Notes
[Notebook: DB 61 Warm]
[Sunday 12 August 2007 - Saturday 18 August 2007]
[page 140]
Sunday 12 August 2007
. . .
War is natural and appears to have been common throughout human time and space, with varying scales and frequencies. War is natural because resources are limited. The land has a carrying capacity which (probabilistically) defines how many people can live in a given environment.
The general process of dispute and dispute resolution is scale invariant, from disputes between electrons for the occupation of a state. Individual disputes are wars are examples of the same process at different scales. We avoid war by avoiding the rational condition for war: life and death conflicts over essential resources. [There comes a time when it may seem better to eliminate other mouths rather than starve to death.]
Monday 13 August 2007
To prevent such conflicts we must either hold population down by non-violent means or increase [available] resources. Both techniques have features in recorded and conjectured human history, although increased human consumption of the world's environmental services, paralleled by increasing population and increasing consumption per capita has been the dominant trend.
Weinberg xx '. . . our purpose in theoretical physics is not just to describe the world as we find it, but to explain --
[page 142]
in terms of a few fundamental principles -- why the world is the way it is. ' Weinberg 'fundamental principles' = letters of the explanatory alphabet, subroutines of the explanatory process. My every movement at the human macroscopic level invokes countless subroutines within subroutines . . . right down to the initial action -- Am anfang war das tat. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Wikipedia
Weinberg xxi 'The most immediate and certain consequences of relativity and quantum mechanics are the properties of particle states, so here particles come first -- they are introduced in Chapter 2 as ingredients in the representation of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group in the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics.
'Given a a state that in the distant past looks like a certain collection of free particles, what will it look like in the future?
A very modest demand, and almost as unrealistic and far from a 'picture of everything' as it is possible to get. There are no 'free particles, all are entangled in the Universe.
Hamiltonian generates time translations = a Turing machine (or network of same [operating at many different frequencies = energies])
Dynamic message = process = moving text through time, time translation. Each letter corresponds to a tick of the clock.
[page 143]
Wigner: Particle = representative of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group 1939. Wigner
What is the reason for different particles appearing at different energy scales, ie what is the reason for different masses? More generally, what is the coupling between past, present and future? The fundamental time transition driver is energy, which we associate with processing rate, actions per second, say. A tree of such transitions has brought us from the initial singularity until now. On the ground that the initial singularity is everywhere, and so the Universe is rooted in every point within [itself], creating a big bang like expansion of complexity which is naturally modelled by the transfinite numbers. Two features: first, inherently digital, a < b, they do not 'touch'. Second a scale invariance across each transition expressed by the formula
In other words, its the powers that carry us into a new state, not the basis (2 . . . aleph(n) all the same).
Back to why the energy scale, which relates to why so many particles. For as the particle numbers go up, the particle energies go down (on the average). Artificial and natural acceleration of particles can produce conditions that either come from or mimic the initial high energy interactions.
[page 144]
The symmetry of law : the same law (should) apply in the same case, no matter who the people involved.
Our research into quantum information theory shows how quantum systems interact with us and with one another (same thing).
Make everything as explicit as possible to simplify testing, proving or disproving.
A simple thing becomes complex by sharing its energy between more than one state.
A somewhat hidden assumption in physics is that the world works with mathematical precision, although our observations of it can be a bit rough. In general the mathematical precision is expected to be reached only in the limit of infinitely long measurements which yield energy with infinitesimal precision.
Quantum information theory shows us that it is not easy to reach a practical level of precision., let alone the mathematical perfection of the formalism. Entanglement is a resource, but decoherence is a problem.
Here we come to a physical standoff between the forces of order and disorder. As our existence (and even the size of our conflicts) show, order can overcome disorder, at least for a finite time.
The source of order is the initial singularity,
[page 145]
which is the common root of every message we receive from the Universe.
With plausibility goes responsibility.
We need a society that makes it possible to survive without doing evil.
No cloning: every event is unique.
Order overcomes chaos by having duration, ie it is spatial. Space endures, time flows through it. If we populate the whole of space with clocks and can communicate with them we can use the readings to measure spacetime curvature.
What is conserved is probability flow number of trials per second.
Normalized flow of action / probability through any observed part of the Universe is ℵ0, ie ℵ0 simultaneous events of probability 1. Simultaneous? Each only to itself.
Do we measure time in seconds or heartbeats? Both, with a frequency and phase to transform one into the other.
Duration is in a sense an absence of energy, or a potential well deeper than any probable perturbation.
Tuesday 14 August 2007
phys06Superposition - string analogy.
[146]
Writing this stuff a night after a few wines one can sometimes see why people like the prophet Isaiah write
Then, I heard the voice of the Lord saying:
'Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?'
I answered 'here I am, send me'. Isaiah 6:8
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Thursday 16 August 2007
Friday 17 August 2007
SUPERPOSITION == SOURCE
A source is a node in a network which emits a string of symbols which may or may not be meaningful to a listener. Every event is the root of a tree branching into the past. it is also the root of a tree branching into the future.
Scale invariance means that there are common elements in al interactions ranging from fundamental particles to people and galaxies.
event = {event}, smallest event is a quantum of action.
PURE ACT = h bar . ℵ0
Thee is o limit to the complexity of a quantum of action since the complexity of a point is equal to
[page 148]
the complexity of the space of which it is a point. It has position (= meaning) but no magnitude (no meaning of its own).
So (by requisite variety) a point cannot 'know' how meaningful it is.
One person's hero can be another person's murderer. The existence of such dichotomies points to inconsistencies in the social structure, in that if we share a common point of view we will arrive at a common explanation of observations.
Every 'frame' language or culture is a different 'observable' a different reference frame from which to view the one god. Lakoff
I appear to have a mental block against all understanding of mathematical physics unless I can picture what is going on in my own terms, ie in terms of communication. It would be beautiful to interpret the canonical formalism (and other variants of quantum field theory) in network terms, and I do feel that I have a lot of good clues. But I still have to write myself to the final washup. This is the task that sucks me on inexorably even when I am a bit depressed about ever succeeding. Our new vision of god is a physical vision.
Sydney Morning Herald: on the vision of god.
Intelligence is finding the measurement operator which makes sense of what is observed, ie gives a consistent decoding of the messages received..
[page 148]
Saturday 18 August 2007
The quantum formalism applies at al scales.
h-bar and c are both variable constants depending on the features of the network in question: basically this feature is the amount of processing needed to realize (create, destroy, move) a particle.
MASS = rate of metabolism
Everywhere we look we see intelligence and communication.
PhD: 'An interpretation of the canonical formalism'.
We love it when things 'come out' eg Weinberg page 21,
where the Lagrangian of a free complex scalar field yields the relativistic wave equation. This whole effort is an abstract version of the 'flow' of an infinite number of infinitesimal symbols. This formalism does not tell us what will happen (as classical formalism does?) but, through | phi | 2, the probability of certain events. Does ordinary writing like this correspond to real or complex numbers? And is there a hidden | phi | 2 concealed in the way we interpret everyday written texts, ie all the incoming messages and segments of messages. | phi | 2 is a dot product which compresses an infinite dimensional Hilbert space into a rational number, a probability lying between 0 and 1.
[page 149]
Weinberg 25: 'the free field behaves like an infinite number of coupled harmonic oscillators (countably infinite)
STRUCTURE <==> RELATIVELY SLOW CHANGE.
CONSISTENCY + MULTIPLICITY = REALITY
Infinite number of harmonic oscillators Boson (blackbody) / Fermion (world)
Physics uses symmetric and asymmetric wave functions to model bosons and fermions.
ASYMMETRY = BROKEN SYMMETRY = SOURCE OF STRUCTURE.
Weinberg page 28: 'The wave fields phi, psi etc are not probability amplitudes but operators (ie Turing machines) which create and destroy particles in the various normal modes'. (ie which emit symbols).
