Notes
Sunday 8 May 2022 - Saturday 14 May 2022
[Notebook: DB 88: Salvation]
[page 77]
Sunday 8 May 2022
A new week. A holiday declared by the Old God after they had exhausted themselves with creation. They had seen that their work was good, but they had overlooked a fatal flaw. They created three people, Adam, Eve and Satan, and Satan, with God's help, had already destroyed the world for Adam and Eve.
Scientific method is an epistemological principle, the means of getting our minds to conform to reality. This is of course the opposite of what the ruling class want. They want our minds to conform to them. Robert Jay Lifton (1961, 1989): Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a study of 'brainwashing' in China
Slowly the experiences of my past come back. Soon after I left the Dominicans I read Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and realized, if only vaguely, that this technique was as old as the hills and began for most children at birth. Our minds are infinitely plastic, and the foundation of survival in a human community is to fit in, learn the language and culture, practice it religiously and you will probably do well.
[page 78]
Monday 9 May 2022
Symmetry and creation. Plato was right about symmetry and creation. Plato was right and he was wrong. He was right insofar as we all know what we mean when we say horse. But we all know that every horse is different. The identity of all horses does add weight to the idea that there is a formal identity in horses which suggests that there is an ideal horse, eternal and perfect in an invisible heaven. He was wrong about the idea that the variety of real horses is due to the imperfect realization of this perfect idea in the real world.
We would say that the variety of horses that we see is due to a break in the symmetry of horses due to the creative power of reality. We know that the symmetry of horses is due to their evolution in the past from some single species that lies at the beginning of the horse line of evolution that has given rise to the variety of horses as this new species differentiates to adapt itself to different environments. Much of this evolution is due to natural selection, but in more recent times as people began to appreciate the value of horses as animals with a temperament suitable for use as beasts of burden. Horse breeders, wittingly and unwittingly, bred horses for different purposes: big strong one for pulling wagons and chariots; smaller and faster ones for riding and racing, very small ones for pets and children. Natural and artificial selection both depend upon the fact that horses and all living creatures do not breed with perfection, there is variation caused by the random element of the breeding process that provides material for selection, the root of evolution. This randomness is explained by cybernetics as arising from limited control the source of the structure of the world. Evolution of the horse - Wikipedia
As we drill down further into the structure of the world with more powerful accelerators we discover new symmetries, and we discover new ways for these symmetries to be broken, creating the newer structures that we find at lower energy levels, which correspond to higher entropies and more complex structures.
Tuesday 10 May 2022
I am trying to map what little I know of physics onto what little I know of theology. I am surprised how little I know after 60 years of reading but I hope to have developed some feeling for them which will guide me and I
[page 79]
am very fortunate that the coverage of the internet has grown as my memory has faded and so I can look up the details. I have been in a bit of a panic to get cognitive cosmology finished, but I feel relaxed now and only hope that I have enough faith in it to seek judgement from academia. My real problem, always, is to convince myself by logic and a forest of reverences that all this is a genuine article. Landauer's observation that information is physical means that it is observable and particulate as required by Turing's computer and Shannon's proof that deterministic, ie error free communication requires that it be encoded into discrete orthogonal packets that may be interpreted as discrete logical operations that can be transmitted between sources. Claude Shannon (1949): Communication in the Presence of Noise
Piketty, Equality Thomas Piketty (2022): A Brief History of Equality
Gravitation, massive particles, Wilczek and protons. Another bit of cosmic brilliance. It can take months before I can trust a dawning idea enough . . . to write it down. Another bit of cosmic brilliance that began when I read Wilczek's account of how the mass of a proton arises from the binding energy within it. The mass of a proton is much greater than the mass of the first generation quarks that have been found within it. Wilczek has described a computation that develops the missing mass from the kinetic energy of the particles within it (Chapter 9). I have had a few misgivings with this chapter where he begins by noting that the up and down quarks that constitute the proton, discovered by deep inelastic scattering, weigh only about 1% of the mass of the proton. He points out that it took months of computation on supercomputers to modek a proton, which, to maintain its existence, must do something like this computation in infinitesimal fractions of a second. Frank Wilczek (2008): The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Deep inelastic scattering - Wikipedia
My next problem is the fact that his discussion in chapter 8 leads to massive overestimates of cosmological constants. Can't be right. Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia
My third problem revolves around virtual particles and asymptotic freedom. The standard doctrine of virtual particles is built around the idea that quantum fluctuations arising from the uncertainty principle and zero point energy, which treat the uncertainty as a dynamical principle rather than simply a consequence of the principle of requisite variety [and the fact that the quantum of action is an atomic, ie integral, measure of action]. More to say about this when we come to field theory [page 23 electrodynamics].
The story of asymptotic freedom is cooked up around the notion of screening. Virtual negative particles screen positive particles and vice versa, allegedly reducing the perceived charge at a distance, something that enters the idea of renormalization. Of course is there were equal numbers of positive and negative charges we would expect the whole lot to [add up to zero] like an atom.
[page 80]
Asymptotic freedom, on the other hand, requires 'anticreening;. The answer we hear, is colour charge, which is made possible by Yang Mills theory. Gerardus 't Hooft (2005): 50 Years of Yang Mills Theory
Einstein developed his gravitational field equation in the topological differentiable manifold discovered by Gauss and Riemann. This structure enables the existence of null geodesics, the paths of inertial motion, and is such that there is no end to the geodesic of a massive object like the moon – it can occupy an orbit which looks curved but is the nearest thing one can have to a straight line in curved space and a body moving on a geodesic has no acceleration even though its orbit looks curved. Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia
There is no intrinsic metric in the curved manifold because it is topological so general relativity holds whether the universe is as small as a fundamental particle or as large as the current universe. So we can imagine that the interior of a massive particle is a highly curved manifold that enables energetic particles like photons to travel in circular orbits and contribute their energy E = hf to the mass of the particle according to m = E/c2.
Wednesday 11 May 2022
Each new insight adds a little touch of authenticity to my story.
I have been using the term entropy indiscriminately as an indication of the developing structure of the world but it is due for a bit of nuance to be introduced by Chaitin's criterion for randomness which defines a random structure as one that cannot in general be represented by an algorithm shorter than itself. This creates a spectrum of randomness in the space of random numbers since we know that the 100 digit number 1, 1, 1, . . . is a member of the set of random numbers, but it can nevertheless be generated by a very simple algorithm [, ie print 1 one hundred times. I think it is more helpful to divide numbers and structures in general into computable and incomputable, the computable numbers and structures that can be generated in the space of real numbers by algorithms whose execution is a countable number of step. This classification points to the supreme advantage created by genes in the reproductive process since they reduce the possibilities of random reproduction to a tightly controlled subset of possibilities. Gregory Chaitin (1987): Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory
Knowledge, symmetry and genes maybe goes into cc21_memory and cc22_fixed points.
[page 81]
Thursday 12 May 2022
The distinction between Hilbert and Minkowski space mirrors the distinction between formalism and reality, which is embodied form.
The idea that photons are trapped in fundamental particles by curvature, as in gravitation, raises the question of the cause of the curvature and the deeper question of whether curvature needs a cause. In Einstein gravity the cause of the curvature is said to be mass [-energy] and its magnitude, so to speak, is a function of the gravitational constant. On the other hand we may see that the curvature is a purely formal property uncaused, as we might say about Hilbert space, so the choice of the curvature is a matter of indeterminacy and natural selection.
Friday 13 May 2022
Bought another packet of tobacco on the basis that one cigarette usually yields a significant insight. The calculation is as follows: 40 cigarettes a day for 50 years takes 20 years off a life, ie 730 000 cigarettes cost 630,720,000 seconds = 864 seconds per cigarette. So I smoke one a day for the next 25 years I cost myself 91 days, which seems more or less worth it if I keep up this rate of consumption, which I do not mean to do. So I cut my future lifespan down to 24 years and 9 months, max loss.
Saturday 14 May 2022
Another cigarette and 'bandwidth of an electron is limited by its mass', which places a bound set by the theory of Fourier representation [and the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem] the complexity of the . . . representation of a function that can be digitally represented in the invisible interior of the electron. This digitization may be understood as the source of the precision of the representation of the properties of the electron and a similar argument may be used to explain the precision of the interaction of photons and the quantum states [of atomic electrons shown in] the precision pf the spectral lines we observe in atomic electronic transitions. Nyquist, frequencies, Shannon etc. Things like the magnetic moment of the electron. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, Fourier inversion theorem - Wikipedia, W. F. McGrew et al: Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level, Electron magnetic moment - Wikipedia
A rearrangement [of the site]. cco4_self_aware merged with cc20_gravitation and cco4 changed to theology and society [cc04_theol_sci]
|
Copyright:
You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.
Further readingBooks
Chaitin (1987), Gregory J, Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory, World Scientific 1987 Jacket: 'Algorithmic information theory is a branch of computational complexity theory concerned with the size of computer programs rather than with their running time. . . . The theory combines features of probability theory, information theory, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and recursive function or computability theory. ... [A] major application of algorithmic information theory has been the dramatic new light it throws on Goedel's famous incompleteness theorem and on the limitations of the axiomatic method. . . .'
Amazon
back |
Lifton (1961, 1989), Robert Jay, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a study of 'brainwashing' in China, W. W. Norton, 1961, 1989 Jacket: 'Brainwashing has often been described in sensational terms; but Dr Lifton's painstaking investigation of Thought Reform is based on psychological studies (with follow up interviews) of Western civilians and Chinese intellectuals who underwent the process in a variety of prisons, universities and other settings."
Amazon
back |
Piketty (2022), Thomas, A Brieft History of Equality, Harvard UP 2022 ' The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations.'
Amazon
back |
't Hooft (2005), Gerardus, 50 Years of Yang Mills Theory, World Scientific 2005 ' On the 50th anniversary of Yang-Mills theory, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in elementary particle physics that ensued from that beautiful idea.During the last five decades, Yang-Mills theory, which is undeniably the most important cornerstone of theoretical physics, has expanded widely. It has been investigated from many perspectives, and many new and unexpected features have been uncovered from this theory. In recent decades, apart from high energy physics, the theory has been actively applied in other branches of physics, such as statistical physics, condensed matter physics, nonlinear systems, etc. This makes the theory an indispensable topic for all who are involved in physics.An international team of experts, each of whom has left his mark on the developments of this remarkable theory, contribute essays or more detailed technical accounts to this volume. These articles highlight the new discoveries from the respective authors' perspectives. The distinguished contributors are: S Adler, F A Bais, C Becchi, M Creutz, A De Rujula, B S DeWitt, F Englert, L D Faddeev, P Hasenfratz, R Jackiw, A Polyakov, V N Popov, R Stora, P van Baal, P van Nieuwenhuizen, S Weinberg, F Wilczek, E Witten, C N Yang. Included in each article are introductory and explanatory remarks by the editor, G 't Hooft, who is himself a major player in the development of Yang-Mills theory.
Amazon
back |
Wilczek (2008), Frank, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Basic Books 2008 ' In this excursion to the outer limits of particle physics, Wilczek explores what quarks and gluons, which compose protons and neutrons, reveal about the manifestation of mass and gravity. A corecipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilczek knows what he’s writing about; the question is, will general science readers? Happily, they know what the strong interaction is (the forces that bind the nucleus), and in Wilczek, they have a jovial guide who adheres to trade publishing’s belief that a successful physics title will not include too many equations. Despite this injunction (against which he lightly protests), Wilczek delivers an approachable verbal picture of what quarks and gluons are doing inside a proton that gives rise to mass and, hence, gravity. Casting the light-speed lives of quarks against “the Grid,” Wilczek’s term for the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, Wilczek exudes a contagious excitement for discovery. A near-obligatory acquisition for circulating physics collections.' --Gilbert Taylor
Amazon
back |
Links
Aseem Hasnain & Abhilasha Srivastava, Caste doesn’t just exist in India or in Hinduism – it is pervasive across many religions in South Asia and the diaspora, The California State University system, America’s largest public higher education system, recently added caste, a birth-based social hierarchy system, to its anti-discrimination policy, allowing students, staff and faculty across its 23 campuses to report caste bias and discrimination. . . . The caste system is often conflated in Western media with Hindu religion and India alone. However, as social scientists specializing in South Asian Studies, we know that the caste system is neither exclusive to Hindu religion nor is it endemic to India. . . . Social, economic and political status in this pernicious system is tied to traditional occupations fixed by birth.' back |
Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE,
vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back |
Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, Cosmological constant problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the disagreement between measured values of the vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and the zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory.
Depending on the assumptions, the discrepancy ranges from 40 to more than 100 orders of magnitude, a state of affairs described by Hobson et al. (2006) as "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics." ' back |
Deep inelastic scattering - Wikipedia, Deep inelastic scattering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Deep inelastic scattering is the name given to a process used to probe the insides of hadrons (particularly the baryons, such as protons and neutrons), using electrons, muons and neutrinos. It provided the first convincing evidence of the reality of quarks, which up until that point had been considered by many to be a purely mathematical phenomenon. . . .
Henry Way Kendall, Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor were joint recipients of the Nobel Prize of 1990 "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics".' back |
Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia, Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematics, a differentiable manifold is a type of manifold that is locally similar enough to a linear space to allow one to do calculus. Any manifold can be described by a collection of charts, also known as an atlas. One may then apply ideas from calculus while working within the individual charts, since each chart lies within a linear space to which the usual rules of calculus apply. If the charts are suitably compatible (namely, the transition from one chart to another is differentiable), then computations done in one chart are valid in any other differentiable chart.' back |
Electron magnetic moment - Wikipedia, Electron magnetic moment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In atomic physics, the electron magnetic moment, or more specifically the electron magnetic dipole moment, is the magnetic moment of an electron caused by its intrinsic properties of spin and electric charge. The value of the electron magnetic moment is approximately −9.284764×10−24 J/T. The electron magnetic moment has been measured to an accuracy of 7.6 parts in 1013.' back |
Evolution of the horse - Wikipedia, Evolution of the horse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The evolution of the horse, a mammal of the family Equidae, occurred over a geologic time scale of 50 million years, transforming the small, dog-sized, forest-dwelling Eohippus into the modern horse. Paleozoologists have been able to piece together a more complete outline of the evolutionary lineage of the modern horse than of any other animal. Much of this evolution took place in North America, where horses originated but became extinct about 10,000 years ago.' back |
Fourier inversion theorem - Wikipedia, Fourier inversion theorem - Wikipedia, the cree encyclopedia, ' In mathematics, the Fourier inversion theorem says that for many types of functions it is possible to recover a function from its Fourier transform. Intuitively it may be viewed as the statement that if we know all frequency and phase information about a wave then we may reconstruct the original wave precisely.' back |
Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In differential geometry, the Gaussian curvature or Gauss curvature of a point on a surface is the product of the principal curvatures, κ1 and κ2, of the given point. It is an intrinsic measure of curvature, i.e., its value depends only on how distances are measured on the surface, not on the way it is isometrically embedded in space. This result is the content of Gauss's Theorema egregium.' back |
Gregory J. Chaitin, Randomness and Mathematical Proof, 'Although randomness can be precisely defined and can even be measured, a given number cannot be proved to be random. This enigma establishes a limit to what is possible in mathematics.'
Scientific American 232, No. 5 (May 1975), pp. 47-52 back |
Lena Surzhko Harned, What a cathedral and a massive military parade show about Putin’s Russia, ' This fusion of World War II, religion and Russian nationalism are embodied in one unusual building: the Main Church of the Russian Armed Forces, on the outskirts of Moscow. The massive, khaki-colored cathedral in a military theme park was dedicated in June 2020, and celebrates Russian might. The grand opening was supposed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, but it was delayed due to the pandemic.' back |
Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces - Wikipedia, Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ) is a Patriarchal cathedral in honour of the Resurrection of Christ, "dedicated to the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, as well as the military feats of the Russian people in all wars", built in the Patriot Park in the Odintsovsky District, Moscow Oblast. . . . The church, and the imagery within it, have been linked to the 'Russkiy Mir' or 'Russian World' theology which some Orthodox Christian Churches outside Russia have described as a heresy. This ideology has been described in the Financial Times as "Putin’s creation of an ideology that fuses respect for Russia’s Tsarist, Orthodox past with reverence for the Soviet defeat of fascism in the second world war. This is epitomised in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, 40 miles west of Moscow, opened in 2020." During the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the church has come to be seen as a symbol of Russian militarism when Russian operations in Ukraine were viewed as "holy".' back |
Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals (often called "analog signals") and discrete-time signals (often called "digital signals"). It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth.' back |
Raja Abdukrahim & Hiba Yazbek, Al Jazeera Journalist Is Killed in West Bank, ' JERUSALEM — A journalist for Al Jazeera was fatally shot in the West Bank city of Jenin early Wednesday, the news network and the Palestinian health ministry said, blaming Israeli forces for her death.
The circumstances surrounding the shooting of the journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American, were not immediately clear but it happened during clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinian gunmen in the city. Al Jazeera, citing the health ministry, said the journalist had been shot in the head by Israeli forces during a raid.
“Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen,” the news network said in a statement. “It also calls on the international community to condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable".' back |
Valerie Hopkins & Misha Friedman, Leader of Pussy Riot Band Escapes Russia, With Help From Friends, back |
W. F. McGrew et al, Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level, ' The passage of time is tracked by counting oscillations of a frequency reference, such as Earth’s revolutions or swings of a pendulum. By referencing atomic transitions, frequency (and thus time) can be measured more precisely than any other physical quantity, with the current generation of optical atomic clocks reporting fractional performance below the 10−17 level. However, the theory of relativity prescribes that the passage of time is not absolute, but is affected by an observer’s reference frame. Consequently, clock measurements exhibit sensitivity to relative velocity, acceleration and gravity potential. Here we demonstrate local optical clock measurements that surpass the current ability to account for the gravitational distortion of space-time across the surface of Earth. In two independent ytterbium optical lattice clocks, we demonstrate unprecedented values of three fundamental benchmarks of clock performance. In units of the clock frequency, we report systematic uncertainty of 1.4 × 10−18, measurement instability of 3.2 × 10−19 and reproducibility characterized by ten blinded frequency comparisons, yielding a frequency difference of [−7 ± (5)stat ± (8)sys] × 10−19, where ‘stat’ and ‘sys’ indicate statistical and systematic uncertainty, respectively. Although sensitivity to differences in gravity potential could degrade the performance of the clocks as terrestrial standards of time, this same sensitivity can be used as a very sensitive probe of geopotential. Near the surface of Earth, clock comparisons at the 1 × 10−18 level provide a resolution of one centimetre along the direction of gravity, so the performance of these clocks should enable geodesy beyond the state-of-the-art level. These optical clocks could further be used to explore geophysical phenomena, detect gravitational waves, test general relativity and search for dark matter.' back |
Zena Al Tahlan, Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera reporter killed by Israeli gunfire, ' Ramallah, Occupied West Bank – Israeli forces have shot dead Al Jazeera’s journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Abu Akleh, a longtime TV correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, was killed on Wednesday while covering Israeli army raids in the city of Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank.
She was rushed to a hospital in Jenin in critical condition, where she was declared dead shortly after, at 7:15am (4:15 GMT), according to the ministry and Al Jazeera journalists.' back |
|
