Notes
Sunday 14 November 2021 - Saturday 20 November 2021
[Notebook: DB 87: Cognitive Cosmology]
[page 101]
Sunday 14 November 2021
Solving the problems of quantum field theory and quantum gravitation are in no way essential to my central thesis of claiming that the universe is divine. Their role is to be the icing on the cake and part of the promotion. My impossible dream is to be an Einstein, to become very influential not from any traits of personality or aquisition of political power, but from making significant steps forward in our understanding of our place in the universe.
There appears to be some sentiment that we are alone in this magnificent universe, perhaps because we were specially created by a god seeking compliant worshippers or because we have been the result of a long series of rare and fortuitous events that lead to intelligent evolution. The notion that the universe is intelligent enough to create us and millions of species similar to us weakens this argument. The tyranny of distance, however, means that we might never meet our equivalents. The fact that we have five billion years of useful solar energy ahead of us, however, opens a door to contact with anybody within a few billion light years
I do think it is worth exploring the ideas that quantum mechanics is a computational process and that it is the creator of space, particles and the overall structure of the universe and I am pleased that the first glimpses of these ideas have come to me within three years of starting a full time study of the possibilities of uniting physics and theology in a mch more concrete way than Aristotle's
[page 102]
rather abstract speculations. What needs carful exploration in the tracks of von Neumann is the possibilities opened up by the interplay of vectors and operators in Hilbert space. By going abstract we gain symmetry, but by going concrete we can explore the myriad ways these symmetries can be broken or complexified to give us a series of ever expanding zoos from particles to atoms, molecules and species of living creatures operating in ecosystems whose overall complexity is beyond our understanding. We can gain insight into the possibilities by listening to music, the easy entree into Hilbert space.
Monday 15 November 2021
Another principle: Mathematics only gains real meaning when it is applied, just as words need application to reality to gain meaning [and the universe needs to observe itself to go from formal to concrete structure].
And another one: communication is art / work, E = F . s. The only way to change some people's minds is to kill them, as Moses demonstrated at Sinai. War is the hardest and most energetic form of communication whose most effective means is the strong force, the nuclear force that reeducated that Emperor of Japan in [a few days]. Exodus 32: Moses slaughters the worshippers of the Golden Calf, Surrender of Japan - Wikipedia
And another one: stable systems are closed, ie they are a self perpetuating loop, like me who eats and sleeps and thinks and talks, all for myself, until the error rate in my system grows to a point where the closure is broken or, if I am a big enough star, I cannot cannot sustain myself any longer and I [will collapse and] blow up becoming a supernova and spreading my creations through the surrounding space.
Has this got anything to do with quark confinement and asymptotic freedom. It is hard to imagine that the first steps of a universe arising from an initial singularity are not asymptotically simple.
[page 103]
Maybe the whole theory of everything essay can be written as a series of principles with commentary linking them together.
Tuesday 16 November 2021
Cognitive cosmology: our mental processes, like the physical processes of the world are cyclic, sometimes to the point of obsession, and in ideal circumstances the cyclic process contributes to reinforcement, clear insight and improved skill.
The wired network explanation of 3D space must also work in a statistical way for moving fermions which cannot go through one another or pass close as a result of the exclusion principle, thus automatically creating 3D space. This leads to s situation discussed before [e36_path_2_toe_Oct2021, § Gravitation and cosmic structure] comparing wired and wireless networks. Wired networks need 3D space analogous to moving fermions since neither wires nor fermions can cross, whereas bosons in a wireless network travelling at the velocity of light are effectively point particles and can superpose so they can 'go through' one another.
Wednesday 17 November 2021
Denman NSW → Elands
Thursday 18 November 2021
Solzhenitsyn: A Day in the Life . . . My first insight into the horrors of the Soviet Union. An easy and very effective way to write a devastating record of reality as experienced by one political prisoner. I was subjected to the pain of absolutism in the Catholic Church, but did not seem to notice it because it was framed as normal in this vale of tears and I accepted it as normal and enjoyed what there was to be enjoyed and did not complain. The rush of life hid my difficulties and I was always aware that there were people worse off than me, including my father whose life as
[page 104]
a young doctor was permanently blighted by his experience of war in the shadows of Bougainville. He lived energetically with his medical practice, eleven children, a very strong and supportive partner [my deeply Catholic Mother, also a practising doctor], racehorses, farms and boats. The strain began to show show first my sister his daughter died of cancer and then my brother was killed in an accident on a fishing boat. Dad then folded up in a way, and spent the last 20 years of his life in a passive state awaiting death and relying on Mum to look after him until the situation became impossible and they both went into care. After they died I began to examine my own experiences, particularly my Catholic upbringing. This happened in the worldwide context of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. I was not abused sexually [although in those days corporal punishment of children was normal in Catholic schools] but became more acutely aware of the mental abuse I suffered by the comprehensive and false Christian, particularly Catholic, framing of human life. This is the motivation for my interest in scientific theology which began to take concrete shape in the 1980s when my life has calmed down enough to begin to understand my experience. This experience is of value to me but, like Solzhenitsyn's experience, needs to be exposed as a step in bringing down the regime of oppression that gave rise to the negative experience that he used his genius to expose. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970): A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Jeffrey Nicholls (1987): A theory of Peace
My plan has been to lay the foundation for an intellectual revolution against the Catholic Church (in particular) by developing the idea that the universe is the real god and that power comes from below rather than above. This means, to me, uniting physics and theology, and I feel that this has been going well, although it has taken me a long way from the mainstream of both disciplines. This has led me to centre my project on two major and obvious errors, one in theology and the other in physics.
The theological error is rooted in the ancient misunderstanding of the relationship of spirituality to knowledge based on a misunderstanding of matter as a weight on spirit, the central tenet of Christianity emphasized most strongly in the Gnostic strain in Paul and John. Aquinas argues that his absolutely
[page 105]
simple God is maximally knowledgeable because it is essentially spiritual, that is maximally simple. This position is, from a modern information and cybernetic point of view, absolutely wrong. I have written long essays [and an honours thesis] about this, but it is time to develop and publish more concentrated and politically powerful versions. Robert Crotty (2016): Jesus, His Mother, Her Sister Mary and Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Background to the Gospel of John, Gregory J. Chaitin (1982): Gödel's Theorem and Information, Jeffrey Nicholls (2019): Prolegomenon to Scientific Theology, Jeffrey Nicholls (2021): Essay 30: Cognitive Cosmology
The physical error lies in the notion of the vacuum, the [quantum mechanical] ground state of the universe. The clearest manifestation of this is the cosmological constant problem. By considering the vacuum as a quasi infinite set of states of a quantum mechanical harmonic oscillator each with a minimum energy (in its ground state, a state empty of particles) of ½ℏω we calculate that the cosmological constant is some 10100 times greater than its actually observed value. So great is the general faith in the quantum field theory, analogous to the general faith in Christianity, that many feel that some intellectual breakthrough will eventually solve this problem while retaining the general current form of quantum field theory, which, in Feynman's words, uses the doctrine of renormalization to sweep the problem under the rug. Richard P. Feynman (1965): Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics
My answer to both these errors is to go back to Aristotle and Aquinas and think again about the relationship between the quantum of action in physics and the notion that god is actus purus. The first step in this picture is to see action as the source of energy and construct the universe from there.
Most of the work that I have done to arrive at this picture was done in Elands beginning when I went there for there for the birth of my son in 1978, until I left after the death of my mother on 24 May 2016. I began third year philosophy at Adelaide University in 2018, the end of my 40 years 'in the desert’ and the beginning of my effort to get my ideas into the mainstream, culminating in my honours thesis of 2019. This went over like the proverbial lead balloon, but since then I have begin to see how the quantum theoretical version of my thesis is going to work, outlined in 2 essays (forthcoming as they say),
[page 106]
Cognitive Cosmology and A path to a Theory of Everything.
Friday 19 November 2021
Now is the time to go through the difficulties of quantum field theory. A good place to start might be Wilczek's book The Lightness of Being which is a paean to deep inelastic scattering and quantum chromodynamics, singing the praises of the heroic researchers who worked out the theory of asymptotic freedom and, expanding on a modern version of the ether the 'condensate', which seems to be a new name for the vacuum and which, he sheepishly admits, is (at least in theory) enormously dense, repeating a number of versions of the cosmological constant problem which disagree with observation by factors varying from 1044 to infinity [e30_cognitive_cosmology_oct2021, Wilczek page 109]. It amazes me that this discrepancy does not seem to worry a Nobel Prizewinner, who may be blinded by the light.
So if I have any coverage out here in the bush I would have another look at Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga ['s Nobel prize lectures]. Julian Schwinger (1965): Nobel Lecture: Relativistic Quantum Field Theory, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (1965): Nobel Lecture: Development of Quantum Electrodynamics
Saturday 20 November 2021
Sitting in the bush looking back I see that I have been on a mission from god all along, just that I began with the wrong, false god of the Catholic Church. This brings me to the most embarrassing and shameful episode of my life. I had moved from a small country town to the city and spent my last two years of school as a school run by the Dominicans [the Order of Preachers] which had aspirations to become one of the great denominational schools of the city. I did well and was made a prefect and by the end of my second year had made up my mind to join the Dominican Order. Then it came time for the prefects' ball but I did not know any girls to ask to be my partner at the ball so some of my friends at the (all boys) school arranged
[page 107]
me to meet a girl friend of theirs, but I (shamefully) skipped the meeting. Somewhere in my upbringing I had become terrified of women, and this probably had a lot to do with my retreat into the relative safety of poverty, chastity and obedience. Fortunately, after a few years in the Order I realized that the Catholic God is a political chimera, a fake, said so, and was asked to leave. I owe that woman an apology, 60 years later, now that I have come to terms with women, marriage, children and normal life and am beginning to see clearly now that I have a divine mission (what the Catholics call a vocation) to reveal the true god to the world, that is to preach the belief that the world (the universe) itself is the true god, playing all the roles traditionally associated with God. This brings us back to the ancient beliefs of indigenous people before the conquerors and empire builders of the last 5000 years or so coopted theology [Heaven] to serve as the ideological foundation for their idea that murdering masses of people is justified if it is done in the name of god, a thing pioneered in the Hebrew / Christian / Western tradition by Moses at Sinai. Jeffrey Nicholls (1967): How universal is the universe?
So far most of the quantum theory that we have is derived from classical mechanics which is quite reasonable, since classical mechanics is all that we can see, although there are many anomalies in classical mechanics that require quantum explanations, like superconductivity, Bose-Einstein condensation, the behaviour of lasers, the stability of atoms and bound structures in general and the practical applications of quantum mechanics in semiconductors and related fields [like photovoltaic cells] that have transformed our lives. The two big theoretical developments were first the application of Hamiltonian methods to non-relativistic situations and the extension to the Lagrangian approach which gave us manifest relativistic covariance which has nevertheless come with the host of of problems which bedevil quantum field theory, where the application of continuous mathematics to quantum reality seem to be the root of the problem.
So my plan is to get rid of continuity except in its cyclic
[page 108]
role represented as complex numbers which provides us with algebraic completeness in group theory and linear algebra [and help us to model the frequent incidence of recursive processes in nature]. We begin with the quantum of action, identify it with the traditional Catholic god, make it fertile and creative like this god, beginning with the trinity and going on to transfinity. Its simplicity forecloses on control so it can try anything limited only by local contradiction, giving us the world we see. So far all physical ideas, as recommended by Feynman, and no mathematics. We can cherry pick the mathematics as we go along, making the mathematics fit the discrete picture rather than twisting the picture to fit continuous mathematics with its point particles and infinite interactions. So far so good. Sixty years after I joined the Order of Preachers and was profoundly disappointed I have something to preach which seems logically unassailable and may also have some ground in reality].
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Further readingBooks
Avis, Paul D L, The Methods of Modern Theology : the Dream of Reason , Marshall Pickering 1986 'The purpose of this book is to give an in depth critical introduction to the methods of modern theology.' [xi] Discusses Barth, Lonergan, Pannenberg, Rahner, Ritschl, Schleiermacher, Tennant and Tillich .
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Barth, Karl, and G. W. Bromiley (Editor), T. F. Torrance (Editor), G. T. Thomson (Translator), Harold Knight (Translator, Church Dogmatics Volume 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics, T&T Clark Ltd 1956-1963 A gigantic theological classic
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Barth, Karl, The Humanity of God, John Knox Press; Edition Unstated edition (March 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0804206120
ISBN-13: 978-0804206129 1996 'Karl Barth is generally regared as the greatest Protestant thinker of modern times. The three essays in this book, "The Humanity of God," "Evangelical Theology in the 19th Century," and "The Gift of Freedom," show how Barth's later work moved beyond his revolt against the theology dominant in the first decades of the twentieth century.'
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Crotty (2016), Robert, Jesus, His Mother, Her Sister Mary and Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Background to the Gospel of John, David Lovell Publishing 2016 ' The Gospel of John has always been a difficult book to interpret. The differences between John and the Synoptics have always been a stumbling block for students. There have been rather simplistic attempts at exegesis: Jesus changed water into wine at Cana because he did not want the bridegroom ridiculed; he washed the feet of the disciples as an act of humility; he brought Mary and John together as mother and son at the foot of the cross because he wanted his mother cared for in her old age.
This book takes up these problems. It demonstrates that the present text has followed a long and tortured journey from Jewish Gnosticism to a Christian Gnostic compendium, later extensively edited by Roman Christianity. The result is a surprising re-reading. The book throws light on a different Jesus to the canonical one (he is not human), a different Mother (she is Sophia, a divine emanation), a different Sister Mary (she is Eve), a different Mary Magdalene (she is the Beloved Disciple), a new Judas (he is not a betrayer and was the first to receive the Gnostic Eucharist) and a festering confrontation between Peter and the Beloved Disciple. The Roman Christians disagreed on all these interpretations and heavily edited the gospel in order to silence its Gnostic statement. This book will show how the gospel of John should be read at the present time to take account of this complex tradition history.
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Deighton, Len, Goodbye Mickey Mouse, Knopf 1982 Editorial review: 'It is a novel of memory, satisfying on every imaginable level, but truly astonishing In Its recreation of a time and place through minute detail. Deighton has written well of the air before, nonfictionally, and he informs us in an afterword that it took six years of research to do this novel. It shows. The only way you could know more about flying a P-51 Mustang, after reading this book, is to have flown one' - Washington Post
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McGregor, Richard, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, Harper 2010 Amazon editorial review: From Publishers Weekly
'McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times, begins his revelatory and scrupulously reported book with a provocative comparison between China's Communist Party and the Vatican for their shared cultures of secrecy, pervasive influence, and impenetrability. The author pulls back the curtain on the Party to consider its influence over the industrial economy, military, and local governments. McGregor describes a system operating on a Leninist blueprint and deeply at odds with Western standards of management and transparency. Corruption and the tension between decentralization and national control are recurring themes--and are highlighted in the Party™s handling of the disturbing Sanlu case, in which thousands of babies were poisoned by contaminated milk powder. McGregor makes a clear and convincing case that the 1989 backlash against the Party, inexorable globalization, and technological innovations in communication have made it incumbent on the Party to evolve, and this smart, authoritative book provides valuable insight into how it has--and has not--met the challenge. '
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Basic Questions in Theology, Volume II, Augsburg Fortress Publishers 1971 'The essays included in this volume focus on specific standpoints inherent to our understandings of God. From a survey of Western philosophies, Pannenberg concludes that the Christian view of truth is distinctive because of its emphasis on the future. On the subject of faith, he asserts that rational knowledge does not oppose faith, but rather gives support to it. Also, the ideas of Feuerbach and Nietzsche as well as those of the dialectical theologians are critiqued by the author. All in all, Pannenberg's uniting of classic theological insights with contemporary life will speak to the contemporary appropriation of traditional Christian themes. In this classic, two-volume set of collected essays, Wolfhart Pannenberg gives special focus to the ways in which history, hermeneutics, reason, and truth all guide and inform our various attempts at understanding God.'
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Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, Westminster John Knox Press 1976 'Pannenberg is clear that the natural sciences and theology are distinct disciplines, with their own understanding of how information is gained and assessed. Nevertheless, both relate to the same publicly observable reality, and they therefore have potentially complementary insights to bring. The area of the "laws of nature" is a case in point, in that Pannenberg believes that the provisional explanations for such laws offered by natural scientist have a purely provisional status, until they are placed on a firmer theoretical foundation by theological analysis. There is thus a clear case to be made for a creative and productive dialogue between the natural sciences and religion; indeed, had this taken place in the past, much confusion and tension could have avoided.' From Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology.
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Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Basic Questions in Theology, volume III, SCM-Canterbury Press 1973 No review
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Solzhenitsyn (1970), Alexander, and (translated from Russian by Gillon Aitken), A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Sphere Books 1970 'At 5.00 a.m., asusual, rveille was sounded — a hammer banged against a rail just by the staff barracks. The intermittent ringing came faintly through the window-panes, teo fingers thick with front, and died away rapidly; it was cold, and the warder did not want to go on banging for long.'back |
Thompson, David, Europe Since Napoleon, Penguin Books 1982 'The changes in Europe-politically, culturally& economically-in the last two hundred years-and the reasons some worked-but many didn't.'
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Links
Augustus - Wikipedia, Augustus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Augustus (Latin: Imperator Caesar Divi F. Augustus, 23 September 63 BC – 19 August 14 AD) was the founder of the Roman Empire and its first Emperor, ruling from 27 BC until his death in 14 AD' 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 |
Concordat of 1801 - Wikipedia, Concordat of 1801 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII, signed on 15 July 1801. It solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France and brought back most of its civil status.' back |
Demythologization - Wikipedia, Demythologization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Demythologization is a hermeneutic approach to religious texts that seeks to separate cosmological and historic claims from philosophical, ethical and theological teachings. The term demythologization (in German, Entmythologisierung) is introduced by Rudolf Bultmann, but has earlier precedents.' back |
Editors, Encyclopedia Britannica, Cuneiform law, 'Cuneiform law, the body of laws revealed by documents written in cuneiform, a system of writing invented by the ancient Sumerians and used in the Middle East in the last three millennia bc. It includes the laws of the majority of the inhabitants of the ancient Middle East—especially the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Hurrians, Kassites, and Hittites—who, despite many ethnic differences, were in contact with each other and developed similar civilizations.' back |
Exodus 32, Moses slaughters the worshippers of the Golden Calf, '27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbour'.” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day”.' back |
Friedrich Schleiermacher - Wikipedia, Friedrich Schleiermacher - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia, 'Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (German: [ˈʃlaɪɐˌmaχɐ]; November 21, 1768 – February 12, 1834) was a German theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity.' back |
Gregory J. Chaitin (1982), Gödel's Theorem and Information, 'Abstract: Gödel's theorem may be demonstrated using arguments having an information-theoretic flavor. In such an approach it is possible to argue that if a theorem contains more information than a given set of axioms, then it is impossible for the theorem to be derived from the axioms. In contrast with the traditional proof based on the paradox of the liar, this new viewpoint suggests that the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Gödel is natural and widespread rather than pathological and unusual.'
International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21 (1982), pp. 941-954 back |
Seventh Letter (Plato) - Wikipedia, Seventh Letter (Plato) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Seventh Letter of Plato is an epistle that tradition has ascribed to Plato. It is by far the longest of the epistles of Plato and gives an autobiographical account of his activities in Sicily as part of the intrigues between Dion and Dionysius of Syracuse for the tyranny of Syracuse. It also contains an extended philosophical interlude concerning the possibility of writing true philosophical works and the theory of forms. Assuming that the letter is authentic, it was written after Dion was assassinated by Calippus in 353 BC and before he was in turn overthrown a year later.' back |
Jacqueline Ruttimann Oberst, Big Thinking At Small Universities, 'Numerous factors, large and small, come into play when one is deciding where to pursue a research career. Here, faculty members and deans size up their decision to work at a smaller institution and the issues that they face.' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (1967), How universal is the universe?, ' 61 The future is beyond our comprehension, but we can get an idea of it and speed its coming by studying what we already have. Contemplating the size and wonder of the universe as it stands in the light of its openness to the future must surely be a powerful incentive to men to love God. We have come a long way since the little world of St Thomas. Ours is open to all things, even participating in god. This is what I mean by universal. ' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I would have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help.' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (2019), Prolegomenon to Scientific Theology, ' This thesis is an attempt to carry speculative theology beyond the apogee it reached in the medieval work of Thomas Aquinas into the world of empirical science. Since the time of Aquinas, our understanding of the Universe has increased enormously. The ancient theologians not only conceived a perfect
God, but they also saw the world as a very imperfect place. Their reaction was to place God outside the world.
I will argue that we live in a Universe which approaches infinity in size and complexity, is as perfect as can be, and fulfils all the roles traditionally attributed to God, creator, lawmaker and judge.' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (2021), Essay 30: Cognitive Cosmology, ' Since ancient times philosophers, physicists and astronomers have sought a comprehensive model of the universe. The current modern model comes in two incompatible parts, the general theory of relativity and the standard model. If the universe is one and consistent, and began with a single initial singularity, it should be possible to unite these two pieces. Success has been elusive, however, casting some doubt on progress so far. Further, while current attempts to create a unified model of the universe concentrate on fundamental particles, it seems that a comprehensive model should embrace all stages in the emergence of the current universe from it initial state: it must explain creation, the most interesting property of both the universe and human psychology.' back |
Julian Schwinger (1965), Nobel Lecture: Relativistic Quantum Field Theory, ' The distinctive features of relativistic quantum mechanics flow from the dea that each small element of three-dimensional space at a given time is physically independent of all other such volume elements.' back |
Malthusianism - Wikipedia, Malthusianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Malthusianism is a school of ideas derived from the political/economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical.' back |
Osservatore Romano, Osservatore Romano , The official Vatican newspaper back |
People's Daily - Wikipedia, People's Daily - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The People's Daily is a daily newspaper in the People's Republic of China. The paper is an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million. In addition to its main Chinese-language edition, it has editions in English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Korean.' back |
Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965: We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.' back |
Richard P. Feynman (1965), Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965: I did gather from my readings, however, that two things were the source of the difficulties with the quantum electrodynamical theories. The first was an infinite energy of interaction of the electron with itself. And this difficulty existed even in the classical theory. The other difficulty came from some infinites which had to do with the infinite numbers of degrees of freedom in the field. As I understood it at the time (as nearly as I can remember) this was simply the difficulty that if you quantized the harmonic oscillators of the field (say in a box) each oscillator has a ground state energy of (½hω and there is an infinite number of modes in a box of every increasing frequency &omeaga;, and therefore there is an infinite energy in the box. I now realize that that wasn’t a completely correct statement of the central problem; it can be removed simply by changing the zero from which energy is measured. At any rate, I believed that the difficulty arose somehow from a combination of the electron acting on itself and the infinite number of degrees of freedom of the field.' back |
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (1965), Nobel Lecture: Development of Quantum Electrodynamics, ' In 1932, when I started my research career as an assistant to Nishina, Dirac published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London1. In this paper, he discussed the formulation of relativistic quantum mechanics, especially that of electrons interacting with the electromagnetic field. . . .On the other hand, Dirac thought that the field and the particles should play essentially different roles. That is to say, according to him, “the role of the field is to provide a means for making observations of a system of particles” and therefore “we cannot suppose the field to be a dynamical system on the same footing as the particles and thus be something to be observed in the same way as the particles”.' back |
Surrender of Japan - Wikipedia, Surrender of Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM local time, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Sixteen hours later, American President Harry S. Truman called again for Japan's surrender, warning them to "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." Late in the evening of August 8, 1945, in accordance with the Yalta agreements, but in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and soon after midnight on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Hours later, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Following these events, Emperor Hirohito intervened and ordered the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to accept the terms the Allies had set down in the Potsdam Declaration for ending the war.' back |
Wolfhart Pannenberg - Wikipedia, Wolfhart Pannenberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Wolfhart Pannenberg (2 October 1928 – 5 September 2014) was a German theologian. He has made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the Resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.' back |
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