vol VII: Notes

2016

Notes

Sunday 23 October 2016 - Saturday 29 October 2016

[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]

Sunday 23 October 2016

Monday 24 October 2016

[page 257]

Tuesday 25 October 2016

st05_network_model

Wednesday 26 October 2016

Just blundering ahead with scientific_theology, hoping to eventually find out where I am.

[page 258]

Thursday 27 October

Have come to a crunch with scientific_theology. It occurred to me in 1987 that Cantor's transfinite numbers were a big enough space to talk about god, and I wrote the theory of peace lectures on the understanding that the source of peace is adequate space in a global sense where space is the dynamic source of resources. While we are compressed into limited spaces we must fight for 'lebensraum'. Perhaps the next step forward was about 2000 when I read Casti and began to see the answer to my most difficult problem, the reconciliation of divine simplicity with universal complexity. Then I could begin to see that the transfinite numbers would serve as a model for the fixed points of the divinity. One of their best features was their hierarchy, which seems to correspond to the hierarchy of fixed points beginning with fundamental particles and building up through molecules, cells etc to the universe as a whole. From the evolutionary point of view, the process of selection is rooted in the limitation of resources which means that the selective competition is a competition for the material resources for survival which come down to energy and bandwidth. This led to the recognition that the transfinite space I introduced in the search for peace was constrained by the processing power available from Turing machines. I have now come to the point where I have to explain this idea in detail, and that is the hurdle I now have to jump. A theory of peace: Lecture 1 Mathematical theology, Casti: Five Golden Rules

Friday 28 October 2016

Trump's misogyny has shone a very bright light on the mistreatment of women by men with power and had the effect of drawing attention

[page 259]

to the sexism inherent in our societies. The effect has been enhanced by the fact that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, is a woman. It is in a way good to see that evils, by defining themselves very clearly, do much to motivate their own demise. One hopes for a similar effect in theology. Although pope Francis is something of a social revolutionary, the Church is in no way prepared to depart from its dogmatic stances about the role of women. This has the overall effect of sharpening the perception of hypocrisy in the Church and putting pressure on the Catholic establishment to grant women a full human role in the Church, ie admission to the priesthood and from there to all the roles in the hierarchy. On a wider canvas, since sexism in the Church is based on obsolete theology, the overall effect may be to increase the pressure for a theological revolution in the Church .

Peacock page 7: Gravitation is a tidal force. It can be transformed away by falling at a point but it cannot be transformed away over a volume of space-time. Peacock: Cosmological Physics

page 10: 'gravitational acceleration depends upon spatial change in the metric.'

Saturday 29 October 2016

The crunch is yielding progress. My analogy for understanding the world is that I have long been confronted with a perfect crystal sphere and I have been trying to break into it to see how it is put together. Since I first read Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, I have seen that Einstein had a similar problem. He solved it by seeing the sphere as a differentiable manifold and through application of differential geometry

[page 260]

and the equivalence principle worked hus way from free fall the happiest thought of his life) to the overall structure of space-time. This led me to think of my path through life as a generalized geodesic guided by my affine connections to the rest of the world. Since then I have seen that my affine connections are many, distinguished by the layers of the transfinite communication network, beginning with my gravitational coupling to the universe and leading to my beatific coupling to god. The task of the rest of the book from chapter 6 constructing_the_world on is to put this idea into words, passing from the perfectly simple god through the ancient doctrine of the trinity to the whole picture, in the proces treating each particle in the divine universe as a chart in the overall atlas of the universe. Now that this is relatively clear, just have to put it all into words, first as a program, then as an execution. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler: Gravitation

We see from the two slit experiment and elsewhere that quantum systems interfere with themselves to give results like the appearance of a particle at a particular point on a screen and we can see this by analogy as god interfering with itself to give us the verbum, imago or Son. Thus we see how quantum systems can generate complexity since any observation takes place in the tensor product space of the observer and the observed, one act of creation. Wojciech Hubert Zurek: The quantum origin of quantum jumps

Have been sitting here in Melbourne for nearly a month now writing all day, so thought I would summarize what I am up to.

The basic position is that the human race has no hope until theology becomes a real science. At present all the theology in the world is just politically oriented fiction designed to control the masses using the theory of the divine right of kings backed up by the military and the police. The Egyptians, Sumerians etc invented this, and it came into our culture via Moses, whose story was that he climbed Mt Sinai and met God who gave him the law incised on stone slabs. God (Yahweh) told him to tell the people that if they did what they were told they would finally get to the Promised Land. Moses had all those who disagreed with his story killed (see the Book of Exodus somewhere). When they got to the promised land Yahweh helped them with the conquest of the original inhabitants. This business is still going on 3000 years later, and it is a general paradigm for monarchs and emperors. The Roman empire lived by pillage and never did anything for us (except roads, aqueducts . . . . See Life of Brian for details).

If theology is to be a science, God must be observable. Part of the divine right of kings story is that God is invisible, making the kings free to make up anything they like, which accounts for the historical and current plethora of conflicting theologies.

The scientific paradigm says we build the new stuff by critical evaluation of the old. Fortunately (from my point of view) the Catholic Church is very dogmatic about its theology, and I got a good grounding in it in my early 20s. The foundation of the catholic model of God is the work of Thomas of Aquino who remains one of my most favourite authors and who I can read fluently in his simple Latin. He follows the mystical line that God is absolutely simple, without any structure which the human mind can grasp and so is absolutely mysterious. This is the Catholic line and anyone who says different gets sacked. Which I did. My sacking offence is recorded at How universal is the universe (1967). Thomas Aquinas: Opera omnia

Progress was slow for a long time, but by the mid 80s I had concluded that Cantor's transfinite numbers were a big enough configuration space to model god. I put this on 2BOB radio. It is transcribed at A theory of peace The Berlin wall came down soon after, for which I naturally take the credit, although I do not boast about it much. This ideas got a bit more solid when I realized that Cantor was really designing a transfinite function space and that von Neumann formulated quantum mechanics in Hilbert space, which is a complex function space which may have countably or uncountably infinite dimension. Much of von Neumanns book is devoted to axiomatizing Hilbert space and establishing its completeness etc. von Neumann: The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Somewhere in the 70s I got a copy of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's Gravitation and learnt a bit about their version of general relativity formulated in terms of differential geometry. I imagine this structure is familiar in discretized versions of this in climate modelling, each of the charts in the overall atlas being representations of parcels of air and the connection coefficients being the computations that relate the state of each parcel at t1 to its state at t2 etc. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler op cit

I began to think of this in terms of a communication network. The layering of the transfinite numbers seemed to fit well with the layering of computer networks, and it seemed possible to carry einstein's thoughts from a differentiable manifold whose elements are inertial frames to a one where the elements of the manifold are function spaces as complex as you like, representing, eg, me, and the connection coefficients in the human peer layer become my relationships with all the other people in my life. My peer layer is built on all the layers beneath us. One of the features of computer networks is that all communications between peers drill down though the layers to the physical layer and then drill up again to the addressed peer. Since gravitation seems to be the lowest physical layer in the universe, we let the initial gravitational singularity be the classical god, so that this idea says that all our communications are ultimately transmitted through god. The classical god and the initial singularity are formally identical since they both featureless and the source of the universe.

So we get from Einstein's model of the large scale structure of the universe to a model able to deal with all the layers of the universe through fundamental particles to atoms, molecules, cells etc. All lovely, but a bit peripheral to getting from Aquinas' Aristotelian model of god to my would be divine universe.

Things improved when I realized in the 90s that the bridge I wanted is fixed point theory. Aristotle in his Metaphysics (written a bit after Moses was a boy) invented the 'first unmoved mover' which makes the universe go, and decided that this entity was pure action. Aquinas coopted this for his model of god. Since god is everything, any mappings in god must be onto itself, and (given completeness, convexity etc) there must therefore be fixed points in these mappings. These fixed points are part of the dynamism, but just do not move. So eternity does not contradict motion. This deals with the very old problem first noted by Parmenides and his mates (500 bc ish) about the relationship between real eternal reality and the floating world of everyday gossip. Fixed point theory provides a path from the pure featureless god to the complex world we see and are. So all the invariants studied by science are fixed points in the divine dynamism. Therefore theology embraces the findings of all the sciences, and we are off and running (qed as we used to say at school). Casti, op cit

So I am trying to use my enforced idleness in Melbourne to put this all into book form so that the theology company (established in the 90s) will at last have a marketable product.

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!)

Casti, John L, Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, John Wiley and Sons 1996 Preface: '[this book] is intended to tell the general reader about mathematics by showcasing five of the finest achievements of the mathematician's art in this [20th] century.' p ix. Treats the Minimax theorem (game theory), the Brouwer Fixed-Point theorem (topology), Morse's theorem (singularity theory), the Halting theorem (theory of computation) and the Simplex method (optimisation theory).  Amazon   back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'  Amazon   back

Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . '  Amazon   back

Pauling, Linus, and Roger Hayward, Architecture of Molecules, W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd 1970 Jacket: 'Nobelist Pauling and artist Hayward have teamed up to produce a technically sound, aesthetically beautiful book which introduces young people to the architecture of molecules. . . . Artist Hayward has produced full page drawings in color, and chemist Pauling has written concise and lucid explanations of the drawing and the chemistry involved. Highly recommended as a supplementary enrichment source for students and teachers in grades seven through twelve.' The Science Teacher.  Amazon   back

Peacock, John A, Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press 1999 Nature Book Review: 'The intermingling of observational detail and fundamental theory has made cosmology an exceptionally rich, exciting and controversial science. Students in the field — whether observers or particle theorists — are expected to be acquainted with matters ranging from the Supernova Ia distance scale, Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory, scale-free quantum fluctuations during inflation, the galaxy two-point correlation function, particle theory candidates for the dark matter, and the star formation history of the Universe. Several general science books, conference proceedings and specialized monographs have addressed these issues. Peacock's Cosmological Physics ambitiously fills the void for introducing students with a strong undergraduate background in physics to the entire world of current physical cosmology. The majestic sweep of his discussion of this vast terrain is awesome, and is bound to capture the imagination of most students.' Ray Carlberg, Nature 399:322  Amazon   back

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins 1965 Sir Julian Huxley, Introduction: 'We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of the Phenomenon of Man.'   Amazon   back

von Neumann, John, and Robert T Beyer (translator), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1983 Jacket: '. . . a revolutionary book that caused a sea change in theoretical physics. . . . JvN begins by presenting the theory of Hermitean operators and Hilbert spaces. These provide the framework for transformation theory, which JvN regards as the definitive form of quantum mechanics. . . . Regarded as a tour de force at the time of its publication, this book is still indispensable for those interested in the fundamental issues of quantum mechanics.'  Amazon   back

Papers

Rebbi, Claudio, "Solitons", Scientific American, , 2, February 1979, page 76-91. 'They are waves that do not disperse or dissipate but instead maintain their size and shape indefinitely. A recent finding is that solitons may appear as massive elementary particles.'. back

Links

Ariana Eunjung Cha, Mythology of 'Patient Zero' and how the AIDS virus travelled to the United States is all wrong, 'In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers used genomic sequencing of blood samples from that era to go back in time and reconstruct the “family tree” of the virus in unprecedented detail. The findings are stunning, debunking many popular beliefs about the virus's origins and spread and filling in holes about how it made its way to the United States.' back

Carl Zimmer, How the Brown Rat Conquered New York City (and Every Other One, Too), 'Despite their ubiquity, Rattus norvegicus, otherwise known as the brown rat, remains surprisingly mysterious. Scientists have only a hazy idea of how it morphed from wild rodent to human companion. Now Dr. Munshi-South and his colleagues have completed the first in-depth genetic study of brown rats from around the world. Their story has twists and turns that surprise even the experts.' back

Carl Zimmer, A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find, 'Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe? . . . In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer. In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.' back

Giovanni Navarria, Looking back at Italy 1992: the sudden spring of civil society, 'Civil society is one of those concepts that is not easy to explain. The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio argued that one way to define it is through comparison, by coupling it with its antithesis: the state. The former doesn’t exist without the latter. Civil society, therefore, is always represented negatively as “the realm of social relations not regulated by the state” (where the state is defined “narrowly and nearly always polemically as the complex of apparatuses that exercise coercive power within an organised social system”). back

Giovanni Navarria, Looking back at Italy 1992: Internet Politics comes of age, 'Television networks played such a major role in shaping public opinion in Berlusconi’s Italy that dissent rarely found its way into the limelight. . . . Consequently, civil society actors were forced to find new ways to connect with each other; to operate and manifest their dissent; to infiltrate the system with the information it censored; and ultimately, if parties kept ignoring them, enter the political fray directly. The Internet provided the ideal space for this new course of action.' back

Global Atheist Convention, 212 Global Atheist Convention | A Celebration of Reason, 'We are currently drafting the speakers program and expect to release official presentation times in early 2012. For those that are currently organising their travel arrangements, here is a tentative program of opening and closing times for each day of the convention. Please note these are not final and are subject to change. Friday 13th 5:45pm – Registration opens (subject to change) 6:15pm – Cocktail event commences 7:30pm – Official opening of the GAC 9:30pm – Close Saturday 14th 8:30am – Introduction and opening 5:45pm – Close of presentations 7:15pm – Start of dinner 11:00pm – Close of dinner Sunday 15th 8:45am – First presentation 4:00pm – Close of GAC (Book signing likely to follow) back

Harriet Sherwood, Vatican bans Catholics from keeping ashes of loved ones at home, 'Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, reiterated that burial of the dead was preferable to cremation. “We come from the earth and we shall return to the earth,” he said. “The church continues to incessantly recommend that the bodies of the dead be buried either in cemeteries or in other sacred ground.” . . . “Furthermore, in order to avoid any form of pantheistic or naturalistic or nihilistic misunderstanding, the dispersion of ashes in the air, on the ground, on water or in some other way as well as the conversion of cremated ashes into commemorative objects is not allowed.” ' back

Isaac Newton, Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series with its Application to the Geometry of Curve-Lines, 'The method of fluxions and infinite series with its application to the geometry of curve-lines by the inventor Sir Isaac Newton ... ; translated from the author's Latin original not yet made publick. To which is subjoin'd, A perpetual comment upon the whole work, consisting of annotations, illustrations, and supplements, to make this treatise a compleat institution for the use of learners. back

Isaac Newton, The General Scholium to Isaac Newton's Principia mathematica, 'Published for the first time as an appendix to the 2nd (1713) edition of the Principia, the General Scholium reappeared in the 3rd (1726) edition with some amendments and additions. As well as countering the natural philosophy of Leibniz and the Cartesians, the General Scholium contains an excursion into natural theology and theology proper. In this short text, Newton articulates the design argument (which he fervently believed was furthered by the contents of his Principia), but also includes an oblique argument for a unitarian conception of God and an implicit attack on the doctrine of the Trinity, which Newton saw as a post-biblical corruption. The English translation here is that of Andrew Motte (1729). Italics and orthography as in original.' back

James Gorman, Flying for 10 Months Without a Layover, 'The common swift is a bird shaped by and for the air. In flight it looks like a crescent moon, with just a hint of head and a tail that, when spread, echoes the curve of its wings. Scientists have now confirmed that it can spend up to 10 months in the air without landing. Only when it makes a nest does it need to come to Earth. It can even mate during flight.' back

kelnaldinho, kelnaldinho's Channel - You Tube, back

Luke Harding, Pussy Riot celebrate the vgina in lyrical riposte to Trump, 'Pussy Riot have released a song celebrating the vagina, in an unashamed feminist riposte to Donald Trump and his boast that when he meets beautiful women he “grabs them by the pussy”.' back

Mark Brown, Paul Beatty wins Man Booker prize 2016, 'Beatty has admitted readers might find it a difficult book to digest but the historian Amanda Foreman, who chaired this year’s judging panel, said that was no bad thing. “Fiction should not be comfortable,” Foreman said. “The truth is rarely pretty and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon … that is why the novel works. “While you’re being nailed, you’re being tickled. It is highwire act which he pulls off with tremendous verve and energy and confidence. He never once lets up or pulls his punches. This is somebody writing at the top of their game.” ' back

Newton.org, Sir Isaac Newton, 'Welcome to newton.org.uk - the virtual museum of Sir Isaac Newton and the history of science.' back

Rick Noack, The ugly history of 'Lügenpresse,' A Nazi slur shouted at a Trump rally, 'BERLIN — When a video of two Donald Trump supporters shouting “Lügenpresse” (lying press) started to circulate Sunday, viewers from Germany soon noted its explosive nature. The defamatory word was most frequently used in Nazi Germany. Today, it is a common slogan among those branded as representing the “ugly Germany”: members of xenophobic, right-wing groups.' back

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas: The medieval theological classic online : 'Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners (according to the Apostle: As unto little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat -- 1 Cor. 3:1-2), we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. We have considered that students in this doctrine have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments, partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require, or the occasion of the argument offer, partly, too, because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of readers.' back

Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, The complete works of one of the most important writers in the Christian tradition. back

Thomas Piketty, An evening with economist Professor Thomas Piketty, 'Monash Business School is proud to host an evening with French economist Professor Thomas Piketty at Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday 28 October 2016. While the event is sold out, we will be live streaming the lecture live on this page from 6pm, Friday 28 October.' back

Waleed Ali, Australia's Poisonous Refugee Policy, 'It’s here we confront Amnesty’s most arresting finding: Australia’s policy is a kind of contagion, lowering global standards on refugee policy, shifting the boundaries of what nations now find acceptable. The most direct example is Indonesia, which, partly at Australia’s urging, has sharply increased its own use of detention centers, criminalized the act of providing accommodations for anyone without a visa, and attempted to return boats headed for Indonesia back to the countries they had left.' back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) "Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on -- to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the ``wavepacket collapse'', designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates. In quantum Darwinism, they are the progenitors of multiple copies spread throughout the environment -- the fittest quantum states that not only survive decoherence, but subvert it into carrying information about them -- into becoming a witness.' back