vol VII: Notes

1982

[Notebook: Poesis (DB 3)]

Sunday 7 February 1982 - Saturday 13 February 1982]

[page 9]

Sunday 6 February 1982

Waking dream: put toaster in oven to make electric oven. Conscious of quite powerful and emotional dreams through the night which create tension (sometimes sore back in the morning) and make for restless sleep, but cannot remember the details - usually seem to be some sort of technological scheme as above.

A coil tongued serpent
deep within me
lashes out so often to protect
the battered parapets
of its lair.
Can a person ever live
unscarred without bitterness.
It is a heavy duty
To fit the world around.

[page 10]

self analysis - some topics: mother, father, wife, child, monastery, homosexuality, self-destructiveness, sexual repression, creativity.

Monday 8 February 1982

Dreams: Old washing machine with beautiful glass liquid filled leg. Vintage railway in Queensland loaded with dressed up and heavily made up children. Trying to get dope from generator shed. Moving into very long dusty room. Made present of bureau full of wool.

Party with people present who slipped away one by one. Sci fi plot: cognition researcher produces hypothesis to explain psychokinesis and then discovers he can work miracles - church distressed.

Have you ever been mad or a genius. We all have and are. We know what it is like to be driven, helplessly by forces inside. Forced to know, to love, to run, to climb, to cry out in protest. Such forces that lift humankind above the everyday and into the tortured realms of the new, the spiritual.

. . .

[page 11]

. . .

Tuesday 9 February 1982

Continue [reading] Fine Fine

. . .

Copyright:

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

Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics'  Amazon   back

Callen, Herbert B, Thermodynamics: an introduction to the physical theories of equiulibrium thermostatics and irreversible thermodynamics, John Wiley and Sons 1962 Preface: 'In writing this book I have forgone the conventional inductive development of thermodynamics in favor of a postulational approach, which I believe is more direct and logically simple. . . . In order to motivate the postulates, an elementary qualitative statistical discussion is given in an appendix, and some appeal is made to experimental observations, but the spirit of the development is that the postulates are best justified by a posteriori success of the theory rather than by a priori proof.'back

Canon Law Society of America, Holy See, Code of Canon Law: Latin-English Edition, Canon Law Society of America 1984 Pope John Paul XXXIII announced his decision to reform the existing corpus of canonical legislation on 25 January 1959. Pope John Paul II ordered the promulgation of the revised Code of Canon law on the same day in 1983. The latin text is definitive. This English translation has been approved by the Canonical Affairs Committee of the [US] National Conference of Catholic Bishops in October 1983.  Amazon   back

Christie, Agathe, The Murder of Roger Akroyd, Harpercollins 1991 Amazon customer review: .The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first Christie I ever read - and it's a real masterpiece. The ending is pretty horrifying, but read the book again, and you'll wonder why you didn't notice various things - things the Murderer/Murderess (I'm not saying which it is!)said and did during the novel, that one didn't notice at the time. Extremely good stuff.. H Lim  Amazon   back

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

Farmelo, Graham, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, Basic Books 2009 Amazon Editorial Review: From Publishers Weekly 'Paul Dirac (1902–1984) shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, but whereas physicists regard Dirac as one of the giants of the 20th century, he isn't as well known outside the profession. This may be due to the lack of humorous quips attributed to Dirac, as compared with an Einstein or a Feynman. If he spoke at all, it was with one-word answers that made Calvin Coolidge look loquacious. Dirac adhered to Keats's admonition that Beauty is truth, truth beauty: if an equation was beautiful, it was probably correct, and vice versa. His most famous equation predicted the positron (now used in PET scans), which is the antiparticle of the electron, and antimatter in general. . . . ' Copyright Reed Business Information  Amazon   back

Fine, Reuben, A History of Psychoanalysis, Columbia University 1979 'The author of this book is a distinguished psychoanalyst who has many psychoanalytic publications to his credit. In particular, he has ably demonstrated his capacity to describe and bring together the contributions of his colleagues on various topics representing different approaches to psychoanalytical work. This capacity he has again demonstrated in his latest book entitled A History of Psychoanalysis in which he traces the history of most of the main concepts used in psychoanalysis, the development of psychoanalytic technique, and its application to different types of mental illness. He describes Freud's initial discoveries and his subsequent alterations to his theories as his clinical experience presented him with aspects of a problem that his original formulations or hypotheses could not cover. He then traces subsequent contributions by psychoanalysts who have worked on the same problems, summarizing their views. Finally, he explores the relationship between Psychoanalysis and other disciplines, e.g. Psychiatry and the Social Sciences, and in particular the psychoanalytic approach to culture and value systems. This book could be invaluable to those who require a summary of the history of the development of psychoanalytic metapsychology and technique, and as such it is recommended.' Pearl H. M. King  Amazon   back

Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . '  Amazon   back

Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press 1996 The classic founding text of cybernetics.  Amazon   back

Links

Elliott H Lieb & Jakob Yngvason, The Mathematical Structure of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, 'The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose increase characterizes the possible state changes under adiabatic conditions. It is one of the few really fundamental physical laws (in the sense that no deviation, however tiny, is permitted) and its consequences are far reaching. This principle is independent of models, statistical mechanical or otherwise, and can be understood without recourse to Carnot cycles, ideal gases and other assumptions about such things as `heat', `temperature', `reversible processes', etc., as is usually done. Also the well known formula of statistical mechanics, S = -\sum p log p, is not needed for the derivation of the entropy principle. This contribution is partly a summary of our joint work (Physics Reports, Vol. 310, 1--96 (1999)) where the existence and uniqueness of S is proved to be a consequence of certain basic properties of the relation of adiabatic accessibility among equilibrium states. We also present some open problems and suggest directions for further study.' back

Erik P Verlinde, The Origins of gravity and the Laws of Newton, 'Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton's law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario. Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton's law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle leads us to conclude that it is actually this law of inertia whose origin is entropic.' back

kwanzaakeepers.com, AIDS Deaths in Africa, SOURCE: Extrapolated from December 2000 UNAIDS data back

Leonard Susskind, The World as a Hologram, 'According to 't Hooft the combination of quantum mechanics and gravity requires the three dimensional world to be an image of data that can be stored on a two dimensional projection much like a holographic image. The two dimensional description only requires one discrete degree of freedom per Planck area and yet it is rich enough to describe all three dimensional phenomena. After outlining 't Hooft's proposal I give a preliminary informal description of how it may be implemented. One finds a basic requirement that particles must grow in size as their momenta are increased far above the Planck scale. The consequences for high energy particle collisions are described. The phenomena of particle growth with momentum was previously discussed in the context of string theory and was related to information spreading near black hole horizons. The considerations of this paper indicate that the effect is much more rapid at all but the earliest times. In fact the rate of spreading is found to saturate the bound from causality. Finally we consider string theory as a possible realization of 't Hooft's idea. The light front lattice string model of Klebanov and Susskind is reviewed and its similarities with the holographic theory are demonstrated. The agreement between the two requires unproven but plausible assumptions about the nonperturbative behavior of string theory. Very similar ideas to those in this paper have been long held by Charles Thorn.' back

Niels Bohr - Wikipedia, Niels Bohr - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish pronunciation: [nels ˈb̥oɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, . . . Bohr has been described as one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century' back

Schrödinger equation - Wikipedia, Schrödinger equation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, the Schrödinger equation, proposed by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1926, describes the space- and time-dependence of quantum mechanical systems. It is of central importance in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, playing a role for microscopic particles analogous to Newton's second law in classical mechanics for macroscopic particles. Microscopic particles include elementary particles, such as electrons, as well as systems of particles, such as atomic nuclei.' back