vol VII: Notes
2019
Notes
Sunday 22 December 2019 - Saturday 28 December 2019
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 67]
Sunday 22 December 2019
Veltman: Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. A tale of many billions of dollars and tens of thousands of engineers and scientistss digging deeper and deeper into the foundations of the universe with ever more powerful machinery and ever more complex mathematical models of what is going on, a saga of hope and despair which, like most science, has opened more questions than it has closed and left the overall impression that the Universe remains incomprehensibly complex and we still have a lot to learn. All this is based on hard won and often highly precise data and calculation which guarantees that we are onto something, but the true shape pf the elephant remains vague. My little hope has been that a theological approach to these questions
[page 68]
might be fruitful, but I have ended up with the physicists, insofar as my thesis that the Universe has emerged from the state of pure action postulated by Aristotle and Aquinas has not yet yielded much simplification, but a three part statement of principle to finish off 2019:
1. A state of pure action will try everything;
2. Local inconsistency annihilates itself; and
3. This process of evolution is isomorphic to the scientific and technological methods we use to both know and create our universe. Veltman: Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics
Huang page 52: Heisenberg: 'The decisive step is always a rather discontinuous jump [in understanding as in physics]. You must leave the old concepts and try something new, and then see whether you can swim or stand or whatever else; but in any case, you cannot keep the old concepts.' Huang: Fundamental Forces of Nature: the Story of Gauge Fields
[non] commutation of matrices x [position] and p [momentum]: [p, x] = -ih.
page 53: Dirac '. . . within a week or two I saw that non-commutation was really the dominant characteristic of Heisenberg's new theory.'
page 56: 'the existence of relative phase [ie relative timing] is what truly marks the difference between [classical] mechanics and quantum mechanics [which is in itself concerned with timing alone].'
So the world runs on timed logic like a network which uses buffering to deal with asynchronous machines.
[page 69]
Huang page 57: What makes the electron's orbit stable? Bohr was right about standing waves, resonances, fixed points, nodes etc.
page 61: Entanglement: Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia
page 73: Unitary operations, which are essentially invisible, affect phase but not the modulus of the wave function and express the fact that time is of the essence in quantum interactions (as it is in human interactions, explaining our interest in clocks, train timetables and meetings).
'The phase factor exhibits periodic behaviour, in that it returns to the original value whenever the phase increases by 2π. Thus, while the phase angle can go from 0 to ∞. the phase factor has only a finite range of values. Mathematically we say that it is '"compact" representation of U(1).' Unitary group - Wikipedia
page 74: Requiring that representations of U(1) be compact (periodic) leads to the quantization of charge. As in all of physics, we ask whether the formalism controls the reality or the reality controls the formalism. Aristotle probably thought that form guided action, and this agrees with Einstein's geometrodynamics and the general tendency of physicists to explain natural behaviours by equations, ie formal equivalences. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation, Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation, Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
page 75: Coupling to gauge field promotes global gauge invariance to local gauge invariance [how can the invariance be global given the finite velocity of light?]. Introduction to gauge theory - Wikipedia
page 76: 'Local gauge invariance [ie communication] frees us from the last vestige of "action at a distance" [so what about entanglement?].
page 77: In 3D 'rotations do not commute' since there are 3 [orthogonal] axes of rotation [and orthogonality destroys commutation, as we see in the quantum mechanical relationships of operators, eg momentum is orthogonal to distance, time to energy]. Orthogonal group - Wikipedia
page 78: L1, L2, L3 are generators of rotation in 3D: [La, Lb] = LaLb - LbLa.
[page 70]
Huang page 79; Hamilton and quaternions i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1
i = -2iL1, j = -2iL2, k = -2iL3.
. . .
[page 71]
Huang page 85: Yang Mills replaced (U1) with SU(2) so introducing the structure of 3-space, where U = 1 + iLa where the La are the three generators of SU(2) (adjoint representation) so as to describe a 2 component wave function (proton / neutron) = ψ = (ψ1 / ψ2). In effect the 3D requirement for complete network connectivity is carried inside local particle symmetries from the global Poincare symmetry. Yang-Mills theory - Wikipedia
page 87: Derivatives are couplings: dx/dt couples x to t. To gauge SU(2) replace the derivative ∂ with the covariant derivative D = ∂ + ig/hc LaAa where Aa is the 4-vector gauge field.
So a logical operator in in effect a derivative, and we can consider the set of logical operators to be the set of Turing machines.
Interaction energy density [communication rate] is ja.Aa, where ja is the conserved isotopic spin current density.
Nucleon now had three non-commuting isotopic spin charges gLa, where g is gauge coupling constant.
page 90: Yang Mills equations of motion:
DμFμν = -jν, Dμ F‾μν = 0, generalizations of Maxwell's equations.
The first equation may be rewritten as
DμFμν = -jν, - ig[AμFμν]
The RHS gives the current that generates the field which includes the field itself which acts as its own source (rather like science, we are looking for a universe that creates itself by the scientific method).
[page 72]
Monday 23 December 2019
Fundamental forces of nature. Forces are the communication links that bind structures, and gluons are the most interesting bosons, since there are so many different codes.
My besetting problem has always been to be rather off centre [which would be great if I was a genius, but is really just an impediment]. My last two years of philosophy have not yielded very good results by my being off the beaten track, led somewhat astray by my theological hypotheses designed to reconcile the God of Aquinas with modern science. This seems to be something of a useless task from the point of view of the philosophical world even though I see it as an essential task within the overall task of using science to develop a globally unified picture of God. So on the one hand I regret that I have not got good results, and on the other I have carried my project a little bit forward over the last two years and take heart that given reasonable health I have another twenty five years to carry the project [further] forward and feel that I might ultimately contribute a little to human welfare.
Tuesday 24 December 2019
Randomness, that is lack of control, is a central feature of the generation of a complex universe from a simple starting point. What I envisage is the random coupling of simple processes, modelled by Turing machines, to create more complex
[page 73]
processes, some of which are self-sustaining, and therefore become foundations for another step forward. The task now is to map this insight onto the current model of fundamental physics.
A particle is a confined unit, a discretum [held together, like me, by internal processes]. How do we make a discretum out of a continuum? Why is the quantum of action quantized, that is in effect the fundamental particle of action. The easiest way to see it is by logic, that every quantum of action, regardless of its size, is a physical representation of the boundary between p and not-p, ie for me my death is the quantum of action that moves me from alive to dead. This large quantum of action is a complex process ultimately comprising a large and relatively well ordered network of fundamental quanta of action, each measured by Planck's contant.
Why is an electron a thing (process) with a very precise mass, charge and spin? Perhaps we should start with the spin since this is closely related to Planck's quantum and wonder how we can build a particle out of spin, taking advantage of the discreteness of action to explain the discreteness of the electron. How do we get from here to charge and mass? Obviously the photon has something to do with this, a discrete particle which nevertheless has no mass and charge and whose fundamental role is bound to communication at the velocity of light. [mass seems easy, since we can imagine the mass of the electron being equivalent to its internal rate of action, but charge? An intrinsic property of electrons which couples them to photons.]
Why are quarks confined? Why are non-quarks not confined. Why are gluons confined? Because they hang with the quarks. They are a sort of photon, massless, spin 1, but coming in 8 varieties [coupled to "colour charge" colour field.] What is the quark - gluon system in terms of coupled computation /
[page 75]
communication processes. Are gluons photons differentiated by their context, ie 3D Yang -Mills 'gauge' processes. As with human language, it is the complexity of the gluon messaging that constructs the proton [analogous to a human community] and which serves with the electron as the foundation of the atom. Once we have explained atoms, it is all go [low energy quantum mechanics] from there. Quark - Wikipedia, Gluon - Wikipedia
Religions (and every other 'particle') define themselves by what they are not, so Catholics are in effect not non-Catholics. So the secularist are inclined to think that the religionists are the evil ones and vice versa. What has this got to do with complexification? Oil and water, surface tension, binding etc. A good theology serves as a detergent, binding opposites, and detergent molecules are the foundation of bubbles, cell walls and a lot of biology.
So, the big question: am I happy being a human being or do I want to be something else? Do I like human music? Human contact? Human science and technology? What carries a lot of weight is future possibilities, summarised in the ancient trilogy faith, hope and charity. We are inclined to see each moment as a new beginning, the birth of a new child from the past, and hold out a hope that things will be better if we cooperate in a shared faith in the nature of the world and act with love. The root of natural theology is faith built on scientific knowledge of the universe that has built us from what appears to be close to nothing over the last 14 billion years.
Wednesday 25 December 2019
[Christmas: Unto us a child was born who we saddled with divinity, and therefore the expectation that the newborn would be able to save the world. Jesus was, as planned by God, murdered by the Romans to make God his father forgive the humans for their original sin. We are still waiting, and many of Jesus' followers are complicit in destroying the world with their false belief in a false God.]
A group can represent a particle insofar as it is a closed
[page 75]
mathematical space with internal processes that do not lead out of the space. We may imagine these processes as computations and the mass / energy of the particle as a measure of the internal processing rate that is coupled to the mass of the particle. This suggests that all the quantum field theory palaver about gauge particles being massless like the photon is off the track since it leads to the endless contortions of the Higgs system in order to explain mass. We should be able to do better, beginning from the computations of the cosmological constant which indicate that our understanding of the vacuum is way off the track. A little project would be to create a comprehensive dossier about all my complaints recorded about the standard model in these naturaltheology/notes. Cosmological constant - Wikipedia
Innocence does not protect me from the heartbreak of false accusation.
The Poincare group puts flat space-time in a closed box which is reflected into itself (convex, compact, continuous) by fixed point theory (eg Brouwer) to give us the particles (subgroups) that we observe in space-time. How does this show up in the 3D structure of quarks and gluons?
Maybe we can interpet all physical currents (jμ) as serial data streams [of 4-vectors] which may be interpreted as probability currents moving entropy or information from one point to another within the system.
The old timers know pain drives insight (spare the rod and spoil the child, more broadly insulate the child from the vicissitudes of life and it will not learn), so my family had tortured me into a deeper understanding of theology, as imprisonment and torture
[page 76]
have developed many political theroists and activitsts like Boetius and Mandela).
What I really need to know is how the groups we see in nature work as communication networks. Very obvious in human society.
How do we project logical processes into 4-space and vice versa? By talking to one another, or communicating in general.
Star Wars IX: the war and conquest paradigm dressed in magic and metaphysical violence. Here we want to interpose some real theology which emphasises cooperation rather than conflict.
Huang page 103: 'When a particle meets its anti-particle both disappear in a puff of energy (. . . gamma rays) [so photons are the default particles]. We can reverse this process: gamma rays can create a particle-antiparticle pair from the vacuum [why 'from the vacuum' why not 'create simpliciter - all these 'manners of speaking' have arisen over the last century and obscure reality in fog of assumptions]'.
'When particle and antiparticle are different, the quantum field operator ψ is different from its hermitian conjugate ψ†: ψ annihilates a particle or creates an antiparticle at [x], ψ† creates a particle or annihilates an antiparticle at [x].
particle, antiparticle, a formal bundle of energy, a meaningless description.
Huang page 104:
Dirac equation (iγμ∂μ - mc/h)ψ = 0
[page 77]
Thursday 26 December 2019
The biggest question is to elucidate the mechanism by which nature works. How does it add and multiply? How does it determine the geodesic of the moon? How does the brain work? Basically how does quantum mechanics work? How does a proton work? An electron?
We easily understand macroscopic mechanisms. Can we extrapolate down to the microscopic? Quantum mechanics suggests a barrier, a different approach at the quantum scale. Can we unify across this boundary? Is it generic? Is it a consequence of the invisibility theorem [that a system does not have the resources to both perform a task and report what it is doing at the same time]? Does the world work linguistically. Language certainly maps it well, particularly when augmented with mathematics. So we keep coming back to logic and the neural network that lies behind the world whose power lies in a combination of it network connections and the integration of inputs at synapses by neurons making the decision whether to fire or not. A clear way forward is to map quantum mechanics to a generic neural network, so that we can see a proton as a little brain.
In physical and biological systems everything works by potentials. In cells these are created by energy driven ion pumps, the flow of energy itself being driven by potentials ultimately created by solar energy whose source in the Sun is the interaction of baryons and associated particles.
Evangelium Passionis et Mortis Jesu Christi Secundum Johannem. Nova Schola Gregoriana, Alberto Turco Director: In Passione et Morte Domini
Huang page 111: 'It is striking that α-1 [= hc/e2] is so close to the prime number 137. We have no clue why this is so, but it never ceases to inspire awe and mystical speculation.' We need to do better than that.
[page 78]
What does a number mean in physics? [A ratio of two quantities]
An essay: Is the proton a little brain?
Huang page 113: QED: Dirac's electron coupled to Maxwell's gauge field. [Additional details:
vertex correction; electron self-energy;
vacuum polarization.
page 117: Ward's identity.
Like all the best tragedies, you have committed suicide vis a vis me for no reason.
page 123: Anomalous magnetic moment [of electron] to ~12 significant figures: Gabrielse and Kinoshita. Electron magnetic moment - Wikipedia
My big project is to climb out of being a nobody into being a somebody, a plan which has so far made no progress since I got good results for my Intermediate Certificate in Mount Gambier in 1959. Now after a long dry run, I have just 25 years before I hit the century and surrender my spirit. The latest blow is poor university results, but I still remain slightly deluded that I will get somewhere at the intersection of physics and theology.
page 79
Huang page 132: 'In classical mechanics the coordinate is a number with which you tag a particle. In quantum mechanics, in contrast, the coordinate in as operator [ie a process].
'The wave function of a stationary state is an eigenfunction of the Hamiltonian. . . . exchanging particles takes us from an eigenstate to an eigenstate . . . Since performing an exchange operation twice brings you back to the initial situation, the wave function either remains unchanged or changes sign. Same = boson; different = fermion.
Pig headed like my "no compromise" father [named a racehorse No Compromise]. Reminds me of my time at school when I was hopeless at marbles but went on until I lost the lot even though it was a foregone conclusion [γνοστι σεαυτον]
I am so pigheaded (are pigs like this?) that I want the universe to obey my plan rather than be the way it is. Or more to the point, I want it to start simple as Aristotle and Aquinas and Hawking and Ellis would suggest and then proceed to become more complex by adding layer after layer of complexity like the evolution of more and more complex forms of life. This requires that we find a temporal ordering in the [emergence of] the fundamental particles and work on the principle that the less complex particles (like the photon) coud exist independently before they became incorporated into a more complex structures. This might say something about quarks and gluons which appear to have no independent existence [so through a gigantic feat of trial and error, the whole "standard model" might have appeared as a full blown consistent whole right at the beginning, a bit like the instantaneous evolution of human beings by trial and error].
page 257: Associated production and strangeness.
page 167: 6 quarks, 3 colours/ 'The exactness of colour symmetry means
[page 80]
that it can be gauged. The resulting Yang Mills theory is QCD (quantum chromodynamics) the theory of strong interactions.
Huang page 181: 'The basic players in the Standard Model are massless Weyl neutrinos interacting via gauge couplings. To generate mass in a gauge invariant manner the gauge symmetry must be broken . . . [why?] This means that while the Hamiltonian continues to be invariant under a gauge transformation, the ground state of the system [its energy?] is not invariant.' This, like so much of the standard model, sounds a little fantastic, a delusion shared by a large community [for their own profit, just like the Catholic Church or the Communist Party of China, delusions too big to fail], a hypothetical theology.
Higgs field: how does a field make mass when mass = energy
Spontaneous symmetry breaking = spontaneous symmetry creation.
Magnetization = politics: high temperate random, [revolutionary] low temperature ordered [steady as she goes].
184: Landau: order parameter, failure of ergodicity [introduction of structure, energy reduction correlated with entropy reduction.]
page 186: Goldstone mode. Does reality follow mathematics [quantization and quantification: ultimately all physics parameters are counts of quanta of action]?
page 188: Goldstone: Whenever a continuous global symetry is broken spontaneously there will appear an excited state whose [local?] energy approaches zero as the wavelength approaches infinity: ∫
[page 81]
My hope is to totally rebuild fundamental physics on a logical basis seeking only to match the phenomena. This idea may seem to be far out of my power but at least it is not as mad as the beliefs about God and humanity held by the Catholic Church and it could very well be a push in the right direction even if it fails. I find much of the current ideas in physics incomprehensible which may be partly due to my weakness of intellect and lack of application, but I also feel that many of the physicists ideas are very far fetched and involve many leaps of faith which seem hard to justify. As I say to myself regularly, I just have to press on in the hope that Shangri La is just over the next hill.
Jo Jo Rabbit Jojo Rabbit - Wikipedia
Huang page 188: Superconductivity: the photon gets mass
'. . . the equation of motion of the gauge field becomes &del;2A + |φ|2A = 0. This means that the photon acquires mass |φ| in the superconducting medium?
page 189: Meissner effect Meissner effect - Wikipedia
'when local gauge invariance is spontaneous (sic) broken, the gauge particle "eats" the Goldstone boson and "gets fat" or acquires mass' ?
page 190: 'The Ginsberg-Landau order parameter in fact represents the condensate wave function of the Cooper pairs.' The BCS theory furnishes a dynamical description of the spontaneous breaking of local gauge invariance [like magnetization?]
Peter Higgs introduced the complex order parameter in the
[page 82]
Standard Model that causes spontaneous breaking of local gauge symmetry and generates mass for particles and gauge bosons' ?
'The order parameter here is called the "Higgs field".'
Huang page 193: Quark confinement. The universe is confined and so am I.
Friday 27 December 2019
We see covariant derivatives in both relativity and [quantum] field theory and they are the mathematical means of implementing communication, that is gauging.
Particles communicate and sense one another through their fields which are implemented by gauge particles or bosons.
Huang page 162: 'Having found the octuplet and decuplet representations of SU(3) one cannot help but ask "where is the fundamental representation". It would be realised by a triplet of particles.'
page 169: Construct a gauge theory of non-gravitational interaction:
1. Start with the free leptons and quarks, Weyl neutrinos, of the Dirac theory.
2. Identify the global symmetry to be gauged, ie the families of particles to communicate with one another.
[page 83]
3. Forget about special particles to create mass (Higgs) and rely simply on frequency of action, ie processing rate identical to mass / energy. Further gauging = communication does not demand sources of equal mass.
4. Introduce necessary gauge fields = communication links to make the system system consistent. The communication links (gauge couplings) are implementations of the covariant derivatives found in both particle physics and gravitation.
Huang page 170: The physical electron, for example, consistes of a left handed screw and right handed screw held together by a mass term'. What can this possibly mean, and what does it tell us about the electron which has charge, mass and spin? Maybe what we have here is out of control Platonism brought on by unrealisable dreams of continuous mathematics.
So
1. Unify EM and weak with model with electron e and neutrino ν
2. add up and down quarks
3. then bring in QCD of strong interactions of quarks
4. put in the other lepton quark families
'In the end we shall have model based on a single principle, the gauge principle, ie the communication network principle.
page 170: Intriguing aspects of the standard model:
spontaneous symmetry breaking [from initial singularity, total symmetry, to complex world]
quark confinement [an image of the universe of closed curved space]
page 207: triangle anomaly
Saturday 28 December
[page 84]
Woke with a stomach full of butterflies after a long hot night (yesterday 40, today 38). Where did they come from? How am I to know. Went to sleep reading Huang on the Standard Model with not much comprehension. It looks so simple, the result of 100 years of quantum theory by a lot of very smart people whose principal product is nuclear weapons, which may have served to keep the peace because they are so destructive they make war pointless. But what about all the theory? Does it really tell us much or has it all been a trillion dollar engineering effort of trial and error? If it is the latter, then maybe there is room for totally new conception of god and the world by mating theology and physics, so the essay 'Is the proton a little brain?'
1. Intro: what is God?
2. Arbitrary creation or evolution
3. Network layering and symmetry (honours thesis)
4. God, pure action, is the root of it all.
5. Creation: try everything, annihilate inconsistency
6. Hilbert pace and the neural network
7. Standard model: gauge and message
8. Brain:proton symmetries [identities], feature by feature
9. Quark: fermion
10. Gluon: boson
11. Confinement
12. Charge, potential, message, sense
13. Isospin: scientific revolution
14. Conclusion: cognitive cosmology: Piketty Thomas Piketty: Capital et Idéologie
[page 85]
Piketty page 16: Capital et Ideologie; theology is the basic source of ideology and serves as the a priori hypothesis which structures the social economic and political features of a community.
page 20: 'Inequality is not economic or technocratic: it is ideological and political. This is the obvious conclusion of the historical inquiry presented in this book.
The network model describes the logical structure without giving the physical details as we can make an abstract model of the brain (a neural network) without reference to the actual physical structure, but when we get down to the fundamental particles we might expect the logical and physical structures to coincide.
The world is all music - timing. The essence of the project is to bring out the beauty of the divine world.
The proton plan is far too narrow and a far better idea is to map god to the Standard Model, or more suggestively to use the standard model of god devised by Aquinas to rationalize the standard model put together by the physicists over the last 120 years. Then I will be in the running for my youthful dream of two Nobel prizes, one for physics and one for theology. The general idea will be the same, just more complete. The physical standard model is very complex compared to the theological standard model, and the hope is to use the theological simplicity to cut down the complexity of the physical model which is the product of the large amount on undigested data emerging from accelerator physic. Of course it is just a guess that the system will be simple, and the reason for the complexity is
[page 86]
largely to maintain consistency by postulating (and discovering) particles to cure apparent inconsistencies in the model. What we need to see is whether these inconsistencies are real or implicit in the model we have cooked up over more than a century.
