarian. Stephen David Snobelen
Tuesday 21 August 2012
Wednesday 22 August 2012
Look in Scholium. Newton
Half the power of science lies in its very formal approach to describing the world. The other half, of course, lies in fitting the formalism ('the literature') to careful observations of the features of the world wee seek to understand through our models.
We, like our environment, are complex creatures, sending and receiving many messages at many levels at once. None of these messages make much sense excepts they are encoded and decoded in the complex space of existence and short as they might be each is a point in that space which carries as much information as the[page 47]
entropy of the space.
Wigner - mathematics, the most powerful. Wigner
Cantor and the power of order - transfinite function theory. Cantor
As the mathematics community executes the dynamics of the mathematical literature.
The world makes itself - the existence of uncertainty makes this possible in a consistent world.
Mantel page 301: 'They have their old bores, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God gave us the printing press.
Simplicity / fixed point theorem.
Thursday 23 August 2012
Cantor Universe / Initial singularity / empty set
Quantum Mechanics / Symmetry / Continuity / Shannon
Complexification
Creation
The collapse problem - from wave equation to eigenfunctions and eigenvalues.
The ancient question remains - how did this get here in the first place, God or not God?
[page 48]
Mantel page 431: 'I was always desired, but now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.'
In the traditional mathematical theory of continuity there are no atoms. Every epsilon and every delta can be divided by two. Cantor atomized the study of continuity.
I'm in the mood for theology. A dangerous game of life and death for believers and/or unbelievers.
Will it come out tomorrow?
Mantel page 514: 'It is necessary to break the hold of these people who talk of end times and threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel the terror they create.'
Cantor laid the foundations of quantum mechanics by atomizing continuity. He was trying to find a way to represent the cardinal of the continuum,. Aristotle said those things are continuous that have their ends in common, but mathematics following Euclid has taken another tack and set out to construct the continuum out of identifiable points,
Mantel page 532 'His guess is the clergy own a third of England.'
Friday 24 August 2012
[page 49]'mantel page 504: 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion, eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money'. Alice More.
Pure action + symmetry = anything can happen.
Aristotle pioneers the road from physics to theology and it remains open to us because God and the Universe are one.
Saturday 25 August 2012
Sun comes in at 7.03 - the invincible sun (Constantine) is winning again and soon my frozen hand will be warm enough to write. Sol Invictus - Wikipedia
Keep in mind that the Sun energizes the Earth at x calculate the rate of our profligate polluting fossil fuelled energy system. [Earth intercepts about 130 million gigawatts of solar energy for 31 million seconds per year = 4 x 1024 Joules per year. Human consumption is about 10 billion tonnes coal equivalent per years, which is 3 x 1020 Joules. Ie sun gives us ten thousand times as much energy as we use]. Orders of magnitude (energy) - Wikipedia
Did God create the world? Can see my way to the end of this essay after the usual night of worry. Perhaps the subconscious discourages me from doing things until I am ready for it: do not shoot until the probability of a positive outcome is sufficiently tight - the basic evolutionary constraint of prudence. Do not climb the ladder unless it is stable. Examine all situations carefully for failure modes before proceeding,. Limit oneself to effective actions when things are tight (which seems to be almost always, but always looking forward to a surplus and a holiday.
[page 50]
Tomorrow is deadline for FQXi. Seems rough, disjointed but a few good sentences, and seems a step closer to
Quantum amplitudes and wave functions are not subject to the velocity of light as owe see from, entanglement and 'spooky action at a distance'. Quantum mechanics is non-local. Salart et al
As we did down the mine seems to become richer (and the rate of pieces fitting together is increasing) and even as little exciting as some scent of success looms on the mist, at least for myself a consistent story which helps me to appreciate my life and face my ultimate death.
Cantor Universe: the whole story that Cantor put together about digital infinity.
The whole entropy of a space applies to every point in it, so the sentence representing the position of all the points is n log n, ie log n of entropy per point for n points if we list all the points. On the other hand we might say the entropy of this arrangement is zero because every [point is fixed, there is no freedom.
Energy is a factor in amplitude, like momentum and space.
Requisite variety: the relationship between two people (if it is free) is more complex than either person so neither can control it without reducing the variety of
[page 51]
the relationship. Does this mean that it takes a church to hold people together?
