Notes
Sunday 13 September 2020 - Saturday 19 September 2020
[Notebook: DB 85 Science]
[page 168]
Sunday 13 September 2020
We might trace many of the ideas current in the human world to the overall spiritual attitude that we are a fallen species in a fallen world, a tale of corruption that we can trace back to ancient Greece in the thought of Plato and his predecessors. One of the bad things about the world in many minds is the notion which equates entropy and the second law of thermodynamics with chaos and death, a very common feature of many post apocalyptic worlds. These ideas overlook the fact that entropy is at the heart of communication and control, and it does not come from nowhere but must be constructed and maintained by the existence of complex structures in the world that can only exist through error resistant communication. So we ask, is entropy the source of life or the course of death. And a
[page 169]
parallel question: why did Ludwig Boltzmann kill himself; and finally, why are 'primitive' religions and theologies so much more inherently optimistic that Christianity, which places all its hopes in a murdered god fixing everything else up at the end of time. Weave this into the Horne Prize story and press on with the study of the creation of entropy in the complexification of the universe via the communication network we see at the root of the quantum mechanical world in the distinction of fermions and bosons that Feynman recognises as a very fundamental area of ignorance in our understanding of the world:
This brings us to an interesting question. Why is it that particles with half integral spin are Fermi particles whose amplitudes add with a minus sign, whereas particles with integral spin are Bose particles whose amplitudes add with a positive sign? We apologize for the fact that we cannot give you an elementary explanation. An explanation has been worked out by Pauli from complicated arguments in quantum field theory and relativity. He has shown that that the two must necessarily go together, but we have not found a way of reducing his arguments to an elementary level. It appears to be one of the few places in physics where there is a rule that can be stated very simply but for which no one has found an easy explanation. The explanation is deep down in relativistic quantum mechanics. This probably means that we do not have a complete understanding of the fundamental principle involved. For the moment you will just have to take it as one of the rues of the world. Feynman, Leighton & Sands III: Chapter 4: Identical Particles , Carlo Cercignani: Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms
[page 170]
Christianity embodied in Jesus fought agains the principle that might is right by seeing the salvation of humanity in Jesus' conquest of the principle by allowing it to kill him, but then having the last laugh by coming alive in the end and proclaiming that his violent and stupid father would finally repudiate the might is right principle at the end of time and the world would be made whole again by love. Here we have played out the evolutionary contradiction between competition and cooperation.
Somehow we must be able to bring the creation of the world down to the entropy increasing power of the network of fermi and bose particles [implementing Cantor's algorithm] and this power is a matter of quantum phase and we need to show that this is the mechanism by which quantum behaviour creates Minkowski space [using the exclusion principle] with the Minkowski metric which is the key to the large scale structure of the universe.
A photon represents a quantum of action and there is no limit to how far it an travel in classical spacetime universe because in effect it is outside that universe and so events in Hilbert space can represent the passage of photons across the universe. How do we differentiate real photons that travel at finite speed and carry information and entanglements that travel at infinite speed but are held to carry no information, merely to be quantum state vectors being measured at two space-like separated points? D. Salart, A. Baas, C. Branciard, N. Gisin, & H. Zbinden: Testing spooky action at a distance
We may say that fermions and bosons are the outcome
[page 171]
of two possible modes of superposition of binary wave-functions, either positive or negative, one with a phase advanced π with respect to the other, so we expect boson and fermions to be equinumerous in the universe. All this explanation needs is two possible phases of superposition in quantum space and no fancy derivation in quantum field theory (?). We can also see it as the foundation of a quantum network model, the atom of the network being two fermions connected by exchanging bosons in Hilbert space underlying Minkowski space, but the subtraction of spin ½ wave functions leads to the exclusion principle which is the constructive foundation of Minkowski space. This looks promising but does not yet explain the velocity of light as a consequence of exclusion. To see this, we need to look more closely at the converse, exclusion as a consequence of the finite velocity of light. We might see a vestigium of this in the ignorance that arose in human affairs due to the finite velocity of the postal service in the days before email, which is faster than the post, but still slower than light. So back to Pauli. W. Pauli: The Connection between Spin and Statistics
Big Dreaming Lawrence Billiet: Freeman
Jammer page 91: '[Kepler] asserts that the force is proportional to the reciprocal of the distance. Irrespective of this error it was Kepler who transformed the concept of force from its Platonic form and interpretation to an essentially relational concept. This concept of force became a basic element of the conceptual apparatus of the seventeenth century.' Max Jammer: Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics
From there it becomes psychological, bonding and influence by communication.
[page 172]
Fermions exclude one another but they nevertheless communicate by bosons, emitting and absorbing them, exchanging quanta of action or spin, so two electrons can flip one another by exchanging photons, electron 1 going from spin + ½ to − ½, emits a photon, spin 1, which is received by electron − ½ to become spin + ½ and vice versa. How does this look in amplitudes [and why is it so complex in the explanation provided by quantum field theory?].
Monday 14 September 2020
Jammer: All measurements bring countable elements of the universe into contact with one another and the basic classical measureables are number of repetitions in time (time frequency [ energy = hf]) and space (space frequency [wavelength λ = h/momentum]). These repetitions are in fact counts of discrete particles, the fundamental element of which is quantum of action, the image of the universe.
Jammer page 105: 'A geometrization of physics - this was Descartes program before classical mechanics was born.'
The general theory connects geometry to energy which is to say to time frequency, which couples classical space to Hilbert space, giving me a mental block to overcome relating formalism to dynamics while avoiding the traditional route leading through calculus and continuity, trying to 'save the appearance' of quantization. The Riemann idea is to hide the coupling between formalism and dynamics in the infinitesimal so we can write ds2 = dt2 - dx2. The idea is to expose this connection as the work of the quantum of action [embodied in a particle] the 'practical' infinitesimal [and a unit of memory].
Jammer page 117: ' Newton's general considerations about force are
[page 173]
methodologically related to his study of gravitation because the problems of the dynamical explanation of planetary motion to account for Kepler's three laws were the question of the hour.'
'We also know that early in 1684 Hooke mentioned to Wren and Halley . . . that the planetary motions could be deduced mathematically from the inverse square law.'
Lost in a mental / psychological space trying to couple the meaning of Hilbert space to the meaning of Minkowski space [but do we have to go through meaning, or can it be done symbolically without understanding?].
Jammer page 124: [Newton:] ' For here I deign only to give a mathematical notion of these forces without considering their physical causes and seats.'
Mechanics: interaction of parts, ie discrete bodies shaped so as to interact in a desired way, eg parts of a motor. The infinitesimal approach to mechanics seeks to deny roles to the actual parts, attributed to them only position and momentum. Particle physics, on the other hand, attributes minimal sets of properties to the particles, beginning with the classification into fermions and bosons which describe the behaviour of particles under permutation (?). In general we might say that the issue is a debate between causality by continuity and causality by shape [or environment]. Feynman, Leighton & Sands FLP III: Chapter 4: Identical Particles
[page 174]
We can understand shape geometrically and see it at work in molecular biology, but we can go deeper, looking for quantum mechanical understanding of shape as a consequence of bonding and communication which are to be explained in terms of energy (physics) and communication (psychology).
My notion that the quantum of action is a particle serves to establish it as the hardware of the universe and has the effect of blurring the distinction between the world of quantum amplitudes and the world of classical probabilities, a distinction which I am trying to clarify in order to get a better grip on Feynman's three rules (these notes page 161). Like the characters described in Jammer's book I am floating around in a fog of uncertainty trying to impose clear and distinct ideas, ie a frame of reference, which must nevertheless avoid prejudging the relationships of the phenomena I am trying to describe - Einstein's general covariance which should apply to natural language as well as to mathematics. An infinity of different codecs can be used to transmit a message as long as they are computable and reversible. Codec - Wikipedia
Jammer page 242: 'The history of physics shows clearly that that the introduction of the concept of force led to a methodological unification of the conceptual scheme of science. Since the raison d'etre of a scientific concept and its importance lie in the methodological function it performs, the concept of force in classical physics was not merely a will-o'-the-wisp. On the contrary, the concept played a most constructive role in the advancement of science and therefore wholly justified its existence.'
We have a very strong love of stories which may explain why we cling so tightly to demonstrably false stories like the Christian history of salvation. A false story is better than no story at all, and since
[page 175]
most stories have a strong fictional element they are not judged so much on literal truth but rather on coherence and symbolic truth, like Aesop's fables. We see a similar tendency in scientific theory. Few things are perfect, most have loose ends which will eventually lead to tidying up, or in some cases to radical revision. I see such a feature in the vacuum so beloved of physics, which not only plays a role in quantum field theory, but calculations of its energy content differ from observation by a factor of about 10120, a loose end in an otherwise useful and illuminating story. How do we fix it? Revise our understanding of the vacuum state [or maybe abandon it altogether]. Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia
Dyson 1949: (quoting Schwinger): Photon self-energy is identically zero. Freeman J. Dyson: The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman
Tuesday 15 September 2020
Waugh: Brideshead page 56: ". . . to know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom.' Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited
I wonder why I spend so much time worrying about physics at the most fundamental level in pursuit of theology when I might do better to work more at activist political level, but every time I wonder about it I can see that the flossy world of personalities and politics does not suit me as well as the search for the key to divinity in the pure activity of the initial universe that is open to all possibilities and so forms a terminus ad quem [a target to aim for] for human activity, a sort of heaven embedded in Cantor's Paradise whose attractive force, akin to love, once sensed, is as irresistible as orgasm, the force that drives us to reproduce against all odds. Lonergan identified the psychological equivalent, insight, and I live for understanding, made
[page 176]
delicious because it comes so slowly, very feminine. Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
One might guess that the liberal project is up against a big problem in the evolutionary algorithm since economic wealth has a strong prima facie case against spiritual development [which tends to become desirable when we are well housed and fed]. In other words cooperation by coercion is in the first instance just as powerful as cooperation by consent. The solution to this problem is perhaps the theological task and at the root it has a lot to do with the counting procedures develped to measure entropy. The Cantor method via order, seems to be the good, but how do I, a very ordered collection of atoms, show that I have higher entropy than the equivalent gas? Here we have two more issues for part 3 of the principia theologica: 3.x Representation, 3.y Computation of entropy.
Jammer page 243; '. . . force was instrumental in the construction of the concept of energy, a notion whose contribution to a unified concption of physical phenomena is unquestioned.' Two thoughts: 1) quantum mechanics has substituted frequency for energy, E = hf, and frequency is a commnication parameter (Mb/sec) so we have linked force to communication; and 2) Energy is also the time derivative of aciton, dh/dt = E so we can get a better picture of the universe by thinking of it terms of actions, each action playing a logical role in communication.
page 244: 'The concept of force in contemporary physics plays the role of a methodological intermediate comparable to the so-called middle term in the traditional syllogism.'
[page 177]
Jammer page 245: 'The replacement of the concept of force in classical physics by functional dependence: F = ma
page 248: '. . . it is often claimed that the concept of work or energy has a more decisive and fundamental role in present day physics than that of force and that in usurping the role of force by energy, only more justice is done to the physical nature of force.'
page 250: 'Whether quantum mechanics is formulated as an operator calculus in which dynamical variables such as coordinates or momentum component are represented by matrices, of whether the Schrödinger formalism is accepted, the concept of force, via the notion of potential energy, is introduced in complete analogy to macroscopic dynamics and is consequently,strictly speaking, an analogy of an analogy.'
page 251: Even according to Dirac's theory of the electron which is perhaps the most satisfactory one we have so far, all that can be stated is: the electron behaves as if it is attracted or repelled, as if it has an internal angular momentum and an associated magnetic moment.'
page 253: Network communications enables us to describe and modulate many body forcces as we see in the political forced mediated among people by the internet [and all other media].
page 254: Exchange force. Exchange force - Wikipedia
[page 178]
Jammer page 257: '. . . on grounds of the rejection of absolute simultaneity of two distant events, special relativity comes to the conclusion that action at a distance has to be excluded as a legitimate physical notion. Forces, in other words, can only be contact forces.'
page 258: 'General relativity assumes only one law of motion: δ ∫ ds = 0, ds2 = gμνdxμdxν.'
page 259: ' Thus gravitational forces are the outcome of a wrong metric. If the appropriate Riemannian metric had been used in which the so called gravitational potentials gμν are determined through the field equations by the mass-energy distribution, the trajectory of our projectile would identify itself as the geodetic line in four dimensional spacetime, corresponding to the given initial conditions. Whereas in classical mechanics the configuration X [the environment of the particle] was the determinative element of the motion, in general relativity it is the spacetime continuum itself. . . . there is no need at all in general relativity for the concept of gravitational force.'
page 260: 'The elimination of the relational concept of force in general relativity is achieved in principle by the following methodological deices: Force causes deviation from natural path; natural path is geodesic; particles follow geodesics; therefore no force.
Gravitation is not a force, it is a property of spacetime [which in the tiny initial universe keeps everything on a closed path since it cannot go "outside"]
"Gravitational force" only began to appear in the universe
[page 179]
when massive particles appeared at the ends of geodesics interrupting the inertial motion that everything previously enjoyed. The massive Earth interrupts my natural geodesic and so I feel my weight, aka gravitational force.
Wednesday 16 September 2020
So there is no force in the initial stages of gravitation and everything is inertial until the invention of particles, that is spatially limited packets of energy [images of the universe as a whole, fixed points in the universal dynamics]. So we think gravitation arrives before particles, but, we think, after energy, maybe purely kinetic and then bifurcating into potential and kinetic. Quantum mechanics responds to potential by creating the energy levels of the harmonic oscillator. Sometime early, we see Hilbert spar representing inertial motion, one of the more fundamental symmetries, perhaps prior to potential, but when potential arrives continues to exist in potential free regions, ie geodesics. A puzzle to solve [how did it all happen?]. Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
Time is the basic parameter in quantum evolution and we see time as the frequency of action, the first dynamic entity to emerge from the initial singularity ["passage of time" is an "apparatus" (Feynman III:8-4)]. Feynman, Leighton & Sands III: Chapter 8: The Hamiltonian Matrix
[Scientific Theology] Chapter 6 version 3: Steps toward the creation of a divine universe . . .
1. In the beginning the eternal god existed . . .. Became a Trinity; a Transfinity, Cantor's Paradise
2. Energy, gravitation, spacetime
[page 180]
I did not have a vocation to be a priest because I really thought that it was all rubbish. I do have a vocation to write a new theology, but I do not have the skill. Nevertheless I try, coming to dead ends regularly and digging my way around them. The last four months have been very productive and I thought to be able to incorporate physics into my new theology, but now I see that much of that is rubbish too, severely infected with Platonism and formalism. I have been driven to Aristotle, the first mover and pure act, quantization, intelligence, communication and logic and now I have to fit all that to the data, trying to rescue what I can from the standard model and I am trying to rescue what I can from Aquinas. Full of hope and ambition, very weak in execution.
The universe is a big group. Everything goes on inside it and it has an infinity of subgroups so it is not surprising that group theory, relativity and quantum mechanics have a lot in common and our construction of the transfinite computer quantum network is a group of groups of . . . permutation groups. Oldish idea, dating from 1987, 33 yo.
Thursday 17 September 2020
Cold feet but press on, greatly cheered by Wigner's theorem and related work seeking to understand the interface between the world of amplitudes in Hilbert space and events in Minkowski space, always supported by the inherent covariance of the network approach since it is effectively self addressing like the internet and does not need to be embedded in a reference system to be intelligible. Wigner's theorem - Wikipedia
[page 181]
The situation in the Middle East continues to underline the importance of theology and religion in geopolitics and the disasters in the US and other authoritarian regimes show the danger of ignoring reality and replacing it with fantastic fairy tales like "herd mentality". Philip Bump: The problem with Trump's 'herd mentality' line isn't the verbal flub. Its the mass death.
Waugh, Brideshead page 327: " ' "Living in sin"; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That's not what they mean. That's not Bridey's pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and while.
" ' Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child, carefully nursed, guarded from the world. "Poor Julia", they say, "she can't go out. She's got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived," they say "but its so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad sin" ' . . . - sin. . . . 'Nameles and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.' " '
page 331: " 'You know at heart that it all bosh, don't you?'
'How I wish it was!' "
My job, everybody's job, to erase the "original sin" that the Church has used for millennia to inject a fake metric into human space. (Jammer page 259 (supra)
[page 182]
Hiaasen page 335: Emerson: ' "The mind once stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." ' Carl Hiaasen: Squeeze Me
Friday 18 September 2020
My web presence states my aims quite clearly but is rather voluminous and diffuse, rather like these notes, snippets of rather disconnected text creating a set of jigsaw pieces which have yet to be assembled into a coherent picture, a task I have taken on this year partly motivated by my experience of a couple of years at university where I discovered that the principal reason for my lack of success was the lack of the tacit foundation for my ideas expressed in the bibliographies attached to my essays. Hence the beginning of Principia theologica, a project to build some foundations for my new approach to theology. A good idea, I think, but I am still juggling with the choice of principles and the order in which to present them. My two foundations are Aquinas and Einstein. Aquinas has, from my point of view, got many of the fundamentals of theology right, but needs some modification in light of the fact that the real, which includes god, is visible and open to scientific study [and he was hampered because science hardly existed in his time so he had to rely on the guesswork of authorities like the Bible]. Einstein, on the other hand, established that the universe goes its own way and the reference systems [coordinate systems] we develop to explain it are essentially irrelevant as he showed with the general theory of relativity. Where he failed was to consider that the universe could be completely described by continuous mathematics, overlooking Planck's discovery that all interactions in the world are quantized [as required for error free communication described by Shannon's mathematical theory.] Thomas Aquinas: Opera Omnia, General covariance - Wikipedia, Claude Shannon: Communication in the Presence of Noise
[page 183]
So 1 God is visible, but 2 Quantization renders some features of god invisible so we must guess how they work by observing what we can see.
Does the universe lie or does it always tell the truth? ie does god lie? Does god bullshit? Obviously yes, since people are an element of god and people lie and bullshit and do an enormous spectrum of other divine things, including murder, rape and pillage. We have no prior grounds for distinguishing god from the devil, insofar as they both exist. Lauren Griffin: Trump isn't lying, he's bullshitting - and its far more dangerous, Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit
I am the representative vehicle of my ideas. The initial singularity is the representative vehicle of the classical god. Rolf Landauer: Information is a Physical Entity
Saturday 19 September 2020
It seems rather weird trying to work out how the world emerged from the initial singularity and comparing the story forming in my mind with the official portrait prepared by the standard model people. The only leg I have to stand on really is the heuristic of simplicity but it seems strong and my story goes back a long way before the energy scales explored by the Large Hadron Collider and its genre of machinery. In a way I feel that the logical and philosophical approach I am exploring is more useful than the methods of the high energy physics community, although I feel that I have as much chance of changing their thinking as I have of changing the long settled doctrines of the Catholic Church, but I am a rich pensioner enjoying myself so there is really no need to turn back.
[page 184]
As time goes by I collect new snippets of truth (and falsehood) and clues about how to fit them together. The notion that a quantum of action is a thing and the hardware of the universe seems to be only about a month old but it has solved old problems about the hardware of the universe (it is god) and the uselessness of continuous mathematics for describing the quantum world and now, I hope, things will fall into place faster and faster (as they do when a jigsaw is nearly finished).
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Further readingBooks
Cercignani, Carlo, Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Oxford University Press, USA 2006 'Cercignani provides a stimulating biography of a great scientist. Boltzmann's greatness is difficult to state, but the fact that the author is still actively engaged in research into some of the finer, as yet unresolved issues provoked by Boltzmann's work is a measure of just how far ahead of his time Boltzmann was. It is also tragic to read of Boltzmann's persecution by his contemporaries, the energeticists, who regarded atoms as a convenient hypothesis, but not as having a definite existence. Boltzmann felt that atoms were real and this motivated much of his research. How Boltzmann would have laughed if he could have seen present-day scanning tunnelling microscopy images, which resolve the atomic structure at surfaces! If only all scientists would learn from Boltzmann's life story that it is bad for science to persecute someone whose views you do not share but cannot disprove. One surprising fact I learned from this book was how research into thermodynamics and statistical mechanics led to the beginnings of quantum theory (such as Planck's distribution law, and Einstein's theory of specific heat). Lecture notes by Boltzmann also seem to have influenced Einstein's construction of special relativity. Cercignani's familiarity with Boltzmann's work at the research level will probably set this above other biographies of Boltzmann for a very long time to come.' Dr David J Bottomley
Amazon
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Hiaasen, Carl, Squeeze Me, Knopf 2020 ' From the best-selling author of Skinny Dip and Razor Girl, a hilarious new novel of social and political intrigue, set against the glittering backdrop of Florida's gold coast. It's the height of the Palm Beach charity ball season: for every disease or cause, there's a reason for the local luminaries to eat (minimally), drink (maximally), and be seen. But when a prominent high-society dowager suddenly vanishes during a swank gala, and is later found dead in a concrete grave, panic and chaos erupt. Kiki Pew was notable not just for her wealth and her jewels—she was an ardent fan of the Winter White House resident just down the road, and a founding member of the POTUSSIES, a group of women dedicated to supporting their President. Never one to miss an opportunity to play to his base, the President immediately declares that Kiki was the victim of rampaging immigrant hordes. This, it turns out, is far from the truth. The truth might just lie in the middle of the highway, where a bizarre discovery brings the First Lady's motorcade to a grinding halt . . .. Enter Angie Armstrong, wildlife wrangler extraordinaire, who arrives at her own conclusions after she is summoned to the posh island to deal with a mysterious and impolite influx of huge, hungry pythons . . . Carl Hiaasen can brighten even the darkest of days and Squeeze Me is pure, unadulterated Hiaasen. Irreverent, ingenious, and highly entertaining, Squeeze Me perfectly captures the absurdity of our times.'
Amazon
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Jammer, Max, Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics, Dover 2011 'Both historical treatment and critical analysis, this work by a noted physicist takes a fascinating look at a fundamental of physics, tracing its development from ancient to modern times. Kepler's initiation of scientific conceptualization, Newton's definition, post-Newtonian reinterpretation — contrasting concepts of Leibniz, Boscovich, Kant with those of Mach, Kirchhoff, Hertz. In-depth analysis of contemporary trend toward eliminating force from conceptual scheme of physics. "An excellent presentation." — Science. 1962 edition.'
Amazon
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Lo, Hoi-Kwong, and Tim Spiller, Sandra Popescu, Introduction to Quantum Computation and Information, World Scientific 1998 Jacket: 'This book provides a pedagogical introduction to the subjects of quantum information and computation. Topics include non-locality of quantum mechanics, quantum computation, quantum cryptography, quantum error correction, fault tolerant quantum computation, as well as some experimental aspects of quantum computation and quantum cryptography. A knowledge of basic quantum mechanics is assumed.'
Amazon
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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
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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
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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.'
Amazon
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Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited, Penguin Books 2000 Amazon customer review: An Often Misunderstood Classic of 20th Century Literature
By Gary F. Taylor
"Like most great novels, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is about a great many things--not the least of which is the decline of English aristocracy. But at center, Evelyn Waugh's greatest novel (and one of his few non-satirical works) is about religious faith, and how that faith continues to operate in the lives of even those who seem to reject it, and how that faith supports even those who falter badly in it. . . . '
Amazon
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Papers
Salart, Daniel, et al, "Testing the speed of 'spooky action at a distance'", Nature, 454, , 14 August 2008, page 861-864. 'Correlations are generally described by one of two mechanisms: either a first event influences a second one by sending information encoded in bosons or other physical carriers, or the correlated events have some common causes in their shared history. Quantum physics predicts an entirely different kind of cause for some correlations, named entanglement. This reveals itself in correlations that violate Bell inequalities (implying that they cannot be described by common causes) between space-like separated events (implying that they cannot be described by classical communication). Many Bell tests have been performed, and loopholes related to locality and detection have been closed in several independent experiments. It is still possible that a first event could influence a second, but the speed of this hypothetical influence (Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance') would need to be defined in some universal privileged reference frame and be greater than the speed of light. Here we put stringent experimental bounds on the speed of all such hypothetical influences. We performed a Bell test over more than 24 hours between two villages separated by 18 km and approximately east–west oriented, with the source located precisely in the middle. We continuously observed two-photon interferences well above the Bell inequality threshold. Taking advantage of the Earth's rotation, the configuration of our experiment allowed us to determine, for any hypothetically privileged frame, a lower bound for the speed of the influence. For example, if such a privileged reference frame exists and is such that the Earth's speed in this frame is less than 10-3 times that of the speed of light, then the speed of the influence would have to exceed that of light by at least four orders of magnitude.. back |
Links
Alice De Jonge, China's grip still tight on state-owned-enterprises, 'The larger SOEs maintain monopolies over key sectors of the economy (energy, mining, infrastructure) and smaller SOEs are characterised by low productivity and high debt levels. A lot of the problems and inefficiencies stem from the fact that the interests controlling SOE behaviour are not necessarily aligned with those of the wider economy or society.' back |
Archibald Prize, Winners / finalists for 2020, back |
Boson - Wikipedia, Boson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In particle physics, bosons are particles with an integer spin, as opposed to fermions which have half-integer spin. From a behaviour point of view, fermions are particles that obey the Fermi-Dirac statistics while bosons are particles that obey the Bose-Einstein statistics. They may be either elementary, like the photon, or composite, as mesons. All force carrier particles are bosons. They are named after Satyendra Nath Bose. In contrast to fermions, several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. Thus, bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space.' back |
Child process - Wikipedia, Child process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A child process is a computer process created by another process (the parent process).' back |
Claude Shannon, Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE,
vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back |
Codec - Wikipedia, Codec - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. Codec is a portmanteau of coder-decoder or, less commonly, compressor-decompressor.' back |
Copenhagen interpretation - Wikipedia, Copenhagen interpretation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' According to the Copenhagen interpretation, physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probability distribution of a given measurement's possible results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse.' back |
Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the disagreement between measured values of the vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and the zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory.
Depending on the assumptions[which?], the discrepancy ranges from 40 to more than 100 orders of magnitude, a state of affairs described by Hobson et al. (2006) as "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics." ' back |
D. Salart, A. Baas, C. Branciard, N. Gisin, & H. Zbinden, Testing spooky action at a distance, ' In science, one observes correlations and invents theoretical models that describe them. In all sciences, besides quantum physics, all correlations are described by either of two mechanisms. Either a first event influences a second one by sending some information encoded in bosons or molecules or other physical carriers, depending on the particular science. Or the correlated events have some common causes in their common past. Interestingly, quantum physics predicts an entirely different kind of cause for some correlations, named entanglement. This new kind of cause reveals itself, e.g., in correlations that violate Bell inequalities (hence cannot be described by common causes) between space-like separated events (hence cannot be described by classical communication). Einstein branded it as spooky action at a distance. A real spooky action at a distance would require a faster than light influence defined in some hypothetical universally privileged reference frame. Here we put stringent experimental bounds on the speed of all such hypothetical influences. We performed a Bell test during more than 24 hours between two villages separated by 18 km and approximately east-west oriented, with the source located precisely in the middle. We continuously observed 2-photon interferences well above the Bell inequality threshold. Taking advantage of the Earth's rotation, the configuration of our experiment allowed us to determine, for any hypothetically privileged frame, a lower bound for the speed of this spooky influence. For instance, if such a privileged reference frame exists and is such that the Earth's speed in this frame is less than 10^-3 that of the speed of light, then the speed of this spooky influence would have to exceed that of light by at least 4 orders of magnitude. back |
David Stringer, Top Miner BHP Sees Profit in a World Speeding Up Climate Action, ' BHP Group, a major industrial polluter, says it will benefit most from a global shift toward faster and more dramatic measures to address climate change, and aims to profit from doing so itself.
The top miner, which plans to reduce emissions attached to its own operations, will drive the innovation needed to do so by expecting investments in climate change action to be profitable, said Chief Executive Officer Mike Henry. Moreover, an aggressive global shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles will boost demand for materials that the company produces, he said.' back |
Duane W. Hamacher, New coins celebrate Indigenous astronomy, the stars, and the dark spaces between them, ' Two new coins have been released by the Royal Australian Mint to celebrate the astronomical knowledge and traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. They feature artworks from Wiradjuri (NSW) and Yamaji (WA) artists that represent two of the most famous features in Aboriginal astronomy: the great Emu in the Sky and the Seven Sisters.' f back |
Exchange force - Wikipedia, Exchange force - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In physics the term exchange force has been used to describe two distinct concepts which should not be confused:
The preferred meaning of exchange force is in particle physics, where it denotes a force produced by the exchange of force carrier particles, such as the electromagnetic force produced by the exchange of photons between electrons and the strong force produced by the exchange of gluons between quarks.
As another, entirely distinct, meaning of exchange force, it is sometimes used[10] as a synonym for the exchange interaction, between electrons which arises from a combination of the identity of particles, exchange symmetry, and the electrostatic force. (see exchange interation).' back |
F. J. Dyson, The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman, ' Abstract A unified development of the subject of quantum electrodynamics is outlined, embodying the main features both of the Tomonaga-Schwinger and of the Feynman radiation theory. The theory is carried to a point further than that reached by these authors, in the discussion of higher order radiative reactions and vacuum polarization phenomena. However, the theory of these higher order processes is a program rather than a definitive theory, since no general proof of the convergence of these effects is attempted. The chief results obtained are (a) a demonstration of the equivalence of the Feynman and Schwinger theories, and (b) a considerable simplification of the procedure involved in applying the Schwinger theory to particular problems, the simplification being the greater the more complicated the problem.' back |
Feynman, Leighton & Sands FLP III:04, Chapter 4: Identical Particles, 'In the last chapter we began to consider the special rules for the interference that occurs in processes with two identical particles. By identical particles we mean things like electrons which can in no way be distinguished one from another. If a process involves two particles that are identical, reversing which one arrives at a counter is an alternative which cannot be distinguished and—like all cases of alternatives which cannot be distinguished—interferes with the original, unexchanged case. The amplitude for an event is then the sum of the two interfering amplitudes; but, interestingly enough, the interference is in some cases with the same phase and, in others, with the opposite phase.' back |
Feynman, Leighton & Sands III:4, Chapter 4: Identical Particles , 'In the last chapter we began to consider the special rules for the interference that occurs in processes with two identical particles. By identical particles we mean things like electrons which can in no way be distinguished one from another. If a process involves two particles that are identical, reversing which one arrives at a counter is an alternative which cannot be distinguished and—like all cases of alternatives which cannot be distinguished—interferes with the original, unexchanged case. The amplitude for an event is then the sum of the two interfering amplitudes; but, interestingly enough, the interference is in some cases with the same phase and, in others, with the opposite phase.' back |
Feynman, Leighton & Sands III:8, Chapter 8: The Hamiltonian Matrix, 'One problem then in describing nature is to find a suitable representation for the base states. But that’s only the beginning. We still want to be able to say what “happens.” If we know the “condition” of the world at one moment, we would like to know the condition at a later moment. So we also have to find the laws that determine how things change with time. We now address ourselves to this second part of the framework of quantum mechanics—how states change with time. ' back |
Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, a fixed point theorem is a result saying that a function F will have at least one fixed point (a point x for which F(x) = x), under some conditions on F that can be stated in general terms. Results of this kind are amongst the most generally useful in mathematics.
The Banach fixed point theorem gives a general criterion guaranteeing that, if it is satisfied, the procedure of iterating a function yields a fixed point.
By contrast, the Brouwer fixed point theorem is a non-constructive result: it says that any continuous function from the closed unit ball in n-dimensional Euclidean space to itself must have a fixed point, but it doesn't describe how to find the fixed point (See also Sperner's lemma).' back |
Fork (software development) - Wikipedia, Fork (software development) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism. Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software (e.g. Unix) also happen.' back |
Gary Younge, Corbyn victory energises the alienated and alienates the establishment, '[Corbyn's] trajectory these last few months has conformed to that dictum for radical reformers generally attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” back |
General covariance - Wikipedia, General covariance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, In theoretical physics, general covariance (also known as diffeomorphism covariance or general invariance) is the invariance of the form of physical laws under arbitrary differentiable coordinate transformations. The essential idea is that coordinates do not exist a priori in nature, but are only artifices used in describing nature, and hence should play no role in the formulation of fundamental physical laws.' back |
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, ' I propose to begin thedevelopment of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly byproviding some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. Ishall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. Myaim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and howit differs from what it is not, or (putting it somewhat differently)to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.' back |
Jane Cadzow, Magda unmasked, 'Szubanski, 54, is one of Australia’s favourite comic actors. “Everybody loves Magda,” says her friend, documentary producer Miche Bonett-Horton. “But nobody truly knows who she is.” Now Szubanski has written a page-turner of a memoir, Reckoning, to be launched this week, in which she effectively peels away a layer of protective coating and explains in unflinching detail what lies underneath. “It was really emotionally gruelling,” she says when we meet on a cool, bright Melbourne morning. But cathartic. “Once I turned the tap, I couldn’t stop the gush of words.” ' back |
John F. Harris, Woodward Bested Trump the Same Way He Bested Nixon: Understanding Power, ' The great theme of Woodward’s career has been that every presidency is built to some degree on illusion, and that there is always a great story in exploring the gulf between illusion and reality. . . . Never was the gap between illusion and reality starker than with the president at the beginning of Woodward’s career, Richard Nixon, who beneath his conventional and pious exterior was a man of agitated obsessions and criminality. Nixon’s entire political project was about covering up the artifice at the center of his career.' back |
Jon Jureidin and Melissa Raven, Antidepressant's trial's upended results show need for sharing all data, 'We found that paroxetine was no more effective than a placebo, which is the opposite of the claim in the original paper. We also found significant increases in harms with both paroxetine and imipramine. Compared with the placebo group, the paroxetine group had more than twice as many severe adverse events, and four times as many psychiatric adverse events, including suicidal behaviours and self-harm. And the imipramine group had significantly more heart problems.' back |
Lachlan G. Howell & Ryan R. Witt, Environment Minister Sussan Ley faces critical test: will she let a mine destroy koala breeding grounds?, ' In the next few weeks, federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley will decide whether to approve a New South Wales quarry expansion that will destroy critical koala breeding grounds.
The case, involving the Brandy Hill Quarry at Port Stephens, is emblematic of how NSW environment laws are failing wildlife — particularly koalas. Efforts to erode koala protections hit the headlines last week when NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro threatened to detonate the Coalition over the issue.' back |
Lauren Griffin, Trump isn't lying, he's bullshitting - and its far more dangerous, ' Bullshitters, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay “On Bullshit,” don’t care whether what they are saying is factually correct or not. Instead, bullshit is characterized by a “lack of connection to a concern with truth [and] indifference to how things really are.” Frankfurt explains that a bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” ' back |
Lawrence Billiet, Freeman, ' The story of a nation coming together around Indigenous athlete Cathy Freeman who delivered when it mattered on the greatest stage on earth. 20 years on, FREEMAN sheds light on one of Australia's proudest moments.' back |
Maxwell's equations - Wikipedia, Maxwell's equations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Maxwell's equations are a set of partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric circuits. The equations provide a mathematical model for electric, optical and radio technologies, such as power generation, electric motors, wireless communication, lenses, radar etc. Maxwell's equations describe how electric and magnetic fields are generated by charges, currents, and changes of the fields. One important consequence of the equations is that they demonstrate how fluctuating electric and magnetic fields propagate at the speed of light.' back |
Metric signature - Wikipedia, Metric signature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Given a finite-dimensional real vector space V with a metric tensor (or scalar product) g, then for every orthogonal basis of V, the metric applied to each basis vector eμ, i.e. g(eμ, eμ), 1 ≤ μ ≤ n will produce a value that is a positive, negative or zero. By Sylvester's law of inertia, the number of values of each of these three cases is independent of the choice of orthogonal basis. The signature (p, q, r) of g is the number of positive, negative and zero values respectively. When r is nonzero, the metric tensor g is called degenerate; when q = r = 0, g is called positive definite; and when p = r = 0 it is called negative definite.' back |
New York Times Editorial Board, Crazy Talk at the Republican Debate, 'And that, America, is frightening. Peel back the boasting and insults, the lies and exaggerations common to any presidential campaign. What remains is a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns.' back |
Order (group theory) - Wikipedia, Order (group theory) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In group theory, a branch of mathematics, the term order is used in two unrelated senses:
The order of a group is its cardinality, i.e., the number of elements in its set. Also, the order, sometimes period, of an element a of a group is the smallest positive integer m such that am = e (where e denotes the identity element of the group, and am denotes the product of m copies of a). If no such m exists, a is said to have infinite order.
The ordering relation of a partially or totally ordered group.
This article is about the first notions.' back |
Peter Steinfels, Why the Catholic Church should talk about contraception, 'Nothing has divided the church more than its prohibition against contraception, even among married couples.
Approximately 80 percent of U.S. Catholics, including the thoroughly devout, disagree with that stance (support for changing the ruling is nearly as high around the world). And the vast majority ignore the teaching altogether — one study suggests that 68 percent of sexually active American Catholic women have used birth control, sterilization or IUDs.' back |
Philip Bump, The problem with Trump's 'herd mentality' line isn't the verbal flub. Its the mass death., ' If we compare the necessary spread to achieve herd immunity with the fatality rate, we get a wide range of possible death tolls from the virus. If, for example, the fatality rate stays at 2.1 percent and herd immunity can be achieved at 60 percent saturation without a vaccine — that would mean 3.8 million total deaths.' back |
Photon - Wikipedia, Photon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of all forms of electromagnetic radiation including light. It is the force carrier for electromagnetic force, even when static via virtual photons. The photon has zero rest mass and as a result, the interactions of this force with matter at long distance are observable at the microscopic and macroscopic levels.' back |
Robert Barjes and Michael A. Fletcher, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice and legal pioneer for gender equality, dies at 87, ' Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court and a legal pioneer for gender equality whose fierce opinions as a justice made her a hero to the left, died Sept. 18 at her home in Washington. She was 87.' back |
Robert Delaney, How Team Trump's flaws are undermining efforts to call out China's misconduct, ' The behaviour of the Trump administration has called into question America’s commitment to defend a democratic world order.
Trump promotes law, order and rising stock prices. So why should it surprise him that Chinese citizens are content with a government delivering economic security?'
back |
Robert Mickens, Who Will (& Will Not) Attend the Synod on the Family, 'It looks like it will be “standing room only” next month when more than 260 Synod Fathers and some seventy other non-voting participants gather for the second round of the Synod on the Family. This past Tuesday the Synod office finally published the complete list of all those who will be attending the upcoming meeting—and none too soon. The gathering’s opening Mass on October 4 is now less than three weeks away.' back |
Rod Lamberts & Will J Grant, 'Science is politicial': Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden over Trump for president. Australia should take note, ' In an unprecedented step, prestigious science publication Scientific American has launched a scathing attack on President Donald Trump and endorsed his opponent, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, in the upcoming US election. It’s the first presidential endorsement in the magazine’s 175-year history. . . . Under Trump, science isn’t just ignored. It is lampooned and directly attacked, especially on issues such as climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. This actively threatens the lives (and livelihoods) of not just millions of Americans, but countless others around the world. ' back |
Rolf Landauer, Information is a Physical Entity, 'Abstract: This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.' back |
Roulette - Wikipedia, Roulette - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Roulette is a casino and gambling game named after a French diminutive for "little wheel". In the game, players may choose to place bets on either a number, a range of numbers, the colors red or black, or whether the number is odd or even. To determine the winning number and color, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction, then spins a ball in the opposite direction around a tilted circular track running around the circumference of the wheel. The ball eventually loses momentum and falls on to the wheel and into one of 37 (in European roulette) or 38 (in American roulette) colored and numbered pockets on the wheel.' back |
Salart, Baas, Branciard, Gisin & Zbinden, Testing the speed of 'spooky action at a distance', ' Correlations are generally described by one of two mechanisms: either a first event influences a second one by sending information encoded in bosons or other physical carriers, or the correlated events have some common causes in their shared history. Quantum physics predicts an entirely different kind of cause for some correlations, named entanglement. This reveals itself in correlations that violate Bell inequalities (implying that they cannot be described by common causes) between space-like separated events (implying that they cannot be described by classical communication). Many Bell tests have been performed, and loopholes related to locality and detection have been closed in several independent experiments. It is still possible that a first event could influence a second, but the speed of this hypothetical influence (Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance') would need to be defined in some universal privileged reference frame and be greater than the speed of light. Here we put stringent experimental bounds on the speed of all such hypothetical influences. We performed a Bell test over more than 24 hours between two villages separated by 18 km and approximately east-west oriented, with the source located precisely in the middle. We continuously observed two-photon interferences well above the Bell inequality threshold. Taking advantage of the Earth's rotation, the configuration of our experiment allowed us to determine, for any hypothetically privileged frame, a lower bound for the speed of the influence. For example, if such a privileged reference frame exists and is such that the Earth's speed in this frame is less than 10(-3) times that of the speed of light, then the speed of the influence would have to exceed that of light by at least four orders of magnitude.' back |
Samantha Hepburn, No, Prime Minister, gas doesn’t ‘work for all Australians’ and your scare tactics ignore modern energy problems, ' The government’s scare tactic completely ignores the two fundamental imperatives of modern energy.
The first is the critical importance of decarbonisation. Energy production from fossil fuels is the most carbon intensive activity on the planet. If we are to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and stay within 2℃ of global warming, we cannot burn fossil fuels to produce energy. . . .
The second is it’s in the public interest to support and invest in energy that’s not only environmentally sustainable for the future, but also economically sustainable. Demand for fossil fuels is in terminal decline across the world and investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure may lead to stranded assets.' back |
Simon Critchley, There Is No Theory of Everything, back |
Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, The complete works of one of the most important writers in the Christian tradition. [© 2019 Fundación Tomás de Aquino
Iura omnia asservantur OCLC nr. 49644264] back |
Tower of Hanoi - Wikipedia, Tower of Hanoi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying the following simple rules:
Only one disk can be moved at a time.
Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the stacks and placing it on top of another stack i.e. a disk can only be moved if it is the uppermost disk on a stack.
No disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.'
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W. Pauli, The Connection between Spin and Statistics, 'I'In the following paper we conclude for the relativistically invariant wave equation for free particles: From postulate (I), according to which the energy must be positive, the necessity of Fermi-Dirac statistics for particles with arbitrary half-integral spin; from postulate (II), according to which observables on different space-time points with a spacelike distance are commutable, the necessity of Bose-Einstein statitsics with arbitrary integral spin. It has been found useful to divide the quantities which are irreducible against Lorentz transformations into four symmetry classes which have commutable multiplication like +1, -1, +ε, -ε, with ε2 = 1.' back |
Wigner's theorem - Wikipedia, Wigner's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Wigner's theorem, proved by Eugene Wigner in 1931, is a cornerstone of the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. The theorem specifies how physical symmetries such as rotations, translations, and CPT are represented on the Hilbert space of states.
According to the theorem, any symmetry transformation of ray space is represented by a linear and unitary or antilinear and antiunitary transformation of Hilbert space. The representation of a symmetry group on Hilbert space is either an ordinary representation or a projective representation. 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.' back |
Zoe Williams, Jeremy Corbyn is redefining opposition - come what may, 'What is obvious, however, is that the new question for the opposition is not “how can we win?” but “who can we help?” The Blairite line is, nobody; not until you have the keys to No 10. If Corbyn can crack open the certainties of politics, so that the alienating verities of centrism, fake moderation and evasiveness have to cede to something more like a contest between genuinely different ideas, opposition may become a meaningful pursuit even while power is unknowably distant.' back |
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