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vol VII: Notes

2018

Notes

Sunday 12 August 2018 - Saturday 18 August 2018

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

Sunday 12 August 2018

[page 251]

Monday 13 August

There are two elements to quantum mechanics, one that determines the nature of events, the eigenvalues which are the fixed points of measurement operators, and the other which determines the frequency of these events. How are they related? The [frequency is determined by the] Born rule which measures the overlap between an eigenvector and the state of the system measured.

[page 252]

We can define stationary points by logical functions and probabilities by the number of times each function is executed.

Tuesday 14 August 2018

We are pushing for evolution of fundamental particles, so we need mechanisms for replication, variation and selection.

Wednesday 15 August 2018
Thursday 16 August 2018

What is the ether equivalent in panpsychism? Only form has reality, but we imagine form embedded in some reality, a bit like materia prima: nec quid, nec quale, nec quantum, nec aliquid eorum quibus ens determinatur yet dynamic and energetic, pure action which, gradually through evolution or emergence, acquires forms of action, te first of these being energy.

ie space-time is a dynamic version of Aritotle's materia prima (a lovely thought, solving many conceptual problems).

Friday 17 August 2018

I am a massive particle with internal processes (energy) which account for my mass.

If the universe started as a point and is dynamic, then it is ultimately serial and so cannot be continuous, since a serial source is quantized by the quantum of action.

[page 253]

The emergence of space is accompanied by the bifurcation of energy into potential and kinetic.

Potential couples to quantum phase, and so is somehow connected to the emergence of momentum.

Photon is the only massless particle and so we imagine that its internal processing is executed by space-time, but this raises a problem when we think about the paths of photons being null geodesics, somehow neutralizing the bifurcation of energy into space and time.

Zee: Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell Zee

We imagine the emergence of energy is the action of the logical not operator. This idea is supported by the dimensional argument that energy is the rate of action, E = hf, = h/t [where time t is the inverse of frequency f and h is Planck's constant. So not acts to convert p to not-p. Not-not-p gives us, in a binary system, p again. So we find two sorts of energy, p which is potentially not-p, and not-p which is potentially p, potential energy, and the actual transitions which are kinetic energy. Algebraically, these two forms of energy add up to zero, so the transition from action to energy creates something new by the bifurcation of something old, and we imagine this to be the fundamental mechanism of creation with conservation. How do we apply this to other potentials, lie the electrical potential?

Saturday 18 August 2018

[page 254]

Zee page 5: 'It struck me as limiting that even after some 75 years, the whole subject of quantum field theory remains rooted in the harmonic paradigm . . .. We have not been able to get away from the basic notion of oscillations and wave packets.

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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!)

Dirac, P A M, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (4th ed), Oxford UP/Clarendon 1983 Jacket: '[this] is the standard work in the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, indispensible both to the advanced student and the mature research worker, who will always find it a fresh source of knowledge and stimulation.' (Nature)  
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Goldstein, David, Jewish Mythology, Hamlyn 1980-1987 Jacket: 'Judaism has flourished for millennia in a myriad of environments;' each has contributed something to the Jewish tradition. ... Jewish Mythology explores the core of the Jewish faith by retelling the stories made up and told by Jews throughout the world. The author develops essential ideas of Judaism, including the creation of the universe, the history of man, the history of Israel and the future of Israel. He retells the familiar Biblical stories surrounding the great Biblical personalities such as Abraham, Moses and Elijah. He then fgoes on to show how their ideas and characters awere developed in the legends and folklore surrounding the Torah, and elaborated throughout rabbinical tradition.' 
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Omnes, Roland, and Arturo Sangalli (translator), Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science, Princeton University Press 2002 Amazon editorial reviews: From Booklist 'Einstein and Aristotle meet and shake hands in this illuminating exposition of the unexpected return of common sense to modern science. A companion volume to Omnes' earlier Understanding Quantum Mechanics (1999), this book recounts--with mercifully little mathematical detail--how this century's pioneering researchers severed the ties that for millennia had anchored science within the bounds of clear and intuitive perceptions of the world. As an abstruse mathematical formalism replaced the visual imagination, scientists jettisoned normal understandings of cause and effect, of coherence and continuity, setting science adrift from philosophical conceptions going back as far as Democritus. But when theorists recently began to weigh the "consistent histories" of various quantum events, the furthest frontiers of science became strangely familiar, as rigorous logic revalidated much of classical physics and many of the perceptions of common sense. With a contagious sense of wonder, Omnes invites his readers, who need no expertise beyond an active curiosity, to share in the exhilarating denouement of humanity's 2,500-year quest to fathom the natural order. And in a tantalizing conclusion, he beckons readers toward the mystery that still shrouds the origins of formulas that physicists love for their beauty even before testing them for their truth. An essential acquisition for public library science collections.' Bryce Christensen 
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Pais, Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this . . . major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. . . . Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography . . . including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.' 
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Pais, Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press 1986 Preface: 'I will attempt to describe what has been discovered and understood about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject and the forces that act on them [in the period 1895-1983]. . . . I will attempt to convey that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big moneys.' AP 
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Palmer, G E H, and Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware (translators), The Philokalia: The Complete Text (vol 1): Compiles by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Mararios of Corinth, Faber & Faber 1983 'The Philokalia is a collection of texts written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition. First published in Greek in 1782, then translated into Slavonic and later into Russian, The Philokalia has exercised an influence in the recent history of the Orthodox Church far greater than that of any book apart from the Bible. It is concerned with themes of universal importance: how man may develop his inner powers and awake from illusion; how he may overcome fragmentation and achieve spiritual wholeness; how he may attain the life of contemplative stillness and union with God.' 
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Polanyi, Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 2009 Amazon product description: '“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.' 
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Schwinger, Julian, and (editor), Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics, Dover 1958 Jacket: In this volume the history of quantum electrodynamics is dramatically unfolded through the original words of its creators. It ranges from the initial successes, to the first signs of crisis, and then, with the stimulus of experimental discovery, the new triumphs leading to an unparalleled quantitative accord between theory and experiment. In terminates with the present position in quantum electrodynamics as part of the larger subject of theory of elementary particles, faced with fundamental problems and future prospect of even more revolutionary discoveries.' 
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Weyl, Hermann, and translated by H P Robertson, The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics, Dover 1950 Jacket: 'This book is devoted to the consistent and systematic application of group theory to quantum mechanics. Beginning with a detailed introduction to the classical theory of groups, Dr Weyl continues with an account of the fundamental results of quantum physics. There follows a rigorous investigation of the relations holding between the mathematical and physical theories.' 
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Zee, Anthony, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University Press 2003 Amazon book description: 'An esteemed researcher and acclaimed popular author takes up the challenge of providing a clear, relatively brief, and fully up-to-date introduction to one of the most vital but notoriously difficult subjects in theoretical physics. A quantum field theory text for the twenty-first century, this book makes the essential tool of modern theoretical physics available to any student who has completed a course on quantum mechanics and is eager to go on. Quantum field theory was invented to deal simultaneously with special relativity and quantum mechanics, the two greatest discoveries of early twentieth-century physics, but it has become increasingly important to many areas of physics. These days, physicists turn to quantum field theory to describe a multitude of phenomena. Stressing critical ideas and insights, Zee uses numerous examples to lead students to a true conceptual understanding of quantum field theory--what it means and what it can do. He covers an unusually diverse range of topics, including various contemporary developments,while guiding readers through thoughtfully designed problems. In contrast to previous texts, Zee incorporates gravity from the outset and discusses the innovative use of quantum field theory in modern condensed matter theory. Without a solid understanding of quantum field theory, no student can claim to have mastered contemporary theoretical physics. Offering a remarkably accessible conceptual introduction, this text will be widely welcomed and used.  
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Links

Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Crusader Who Exposed Pensylvania's Sadistic Priests, ' Without Richard Serbin’s diligence and commitment, many of the atrocities committed by hundreds of Pennsylvania’s Catholic priests would never have come to light. . . . Serbin is also disappointed with the Vatican’s response, which came two full days after the damning report from Pennsylvania was released. “Three popes have been involved in overseeing this [scandal] since I started. I really think they are as much responsible as each of the bishops and church leaders in the States,” he says. “They knew there were serious problems. They knew children were being harmed for life. They knew families were being torn apart. Some of these child predators were so perverted, and I don’t know how any decent human being, not only a member of a religious organization, could look at this other than with disgust. And this still shocks me to this day. This should never happen again. And these bishops and church leaders, these heads should roll.” ' back

Belinda Liddell, Culture may affect the way your brain processes everything. Here's why that's important, ' Have you ever wondered whether your cultural background influences how your body or brain functions? The emerging field of cultural neuroscience is showing culture drives many aspects of human functioning and information processing, including how our brains work. ' back

Charles Fishman, Don't Waste the Drought, 'WE’RE in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it. ' back

Chico Harlan, New wave of sex-abuse scandals threatens to stain Francis's papacy, 'In Chile, prosecutors have raided church offices, seized documents and accused leaders of a coverup. In Australia, top church figures are facing detention and trials. And in the United States, after the resignation of a cardinal, questions are swirling about a hierarchy that looked the other way and protected him for years.' back

Daryl Banttari, Daryl's TCP/IP Primer, 'This document is designed to give the reader a reasonable working knowledge of TCP/IP subnetting, addressing, and routing.' back

David Keyes, Details of horrific first voyages in transatlantic save trade revealed, ' Exactly five centuries ago – on 18 August 1518 (28 August 1518, if they had been using our modern Gregorian calendar) – the King of Spain, Charles I, issued a charter authorising the transportation of slaves direct from Africa to the Americas. Up until that point (since at least 1510), African slaves had usually been transported to Spain or Portugal and had then been transhipped to the Caribbean. ' back

David Quammen, The Scientist Who scrambled Darwin's Tree of Life, 'But these archaea, these whatevers, were drastically unlike bacteria if you looked at their DNA, which is what (indirectly) Woese had done. They lacked certain bits that characterized all bacteria, and they contained other bits that shouldn’t have been present. They constituted a “third kingdom” of living creatures because they fit within neither of the existing two, the bacterial kingdom (bacteria) and the kingdom of everything else (eukarya), including animals and plants, amoebas and fungi, you and me.' back

Dirac equation - Wikipedia, Dirac equation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. In its free form, or including electromagnetic interactions, it describes all spin-1⁄2 massive particles such as electrons and quarks, for which parity is a symmetry, and is consistent with both the principles of quantum mechanics and the theory of special relativity, and was the first theory to account fully for special relativity in the context of quantum mechanics. It accounted for the fine details of the hydrogen spectrum in a completely rigorous way.' back

Donald Mitchie - Wikipedia, Donald Mitchie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In 1960, he developed the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (MENACE), one of the first programs capable of learning to play a perfect game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Since computers were not readily available at this time, Michie implemented his program with about 300 matchboxes, each representing a unique board state. Each matchbox was filled with coloured beads, each representing a different move in that board state. The quantity of a colour indicated the "certainty" that playing the corresponding move would lead to a win. The program was trained by playing hundreds of games and updating the quantities of beads in each matchbox depending on the outcome of each game.' back

Harrison Smith, V.S. Naipul, A Nobel winner who offered a 'topography of the void,' dies at 85, 'V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel Prize-winning writer from Trinidad who penned comic masterpieces of island life before turning to the larger world, traveling from South America to Africa and Asia for richly detailed works on postcolonial states, died Aug. 11 at his home in London. He was 85.' back

Landauer, Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process, 'Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations.' back

Louise Pryke, Friday Essay: the recovery of cuneiform: the world's oldest known writing, 'For over 3,000 years, cuneiform was the primary language of communication throughout the Ancient Near East (roughly corresponding to the Middle East today) and into parts of the Mediterranean. The dominance of the cuneiform writing style in antiquity has led scholars to refer to it as “the script of the first half of the known history of the world”. Yet it disappeared from use and understanding by 400 CE, and the processes and causes of the script’s vanishing act remain somewhat enigmatic.' back

Marwan Kabalan, Trump's 'Arab Nato' plan to counter Iran is domed to failure, ' Yet, a greater number of Arabs believe that Israel and the US present a far greater threat to Arab security than Iran. According to the Arab index, Iran ranks first among the most threating countries to Arab security only in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. For the rest of the Arab world, it lags far behind Israel and the US. In addition, a great number of Arabs believe that the most pressing problem for them is the lack of good governance and the absence of sound public policies to tackle poverty, unemployment, and social inequality. ' back

Michael Daly, Catholic Church Shielded Priest Who Raped Boys, but It Helped Lock Up a Priest Who Swiped Bucks, 'Rape and molest trusting young boys for half a century, but do not touch the Catholic Church’s money. Therein lies the lesson offered in Pennsylvania by Father Francis Rogers and Monsignor William Dombrow. Rogers’ decades of depredations were detailed in a grand jury report on the Archdiocese of Philadelphia made public in 2005, and which was finally followed this week by a similar grand jury report on six other dioceses in Pennsylvania.' back

Omid Tofighian, Truth to power: my time translating Behrouz Boochani's masterpiece, ' Behrouz and I had a mutual understanding; in fact, the translation team embodied a kind of collective intention or shared agency. Our literary and philosophical interpretations evolved throughout the process. But the shared goal from the start was to produce a visceral narrative, a riveting masterpiece that exposed one central aspect of the detention regime: systematic torture. ' back

Pogo (comic strip) - Wikipedia, Pogo (comic strip) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pogo is the title and central character of a long-running daily American comic strip, created by cartoonist Walt Kelly (1913–1973) and distributed by the Post-Hall Syndicate. Set in the Okefenokee Swamp of the southeastern United States, the strip often engages in social and political satire through the adventures of its anthropomorphic funny animal characters.' back

Steve Wylie, Jen Mccomb & Kevin Thiele, The mysterious Pilostyles is a plant within a plant, ' In 1946, forestry officer Charles Hamilton found something unusual on a shrubby native pea plant growing in Mundaring, near Perth. The pea had strange knobs on its stems, which looked like odd (and very un-pea-like) flowers. When he showed these to government botanist Charles Gardner, Gardner initially dismissed them as “galls” (the plant equivalent of warts). However, a closer look quickly changed the story. Gardner realised he was holding a specimen of one of the world’s most extraordinary flowering plants. In 1948, he described it as Pilostyles hamiltonii. ' back

Thomas Jech, Set Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), back

Wave equation - Wikipedia, Wave equation - Wikipedia. the free encyclopedia, 'The wave equation is an important second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves – as they occur in physics – such as sound waves, light waves and water waves. It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics. Historically, the problem of a vibrating string such as that of a musical instrument was studied by Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange.' 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

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