vol VII: Notes
2015
Notes
[Sunday 4 January 2015 - Saturday 10 January 2015]
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[page 79]
Sunday 4 January 2015
Symmetry is a fancy way saying that nothing happens. It becomes necessary when we have models with more degrees of freedom that the system being studied. The prime example of this is the idea, based on point set theory, that every point in a continuum carries data.
Conversation: Health is made at home. Hospitals are for repairs. Book African Health Leaders Lord Nigel Crisp. Rob Moodie
Monday 5 January 2015
[page 80]
Tuesday 6 January 2015
Woke dreaming of the path integral which has been central to physics over the last fifty years and seems to be the culmination of the Hamiltonian approach to physics. Feynman speaks of it as the method used by nature to 'sniff out' the actual path taken by a process that explores all possible paths and finds the one where action is stationary. A strong argument in its favour is that it gives the classical result when we take Planck's constant to zero. From my point of view, it finds the path where action is an integral multiple of Planck's constant, ie a process which requires an integral multiple of halted computations.
The interpretation of a series of keystrokes and other inputs into a computer depends upon the process to which it is addressed.
A quantum of action corresponds to the exchange of an observable physically embodied symbol (particle), and the rate of exchange of such symbols is the energy (processing rate) of the state.
Creation operator: send a message
Annihilation operators: receive a message.
Thursday 8 January 2015
Those who deny the Universe is divine are in the same category as climate denialists who cannot see things which are in plain sight like millions of temperature measurements taken around the world.
America as a functioning nation has been shut down by nostalgic religious extremists. Israel is in the same boat.
[page 81]
Australia is at risk if we do not stop the religious and capitalist right whose cats paw is the current PM. Cat's paw - Wikipedia
Kuiper: Flyvbjerg: 'Power determines what counts as knowledge . . . where it ignores of suppresses that knowledge which does not suit it. Gabrielle Kuiper
Friday 9 January 2015
[page 81]
Smith, Conversation: 'Economic rent is unearned income.' Warwick Smith
Saturday 10 January 2015
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Copyright:
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Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Collier, Paul, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What can be Done about it, Oxford University Press, USA 2008 Amazon customer review: ' . . . This book is not only fascinating and thought-provoking, but very easy to read. Collier distills concepts that are broad, deep and complicated like few writers I have come across. He is probably an excellent teacher because he can translate his knowledge into language I can understand.
The big reason to buy this book is that he does a great job explaining exactly why being resource-rich is a curse. Others have alluded to this phenomenon, but Collier is the first to really impact my understanding of the issue. He also explains why electoral democracies with poor checks and balances are actually worse at dealing with this curse than autocracies.
The good news is that full-fledged liberal democracies with strong checks on executive spending are able to out-compete them both. . . . 'George Haines
Amazon
back |
Collier, Paul, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What can be Done about it, Oxford University Press, USA 0195373383
• ISBN-13: 978-0195373387 2008 Amazon customer review: ' . . . This book is not only fascinating and thought-provoking, but very easy to read. Collier distills concepts that are broad, deep and complicated like few writers I have come across. He is probably an excellent teacher because he can translate his knowledge into language I can understand.
The big reason to buy this book is that he does a great job explaining exactly why being resource-rich is a curse. Others have alluded to this phenomenon, but Collier is the first to really impact my understanding of the issue. He also explains why electoral democracies with poor checks and balances are actually worse at dealing with this curse than autocracies.
The good news is that full-fledged liberal democracies with strong checks on executive spending are able to out-compete them both. . . . 'George Haines
Amazon
back |
Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants" -- a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.'
Amazon
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Feynman, Richard P, and Albert P Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, McGraw Hill 1965 Preface: 'The fundamental physical and mathematical concepts which underlie the path integral approach were first developed by R P Feynman in the course of his graduate studies at Princeton, ... . These early inquiries were involved with the problem of the infinte self-energy of the electron. In working on that problem, a "least action" principle was discovered [which] could deal succesfully with the infinity arising in the application of classical electrodynamics.' As described in this book. Feynam, inspired by Dirac, went on the develop this insight into a fruitful source of solutions to many quantum mechanical problems.
Amazon
back |
Gingerich, Owen, God's Universe, Belknap Press 2006 Amazon editorial review From Booklist
'Astronomer Gingerich believes in a designed universe, although not in intelligent design (ID), the antievolution theorizing that some Evangelical Christian activists want taught in public-school science courses. His intent isn't, however, to flay ID as Michael Shermer does in Why Darwin Matters (see review on p.22); it is to explore a few topics in science that suggest design and a designer, God. He weighs the Copernican principle that intelligent life isn't exceptional in the universe against the Darwinian emphasis on the uniqueness of life on Earth. He probes the differences between atheist and religious scientists (this is where he dismisses ID along with "evolution as a materialist philosophy" as ideologies), especially over the big bang and cosmological teleology. Finally, he raises some "Questions without Answers" to point up the different, irreconcilable concerns of physics as opposed to metaphysics, science as opposed to religion. Utterly lacking scientific or religious triumphalism, demonstrating why both ways of knowing are indispensable, Gingerich's highly rereadable remarks may well outlast all the brouhaha of the ID-evolution fracas.' Ray Olson
Copyright American Library Association.
Amazon
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Schiff, Leonard I, Quantum Mechanics, McGraw-Hill 1968 Preface: 'This volme has a threefold purpose: to explain the physical concepts of quantum mechanics, to describe the mathematical formalism, and to provide illustrative examples of both the ideas and the methods.'
Amazon
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West, Morris, Cassidy, Doubleday - Garden City 1986
Amazon
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Papers
| Blair, David, "Gravitational astronomy 101: It's a bit of a shock", Nature, 457, 7225, 1 January 2009, page 122. Nature Futures. back |
| Gingerich, Owen, "Mankind's place in the Universe", Nature, 457, 7225, 1 January 2009, page 28-29. Technological developments in astronomy have long helped to answer some of the greatest questions tackled by humanity . . . '. back |
| McGeough, Paul, "Israel takes little comfort fromn Obama", Sydney Morning Herald, , , 3 January 2009, page . 'In July Barack Obama sought to boost his Jewish vote back in America with an emotional stump-speech in Sderot, a community in Israel which is a target for much of the Palestinian rocket-fire from Gaza.
Referring to his children Malia, 9, and Sasha, 7, the then US presidential candidate said: "If somebody is sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that - and I'd expect Israelis to do the same thing."
This week, however, Obama had no such words of comfort for Anwar Balousha. A 40-year-old father from Gaza who describes himself as a factional agnostic, Balousha had to bury five of his daughters - Tahrir, 17, Ikram, 14, Samar, 13, Dina, 8, and Jawaher, 4 - after they were killed when their home was destroyed in an Israeli missile-strike on a nearby mosque.'. back |
Links
| Cat's paw - Wikipedia, Cat's paw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Cat's paw is a phrase derived from La Fontaine's fable, "The Monkey and the Cat", referring to a person used unwittingly or unwillingly by another to accomplish the other's own purpose. back |
| Classical probability - Wikipedia, Classical probability - Wikipedia, 'The classical definition of probability is identified with the works of Pierre Simon Laplace. As stated in his Théorie analytique des probabilités,
The probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favorable to it, to the number of all cases possible when nothing leads us to expect that any one of these cases should occur more than any other, which renders them, for us, equally possible.
This definition is essentially a consequence of the principle of indifference. If elementary events are assigned equal probabilities, then the probability of a disjunction of elementary events is just the number of events in the disjunction divided by the total number of elementary events.
The classical definition of probability was called into question by several writers of the nineteenth century, including John Venn and George Boole. The frequentist definition of probability became widely accepted as a result of their criticism, and especially through the works of R.A. Fisher. The classical definition enjoyed a revival of sorts due to the general interest in Bayesian probability.' back |
| Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope - Wikipedia, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly named the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST) is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard GLAST, the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), is being used to study gamma ray bursts.' back |
| Gabrielle Kuiper, The political value of climate denial has fallen to zero. What will Abbot do now?, 'What was astounding was how poorly Abbott misread the views of his fellow conservatives. He seemed oblivious of the fact that a few months earlier Britain had joined France, Germany and Italy in calling for a raised EU emission reduction target of 40% by 2030.' back |
| Gregory Chaitin - Wikipedia, Gregory Chaitin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Gregory John Chaitin (born 1947) is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a new incompleteness theorem in reaction to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.' back |
| Kurt Gödel - Wikipedia, Kurt Gödel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Gödel is best known for his two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The more famous incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.' back |
| Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia, Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Lagrangian mechanics is a re-formulation of classical mechanics that combines conservation of momentum with conservation of energy. It was introduced by Joseph Louis Lagrange in 1788. In Lagrangian mechanics, the trajectory of a system of particles is derived by solving Lagrange's equation, given herein, for each of the system's generalized coordinates. The fundamental lemma of calculus of variations shows that solving Lagrange's equation is equivalent to finding the path that minimizes the action functional, a quantity that is the integral of the Lagrangian over time.' back |
| No cloning theorem - Wikipedia, No cloning theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The no cloning theorem is a result of quantum mechanics which forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters, Zurek, and Dieks in 1982, and has profound implications in quantum computing and related fields.' back |
| Normalisable wave function - Wikipedia, Normalisable wave function - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In quantum mechanics, wave functions which describe real particles must be normalisable1: the probability of the particle to occupy any place must equal 1.' back |
| Office of the President-Elect, Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team, 'Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.' Barack Obama back |
| Path integral formulation - Wikipedia, Path integral formulation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The path integral formulation of quantum mechanics is a description of quantum theory which generalizes the action principle of classical mechanics. It replaces the classical notion of a single, unique trajectory for a system with a sum, or functional integral, over an infinity of possible trajectories to compute a quantum amplitude. . . . This formulation has proved crucial to the subsequent development of theoretical physics, since it provided the basis for the grand synthesis of the 1970s which unified quantum field theory with statistical mechanics. . . . ' back |
| Paul McGeough, Israel takes little comfort from Obama - Opinion, 'In July Barack Obama sought to boost his Jewish vote back in America with an emotional stump-speech in Sderot, a community in Israel which is a target for much of the Palestinian rocket-fire from Gaza.
Referring to his children Malia, 9, and Sasha, 7, the then US presidential candidate said: "If somebody is sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that - and I'd expect Israelis to do the same thing."
This week, however, Obama had no such words of comfort for Anwar Balousha. A 40-year-old father from Gaza who describes himself as a factional agnostic, Balousha had to bury five of his daughters - Tahrir, 17, Ikram, 14, Samar, 13, Dina, 8, and Jawaher, 4 - after they were killed when their home was destroyed in an Israeli missile-strike on a nearby mosque.' back |
| Rob Moodie, In conversation with Nigel Crisp: Ebola response and lessons from African health leaders, 'Ebola has focused the world’s attention on the challenges of health care in Africa. The continent has 11% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s disease burden. It also has just 1.3% of the global health workforce.
Yet African health leaders have shown enormous creativity, innovation and leadership in tackling global health challenges.
University of Melbourne Professor of Public Health Rob Moodie spoke with Lord Nigel Crisp about his new book – African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming the Future – and the lessons Australia and the world can learn from African health leaders.' back |
| Sonoma State University, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, back |
| Warwick Smith, How's this for fundamental tax reform? Target the rentseekers, 'Economic rent is unearned income. This means that it has no clearly associated cost of production.
Unearned income can be obtained in many different ways but is almost always derived from privileged access to something scarce.' back |
| William Ross Ashby - Wikipedia, William Ross Ashby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Despite being widely influential within cybernetics, systems theory and, more recently, complex systems, he is not as well known as many of the notable scientists his work influenced including Herbert Simon, Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Stafford Beer and Stuart Kauffman.' back |
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