Notes DB 94 - Theory of Peace - 2026
Sunday 19 April 2026 - Saturday 25 April 2026
[page 69]
Sunday 19 April 2026
It is one thing to have all the answers. It is another to get anyone to listen. I am very happy with my book, will anyone bother to read it? Will it ever have any effect on the outrageous fantasies of enormously powerful organizations like the Roman Catholic Church which has such a powerful role in the direction of the people of the world?
When I look around I see that the most effective human developments have been ‘mechanical’ inputs which manipulate physical phenomena for our benefit, perhaps the most effective in my lifetime was the heat engine studied by Sadi Carnot and now the big changes coming through are the application of quantum mechanics. Perhaps this is in the back of my mind when I try to apply quantum mechanics to theology, the “science” that has the strongest role, through religion, in the direction of the human race.
Einstein set quantum mechanics on its way but his sovereign achievement was the general theory of relativity which depends on the deterministic application of the mathematical fiction that the world is continuous [and amenable to study by calculus]. He spent the second half of his life looking for
[page 70]
a theory of everything, a unified field theory, but his path was blocked because he rejected quantum mechanics with its statistical implications and application to discrete particles rather than the continuum. His approach has in effect overwhelmed quantum mechanics by coupling it to field theory by analogy to gravitation [so that nearly a century after its discovery, quantum field theory has yet to make any headway with gravitation]. My feeling is that the resulting field theory is a barrier to true theology and so I have arrived, at chapter 26 of my book, at the rejection of QFT, first outlined in my website Cognitive Cosmology, page 24: Is there an alternative to field theory?.
Following Mohammed Ali, who [put his body and mind on the line to make a political point], I see my way forward through physics sn attack on quantum field theory which is currently held in high esteem through the patronage of the Standard Model, which is quite dodgy but travels with the enormous [economic, politic and hegemonic] momentum of the physics industry. My intellectual weapon here is the idea that the foundation of quantum mechanics lies in the initial singularity rather than Minkowski space and relativity. I have been nursing this idea since my “radical Ansatz” recorded in my notes of Monday 6 July 2020, six months after I finished my honours year in 2019 with a thesis entitled Prolegomena to Scientific Theology.
Now I have to write an article explaining this work, whose working title is on_creation_March_2026/Physical_theology/Science/learned/aaPrint/Pternip/Documents/Desktop/Jeffrey.
I was booked into another world at birth. Now I read my mothers’s notes in her old Bible: Quoting Pedro Arrupe:
[page 71]
More than ever I now find myself in the hands of God. This what I have wanted all my life from my youth. And this is what I still want. But now there is a difference. The initiative is now entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in His [their] hands, in the hands of my God who has taken hold of me. Pedro Arrupe - Wikipedia
Very literally true for all of us living in the divine unverse once we begin to see it. This quote can be part of the divine universe PR!
Monday 20 April 2026
Albert Camus L’etranger movie has moved me in a strange way reflecting on my understanding of Aquinas–Einstein singularity at the origin of the universe as an inhuman and disinterested personality similar to the attitude of the French colonial power in Algeria where, as in Trump’s US, human life is expendable in the face of political expedience. This adds weight to my idea of quantocracy which establishes that quantum mechanics respects freedom and agency of all particles in the universe at all scales and suggests that after I have introduced Hilbert space and quantum mechanics into the model via Augustine I introduce a section on symmetry with respect to complexity: Lust-4-Life: Essay l4l01: Quantocracy: The universal quantum mechanical foundations of democracy and freedom. The Stranger (2025 film) - Wikipedia
[page 72]
Tuesday 21 April 2026
The universe does not lack ambition, like Meursault - absurdism. Foundations: Weinberg on symmetry, Einstein on principle and Darwin on creative randomness, the first emergent property being a sequence of random events ultimately to be interpreted as time, waves and reduced to deterministic carriage of information by Shannon’s theory. Richard Feynman & Steven Weinberg (1986): Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures, Albert Einstein (1916, 2005): Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Charles Darwin (1875, 1998): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Foundations of Natural History), Claude Shannon (1949): Communication in the Presence of Noise
Meursault’s ‘apathism’ enables him to open his heart to the ‘benign indifference of the universe’ in conrast to ‘life is what you make it’ a clarification which I owe in a way to Camus and Talking Heads, played at my program on peace in 1987. Overall the Camus movie has many of my doubts about my book and reinforces my motivation to finish my essay On Creation. Talking Heads: Life is what you make it, Jeffrey Nicholls (1987): A theory of Peace
The initial singularity is actus purus a quantum of action. A quantum may split into kinetic and potential energy, one equivalent to time going forward as per normal and the other going (relatively) backward, although in the photon frame travelling at the speed of light we might see backward as stationary o the quantum is not ‘split’ and the spin of a photon is 1. In a rest frame like an electron, however, the two directions of time may represent a bifurcation of the spin into spin ½ ‘up’ and ½ ‘down’. Or something like this, splitting the singularity into fermions and bosons. We like to see this as a quantum phenomenon, subsequent to the bifurcation of the initial singularity (gravitation?) into kinetic and potential energy - kinetic moves at c, potential ± ½.
[page 73]
A clock is a logical operator with two directions, tick and tock, which may be imagined as spin up to spin down and vice versa.
Wednesday 22 April 2026
Working on_creation_march_2026 and bringing quantum mechanics down to superposition where the only important property of a vector in an infinite dimensional space is the direction resulting from the sum of all the directions of the normalized vectors constituting it. Is this right? In quantum mechanics all information is carried by phase in multidimensional [phase?] space. How does this map to speech? The vectors are all rotating around their normals in the complex plane [rays?]. Is this a superposition of angular frequencies? We think of it all as speech whose components are in motion as frequencies and intensities of sound. Dirac confuses me. I must stick with von Neumann in order to extract the primal simplicity of quantum theory. Dream on it. von Neumann (1932, 1955, 1983): Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
The important points are a) the heuristic of simplicity and b) the symmetry of quantum mechanics with respect to complexity and this enables us to deal with quantum mechanics on the basis of qubits, normalization and direction in multidimensional space in which each direction is the normal to a complex plane so that ψ = eiθψ, ie we are talking about rays where a ray is in effect the normal to complex plane, it is normalized and superposition of hermitian operators deletes the complex motion and leaves it with just one or other of the basis vectors. I have to get my imagination
[page 74]
around this by visualizing it rather than just following the logic of the Dirac approach. How do we see hermitian (self adjoint operators) extracting eigenvectors from this complex periodic motion [so hiding the ‘hidden information’ imagined by Nielsen and Chuang page 16]. I thought I had it right in my book and my websites and now I am worrying again, but simplicity, normalization and orthogonality + symmetry with complexity hopefully say it all in the world prior to Minkowski space [where von Neumann’s three simple axioms rule, page 34]. The next step is to explain how inertial symmetry flows from quantum mechanics. Nielsen & Chuang (2016): Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
We understand the information bearing modulation in quantum mechanics is phase and we understand the orthogonality of the basis states in Hilbert space to represent phases. This is the wave mechanical interpretation of the axioms of Hilbert space. The basis states are normalized so that their inner products with themselves are 1 and their inner products of each other are 0, ie they are orthogonal like the basis states of Euclidean space. The superposition of the bases of a Hilbert produces a vector with a composite phase mapped into the dimensions of the Hilbert space. Each basis is a ray and its specific phase is the direction of its normal while the angle of rotation in the normalized complex plane is free to move and the total motion of the resultant vector has the direction of the resultant of the normals and the rate of rotation is the sum of the rates of rotation of all the constituent vectors. Watch Behiel electrodynamics again and see if it relates to this interpretation. Graphic superposition based on speech modulated by cranial anatomy. Fit to von Neumann and de Broglie. Richard Behiel: Electromagnetism as a Gauge Theory
Thursday 23 April 2026
What do von Neumann’s axioms mean? Remember the universe is yet very simple , no space or time, just an omnipotent singularity capable of realizing anything consistent, like Hilbert’s formal model of mathematics with two orthogonal components of the primordial Hilbert space. Feynman tells us that we have a system for computation and communication, defined in detail by Nielsen and Chuang. By analogy with classical binary communication and computation, we call this primitive [two state] system a qubit and write it as a wave function ψ = α|0〉 + β|1〉, taking a hint from de Broglie and representing our primordial state and a random combination of |0〉, and |1〉, a primitive wave, a superposition of two states we call a wave. What does our wave do? Let us call |0〉, a boson and |1〉, a fermion and imagine they they represent a break in the primordial symmetry which creates the inertial space studied by Einstein. Here we must degenerate to hand waving for a few moments. Louis de Broglie (1929): Nobel Lecture: The Wave Nature of the Electron
Einstein arrived at the special theory of relativity by considering that the speed of light is the same for all observers because it is a consequence of Maxwell’s equations for electrodynamics. How do we understand this equation as a primitive dualistic system resulting from a broken symmetry in Hilbert space, an artefact of primordial random duality? Symmetry, at root, is a statement of absence. I am symmetrical insofar as my right side is [a mirror image] identical to my left side. My symmetry is broken internally insofar as there as there are internal differences in the disposition of organs like my heart and liver.
[page 76]
The Aquinas–Einstein symmetry is broken by the qubit, an abstract version of Maxwell’s equations which we can interpret as the Minkowski metric. Fermions exclude one another, and need three Euclidean dimensions to move freely. Bosons like photons communicate between fermions, moving at the speed of light on null geodesics made possible by the inverse relationship between space and time. Minkowski space, formally speaking, is an interpretation of the axiomatic qubit, cognitive cosmogenesis, a modern version of Aristotle’s hylopmorphism. Hylomorphism - Wikipedia
Formalism, gravitation and the gnostic gap. Since time immemorial people, particularly theologians, have imagined that reality has two principal components colloquially identified as spirit and matter and radically opposed to one another, a phenomenon I call the gnostic gap after the gnostic belief system which flowered in the early days of Christianity. Here let us guess that this gap is spanned by the two number system, real and complex, that span the field of algebra [symbolic computation]. Complex numbers and quantum theory correspond to spirit. Gravitation, real numbers, calculus and determinism correspond to matter, and the gap is spanned by the dichotomy between kinetic [visible] and potential [hidden] energy. Potential in general represents real possibility. Gravitational potential acts when I am no longer supported and fall. Aristotle thought matter converted abstract ideas into concrete substances, potentials into actuality. We give the parallel role to the bifurcation of the initial singularity into equivalent
[page 77]
amounts of potential and kinetic energy, playing the foundation of the principle of conservation of energy. Gnosticism - Wikipedia
The underlying [particulate] quantization of fermions and bosons appears in the pixellation of Minkowski space in the so-called uncertainty principle Δx.Δp ≈ ΔE.Δt ≈ h which is really an expression of the certainty of the quantum of action modelled by the initial singularity.
We assume that the universe begins wth zero energy and remains zero forever. We may say that the initial condition is consistent wth the third law of thermodynamics, energy, entropy and temperature zero. Feynman sees the zero energy state as consistent with general relativity and remains so for the life of the universe where the creation of kinetic energy (mass) is exactly balanced by negative potential energy, the energy of structure. We carry this idea over into the creation of fermions and bosons and assume that the energy of fermions is equivalent to the energy of bosons, adding up to zero and preserving the principle of conservation of energy. Third law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia
In other words, creation is not a matter of creating energy but of creating something more spiritual, potential and entropy, information, which is the physical binding power of the universe embodied in the form of bosons. It is potential that holds hadrons together and it would not surprise if the [total] energy, kinetic and potential, of a proton is 0.
[page 78]
I always feel that I am on the verge of something exciting and my intellectual journey has rewarded me handsomely. The late beautiful charm is the stuff I copied out from my mother’s bible about being in the hands of God which is now totally literally true in my divine universe. The article on creation is also going well as I realize that energy is conserved exactly by dividing into kinetic (fermion) and potential (boson) thereby remaining constant while entropy is continually increasing through the increase in freedom, agency and justice. My hope of finishing my essay on creation before I have my teeth done [is postponed] but the excitement it has generated today is well worth the delay.
Am I stuck? Where am I stuck. How to implement gravitation [as part of omnipotence, but no energy yet]. We must say the singularity is a real substance. A quantum of action, it grows formally by Brouwer’s fixed point theorem. The fixed points, or forms, are built on the basis of the singularity mapping onto itself. They elicit kinetic and potential energy from zero energy gravitation, keeping total energy at zero, multiplying [potential] entropy. [energized] Quantum structure makes Minkowski space. Einstein [formally] cancels Minkowski space with absolute differential calculus. This gives large scale structure to the universe moving the orbit of mercury. How? by the Structure arising from mass/energy. We are getting energy from nowhere, positive and negative The essence of gravitation is a consequence of continuity and closure curving spacetime [because it is in effect the interior of a quantum of action, a particle, expanding continuously and closed, curving spacetime.[maybe quanta of action can grow inside one another like the bases of Hilbert space inside the initial singularity]. Goback to the beginning.Free fall. We are trying to say that quantum mechanics causes creation. What dole does continuity play? [maybe connection prior to the advent of quantum logical connection]. Completeness, closure, continuity, convexity.
[page 79]
Shuffle all these pieces around and get a good story? The real bonus is to use to create quantum mechanics via fermions and bosons to create Minkowski space, which Einstein used to create general relativity by neutralizing the structure with continuity [is this possible with real particles, the continuity has to be there first?] Keep trying.
We must incorporate black holes somehow rather like protons held together by their own potential. Are black holes massless? Energy less? How does an electron hold together. Not by opposing forces but by formalism - potential -spirit - attraction - stability - boson. There must be an answer somewhere and I have hope because I am far from the rather frayed beaten track.
Friday 24 April 2026
As is usual I wake up feeling that my project is both hopeless and essential and looking for ways to modify it to make it more palatable to the mainstream. The key, since I took the idea of quantum computation and quantum communication in hand, is the idea that vectors [sentences, functions] in Hilbert space have sufficient entropy to store all the information in the universe and manipulate it in a Darwinian manner to bring a structureless initial singularity to its present state. The key idea is that energy [ie quanta of action, unmoved movers] makes forms into substances seems to hold, including the idea that the initial singularity/symmetry is a substance that is in some way embodies Einstein gravitation which is split into kinetic and potential energy to give us the zero energy universe of unlimited entropy that we inhabit.
[page 80]
At the moment the connection between quantum mechanics and the mathematical theory of communication is coming into focus and will be something like a clincher showing that the physical universe is the voice of god explaining our nature and future to us. So the idea seems good, plausible and preachable and gives me something to do for the rest of my life which will be valuable fun. Getting new teeth is an investment in the future which I hope will pay off with health, wealth snd happiness [and I also have learnt since, quite painful; one has to suffer to be beautiful: Il faut souffrir pour être belle]
[Here is my brief introduction of the equivalence of quantum mechanics and communication as a “cheat sheet” to understand my book:
Friday 19 December 2025
Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic integration of physics and theology
A brief peek
This book started with an idea I had when I was 20, during the Second Vatican Council. There can be little doubt that the theology built on the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament has had enormous influence on our world. Theology is traditionally the Queen of Sciences and some theology is deeply ingrained in every culture.
As I saw them then and still see them now, these ancient documents are science fiction repeating ideas about the creation and management of the world that were formed more than 2000 years ago. They probably originated in the theocratic society that developed in Egypt about 3000 bce.
Scientific theology took a breath in 13th century Europe with the arrival and translation of the work of Aristotle. The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s books and incorporated many Aristotelian ideas into Catholic theology. After initial hesitation, the Church embraced Aquinas. His major works like the Summa Theologiae are still studied and recommended by the Church for the education of priests.
My idea was to repeat the work of Aquinas, rebuilding theology around modern science to replace the common sense impressions that Aristotle used 2300 years ago to write his classical treatises. The difference would have been that evidence based scientific theology would require God to be observable, that is for the visible universe to be divine. For the Catholic Church, this is heresy. It is attached with infallible faith to a 3000 year old depiction of the world and its creator embedded in the Bible. The Catholic religious Order where I was studying to be a priest rejected me.
We can date the dawn of the scientific era to the life of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Three hundred years after Aquinas, 17th century astronomical observations had improved to the point where it was becoming clear that Earth revolved around the Sun rather than vice versa.
Galileo’s made a telescope and used it to observe the phases of Venus. His work showed showed without doubt that Venus orbits the Sun inside the orbit of Earth. His refutation of ancient tradition upset the Church. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition accused Galileo of vehement suspicion of heresy. He was ultimately forced to recant to avoid severe, possibly lethal, punishment. Nevertheless, empirical science was on its way.
The Church has stuck to its beliefs ever since, as it must, since its whole reality depends on its story of the creation of the world, of the original sin of humanity, of the redemption won by the crucifixion of the divine Jesus of Nazareth, and its promise of a life to come after the apocalyptic remodelling of the universe at the end of days. It claims to be the only organization that can save us.
Anybody aware of the immeasurable magnificence and power of the Universe revealed in the last century may find this hard to believe, and for them at least, the old picture must eventually fade.
Although it was not clear to me when I began writing my story has a relatively simple core based the theories of communication and quantum theory. A serious bugbear in the communication industry is the noise coming from the ceaseless activity in the world which blurs our messages. Claude Shannon working for Bell Telephone devised a mathematical theory of communication which shows how to overcome this noise by encoding messages into chunks that last for a significant period of time.
Shannon notes that
Actually, two signals can be reliably distinguished if they differ by only a small amount, provided this difference is sustained over a long period of time. Each sample of the received signal then gives a small amount of statistical information concerning the transmitted signal; in combination, these statistical indications result in near certainty. . . . We will now make use of the geometrical representation to determine the exact capacity of a noisy channel.
We imagine this works because random noise, averaged over a long period, tends to cancel itself out, leaving the signal. Signals, on the other hand, comprise a relatively small set of symbols which have a fixed probability structure so that the sum of the probabilities of the symbols add up to 1. If you were to count all the letters in this passage and work out the probability of each letter, the sum of these probabilities will come close to 1. Letters like “space” and “e” are frequent, “q” and “z” are rare. This property is called unitarity.
The output of quantum mechanics is also unitary. Quantum mechanics is quite intelligent. Its inner working are executed by complex numbers but its unitary outputs are real numbers, which are an infinitesimally small proportion of complex numbers. In other words quantum mechanics is very sharp selection and has a very small target. This is rather like evolution, where the target for survival is successful reproduction. This distinguishes quantum mechanics from artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence systems take large volumes of input (often stolen from unsuspecting authors). They are programmed to find statistical correlations within this data, but they have no way of deciding whether their results are right or wrong. They can easily produce rubbish.
All the output that we receive from the physical universe is encoded by quantum mechanics, so we may look at the information we are receiving from the world as a story, rather like the bible. If we think of the world as divine we see that the physical world is our new Bible. Theologians understand the physical written Bible as communicating the mind of the divinity to us.
If the world is divine, we may think of the physical world as God’s body language. We are all used to understanding one another through body language, speech, gesture, expression, look, all bodily actions that convey states of mind. This leads to the subtitle of my book: A systematic integration of physics and theology. I propose that in a divine world the study the physical world leads us to understand the mind of God. There is infinitely more meaning in the enormous world that we will ever find in the tiny Bible.
Imperial power demands that people will die in battle for the imperium and in human affairs this requires the identification of the power with divinity which is generally accepted to have the power of life and death we see in all the old theologies. In other words, there is good evidence for the proposition that all religions aid wars and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the battle between the imperial Christian United States and the derivatives of the Pharoahonic Kingdoms that spawned Israel and its Christian and Muslim deriatives that have been fighting in the Middle East since time immemorial, via the Roman and British empires.
What I am learning as I work on the theory of peace is what I was intuitively aware of in 1987 when I proposed Cantor’s transfinite numbers as the answer to a peaceful world, creating formal peace for a transfinite number of ideas. A theory of Peace
This idea now appears in Einstein’s general theory which shows that the structureless transfinite
[page 81]
consistent universe can be locally defined by things like Minkowski space and the mass shell and the centre of mass frame. We understand creation in the context that the total momentum and energy of the universe begins and remains zero, beginning with the third law of thermodynamics and the actual creation in terms of entropy or information which Hawking and co understand to bre conserved even in black holes which serve like neutron stars to preserve the information content of their parent in the form of spin qubits. Robert M Wald (1999_12_31): The Thermodynamics of Black Holes, Bardeen, Cooper & Hawking (1973_07): The four laws of black hole mechanics
We see general relativity and quantum mechanics as unified in complex numbers which embrace both space and time. The function of quantum mechanics is embodied in hermitian operators which separate real from complex. In other words the theory to peace is this marvellous idea that the universe is algebraically complete, first identified by Einstein in the special theory of and then embodied in his idea of general covariance which has now been taken up by abstract algebra. Abstract algebra - Wikipedia, Category theory - Wikipedia
Now that I have got teeth again I can start to make money in theology, beginning with the destruction of AI by ptomoting TI which I call theological intelligence or perhaps DI, divine intelligence, [or best of all NI, natural intelligence] rooted in abstract algebra and Hilbert’s formalism. This is the foundation of the marvellous idea that I had under the influence of this morning’s general anaesthetic.
mass shell
abstract algebra
Hilbert’s formalism
Lagrangian of general relativity
Zero mass / zero momentum/ infinite entropy
Quantum theory of communication and computation.
[page 82]
New abstract for theory of peace is marvellous idea that destroys the false god and infinite imperial power with quantum independence and agency and quantum mechanical creation of potential and kinetic energy → entropy preserved in black holes. As usual I rattle the pieces, new pieces appear and the picture is complete, rebuilt by realization that my mother was right to be embraced by god, the god of Jesus, not the false imperial god of Moses and the Pharoahs.
Tax and revenue from coal and gas exports [. . .]
A letter to academia: there are three Nobel prizes in my book that may be of interest to somebody in academia:
1. A proof that the universe is divine.
2. A discussion that points out the power of quantum mechanics and deletes AI.
3. A rebooting of relativistic quantum mechanics which shows the problems with quantum field theory and solves the Yang-Mills problem.
I am to old and disconnected fron politics and academia to pursue
[page 83]
these honours for myself and I do not need the money, so I am happy to pass them on to you with a suggestion that you buy the book because the money will end up wth my children and friends. [Posted copies to profs Eagle, Opie and Sumby, U of A]
My fifth academic phase was over so then I wrote the book:
priesthood/medicine/geography/theology/philosophy: then diy Book: Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic integration of physics and theology
The key theme is that the mass of a hadron is equal to its binding energy [like the universe] and in the case of the proton means that it is indestructible.
The beauty of electrodynamics is that communication [photons] are much cheaper than physicality [electrons].
The role of electroweak particles is to unite hadrons and electrons and the mesons are there to take care of the details..
Saturday 25 April 2026
Now to take care of the tooth money [new temporary false teeth].
The wonderful concept that the world is speaking to us as the voice of god works well as long as we are listening to the voice of science and to some extent the voice of science spoken through technology which together might account for 1% of all the information reaching the average person. On the other hand the enormous amount of entrenched fundamentalist belief being preached by proponents of the standard religions and
[page 84]
theologies which have become entrenched over thousands of years and which is backed by the enormous amounts of wealth and power that have been accumulated by that tradition. My little book is at best a leaf in the storm but nevertheless like a canoe pushing a supertanker may have some little effect and it is in my interest to push it out, as reluctant as I am to be a preacher [even though I joined the Order of Preachers, OP!] and a ‘public intellectual’. What I rely on, I suppose, is my own reluctant desire to be an influencer which I embrace most strongly by abstract writing than by concrete personal appearance. The way to go, of course, is to attract interest by seeking publicity among the billions of voices surrounding me.
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Further readingBooks
Carlson (2006), James, and Arthur Jaffe & Andrew Wiles, The Millennium Prize Problems, Clay Mathematics Institute and American Mathematical Society 2006 1: The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture: Andrew Wiles
2: The Hodge Conjecture: Pierre Deligne
3: The Existence and Smoothness of the Navier-Stokes Equation: Charles L Fefferman
4: The Poincare Conjecture: John Milnor
5: The P versus NP Problem: Stephen Cook
6: The Riemann Hypothesis: Enrico Bombieri
7: Quantum Yang-Mills Theory: Arthur Jaffe and Edward Whitten
Amazon
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Darwin (1875, 1998), Charles, and Harriet Ritvo (Introduction), The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Foundations of Natural History), Johns Hopkins University Press 1875, 1998 ' "The Variation, with its thousands of hard-won observations of the facts of variation in domesticated species, is a frustrating, but worthwhile read, for it reveals the Darwin we rarely see -- the embattled Darwin, struggling to keep his project on the road. Sometimes he seems on the verge of being overwhelmed by the problems he is dealing with, but then a curious fact of natural history will engage him (the webbing between water gun-dogs' toes, the absurdly short beak of the pouter pigeon) and his determination to make sense of it rekindles. As he disarmingly declares, 'the whole subject of inheritance is wonderful.'.
Amazon
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Einstein (1916, 2005), Albert, and Robert W Lawson (translator) Roger Penrose (Introduction), Robert Geroch (Commentary), David C Cassidy (Historical Essay), Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Pi Press 1916, 2005 Preface: 'The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. ... The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.' (page 3)
Amazon
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Nielsen (2016), Michael A., and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2016 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002.
Amazon
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von Neumann (1932, 1955, 1983), John, and Robert T Beyer (translator), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1932, 1955, 1983 Jacket: '. . . a revolutionary book that caused a sea change in theoretical physics. . . . JvN begins by presenting the theory of Hermitean operators and Hilbert spaces. These provide the framework for transformation theory, which JvN regards as the definitive form of quantum mechanics. . . . Regarded as a tour de force at the time of its publication, this book is still indispensable for those interested in the fundamental issues of quantum mechanics.'
Amazon
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Links
Abstract algebra - Wikipedia, Abstract algebra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematics, more specifically algebra, abstract algebra or modern algebra is the study of algebraic structures, which are sets with specific operations acting on their elements. Algebraic structures include groups, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces, lattices, and algebras over a field. The term abstract algebra was coined in the early 20th century to distinguish it from older parts of algebra, and more specifically from elementary algebra, the use of variables to represent numbers in computation and reasoning. [. . .]
Algebraic structures, with their associated homomorphisms, form mathematical categories. Category theory gives a unified framework to study properties and constructions that are similar for various structures.
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Alex Cloud et al. (2026_04_15), Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in data, Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate data to train improved models1,2,3, but it remains unclear what properties are transmitted in this model distillation4,5. Here we show that distillation can lead to subliminal learning—the transmission of behavioural traits through semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a ‘teacher’ model with some trait T (such as disproportionately generating responses favouring owls or showing broad misaligned behaviour) generates datasets consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a ‘student’ model trained on these data learns T, even when references to T are rigorously removed. More realistically, we observe the same effect when the teacher generates math reasoning traces or code. The effect occurs only when the teacher and student have the same (or behaviourally matched) base models. To help explain this, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning arises in neural networks under broad conditions and demonstrate it in a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. As artificial intelligence systems are increasingly trained on the outputs of one another, they may inherit properties not visible in the data. Safety evaluations may therefore need to examine not just behaviour, but the origins of models and training data and the processes used to create them. back |
Alyssa Chen (2026_04_23), Why Iran war is the surest sign that the US is in decline, ' As key allies turn away and war costs soar, the US military campaign against Iran is spurring a growing consensus among Chinese observers and state media – that Washington’s unrivalled global dominance is crumbling.
Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily issued a sharp critique on Thursday, warning that the United States’ shift from an “international rule-builder” to a “predatory hegemon” would ultimately undermine its prosperity and influence.
“In the post-Cold War era, while the undercurrents of US hegemony were always present, Washington at least maintained on the surface the image of a ‘responsible actor’: sustaining alliances, providing some international public goods, and leading the creation and enforcement of global rules,” the commentary read.
“Today, that facade has rapidly fallen away. America has devolved entirely into a ‘rule-breaker’ and ‘cooperation saboteur’, now relying on the naked ‘law of the jungle’ to maintain its dominance.”
The article was attributed to Zhong Sheng – a homonym in Chinese for “the voice of China” and a pseudonym often used to voice Beijing’s position on global affairs.
Several Chinese analysts have expressed similar views, arguing that Washington’s reckless behaviour has alienated allies, weakened its credibility and eroded US influence on the global stage.' back |
Bardeen, Cooper & Hawking (1973_07), The four laws of black hole mechanics, 'Expressions are derived for the mass of a stationary axisymmetric solution of the Einstein equations containing a black hole surrounded by matter and for the difference in mass between two neighboring such solutions. Two of the quantities which appear in these expressions, namely the area A of the event horizon and the “surface gravity” κ of the black hole, have a close analogy with entropy and temperature respectively. This analogy suggests the formulation of four laws of black hole mechanics which correspond to and in some ways transcend the four laws of thermodynamics. back |
Category theory - Wikipedia, Category theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Category theory is a general theory of mathematical structures and their relations. It was introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in the mid-20th century in their foundational work on algebraic topology. Category theory can be used in most areas of mathematics. In particular, many constructions of new mathematical objects from previous ones that appear similarly in several contexts are conveniently expressed and unified in terms of categories. Examples include quotient spaces, direct products, completion, and duality.
Many areas of computer science also rely on category theory, such as functional programming and semantics.
A category is formed by two sorts of objects: the objects of the category, and the morphisms, which relate two objects called the source and the target of the morphism. A morphism is often represented by an arrow from its source to its target (see the figure). Morphisms can be composed if the target of the first morphism equals the source of the second one. Morphism composition has similar properties as function composition (associativity and existence of an identity morphism for each object). Morphisms are often some sort of functions, but this is not always the case. For example, a monoid may be viewed as a category with a single object, whose morphisms are the elements of the monoid.
The second fundamental concept of category theory is the concept of a functor, which plays the role of a morphism between two categories C 1 and C 2: it maps objects of C 1 to objects of C 2 and morphisms of C 1 to morphisms of C 2 in such a way that sources are mapped to sources, and targets are mapped to targets (or, in the case of a contravariant functor, sources are mapped to targets and vice-versa). A third fundamental concept is a natural transformation that may be viewed as a morphism of functors. ' back |
Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the prsence 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 |
Febe Armanios (2026_04_26, Christian satellite TV has broadcast evangelical faith – and end‑times prophecies – into Iran for decades, ' When the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, images of smoke billowing over Iranian cities began to dominate the news. But another feature of those skylines has remained constant: the thousands of satellite dishes that dot Tehran’s rooftops, picking up signals that originate far beyond Iran’s borders – despite attempts to confiscate them.
For two decades, Christian television channels produced in the United States and Europe have made their way into Iranian homes. Some of this programming echoes apocalyptic ideas from American figures promoting the war, drawing on scriptural interpretations long present in evangelical teachings. Writer Hal Lindsey popularized such ideas in the 1970s with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” a best-selling book that cast Persia as the foretold antagonist in an imminent end-times conflict that would usher in Jesus’ second coming.
In my 2025 book, “Satellite Ministries: The Rise of Christian Television in the Middle East,” I show how these broadcasts became tools for spreading such messages to Christians and potential converts – positioning the region at the center of a long-running “faith war.” [. . .]
In Iran, Western evangelicalism’s history dates to the 19th century. But arguably its most striking form emerged about two decades ago, when Christian networks began using new technologies to get around decades of restrictions in media and religion.
After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic allowed Armenian and Assyrian Christians to practice their ancient faiths in their own languages. The government officially recognizes them as religious minorities. However, it effectively criminalized Protestant activities in Persian, which it associated with Western missions. [. . .]
By 2006, Christian organizations abroad turned to satellite broadcasts as an easier way of reaching Iranian audiences. Satellite dishes, though officially prohibited, were widespread and difficult for authorities to control. Tracking who actually watches these channels is extremely difficult, but producers claim that Christian broadcasts helped foster secretive house churches across Iran. [. . .]
Meanwhile, religious language about the conflict continues to escalate in American politics, with some evangelical commentators referencing apocalyptic prophecies.
Since the early 1980s, evangelical TV ministries in the region have advanced a similar message about politics, religion and the end times – under the banner of conversion.' back |
Gnosticism - Wikipedia, Gnosticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός gnōstikós, "having knowledge") is a collection of ancient religious ideas and systems which originated in the first century AD among early Christian and Jewish sects. These various groups emphasised personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) over orthodox teachings, traditions, and ecclesiastical authority. Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a blind, malevolent demiurge responsible for creating the material universe. Viewing this material existence as flawed or evil, Gnostics considered the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the supreme divinity in the form of mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.' back |
Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, Hylomorphism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Hylomorphism (Greek ὑλο- hylo-, "wood, matter" + -morphism < Greek μορφή, morphē, "form") is a philosophical theory developed by Aristotle, which analyzes substance into matter and form. Substances are conceived of as compounds of form and matter.' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back |
Kai Kupferschmidt (2026_04_21), This simple house may help prevent multiple fatal diseases in African children, ' Randomized, controlled trials, the most stringent test of a medical treatment, aren’t easy to do for even straightforward interventions such as exercise or a daily pill. So spare a thought for the researchers who used a randomized trial to test the health effects of giving people a brand-new home.
In southern Tanzania, scientists hired contractors to build 110 simple, two-story houses designed to reduce the risk of a slew of diseases for their residents and then randomly selected families to live in them. Children in those buildings suffered less often from malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory infections—diseases that together kill more than 1 million children each year in sub-Saharan Africa—than those living in traditional mud-and-thatch houses in the same villages, the scientists report today in Nature Medicine.' back |
Louis de Broglie (1929), Nobel Lecture: The Wave Nature of the Electron, ' The necessity of assuming for light two contradictory theories-that of waves and that of corpuscles - and the inability to understand why, among the infinity of motions which an electron ought to be able to have in the atom according to classical concepts, only certain ones were possible: such were the enigmas confronting physicists at the time I resumed my studies of theoretical physics.
Now a purely corpuscular theory does not contain any
element permitting the definition of frequency. This also renders it necessary in the case of light to introduce simultaneously the corpuscle concept and the concept of periodicity.
On the other hand the determination of the stable motions of the electrons in the atom involves whole numbers, and so far the only phenomena in which whole numbers were involved in physics were those of interference and of eigenvibrations. That suggested the idea to me that electrons themselves could not be represented as simple corpuscles either, but that a periodicity had also to be assigned to them too. . . .
Thus to describe the properties of matter as well as those of light, waves and corpuscles have to be referred to at one and the same time. The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.
It has thus been possible to predicta whole group of phenomena without their actually having been discovered. And it is on this concept of the duality of waves and corpuscles in Nature, expressed in a more or less abstract form, that the whole recent development of theoretical physics has been founded and that all future development of this science will apparently have to be founded.' back |
Pedro Arrupe - Wikipedia, Pedro Arrupe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Pedro Arrupe y Gondra, SJ (14 November 1907 – 5 February 1991) was a Basque Spanish Catholic priest who served as the 28th superior general of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He has been called a second founder of the Society, which he led in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, especially with regard to faith that does justice and preferential option for the poor.
Born in 1907 in Bilbao, Arrupe joined the Jesuits in 1927 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1936. While serving as a novice master outside Hiroshima in 1945, Arrupe used his medical background as a first responder to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
In 1983, paralysis from a stroke caused Arrupe to resign from office. He lived on until 1991, when he died in the local Jesuit infirmary.[4] His cause for sainthood was opened by the Jesuits and the Diocese of Rome in 2018.' back |
Richard Behiel, Electromagnetism as a Gauge Theory, ' "Why is electromagnetism a thing?" That's the question. In this video, we explore the answer given by gauge theory. In a nutshell, electromagnetism arises from local phase symmetry. But what does that mean, and how exactly does that work? That's what this video is all about!
This video is quite long and technical. Think of it as a video textbook, so you can skip around to different parts if you’d like. But I wanted to err on the side of rigor and thoroughness, to show comprehensively how local U(1) symmetry blossoms into electromagnetism. So the ideas are all there for you, but you don’t have to watch this in one sitting! ' back |
Richard Feynman & Steven Weinberg (1986), Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures, Foreword: John C Taylor: 'Dirac Died in 1984, and St John's College, Cambridge (Dirac's College), very generously endowed an annual lecture to be held at Cambridge University in Dirac's memory. The First two lectures, printed here, are contrasting variations of Dirac's theme of the union of quantum theory and relativity.' back |
Robert M Wald (1999_12_31), The Thermodynamics of Black Holes, 'We review the present status of black hole thermodynamics. Our review includes discussion of classical black hole thermodynamics, Hawking radiation from black holes, the generalized second law, and the issue of entropy bounds. A brief survey also is given of approaches to the calculation of black hole entropy. We conclude with a discussion of some unresolved open issues.' back |
Salum Mshamu, et al., A sustainable house design to improve child health in rural Africa: a cluster-randomized controlled trial, ' Abstract
Malaria, diarrhea and acute respiratory infections (ARIs) are the major causes of mortality in young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Here we provide support for the hypothesis that children can be protected from these diseases by improvements in house design. We designed a novel double-story house, called a Star Home, to provide an insect-proof, cleaner, cooler and smoke-free environment, with a reliable supply of water and sanitation. We conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial where households with children under 13 years of age were randomly allocated (1:4.7) to living in 110 Star Homes or in 513 traditional mud and thatched-roofed houses. The primary outcome of childhood malaria incidence was met: after 3 years, children living in Star Homes had 44% less malaria (incidence rate ratio (IRR): 0.56 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.43−0.72), P < 0.0001) compared to children living in traditional homes. Children in Star Homes had 30% less diarrhea (IRR: 0.70 (95% CI: 0.53−0.91), P = 0.0070) and 18% less ARIs (IRR: 0.82 (95% CI: 0.73−0.93), P = 0.0010) than children living in traditional homes. Children under 5 years of age living in Star Homes were also taller for their age than those living in traditional homes. Our house design is intended to inspire those working in the building sector and with local communities to develop innovative designs for healthier homes. Major improvements in rural house design have the potential to make a substantial public health impact across hot, humid regions of Africa. [. . .]
Malaria, diarrheal diseases and ARIs are three major causes of mortality in young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria accounts annually for an estimated 610,000 lives lost—an incidence more than three times higher than the global target. In 2024, 282 million malaria cases were reported worldwide, nine million more than in 2023, with 94% of cases and 95% of deaths occurring in Africa. Diarrhea is responsible for approximately 1.8 million childhood deaths in low- and middle-income countries, of which approximately 375,000 occur in sub-Saharan Africa4. ARIs contribute up to one-third of under-5 mortality—approximately 350,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. back |
Shalom Goldman (2026_03_12), As Iran war expands, some conservative Christians interpret the conflict through biblical prophecies, ' As the American and Israeli war with Iran unfolds, some American Christians are speaking of the conflict in biblical terms, mapping end-time prophecies on to current events in the Middle East.
In a sermon on March 1, 2026, for example, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, described the war as part of a divine plan. “Prophetically, we’re right on cue,” he said. Later, he prayed that “God Almighty is brought onto the battlefield and the enemies of Zion and the enemies of the United States can be destroyed before our eyes. Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.”
Meanwhile, Christian singer and activist Sean Feucht referred to “the end-time open doors of what (God) is going to do in Iran when this regime is prayerfully removed.
This type of apocalyptic thought has roots in the 19th century, when many American preachers turned toward more literal readings of the Bible. Those readings also emphasized the Bible’s account of God promising the “Holy Land” to Abraham and his descendants. But Christian Zionism’s influence on politics has grown over the past half-century, as I write about in my book “Zeal for Zion.” Today, that mindset seems to be moving into the halls of the American government and the military. [. . .]
The outcomes of Israel’s 1967 war with a coalition of Arab states changed that situation. From Syria, Israel conquered and occupied the Golan Heights; and from Jordan, East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan. From Egypt, Israel won the Sinai Peninsula, from which it eventually withdrew, and the Gaza Strip.
As Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg noted, “The Six Day War did more than create a new political and military map in the Middle East. It also changed the mythic map, in a piece of the world where myths have always bent reality".' back |
Stewart Patrick (2026_04_19), The Warmongers Are Getting History All Wrong, ' The second Trump administration has embraced the logic of the Melian Dialogue with gusto. It echoes in the president’s blunt declaration to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that “you don’t have the cards,” his browbeating of Denmark to cede control of Greenland, his unilateral imposition of tariffs on smaller nations, his threats to “take” Cuba at a time of U.S. choosing and his demands that NATO allies — who were not consulted before the war in Iran — help open the Strait of Hormuz. These are the actions of a rogue superpower that has abandoned any pretense of enlightened leadership or aspirations to legitimacy in favor of pure global dominance.
The Trump administration’s relentless bullying ignores a central lesson from classical antiquity: Athens’s shift from benevolent hegemony to malevolent empire paved its road to ruin. [. . .]
The temptation to exploit dominance is a recurrent historical impulse — one to which Trump’s America has succumbed. Tired of assuming burdens in the general interest, the United States is now leveraging and abusing its structural dominance for maximal gain, coercing and extracting benefits from even its closest partners. As in Thucydides’ time, this posture promises short-term gains but long-run disaster.
The genius of post-1945 U.S. foreign policy was in embedding America’s awesome power in a framework of international institutions and law in which all nations, large and small, could participate and benefit. It was far from perfect and coincided with plenty of episodes of imperialist intervention. But the strategy overall paid off for the United States. It cushioned the reality of American dominance, legitimated American power and produced an order broadly consistent with American interests.
All these advantages are now being abandoned. The Trump administration is destroying any remaining faith that the United States can be trusted to exercise power responsibly. It is also erasing any distinction between the exercise of American might and Russian conduct in Ukraine and Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or (potentially) over Taiwan.' back |
Talking Heads, Life is what you make it, ' Baby, life's what you make it
Can't escape it
Baby, yesterday's favourite
Don't you hate it?
(Everything's all right)
Life's what you make it
(Everything's all right)
Baby, life's what you make it
Don't backdate it
Baby, don't try to shade it
Beauty's naked
(Everything's all right)
Life's what you make it
(Everything's all right)
What you make it
Baby, life's what you make it
Celebrate it, anticipate it
Yesterday's faded, nothing can change it
Life's what you make it
(Everything's all right)
Life's what you make it
(Everything's all right)
Life's what you make it
(Everything's all right)
(Everything's all right)
(Everything's all right)
Make it, make it
(Everything's all right)
Life's what you make it back |
The Stranger (2025 film) - Wikipedia, The Stranger (2025 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Stranger (French: L'Étranger) is a 2025 drama film written and directed by François Ozon , based on the 1942 novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. Benjamin Voisin stars in the lead role of Meursault, alongside Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud and Denis Lavant.
The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2025, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion. It was theatrically released in France by Gaumont on 29 October. ' back |
Third law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia, Third law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nernst–Simon statement of the third law of thermodynamics concerns thermodynamic processes at a fixed, low temperature:
The entropy change associated with any condensed system undergoing a reversible isothermal process approaches zero as the temperature at which it is performed approaches 0 K.
Here a condensed system refers to liquids and solids.' back |
Wendy Tuohy (2026_04_19), ‘Cases that stay with you forever’: They see women killed by violence, and this is what they want you to know, ' Joanna Glengarry has performed 5000 autopsies on people who died in hundreds of ways. She describes forensic pathologists as a robust bunch, yet some of these deaths stay with her.
They are the cases in which no amount of science can explain the horrendous violence inflicted on women with everything to live for.
Many of these killings made national and international headlines, but the New Zealander who now heads up forensic pathology at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has seen the carnage up close.
Some hit home because she and the victim of a crime that outraged a community had so much in common – as was the case with Auckland accountant Jo Pert, 41. Glengarry did her autopsy after Pert’s daylight killing during her regular jog.
“She was my age, she was just out for her afternoon run, and she was stabbed multiple times,” says Glengarry, a fellow runner. “The man [who murdered her] had decided that his goal for that day was to kill someone.” He had previously assaulted two women. [. . .]
It is the hidden toll of violence that Glengarry and her pathologist colleagues also wish to expose and discuss.
She is part of a national effort, including Victoria Police, to have women’s suicides strongly suspected to be linked with family violence reclassified as homicides so statistics better reflect reality.
States around Australia are grappling with how to capture this phenomenon, and submissions to a federal parliamentary inquiry into the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide closed on March 13.
Glengarry’s colleagues Dr Heinrich Bouwer and Dr Paul Bedford share her sense that the community does not have a complete understanding of how much gendered violence we live among, or its true impact.' back |
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