Notes
[Notebook: DB 62 Interpretation]
[Sunday 28 October 2007 - Saturday 3 November 2007]
Sunday 28 October 2007
[page 26]
Many things (like quantum mechanical superposition) are linearly dose dependent, and in the case of quantum mechanics the agonists and antagonists ad algebraically, a fact that underlies the Fourier transforms.
Monday 29 October 2007
Tuesday 30 October 2007
Wednesday 31 October 2007
Thursday 1 November 2007
Actual memory constrains the future so in a sense the more we forget the less constrained our future. This is certainly true of old grudges and erroneous conditions in general. Forgetting comes at a cost. See Landauer et al. Landauer
Friday 2 November 2007
'History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything can become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers and abstract relations. For history the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction. Barzun, Krystal
[page 27]
New Yorker page 103 Krystal
Quantum field theory works very well with electrons and photons, although the calculations are messy, the results agree with reality to ten or so decimal places. We cannot doubt that it is on the right track, both in principle and in practice. The principle is the relationship between physical action and mathematical phase, and the practice is Feynman diagrams. Feynman The path integral method, also invented by Feynman, tells us how to apply the ideas of phase, action and superposition.
In quantum physics we talk about the superposition of [complex] vectors . . . whereas classically we see superposition as the algebraic addition of signed [real] numbers. In both cases we may arrange that everything adds up to zero by suitable choice of the origin of sign, ie the point that divides positive from negative.
There is a two way traffic between vectors and numbers which is explained by the fact that information is represented physically and that all physical symbols have some common weight which can be used with set theory and the theory of probability to give a physical measure of the weight (four momentum) of the information flowing through a channel.
