Notes
[Sunday 18 October 2009 - Saturday 24 October 2009]
[Notebook: DB 68 Salalah
Sunday 18 October 2009
Information simply specifies a state in a space. It gains meaning by its mapping to reality [ie other states, its environment].
An unanswerable question cannot be effectively asked, since only question and answer provide a definite step forward. So the universal dynamics is continually posing questions whose answers are fixed points that qualify to be part of the fixed past rather than the probable future. A question in known to be well asked only when it is answered. To be well asked, the question must be the starting state of a halting computer.
The symmetric Universe is a set of well defined points growing treelike from a root which we can represent by terms like God, the initial singularity, the empty set and so on, all intended to denote the simplest initial state of the Universe which has differentiated to it current state. We model this differentiation with the symmetric Universe. We apply the model to establishing correspondences between points in the
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model and stationary points in the Universe. One of the early triumphs of quantum mechanics were models that imitated the stationary electronic states in the hydrogen atom.
Clear and efficient management requires a well defined goal that can be reached by known means from our present situation. The ultimate goal setter is theology, which defines the meaning of life by attributing some cosmic purpose to mankind. Once we all share a well defined God as the object of our love and effort, we will all start to work together for our common survival and pleasure.
Assumption University Assumption University : How to fit management courses into their overall theological vision of a university.
The vast array of points in the transfinite symmetric network give us enough points to map one to every possible structure in the Universe. This mapping gives meaning to the points, and we hope to imitate nature by creating a map among our representative points that is isomorphic to the real mappings that we observe. We are moving physics away from measuring cardinals to measuring ordinals.
Convert to a broadband God.
A challenge to the Pope: a proof that God is not other than the Universe.
Monday 19 October 2009
Tuesday 20 October 2009
Wednesday 21 October 2009
Michael Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension, on unconscious knowledge, like knowledge of language and custom. Polanyi
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The key to the whole story is that mutatis mutandis my life and the life of an electron or any other living entity in the Universe are the same.
The biggest blue economists have made is the assumption of rational buyers and sellers. Every transaction is subject to many incommensurate layers of decision making whose outcome may not be 'rational' or more particularly, the rationality of a decision depends on the value space in which the decision is made, optimizing some generic value.
Selective advantages really only show themselves in life and death situations where there are only enough resources to support a proper subset of existing systems.
Thursday 22 October 2009
Friday 23 October 2009
Kent A Peacock fqxi . . . /584 Kent A Peacock
Quoting J S Bell '. . . maybe there must be something happening faster than light although it pains me to say even that much.' Mann and Crease, JSB interview Omni May 1988 pp 84-121. Mann & Crease
Peacock page 1: 'As a general methodological rule, one should be suspicious of mathematical rigour in physical arguments, especially when they are arguments designed to exclude a possibility.'
Bertrand Russell: 'It is one of the chief merits of proofs that they instil a certain scepticism as to
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the result proved. Latakos, Proofs and Refutations CUP 1976 Lakatos
Peacock page 4: 'We can't get controllable signalling in quantum mechanics without actually expending some free energy on the receiving device any more than we can do with any other kind of signalling; we could say that the conventional no-signalling arguments also amount to a confirmation of the second Law of Thermodynamics in the sense that no transmission of information can be accomplished without the expenditure of free energy.'
page 5: 'Microcausality can therefore be thought of as a sort of security patch downloaded as it were into the structure of field theory in order to prevent conflict with the orthodox interpretation of relativity and any presumption that it provides for a completely general prohibition of signalling is question begging.'
page 6: '. . . a general suspicion, probably endemic to physicists all the way back to the time of Newton, of the notion of action at a distance, and it seemed eminently reasonable to the framers of the brash new theory of quantum mechanics to assume that relativity is logically prior to it and that it should therefore not contradict relativity.'
page 7: '. . . Lee Smolin and other proponents of quantum gravity have argued [that] the conservative approach [relativity logically prior] is no longer open to us since the task now is to show how to construct spacetime out of quantum mechanics - not shoehorn quantum mechanics into spacetime.'
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Peacock page 8: 'The idea that all particles in the Universe are entangled in a completely consistent way is not unreasonable given that something like the Big Bang theory is probably true.
Bell: 'What is usually demonstrated by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.'
'The problem of quantum signalling is of interest not only in itself, but also as a case study in the larger problem of determining whether an apparent limit in nature is a genuine limit or merely the result of an attempt to define an awkward problem out of existence. I claim that the latter is precisely what has happened around the signalling problem.'
Comment posted to Peacock:
Dear Kent, Yours is the most interesting essay I have read so far on this site. It seems to me that the signalling problem will lead us to the next step in physics. I am inclined to think that quantum mechanics in fact describes a digital communication network. Shannon's theory of communication tells us that we avoid error by quantizing messages, that is by making them as far apart as possible in message space so that the probability of their confusion is negligible. This would seem to explain the fact of quantization. Shannon's theory also explains the delay in error defeating communications, since the packetizing system must wait for the source to emit a certain number of symbols before it can construct a packet. We might associate 'the universal minimum error proofing delay' with the velocity of light, light speed representing the fastest communication algorithm in the Universe. In situations, where error is not a problem, the error proofing delay is unnecessary and so we might get superluminal communication. A computer communication network is a digital, logical system, and it seems to me that such a system has a property we might call logical continuity (like a proof or the execution of a Turing machine) , which I feel is logically prior to the geometrical community that physicists struggle so hard to preserve. Finally, the network approach might lead us to the idea that gravitation is not quantized since, like an ideal power distribution network, it is operating at zero entropy, not transmitting any information, therefore has no possibility of error and so quantization or packetization for error prevention is unnecessary. Jeffrey Nicholls wrote on Oct. 23, 2009 @ 22:06 GMT PS: In a nutshell, we might map quantum measurement to digital communication and accept that logical continuity (the continuity of a digital communication network) is prior to geometrical continuity, so that the latter is a product of the former rather than vice versa. Networks are made possible by communication protocols which are algorithms for moving information from user to user. The foundation of every network is a physical layer. Physics we might then see as the fundamental communication protocol in which messages are so simple that we can decode them by integrations, that is by simply adding up the number of letters in a message string. We look at a 'wave packet' as a string, a superposition of 'letters'. Higher software layers in the universal network add more complex algorithms to their communication protocols all the way up to ourselves and beyond. For my purposes, the digitization of the world vastly increases its entropy (and so the information content of concrete situations), so that I may reasonably propose that the Universe is divine, establishing a precondition for theology to become an empirical science. All the best, JeffreyAn essential feature of a society is a subset of the population who are explorers and entrepreneurs, seeking new pastures and ways to exploit them. This is how our species filled the earth.
Ken Wharton Ken Wharton
Variational principle: 'The basic idea is that instead of starting with initial condtiions and solving some set of equations, VPs utilize partial initial conditions and partial final conditions and then minimize some global function S (known as the action) that describes what happens in between.'
EVOLUTION and VARIATIONAL PRINCIPLE
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Wharton page 1: 'The fact that all known fundamental physics can be done using VPs will be this essay's lodestar.
page 2: 'The results of external measurements on some space-time region are exactly the external constraints to be used in the action minimization for that region.
A set of algorithmically indistinguishable points (units) can be meaningfully integrated.
We use complex numbers in quantum mechanics because a state vector is an ordered string and we need both phase and amplitude data to transforms from time to frequency domain, where each frequency represents a symbol and phase controls the ordering of the symbols.
Peter Lynd: Very Classical/geometrical. Peter Lynd
An algorithm applies the same sets of operations to different sets of data (inputs) and can be thought of as a channel or pipeline.
Zhang et al Science 325:1544 Zhang 'The advent of genome sequencing has enabled development of computational and experimental tools to investigate complete biological systems, but it has also highlighted the difficulty in integrating complex information for the hundreds to thousands of different molecules that compose even the smallest biological networks. Such integration presents many challenges, especially when assembling data from diverse fields, such a biochemistry and structural biology, that use different operational languages and conceptual frameworks.' - PROTOCOLS
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Language is 'contained' by the conceptual framework as dynamics is contained by statics and vice versa.
Rasmussen: 'Hydrogen is a colourless, odourless gas which given enough time, turns into people.' Balaz, Science 325: 1632. Balazs
