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vol VII: Notes

2016

Notes

Sunday 12 June 2016 - Saturday 18 June 2016

[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]

[page 103]

Sunday 12 June 2016

My biggest problem is that I do not understand the Standard Model well enough to criticize it properly, although I feel there is a lot of special pleading and ad hoc inputs of data from observations, but its results are quite firm and so I should be looking for interpretations of what the physicists are doing rather than criticism. I think that the idea that it is describing the statistical products of an invisible computer has value, but is still very tentative. It worries me in a way that I

[page 104]

have spent so much time on this but made so little progress but am heartened by the fact that the physicists themselves spent many years in the dark but pressed on, and their results are very useful, if not an altogether perfect theoretical foundation for what I see as a divine world, although we can in effect construct any theory with a sufficiently well connected tree of binary operations, and I am continually striving to reach a metaphysical height from which I can see it all, but the air is getting a bit thin up here.

Cosmic plumbing: 'In fact dynamics, in a precise mathematical sense, is merely a fluid flow in a phase space. This "phase flow" . . . has a very special property: it is area preserving, that is the areas of two dimensional sheets of fluid remain unchanged as they flow along [laminar?]. Since a fluid flow in a manifold may be viewed as a time-dependent transformation of that manifold, we conclude that dynamics consists of a time-dependent transformation of phase space which preserves areas. And where there are areas, there must be symplectic forms.' Martin J Gotay and James A Isenberg, page 8

Monday 13 June 2016
Tuesday 14 June 2016
Wednesday 15 June 2016
Thursday 16 June 2016

Feynman, Nobel Lecture: 'It always seemed odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not

[page 105]

apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. An example is the Schrödinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why this is—it remains a mystery, but something I learned from experience. There is another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before . . . Perhaps a thing is simple if you can describe it fully in several different ways without immediately knowing that you are describing the same thing.' Linguistic frames of reference, different languages. Richard P. Feynman

Feynman: amplitude for a path is eiS/ℏ, where S is the action for the path [ie the number of 'waves', ie number of computational steps].

So we set out (long ago) to digitize the path integral method.

Feynman: 'I want you to see an interesting point. . . . I never used all that theory I had cooked up to solve a single physical problem, I hadn't even calculated the self energy of the electron up to that moment, and was studying the difficulties of the conservation of probability and so on, without actually doing anything except discussing the general properties of the theory' [maybe electron is a piece of software = algorithm, not a point in continuous space].

'Nevertheless a great deal more truth can be known than can be proven.'

'That is. I believe there is no really satisfactory quantum electrodynamics but I am not sure. . . . Therefore I think that the renormalization theory is simply a way to sweep the difficulties of the divergences of electrodynamics under the rug. I am, of course, not sure of that.'

Friday 17 June 2016
Saturday 18 June 2016

We build a universe from atomic events, 2πℏ

[page 106]

A non-symbol is a continuum. A symbol is a non-continuum, ie a transition from p (0) to not-p (1).

Comment on Robert Mickens Letter from Rome: How does the Vatican Discern Spiritual Gifts.

Politics trumps both science and faith. The science cannot be done nor the faith developed and promulgated unless the politicians holding the purse strings make the necessary resources available. Wooden's summary of Iuvenescit Ecclesia says it all: "The hierarchical gifts—teaching, sanctifying and governing—are those conferred with ordination." In other words, the gifts belong to the hierarchy that confers the ordination that confers the gifts. Francis has the same fight on his hands as the democratizing forces in Communist China: the people seeking modern government must break the power of the dictatorial party. In this he is somewhat hamstrung by the fact that in law (Canon 333) he is officially the dictator, and his curia does not want him to forget this, lest they lose their own power. Robert Mickens

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Further reading

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Brown, Dan, , St. Martin's Griffin 2000 Review From Booklist 'The National Security Agency (NSA) is one setting for this exciting thriller; the other is Seville, where on page 1 the protagonist, lately dismissed from NSA, drops dead of a supposed heart attack. Though dead, he enjoys a dramaturgical afterlife in the form of his computer program. Digital Fortress creates unbreakable codes, which could render useless NSA's code-cracking supercomputer called TRANSLTR, but the deceased programmer slyly embossed a decryption key on a ring he wore. Pursuit of this ring is the engine of the plot. NSA cryptology boss Trevor Strathmore dispatches linguist Dave Becker to recover the ring, while he and Becker's lover, senior code-cracker Susan Fletcher, ponder the vulnerability of TRANSLTR. In Seville, over-the-top chase scenes abound; meanwhile, the critical events unfold at NSA. In a crescendo of murder, infernos, and explosions, it emerges that Strathmore has as agenda that goes beyond breaching Digital Fortress, and Brown's skill at hinting and concealing Strathmore's deceit will rivet cyber-minded readers.' Gilbert Taylor 
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Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics. 
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Jung, Carl G, Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C G Jung, Volume II), Princeton University Press 1975 'Nowhere else than in this study of the interplay of East and West is the point so forcefully made that man's cultural past somehow molds his feelings and thinking as well as his highly contrasting attitudes toward reality.' -- The New York Times Book Review  
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Popper, Karl Raimund, The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 1) : The Spell of Plato, Routledge 1966 Introduction: 'This book ...attempts to show that [our civilisation] has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth - the transition from tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. ... It further tries to examine the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society.'  
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Prigogine, Ilya , From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences, Freeman 1980 Jacket: 'How has order emerged from chaos? In this book, intended for the general reader with some background in physical chemistry and thermodynamics, Ilya Prigogine shows how systems far from equilibrium evolve elaborate structures: patterns of circulation in the atmosphere, formation and propagation of chemical waves, the aggregation of single-celled animals. In an effort to understand these phenomena, he explores the philosophical implications of the work that won him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.' 
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Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, Bantam 1984 Foreword: 'Order Out of Chaos is a brilliant, demanding, dazzling book -- challenging for all and richly rewarding for the attentive reader. It is a book to study, to savour, to reread -- and to question yet again. It places science and humanity back in a world where ceteris paribus is a myth -- a world in which other things are seldom held steady, equal or unchanging. In short it projects science into today's revolutionary world of instability, disequilibrium and turbulence. In so doing, it serves the highest creative function -- it helps us create fresh order.' Alvin Toffler, xxvi 
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