vol VII: Notes
2016
Notes
Sunday 2 October 2016 - Saturday 18October 2016
[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]
[page 252]
Sunday 2 October 2016
Why the mental block, the feeling of reluctance to carry the project forward when it seems to be going so well? Too well? Am I protecting myself from my own delusion? Should I force my way forward or wait for enlightenment? Force means going to lower layers, but my dream is theological, seeking to occupy the highest gentlest theological layer, so I should seek to float like a butterfly despite all the provocation coming from the selfish deeds of Assad, Putin and all the other murderous dictators that occupy my world. Perhaps my inertia arises because I feel helpless in the face of these forces although the theory I seek will hopefully explain how complex gentleness can overcome simple violence. Perhaps I can best protect myself from this malaise by focussing on the formal aspects of my ideas and ignoring at least for the time being the political inputs and outputs.
Bonding associated with reduced energy (two can life as cheaply as one) and increased entropy (two heads are netter than one).
Maybe my trouble is fear of failure, a common problem in all activity, to be overcome, as in all communication, by repeating the message until the listener (a person, a nail) gets the message and the effort comes to a successful conclusion. At my age I give myself another 20 years or so to succeed. So don't panic.
Monday 3 October 2016
[page 253]
Am I still trapped in the illusions of love? I place my faith in formalism like Parmenides and Plato. It is the only way to produce a durable definition of the world, by definition in effect - definition yields definition.
Power corrupts because it is very easy to go wrong and the more power there is in the wrong the greater the damage. We should as far as possible detect error at the earliest possible to minimize the damage and maximize the ease of correction. In a good democracy it should organize so that all people experiencing wrongs be heard and the wrong, if possible, [be] redressed.
Tuesday 4 October 2016
Change is where the abstract meets the concrete/dynamic, the form exerts a force by virtue of its form, a sort of attractive or repulsive momentum change, ie formal change? It is hard to think in dynamic terms, which is perhaps why we are more interested in the eternity of God rather than the life of god where everything is new, even if it has old roots, every moment/event is a new creation, some deterministic, some not.
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Insights flash by like events in the physical world. The meaning of an event arises from the context, how it is encoded and decoded.
. . .
Thursday 6 October
Friday 7 October 2016
Saturday 8 October 2016
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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!)
De Jonge, Alex, Fire and Water: A Life of Peter the Great, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 1985 'Peter the Great was a giant in every sense of the word: Towering at six feet nine inches and of prodigious physical strength, he shocked the eighteenth century Western world while forcing Russian, a land of exotic extremes, headlong into it.'
Amazon
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Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Statistics, Dover 1998 'In the area of quantum statistics, I show that a rigorous mathematical basis of the computational formulas of statistical physics . . . may be obtained from an elementary application of the well-developed limit theorems of the theory of probability.'
Amazon
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Neuenschwander, Dwight E, Emmy Noether's Wonderful Theorem, Johns Hopkins University Press 2011 Jacket: A beautiful piece of mathematics, Noether's therem touches on every aspect of physics. Emmy Noether proved her theorem in 1915 and published it in 1918. This profound concept demonstrates the connection between conservation laws and symmetries. For instance, the theorem shows that a system invariant under translations of time, space or rotation will obey the laws of conservation of energy, linear momentum or angular momentum respectively. This exciting result offers a rich unifying principle for all of physics.'
Amazon
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Park, David Allen, Introduction to the Quantum Theory, McGraw-Hill Book Company 1992
Amazon
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Wechsler, Judith, On Aesthetics in Science, The MIT Press 1981 Amazon editorial review:
'The contributors to this unusual collection of essays—two physicists, a mathematician, a metallurgist, a psychologist, and a social theorist—all agree that aesthetic judgments are crucial to science. After all, Einstein, Bohr, and other pioneers of quantum theory relied heavily on visual thinking and aesthetic intuition. Darwin's recurrent image of an 'irregularly branching tree' presaged his theory of evolution. Poincare believed that aesthetic, not logic, is the hallmark of the mathematical mind. These clearly written essays explore such topics as the importance of personal style to discovery and invention, theoretical paradigms in the evolution of science, and the productive yet generally unacknowledged role of complex images in scientific work. Illustrative examples are drawn from a wide range of sources: crystal patterns to modern architecture, the writings of Borges and Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' A fruitful comparison of artist and scientist.'
—Publishers Weekly
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Wilson, Edward Osborne, Sociobiology: The new synthesis, Harvard UP 1975 Chapter 1: '... the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism, which by definition reduces personal fitness, possibly evolve by natural selection? The answer is kinship. ... Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour. ... It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.'
Amazon
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Links
| Ik people - Wikipedia, Ik people - Wikipedia, the free encclopedia, 'The Ik (Icietot IPA: [iːk]) (sometimes called Teuso, though this term is explicitly derogatory) are an ethnic group numbering about 10,000 people living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda near the border with Kenya, next to the more populous Karamojong and Turkana peoples. The Ik were displaced from their land to create the Kidepo Valley National Park and consequently suffered extreme famine. Also, their weakness relative to other tribes meant they were regularly raided. The Ik are subsistence farmers who grind their own grain.
The Ik language is a member of the highly divergent Kuliak subgroup of Nilo-Saharan languages.' back |
| Ilan Stavans, Alicia Machado vs. Donald Trump;s Machismo, 'Venezuela isn’t only the country with the most Miss Universe winners, a whopping seven crowned since 1979. It is also fanatical about the contest in ways that run deep in the nation’s culture. The 1996 winner, Alicia Machado, with whom Donald J. Trump has been keeping up a very public feud, is considered a dissenter in that culture, in which she is both cherished and vilified.' back |
| Jesse Jackson - Wikiquote, Jesse Jackson - Wikiquote, 'The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. (born 8 October 1941) is an American pastor, and a prominent civil rights and political activist.' back |
| Myles and Milo Dunphy - Wikipedia, Myles and Milo Dunphy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Myles and Milo Dunphy were Australian conservationists who played an important role in creating the Australian wilderness movement.' back |
| National Parks Association, Milo Dunphy obituary, 'Milo Kanangra Dunphy, architect, conservationaist, bushwalker, dear friend to many, died in Sydney on 13 April 1996.' back |
| Order of Preachers, Dominican Province of the Assumption, 'The Australasian Dominican Order began as an Irish mission. Some 70 Irish friars served in this Province in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, currently, there are still two active Irish priests. The Irish have been predominant, whether from Ireland or from Irish Australian and New Zealand families, but the friars who have worked, or are still working, in this part of the world have been drawn from a remarkable diversity of other nationalities: French, English, Italian, Spanish, Maltese, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Indian, Vietnamese, Solomonese, Papua New Guinean, Gilbertese, American.' back |
| Stephen Koukoulas, Credit downgrade assured if Coalition keeps hiding from its debt and deficit disaster, 'Looking at the budget outcome document, it is clear why it was released in the shadows of the Friday night without any fanfare.
The 2015-16 budget deficit was $39.6bn or 2.4% of gross domestic product. When the former treasurer Joe Hockey delivered the first budget of the Coalition government in May 2014, the budget deficit for 2015-16 was forecast to be $17.1bn.
Much of the blowout was due to decisions of the Coalition government. Foregoing revenue from the carbon price, gifting $8.8bn to the RBA and ramping up spending on border protection without any offsets were vital.' back |
| Thomas Aquinas, Via negativa, 'We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not. So to study Him, we study what He has not -- such as composition and motion. His simplicity (3) or lack of composition. His perfection: and because everything in so far as it is perfect is called good, we shall speak of His goodness (6) -- and goodness in general (5) -- as well as His perfection (4). His infinity (7) and omnipresence (8). His immutability (9), and His eternity (10) following on His immutability. His unity (11). How God is known by us (12). The names of God (13). back |
| Total Environment Centre, Total Environment Centre, Established in 1972 by pioneers of the Australian environmental movement, TEC is a veteran of more than 100 successful campaigns. For over 30 years, we have been working to protect this country's natural and urban environment, flagging the issues, driving debate, supporting community activism and pushing for better environmental policy and practice. back |
| University of St Andrews / ConocoPhillips, The St Andrews Prize for the Environment, ' Welcome to the
St Andrews Prize for the
Environment website.
The St Andrews Prize for the Environment is an initiative by the University of St Andrews in Scotland and the international integrated energy company, ConocoPhillips.
The Prize recognises significant contributions to environmental conservation and since its launch in 1998 has attracted entries from more than 50 countries each year on diverse topics including;
sustainable development in the Amazon rainforest
urban regeneration
recycling
health and water issues
renewable energy' back |
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