"natural theology > notes > 2017

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Please click here to buy a copy of this book and support this project

Aristotle, and (translated by P H Wickstead and F M Cornford), Physics books I-IV, Harvard University Press, William Heinemann 1980 Introduction: 'The title "Physics" is misleading. .. "Lectures on Nature" the alternative title found in editions of the Greek text, is more enlightening. ... The realm of Nature, for Aristotle, includes all things that move and change ... . Thus the ultimate "matter" which, according to Aristotle, underlies all the elementary substances must be studied, in its changes at least, by the Natural Philosopher. And so must the eternal heavenly spheres of the Aristotelean philosophy, insofar as they themselves move of are the cause of motion in the sublunary world.'
Amazon back

Brandt, Siegmund, and Hans Dieter Dahmen, The Picture Book of Quantum Mechanics, Springer-Verlag 1995 Jacket: 'This book is an introduction to the basic concepts and phenomena of quantum mechanics. Computer-generated illustrations are used extensively throughout the text, helping to establish the relation between quantum mechanics on one side and classical physics . . . on the other side. Even more by studying the pictures in parallel with the text, readers develop an intuition for notoriously abstract quantum phenomena . . .'
Amazon back

Cohen, Paul J, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis, Benjamin/Cummings 1966-1980 Preface: 'The notes that follow are based on a course given at Harvard University, Spring 1965. The main objective was to give the proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis [from the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for set theory with the axiom of choice included]. To keep the course as self contained as possible we included background materials in logic and axiomatic set theory as well as an account of Gödel's proof of the consistency of the continuum hypothesis. . . .'
Amazon back

Coyne, Christopher J., and Rachel L. Mathers, Handbook on the Political Economy of War, Edward Elgar 2012 'The Handbook on the Political Economy of War highlights and explores important research questions and discusses the core elements of the political economy of war. By defining political economy and war in the broadest sense, this unique Handbook brings together a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars from economics, political science, sociology, and policy studies to address a multitude of important topics. These include an analysis of why wars begin, how wars are waged, what happens following the cessation of war, and various alternatives to conflict.'
Amazon back

Creutz, Michael , Quarks Gluons and Lattices, Cambridge UP 1983 Jacket: 'This book introduces the lattice approach to quantum field theory. The spectacular successes of this technique include compelling evidence that exchange of gauge gluons can confine the quarks within subnuclear matter. The treatment begins with the lattice definition of the path integral method and ends on Monte Carlo simulation methods.'
Amazon back

Dirac, P A M, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (4th ed), Oxford UP/Clarendon 1983 Jacket: '[this] is the standard work in the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, indispensible both to the advanced student and the mature research worker, who will always find it a fresh source of knowledge and stimulation.' (Nature)
Amazon back

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

Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.'
Amazon back

Goddard, Peter (editor), and Abraham Pais, Maurice Jacob, David Olive, Michael Atiyah and Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, The Man and His work, Cambridge University Press 1998 Amazon Product Description 'Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was one of the founders of quantum theory. He is numbered alongside Newton, Maxwell and Einstein as one of the greatest physicists of all time. Together the lectures in this volume, originally presented on the occasion of the dedication ceremony for a plaque honoring Dirac in Westminster Abbey, give a unique insight into the relationship between Dirac's character and his scientific achievements. The text begins with the dedication address given by Stephen Hawking at the ceremony. Then Abraham Pais describes Dirac as a person and his approach to his work. Maurice Jacob explains how Dirac was led to introduce the concept of antimatter, and its central role in modern particle physics and cosmology. This is followed by David Olive's account of the origin and enduring influence of Dirac's work on magnetic monopoles. Finally, Sir Michael Atiyah explains the deep and widespread significance of the Dirac equation in mathematics.'
Amazon back

Goddard, Peter (editor), and Abraham Pais, Maurice Jacob, David Olive, Michael Atiyah and Stephen Hawking, Paul Dirac, The Man and His work, Cambridge University Press 1998
Amazon back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
Amazon back

Siegel, Warren, Introduction to String Field Theory, World Scientific 1988 Introduction: 'The experiments that gave us quantum theory and general relativity are now quite old, but a satisfactory theory which is consistent with both of them has yet to be found. ... Strings ... offer a possibility of consistently describing all of nature. However, even if strings eventually turn out to disagree with nature, or to be too intractable to be useful for phenomenological applications, they are still the only consistent toy models of quantum gravity ... so their study willbe useful for discovering new properties of quantum gravity.' page 1.
Amazon back

Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press 1997 Jacket: 'The Story of Spin, as told by Sin-itiro Tomonaga and lovingly translated by Takeshi Oka, is a brilliant and witty account of the development of modern quantum theory, which takes electron spin as a pivotal concept. Reading these twelve lectures on the fundamental aspects of physics is a joyful experience that is rare indeed.' Laurie Brown, Northwestern University.
Amazon back

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. ...'
Amazon back

Wannenburg, Alf, and Peter Johnson and Anthony Bannister (photography), The Bushmen, Chartwell Books Inc 1979 'Even as this book goes to press, the last of the Kalahari Bushmen are being drawn into the vortex of our civilisation. Aware of the urgency of the task, the author and photographers searched deep into the Kalahari thirstlands to find those few remaining Bushmen who still live as their forefathers have done for the last 20 000 years'
Amazon back

Papers

Proga, Daniel, "Magnetic accretion", Nature, 441, 7096, 22 June 2006, page 938. 'Asronomical objects that siphon off their energy from gravitational processes are the mot powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the Universe. Of these, quasi-stellar radio sources (quasars), which can release as much pwoer as several hundred galaxies, are perhaps the most spectacular example. ...'. back

Links

Andrea Romanino, The Standard Model of Partice Physics, 'Abstract: These lectures provide a basic introduction to the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. While there are several reasons to believe that the Standard Model is just the low energy limit of a more fundamental theory, the SM has been successfully tested at an impressive level of accuracy and provides at present our best fundamental understanding of the phenomenology of particle physics. The perspective I will take will not be historical, I will instead take advantage of our present understanding to find the most direct logical motivations.' back

Calla Wahlquist, Map of massacresof Imdigenous revesls untold history of Australia, painted in blood, 'The first recorded killing happened on 1 September 1794, six years after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove and declared Australia a British colony. It was not the first murder of Aboriginal people by Europeans but it is the earliest to have enough evidence to meet the strict criteria of University of Newcastle researchers, who have mapped the sites of more than 150 massacres in one of the most significant pieces of work ever undertaken on the frontier wars.' back

Carl Zimmer, In Neaderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration, 'The expert consensus now is that Homo sapiens evolved at least 300,000 years ago in Africa. Only much later — roughly 70,000 years ago — did a small group of Africans establish themselves on other continents, giving rise to other populations of people today. To Johannes Krause, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany, that gap seems peculiar. “Why did people not leave Africa before?” he asked in an interview. After all, he observed, the continent is physically linked to the Near East. “You could have just walked out.” In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, Dr. Krause and his colleagues report that Africans did indeed walk out — over 270,000 years ago.' back

Coral Davenport, Counseled by Industry, Not Staff, E.P.A. Chief Is Off to a Blazing Start, 'WASHINGTON — In the four months since he took office as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history, according to experts in environmental law.' back

Damien Williams, Denialism and blindness en masse, 'We can continue to buy into the cheap notion that the church is some sort of evil institution staffed by a quackish bunch of freaks and weirdos. Or we can start to have an open discussion about sexuality, gender and the abuses that humans continue to perpetrate on one another well beyond institutional settings.' back

David Sessions, The Rise of the Thought Leader, ' The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” ' back

E.J.Dionne Jr., There's a right way to judge America's past, 'I’m happy I’ll find myself celebrating the Fourth of July in a city whose mayor, Mitch Landrieu (D), received widespread and deserved national attention in May for a speech explaining why he took down New Orleans’s monuments to Confederate leaders. . . . “The historic record is clear,” Landrieu said. “The Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.” ' back

Edmund Burke, Rage and frenzy . . . , ' “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” ' back

Gary McNair, 'Some make Trump look like a gentleman': what men really talk about when they talk about women, 'In January this year, I began a process of asking hundreds of men about the things they say to other men when they talk about women. I was creating a verbatim play called Locker Room Talk, where the real words of men would be spoken aloud by an all-female cast.' back

Gianluigi Fogli, An Introduction to the Standard Model, '1. A critical approach to the Standard Model 2. The Electromagnetic Interaction 3. Weak Interactions 4. Electroweak Interactions 5. Gauge Symmetry 6. The Standard Model 7. Renormalization and Running Coupling Constants back

Gordon Campbell, Empedocles (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), 'Empedocles [c.492-432 B.C.E.] (of Acagras in Sicily) was a philosopher and poet: one of the most important of the philosophers working before Socrates (the Presocratics), and a poet of outstanding ability and of great influence upon later poets such as Lucretius. . . . Empedocles’ world-view is of a cosmic cycle of eternal change, growth and decay, in which two personified cosmic forces, Love and Strife, engage in an eternal battle for supremacy.' back

Mens rea - Wikipedia, Mens rea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The standard common law test of criminal liability is expressed in the Latin phrase actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, i.e. "the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty". In jurisdictions with due process, there must be both actus reus ("guilty act") and mens rea for a defendant to be guilty of a crime (see concurrence). As a general rule, someone who acted without mental fault is not liable in criminal law. Exceptions are known as strict liability crimes.' back

Just war theory - Wikipedia, Just war theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Just war theory (Latin: jus bellum iustum) is a doctrine, also referred to as a tradition, of military ethics studied by theologians, ethicists, policy makers, and military leaders. The purpose of the doctrine is to ensure war is morally justifiable through a series of criteria, all of which must be met for a war to be considered just. The criteria are split into two groups: "right to go to war" (jus ad bellum) and "right conduct in war" (jus in bello).' back

Luisa Torre and Patrik Camporex, Life for Barzils Krenak after Fundao dam collapsed, 'On November 5, 2015, a sea of toxic mud and mineral waste flooded out of the Fundao dams operated by Samarco, killing 19 people, destroying homes and polluting waterways. Since the flood, which is widely regarded as Brazil's worst ever environmental disaster, life on the riverbank has been completely transformed.' back

Lyndal Ryan. Jennifer Debenham, Mark Brown and William Pascoe, Colonial Frontier Massacres In eastern Australia 1788-1872, 'From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance. As a result thousands of Aboriginal men women and children were killed. This site presents a map, timelines, and information about massacres in Eastern Australia from 1794 when the first massacre was recorded until 1872.' back

Matt Valentine, The Second Amendment Issue the Supreme Court Can't Avoid, 'The underlying issue is that gun regulations vary drastically from one state to another, especially concerning public carry. Today in Texas, it’s legal to strap a fully loaded semiautomatic rifle across your chest and stroll down the busiest boulevards of Dallas or Houston, with no license of any kind. Meanwhile a San Franciscan wishing to carry a small, concealed handgun will almost certainly be denied the required California license, regardless of training or vetting.' back

Ralph Vartabedian and Allen J. Schaben, 1,800 tons of radioactive waste has an ocean view and nowhere to go, 'And like the other 79,000 tons of spent fuel spread across the nation, San Onofre’s nuclear waste has nowhere to go. The nation’s inability to find a permanent home for the dangerous byproduct of its 50-year-adventure in nuclear energy represents one of the biggest and longest running policy failures in federal government history.' back

Richard Holden, Vital signs: How likely is another financial crisis? It comes down to what we believe, 'But if there is a view that some new form of moral hazard is taking place, and people lose faith in the regulatory regime, then perhaps 2008 could occur again. And soon. As game theory - and the lessons of the classic depression-era bank runs - teach us, it all comes down to what people believe about what other people believe. That seems like a pretty slippery object to me.' back

Robert J Samuelson, Trump is not destiny. Here's what is, 'The nation’s future also hangs on larger economic and social trends that no president can shape. A new report from the congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) reminds us of this. The report examines the nation’s “social capital.” . . . The JEC study assessed social capital in four realms — family life, the workplace, religion and community — and found it weakening in all four. Here’s a brief summary of the report’s conclusions, which are based on scholarly studies and public opinion surveys.' back

Robert Wright and Drew Taylor, Our Man In Tehran, 'In 1979, the Iranian Revolution erupted. During this upheaval, the US Embassy and its personnel were seized by militants, while six diplomatic personnel managed to escape and find refuge courtesy of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his staff. Through their words and others' from that time, the events of that crisis are told as Canada found itself in the midst of an international intrigue that defied all conventional understanding. All this culminated in the Canadian government devising a way with CIA assistance to smuggle the fugitives out in an operation that would provide some hope during a dark time in American history back

Roy Greenslade, National newspapers savage Tony Blair over the Chllcot report, '. . . the single line in Blair’s memo to George Bush eight months before the invasion - “I will be with you whatever” - featured boldly on the front pages of the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mirror. From that “private promise”, said the Guardian, “every abuse of public process would flow, as well as that pervasive, poisonous sense that the government was not playing it straight.” Blair “fatally compromised his own preference for constructing a UN-blessed route to war, by preceding it all with the bald vow that Washington could count on him.” ' back

Shaun Walker, Rusia begins cleaning up as the Soviets' top-secret nuclear waste dump, 'When the Soviet Union collapsed, transfers of the spent fuel ceased, and about 22,000 spent nuclear fuel caskets were left at Andreyeva Bay in leaky dry storage units, creating the potential for an environmental catastrophe. “I’ve been all over the world to pretty much every country that uses nuclear power and I’ve never seen anything so awful before,” said Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer and environmentalist who has been monitoring the site for years.' back

Sophie Jamieson, Fish become transgender from contraceptive pill chemicals being flushed down household drains, 'A fifth of male fish are now transgender because of chemicals from the contraceptive pill being flushed down household drains, a study by has suggested. Male river fish are displaying feminised traits and even producing eggs, the study found. Some have reduced sperm quality and display less aggressive and competitive behaviour, which makes them less likely to breed successfully. The chemicals causing these effects include ingredients in the contraceptive pill, by-products of cleaning agents, plastics and cosmetics, according to the findings.' back

Walter G Langer, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, back

Zaadz, Saint Francis of Assisi Quotes, Zaadz Plan: 'The quick version of what we're gonna do: build THE most inspired community of people in the world... Imagine social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. Fun fun fun.' back

Zena Tahhan, fAter a revolution and a military coup, Egypt faces abuses to a degree unseen in the Mubarak years analysts say., '"On virtually every indicator, Egypt is worse off today than it was under Mubarak," Yerkes said. "The security situation is far worse, the economy is worse, the levels of repression are far higher and the ability of the government to deliver basic goods and services has declined." ' back

vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 2 July 2017

Monday 3 July 2017

Tuesday 4 July 2017

Wednesday 5 July 2017

Thursday 6 July 2017

Friday 7 July 2017

Saturday 8 July 2017

Further reading

Books

Papers

Links