vol VII: Notes
2017
Notes
Sunday 23 July 2017 - Saturday 29 July 2017
[Notebook: DB 81: Scientific theology]
[page 77]
Sunday 23 July 2017
Berger page 50: One of the fundamental propositions of the sociology of knowledge is that the plausibility, in the sense of what people actually find credible, of views of realty depends on the social support these
[page 78]
receive. Berger: A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural
page 52: 'The dynamics most definitely pertain to any religious affirmation about the world because there affirmations are, by their very nature, incapable of being supported by their own sense experience and therefore dependent upon social support.' In mystery religions, but not on an empirical religion where we see God and develop models to understand it.
page 54: 'The community of faith is now understandable as a constructed entity — it has been constructed in a specific human history by human beings.' So we set out to construct a scientific theology, not a castle in the air but a castle based on the rock of observable reality.
page 56: ' "Profane history" refers to the ordinary course of events as it can be studied by the historian; "sacred history" is the story of God's acts in the world, which can be grasped only in the perspective of faith.' False dichotomy in the divine world.
page 61: '[The] pluralization of socially available worlds has been of particular importance for religion, again for far from mysterious reasons, the most definitive being the Protestant Reformation and its subsidiary schisms. It is this pluralization, rather than some mysterious intellectual fall from grace that I see as the most important cause of the diminishing plausibility of religious traditions.' They can no longer embrace the full complexity of human experience.
Monday 24 July 2017
Berger page 113: ' . . . there is a common, empirically given human reality that underlies all quests for redemption. This is the reality of suffering, evil and death [all of which are quite natural in a divine world].'
[page 79]
page 117: 'The point could also have been made that many new intellectual departures have become possible only after the luxuriant complexities accumulated before them have been reduced to a surveyable simplicity.'
Minkowski space is metric but the differentiable manifold is not.
Auyang Auyang: How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?Tuesday 25 July 2017
Wednesday 26 July 2017
It was the Christian (human) think to do.
Freedom, complexity, spirituality.
Wardbukarra: Paul Williams (director)
The first song: everything made from Rainbow Serpent. Paul Williams (director): Wardbukarra
Thursday 27 July 2017
Auyang page 27: 'The Gaussian coordinate individuate but neither relate nor measure.' ? They relate by multidimensional ordering.
page 31: 'In Newtonian physics the structures of space and time are posited independently of the concept of velocity, which is a derived concept. Special relativity makes the concept of velocity fundamental to the spatiotemporal structure . . . velocity is the parameter of the Lorentz transformation.' Lorentz transformation - Wikipedia
'In general relativity, the metrical or light cone structure of special relativity is localized to the tangent space above a single point. . . . Note that 'local' here
[page 80]
means a point and its tangent space, which contains infinitesimal displacements. . . .The result of localization is that in general relativity the orientation of the light cones on various points are all different from each other. The difference in orientations is reconciled by gravity, mathematically represented by the connection of the differentiable manifold.'
Friday 28 July 2017
Saturday 29 July 2017
Auyang: 27-30: Cartesian geometry to differential geometry. Inertial (Minkowski) spaces are cartesian. We network them together to make differential geometry:
1. Gaussian mapping of points to numbers — identification [giving each point an identity with a corresponding real number]
2. Differentiation / derivative, limit as h → 0 [f(x+h) - f(x)] / h. This works for Gaussian coordinates because the limit exists.
How does differentiation apply in a network? [Network differentiates by sending messages, ie gauge particles].
The general theory of relativity assumes that the universe is a continuum, but communication is necessarily digitized. The continuum is a large numbers approximation to the digital reality [when gravitation began, the Universe was strictly one, like God, needing no communication?].
3. Curves created by mapping segments of the real line into the manifold (presumably using the Gaussian coordinates of line and manifold.
4. Tangent space is the set of all possible infinitesimal displacements in the manifold, yielding a space of tangent vectors of the same dimension as the manifold.
5. Connection: tangent spaces are disjoint — we join them by a curve and a connection [channel and message]. We see connections as messages, since connections represent potentials or interaction fields. Connections enable us to compare vectors in different tangent spaces.
6. Metric tensor: — inner product defined upon tangent spaces over each point in a manifold. Yields infinitesimal length elements but not finite distances.
7. Length is integral of infinitesimal distances [as if these things actually exist physically?]
8. Distance function between two points is greatest lower bound of lengths
[page 81]
all curves joining the points.
Auyang page 30: 'Physical theories parametrized by space-time variables are considered more basic that those that are not.' But is this true? What about quantum mechanics that exists in time alone? Where does space come from? Space provides addressing in a Gaussian manner with no metric, as in a network, where we can only tell how far we are away from a source by the time lapse in communication [sometimes measured in light years].
All spatio-temporal structures are '4D locally Euclidean continua comprising discrete points'. A contradiction in terms, continuum / points. M4 in which every point is uniquely designated by an ordered set of four real numbers. 'The concept of identifiable points in a continuum is most important' but it makes no sense.
page 31: proper time: Δτ2 = Δt2 - Δx2/v2 [where v may be any veloity including c] — arriving at work on time.
page 32: 'The symmetry structure of physical theories unites many broad principles of which the conservation law is one example, and the coordinate free expression of laws is another.' The real structure of any system is maintained by the communications between the sources from which it is constructed. My geographic coordinate is [almost] irrelevant to my physiology.
page 33: group = set of operations with a rule of composition. So a computation is a set of operations and an ordering of the operations, ie a set of Turing machines and a set of permutations. [only reversible (invertible) computations can form a group, ie reversible permutations of reversible machines].
Symmetry = difference + identity
page 37: '. . . there must be no relativistically invariant subspaces for the state space of a free elementary particle otherwise we will call the invariant subspaces elementary.' You are saying that the internal state of an electron is a function of its state of motion in an external field, ie an atom. [Charged particles cannot exist alone, they only make sense in the context of photons, the electromagnetic field, the charge is in effect that rate of interaction with the field.
