Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 28 January 2007 - Saturday 3 February 2007]
[page 84]
Sunday 28 January 2007
Feast of Thomas Aquinas
Physical Theology: rewrite as 'Why is the Universe quantized?' Make no mention of theology, but emphasize the fact that a quantized symbolic Universe is isomorphic to formal logic, first and second order. Explain quantization in terms of communication theory and the transfinite network. Should be possible to make this almost foolproof. I wish.
How many different symbols are there? As many as there are different events. We start with elementary events which we map to fundamental particles and then we combine elementary units into strings and networks of strings to create random events. We can imagine a hierarchy of random events isomorphic to the Cantor Universe, permuting ℵ0 elementary events to make ℵ1 random events, and then treating these random events as elementary creating ℵ2 random events and so on. Each person, plant, galaxy etc has an isomorph somewhere in this scheme and we can somehow imagine spacetime as the 'paper' on which it is all written.
Monday 29 January 2007
Tuesday 30 January 2007
Ethnic cleansing and religious cleansing are just two
[page 85]
manifestations of the general cleansing phenomenon. Rather than developing systems to deal with complexity, by matching variety with variety, the 'cleansing ' approach is to remove all sources of 'noise', noise being defined with respect to a definite and sovereign signal.
Natural religion is a religion of following (submission to) nature, working our system so as to respect the natural givens, of which complexification to the point of peer level homogeneity leads us to the maximum entropy, the maximum individual freedom (ie the cardinal of each entity as a source) which gives us equilibrium and stability,
Statistical mechanics is based on measure by counting discrete and identifiable entities. The statistics vary (Bose, Fermi) with the level of identifiability of the entities being counted.
QUANTIZATION <=> STATISTICAL MECHANICS
Statistical mechanics predicts the structure we will find as we apply different protocols for the interaction of particles.
You can whinge all you like about money but it is there and you have to deal with it.
Hofstadter's GEB is a precise and intuitive description of the behaviour of formal systems of various sizes and structures. Quantum mechanics tells s that the Universe is a formal system, a version of
[page 86]
its symbols being the eigenvalues of the energy operators of physical systems. We can only manipulate very small quantum systems but we are confident that our formalism extends to systems of unlimited size represented in spaces which are tensor products of the Hilbert spaces of their constituent elements. Hofstadter
Wednesday 31 January 2007
Thursday 1 January 2007
Friday 2 January 2007
Its only illegal if you get caught (and convicted).
Einstein Calaprice 167: 'The state of mind that enables a man to do work of this kind . . . is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.' Calaprice
page 172: "Concern for man himself and his fate must always be the chief interest of human technical endeavours . . . in order that the creations of our minds shall be a blessing and not a curse on mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations'
173: 'I believe that the present fashion of applying the actions of physical science to human life is not only a mistake but has something reprehensible about it.'
175: 'What we call physics comprises that group of natural sciences which base their concepts on measurements [counts] and whose concepts and propositions lend themselves to mathematical formulations.' [everything can be counted]
[page 87]
177: A priori construction in physics is as essential as empirical facts.
An hour spent with a pretty girl on the beach passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove is like an our.
185: 'The aim of science is on the one hand, as complete a comprehension as possible of the connection between perceptible experiments in their totality, and on the other hand, the achievement of this aim by employing a minimum of primary concepts and relations.' So we begin with one source and one channel.
187: 'The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . . The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle'. No, its [comprehensibility] is a tautological consequence of the way the world generates itself.
204: 'He that has never been deceived by a lie does not know the meaning of bliss.'
211: 'Nothing is more destructive for government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase in crime in this country is closely connected with this.'
214: 'Words or language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play a role in my mechanism of thought. '
231 'Einstein was prone to talk about God so often that I was led to suspect he was a closet theologian.'
[page 88]
Calaprice page 241: 'Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and so I was fully convinced that he understood it.' Chaim Weizman, 1929.
Saturday 3 January 2007
Calaprice page 86 quote 167: 'Our minds are geared to survival and are capable of changing strategies to suit vastly different environments. Arctic Tundra, Tropical Jungle or New York. The fundamental strategy is pretty much the same, to acquire enough resources for survival, and if possible enough surplus to reproduce. We have been living in a fairytale world since the climate stabilized in a warm mode conducive to agriculture some ten thousand years ago. This cake was thickly iced by the discovery of heat engines and fossil fuel. This has led to our current problem: our appetite for resources is close to sustainable limits, and we have to begin to diminish our footprint. Within this larger problem are the lesser problems of distribution of the worlds resources among human and other consumers. This is the budgeting problem faced by economists at all scales.'
Theological Studies: The purpose of this hypothesis is to explore the hypothesis that god and the Universe are the same entity rather than being absolutely different, as many hold. [a common position in many religious organizations] [a common feature of many human beliefs.]
'Belief' constrains the universal human mind to the milieu in which it lives, so the newborn gradually learns to walk, speak and act in a manner which
[page 89]
improves the chance of good success in his or her birth environment [or any environment].
The great Catholic mismatch between expectation and reality is epitomized by the hafnium bomb. Weinberger page 147.
Communication theory
Network theory
Coding
Time
Special Relativity
General Covariance
The Universe of communication is pixellated, quantized and countable. Countability is relative. An entity of cardinal aleph(n) can count itself and all aggregates of lesser cardinality, but aleph(n+1) or greater is uncountable relative to the system in question. [unless we use position sensitive notation instead of simple one to one correspondence.]
An event (or communication) is pixellated in 4-space, occupying a certain amount of 3-space and taking a certain time to execute. The unit event is measured by the quantum of action, h.
[for a long time I have suspected that this measure applies to all events, qua events, even something like an earthquake which involves a vast number of events, but may somehow be characterized as one event, rather vague defined in space and time. ]
So a quantum of action is a volume in spacetime, where the volume is not so much length by breadth by depth, but energy, the rate at which the quantum processes are being repeated, andt he momentum which measures the spatial complexity of the process.
[page 90]
Bureaucracies seek to channel action through discrete channels (with names like Federal Bureau of Investigation) a bureau being the desktop on which the agency interacts with its world.
What we see is the interface. All else is interpretation, which is also seeing. All seeing is interpretation and at is most mathematical, we represent a deterministic interpretation by an algorithm which represent a transformation. Einstein worked on the assumption that there is an invariant underlying reality which appears in different forms as it is transformed in different ways. The [local] space of transformations in the space of [local] general covariance.
The Roman Catholic Church epitomizes the Bush idea that we are an empire and that we make our own reality..
Nature 445:347 Giles
Nature 465:365 'In an article in the New York Times magazine on 17 October 2004, Suskind quoted a senior White House advisor mocking journalists and others in the "reality based community' who believe that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". The advisor added "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality". Horgan
[page 91]
The first thing we want to explain in the fermion/boson dichotomy. Nature 445:402 Jeltes et al.
