"natural theology > notes > 2015 > Sunday 15 November "

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Auyang, Sunny Y., How Quantum Theory is possible, Oxford University Press 1995 Jacket: 'Quantum field theory (QFT) combines quantum mechanics with Einstein's special theory of relativity and underlies elementary particle physics. This book presents a philosophical analysis of QFT. It is the first treatise in which the philosophies of space-time, quantum phenomena and particle interactions are encompassed in a unified framework.'
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Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, General Books LLC 2009 'Long absent from the center of discussion in Western philosophy, Bergson has recently made a reappearance. The Centennial Series of his works undertaken by Palgrave Macmillan thus comes at an opportune time, making it possible for those interested in Bergson's ideas t have access to newly annotated versions of several of his chief writings, freshly introduced and discussed. It is particularly good to see the republication of Mind-Energy, a treasure trove of Bergsonian insights long out of print.' - Pete A.Y. Gunter, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of North Texas
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Cheney, Margaret, Tesla: Man out of Time, Touchstone 2001 Jacket: 'In Tesla: Man Out of Time Margaret Cheneyexplores the brilliant and prescient mind of the twentieth century's greatest scientist and inventor.
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Chrsitie, Agatha, Taken at the Flood, Collins Crime 2000
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Fortun, Mike, and Herbert J Bernstein, Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century, Counterpoint 1998 Amazon editorial review: 'Does science discover truths or create them? Does dioxin cause cancer or not? Is corporate-sponsored research valid or not? Although these questions reflect the way we're used to thinking, maybe they're not the best way to approach science and its place in our culture. Physicist Herbert J. Bernstein and science historian Mike Fortun, both of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS), suggest a third way of seeing, beyond taking one side or another, in Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. While they deal with weighty issues and encourage us to completely rethink our beliefs about science and truth, they do so with such grace and humor that we follow with ease discussions of toxic-waste disposal, the Human Genome Project, and retooling our language to better fit the way science is actually done.'
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Grgin, Emile, The Algebra of Quantions: A Unifying Number System for Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, AuthorHouse 2005 Amazon Product Description 'Quantum mechanics and relativity have been in structural conflict for eighty years. This work shows that the incompatibility in question stems only from the assumption that their unification must be based on the field of complex numbers. Dropping this assumption, one can derive a simple mathematical structure which subsumes both theories as special cases. While the idea of generalizing the number system of quantum mechanics to make structural room for relativity is very old, no attempt has been successful in the past. The novelty brought out in the present work is based on a self-evident observation: there is no reason to expect the development of mathematics and physics to be synchronized in a manner that would keep the former forever one step ahead of the latter. More specifically, if a new number system seems to be needed in physics, there is no reason to believe that this system already belongs to our mathematical heritage.This observation changes the nature of the problem from 'finding' a unifying number system among the algebras already studied by mathematicians, to 'discovering' it ab initio from the requirement that it should lead to a structural merging of quantum mechanics and relativity. The solution, named "algebra of quantions", is derived in this book from several viewpoints, together with proofs of its mathematical uniqueness. Its physical relevance stems from the fact that the Standard Model depends less on observations if formulated over the quantions. This work is a philosophical and technical introduction to the algebra of quantions, to quantionic analysis, and to quantionic field equations.'
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Latifa, My Forbidden face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story, Miramax 2003 Amazon review From Booklist 'Latifa was only 16 when the Taliban overran Kabul, changing her life dramatically. On the morning of September 26, 1996--the day the Taliban took Kabul--Latifa, her sister, Soraya, and their father drove to Aryana Square and saw the body of the murdered former president, Najibullah. The Taliban began issuing edicts, forbidding women to leave their houses without a close male relative to escort them; forcing them to wear chadris, which cover their entire bodies; and refusing to allow them to work. Latifa, Soraya, and their mother suffered greatly, falling into depression. Their mother, a doctor, continued to see patients secretly, and Latifa eventually started an underground school for girls, an action that put both her and her students at great risk. Latifa and her parents left Afghanistan to be interviewed by the French magazine Elle, but when they tried to return, they discovered that the Taliban had declared them enemies of the state. A moving firsthand account with a real sense of immediacy.' Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association.
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Park, David Allen, Introduction to the Quantum Theory, McGraw-Hill Book Company 1992
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Polanyi, Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 2009 Amazon product description: '“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.'
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'
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Links

Active intellect - Wikipedia, Active intellect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Active intellect or agent intellect is a term used in philosophy to refer to the formal (morphe) aspect of the intellect (nous), in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism. . . . Aristotle: the active intellect was the subject of much intense discussion in medieval philosophy. The idea is first encountered in Aristotle's De Anima, in which he discusses the human mind and distinguishes between the active and passive intellects.[1] Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible forms of things, but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. back

Annabel Crabb, The fight between being and nothingness, 'Several weeks ago, the Thatcher archive finally released the speech the Iron Lady had been planning to give at that 1984 conference. It was an unprecedentedly savage attack on the Labour Party, laced with personal abuse and contumely. The speech she actually gave, hastily rewritten in the rubble, was eminently more gracious. Even Britain's immortal political warrior knew that in the face of a shared new enemy, old enemies must sometimes call a truce.' back

Ari Mattes, Reflections of Paris: technics and terrorism in Vision Culture, 'The entire event-complex is, of course, deeply sad for the families of the dead – all of the dead, including the families of the perpetrators – and this, hopefully, elicits the empathy of those not directly affected. But the event’s revelation of the inability of the majority of public figures to think in terms of systems and history – to think dynamically, and to see and understand the relationships between different forces, political, economic, cultural and geographic – is a source of profound despair regarding the global future.' back

Carol Giacomo, What the Saudis Miss When They Focus on Iran, 'I visited the region last month, shortly after a gunman linked to an Islamic State affiliate killed five people at a meeting hall associated with a mosque in the city of Shaihat. On Wednesday in the same city, gunmen killed two members of the Saudi security forces. Many Shiite residents, already alienated from the government, are fearful. “They feel they are being targeted for their faith,” a Saudi journalist said. The Saudis’ Wahhabi version of Islam, which underpins the conservative government and society, considers Shiites infidels, and anti-Shiite propaganda is common.' back

George Monbiot, There's a population crisi alright> But probably not the one you think, 'So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals. Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price.' back

Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, 'The primary premise of the Alliance is that in order to insure an environmentally sustainable future, humans must reorient themselves from an exploitative and ultimately self-destructive relationship with nature, to one that honors the deep interrelation of all life and contributes to the health and integrity of the natural environment. An essential step in achieving this is to create a system of jurisprudence that sees and treats nature as a fundamental, rights bearing entity and not as mere property to be exploited at will.' back

Henri Bergson - Wikipedia, Henri Bergson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Henri-Louis Bergson (. . . 18 October 1859–4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century.' back

Jim Holt, Nothing Ventured, 'In 1935, around the time he began proclaiming that Hitler would rescue the German people from their forgetfulness of Being, Heidegger declared "Why is there something rather than nothing?" to be the deepest and most far-reaching of all questions. Each of us, he claimed, is "grazed...by its hidden power" at least once in our lives, whether we realize it or not: The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured....It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think they are not than to understand that they are and are as are. The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not... ' back

Joshua Robertson, Sex abuse victimes struggle for justive in Brisbane's web of powerful interests, 'Archbishop Phillip Aspinall has signalled the church will refund considerable fees paid to St Paul’s by victims of abuse by Lynch and Knight. But Aspinall indicated to the commission that the church, even when it was willing to take a less combative tack with victims in legal proceedings, had scarcely any more opportunity to do so while “trapped” by the terms of their insurance contracts. Aspinall said there was an inherent conflict when insurers with commercial interests acted for a school or a church that wished to “express care and concern for the survivor without voiding its insurance cover”. Worse still, he saw no way “that conflict can be resolved”. This means that churches and schools, regardless of any willingness to own up to their failures, remain captive to commercial imperatives that turn the handling of historical sexual abuse complaints into a ' back

Kamel Daoud, Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It, 'Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it. The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.' back

Laila Lalami, When terror strikes, Saudi Arabia evades responsibility, 'When I was a child in Morocco, no clerics told me what to do, what to read or not read, what to believe, what to wear. And if they did, I was free not to listen. Faith was more than its conspicuous manifestations. But things began to change in the 1980s. It was the height of the Cold War and Arab tyrants saw an opportunity: they could hold on to power indefinitely by repressing the dissidents in their midst – most of them secular leftists – and by encouraging the religious right wing, with tacit or overt approval from the US and other Western allies. Into the void created by the decimation of the Arab world's secular left, the Wahhabis stepped in, with almost unlimited financial resources. Wahhabi ideas spread throughout the region, not because they have any merit – they don't – but because they were and remain well funded. We cannot defeat IS without defeating the Wahhabi theology that birthed it. And to do so would require spending as much effort and money in defending liberal ideas.' back

Luke Kemp, Explainer: how the OECD agreement dealsanother blow to coal worldwide, 'The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have agreed to limit subsidies for the export of inefficient coal-fired power plant technologies. Export credit funding will be limited to coal-fired power generators using only the most efficient, and least polluting, “ultra-supercritical” technologies. The deal will come into force in January 2017 and be reviewed in 2019. . . . Australia unfortunately continued its role as a climate laggard by negotiating for the inclusion of a clause allowing for exceptions. back

Pat McConnell, 21st Century bank fraud demands a new generation of IT experts, 'It would seem that the world is vastly infested with dodgy code, a lot of it hiding behind the shield of ‘intellectual property’, ‘commercial in confidence’ etc etc. Code functions very like law, and despite the efforts of many dodgy lawmakers in Australia and elsewhere, it is a well established principle that the text of laws will be publicly available and that the High Court has the last say on what the words actually mean and whether the meaning is constitutionally acceptable. The law, in other words, is ‘open source’. Maybe it is time to implement this principle in all code which effects human health, safety and security, the stability of the financial system and in fact everything which impacts on the public welfare. If all this code was open source, millions of skilled eyes could go over it and alert the rest of it to deliberate or unintentional dodginess. It would seem, for instance, that there are forests of errors in the code employed by our governments in their efforts to get into the cybercentury while being too stingy to employ properly qualified software engineers to design and build their systems, eg http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/taxpayer-records-exposed-by-serious-ato-mygov-security-flaw-20151117-gl1kex' Jeffrey Nichols comment back

Tamara Tulich, National security bill opens the door to expanded control orders and secret evidence, What is new in the anti-terror context is legislation that allows the courts to rely on secret evidence in control order proceedings. . . . UK Supreme Court justice Lord Kerr made the following comments in a case about secret evidence: The central fallacy of the argument, however, lies in the unspoken assumption that, because the judge sees everything, he is bound to be in a better position to reach a fair result. That assumption is misplaced. To be truly valuable, evidence must be capable of withstanding challenge. I go further. Evidence which has been insulated from challenge may positively mislead.' back

Ted Lefroy and Benjamin Richardson, We quibble over 'lawfare', but the law is not protecting species properly anyway, 'An alternative vision that evokes Christopher Stone’s ideal is beginning to find legal expression in some countries, such as New Zealand, where a long dispute between the government and Maori over management of a major river concluded in 2012 with an historic agreement that the Whanganui River is a legal person, with its own rights. Two guardians, one appointed by the local Maori iwi and the other by the government, will protect the river’s interests forever.' back

The Ant and the Grasshopper - Wikipedia, The Ant and the Grasshopper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Synopsis The fable concerns a grasshopper who has spent the warm months singing away while the ant (or ants in some editions) worked to store up food for winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger, and upon asking the ant for food is only rebuked for its idleness. The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence. Some versions of the fable state a moral at the end, along the lines of: "Idleness brings want", "To work today is to eat tomorrow" or "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity". back

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act 4, Scene 3, 'BRUTUS Under your pardon. You must note beside, That we have tried the utmost of our friends, Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe: The enemy increaseth every day; We, at the height, are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.' back

vol VII: Notes

2015

Notes

Sunday 15 November 2015

Monday 16 November 2015

Tuesday 17 November 2015

Wednesday 18 November 2015

Thursday 19 November 2015

Friday 20 November 2015

page 17: '. . . we have no satisfactory criterion that separates quantum from classical systems.

Saturday 21 November 2015

Further reading

Books

Links