vol VII: Notes

1982

[Sunday 30 May 1982 - Saturday 5 June 1982

[notebook DREAMING DB1]

[page 62]

Sunday 30 May 1982

Stare into the fire wondering and wondering where she's at, that's going on in her mind, what's happenning. Real communication is so impossibly difficult. The extra-conscious layers of deceit and meaning so numerous, so complex. What do we really want - all sorts of things. How do we really get them - all sorts of ways, none simple, none of them clear, even to the actors. Look to your dreamsa for some indication of what is going on in the deep layers.

Monday 31 May 1982

Tuesday 1 June 1982

Wednesday 2 June 1982

Thursday 3 June 1982

Began in a newspaper office. Editor and reporter, no one else present. Greyish people, old fashioned. Me looking for someone, feeling inferior, out of place. Cut, in same building to large L shaped room, white with a single beds in which the queen lying, sick. I am summoned to go in on some pretext, in the hope that I may help. Perhaps as a printer. Then I am partly in the room, measuring walls with a steel tape, similar to that used by Mick to measure

[page 63]

[the] hall. - Z asked me to help with stripping the front to paint a mural. . . . . Was a steel hospital type bed, starched white sheets, white gloss walls - W - nowhere to be seen.

Simple warming fire,
What pleasure to be warm
Cold cold rain beats
On the roof.
How did they cope,
Our ancestors without houses?
Cave, fire, sparse comfort
Sufficient though.

Desire. Desire comes back to survival
How do I long to be warmly wrapped,
In the arms of a friendly woman
Why?
Why do I feel so?
Because my genes know,
That if I do that they will have a better chance
of reincarnation.

To Portrait of an Abstract Man

What is left in life then, after we discover that our intelligence is merely an effect of the blind evolutionary forces of the Universe. We have no friends. No kind god who made us, no guardian angels watching, no devils tempting. Only ourselves, form, drawn on the void, perilously close to not-being.

A word on paper,
Has the power of life and death,
Not the ink, not the paper,
But the content, the form,
The meaning, outisde paper and ink.
So I exist, written of nothingness on the void.

Ex ninilo omnia fiunt.
Sed non ex, sed post.
Post nihil omnia fiunt.

Words, like atoms, flit and shuttle,
Coalesce, gather meaning, spray
Apart. Random, guided, seeking new sound

New meaning, new.

Friday 4 June 1982

Saturday 5 June 1982

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!)

Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'  Amazon   back

Chaitin, 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

Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.'  Amazon   back

Gardner, Erle Stanley, The Case of the Singing Skirt, Fawcett 1992 From the Inside Flap 'Ellen Robb does more than just sing for her supper -- she also dances and sells cigarettes in a two-bit gambling parlor in a one-horse town. But when she hits a sour note with her scheming employer by refusing to help fleece a fat-cat customer in a crooked card game, she finds herself out of all three jobs. That's when she sings her song of woe to Perry Mason, who promises to turn her blues into greenbacks with the help of his crack team, Della Street and Paul Drake, and a hefty lawsuit. Things are humming along just fine -- until murder interrupts the merry melody of Mason's crafty legal maneuvers. When the vindictive wife of Ellen Robb's not-so-secret lover turns up shot to death, Mason is certain it's a frame-up -- and that his songbird client's belligerent boss is to blame. Until his own gun is found at the scene. The cocksure Mason will have to change his tune -- and do some quick thinking -- or else this case could be his swan song.'  Amazon   back

Higman, Bryan, Applied Group-Theoretic and Matrix Methods, Dover Publications Jacket: '... This work, a comprehensive, thoroughly reliable exposition of the basic ideas of group theory (realized through matrices) and its applications to various areas of physics and chemistry, systematically covers this important ground for the first time. ... Although [it] deals basiclaly with advanced level material, the unusually clear exposition provides much valuable insight and fruitful suggestion for student and specialist alike. Chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others who would like an idea of the applications and methods of group and matrix theory in the physical sciences will profit greatly from this book. ...'back

Jech, Thomas, Set Theory, Springer 1997 Jacket: 'This book covers major areas of modern set theory: cardinal arithmetic, constructible sets, forcing and Boolean-valued models, large cardinals and descriptive set theory. . . . It can be used as a textbook for a graduate course in set theory and can serve as a reference book.'  Amazon   back

Kuhn, Thomas S, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912, University of Chicago Press 1987 Jacket: '[This book] traces the emergence of discontinuous physics during the early years of this century. Breaking with historiographic tradition, Kuhn maintains that, though clearly due to Max Planck, the concept of discontinuous energy change does not originate in his work. Instead it was introduced by physicists trying to understand the success of his brilliant new theory of black-body radiation.'  Amazon   back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'  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

Nixon, Richard Milhous, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Buccaneer Books 1994 Amazon editorial review: 'Former President Richard Nixon's bestselling autobiography is an intensely personal examination of his life, public career, and White House years. With startling candor, Nixon reveals his beliefs, doubts, and behind-the-scenes decisions, and sheds new light on his landmark diplomatic initiatives, political campaigns, and historic decision to resign from the presidency. Throughout his career, Richard Nixon made extensive notes about his ideas, conversations, activities, and meetings. During his presidency, from November 1971 until April 1973, and again in June and July 1974, he kept an almost daily diary of reflections, analyses, and perceptions. These notes and diary dictations, which are quoted throughout this book, provide a unique insight into the complexities of the modern presidency and the great issues of American policy and politics.'  Amazon   back

Pais, Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this . . . major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. . . . Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography . . . including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.'  Amazon   back

Yourgrau, Wolfgang, and Stanley Mandelstam, Variational Principles in Dynamics and Quantum Theory, Dover 1979 Variational principles serve as filters for parititioning the set of dynamic possibilities of a system into a high probability and a low probability set. The method derives from De Maupertuis (1698-1759) who formulated the principle of least action, which states that physical laws include a rule of economy, the principle of least action. This principle states that in a mathematically described dynamic system will move so as to minimise action. Yourgrau and andelstam explains the application of this principle to a variety of physical systems.   Amazon   back

Papers

Bouwmeester, Dick, "High NOON for photons", Nature, 429, 6989, 13 May 2004, page 139-141. 'Entangled photons conspire to create interference patterns that would normally be associated with a wavelength much smaller than that of the individual photons, beating the diffraction limit.'. back

Szathnary, Eors, Peter Hammersetin, "John Maynard-Smith (1920-2004)", Nature, 429, 6989, 20 May 2004, page 258-259. 'John Maynard-Smith ... made crucial contributions to several debates in evolutionary theory: the levels -- genes, the individual organism, and so on -- at which natural selection operates effectively; the maintenance of sex as a costly mode of reproduction; the use of game theory for biological analysis of conflict and cooperation; the characteristics of major evolutionary transitions, such as the origin of multicellularity; and the logic of animal signalling. ... Maynard-Smith observed succinctly that twentieth-century biology is more about the role of information in biology than about anything else. The terminology of molecular biology (transcription, translation, proofreading and so on), the concept of positional information in embryology, the nervous system as information processor and the questions on animal signalling (about which he published his last book just a few months ago) all confirm the validity of this point. ... '. back

Tschumperlin, Daniel J, et al, "Mechanotransduction through growth-factor shedding into the extracellular space", Nature, 429, 6987, 6 May 2004, page 83-86. 'Physical forces elicit biochemical signalling in a diverse array of cells, tissues and organisms, helping to govern fundamental biological processes. Several hypotheses have been advanced that link physical forces to intracellular signalling pathways, but in most cases the molecular mechanisms of mechanotransduction remain elusive. Here we find that compressive stress shrinks the lateral intercellular space surrounding epithelial cells and triggers cellular signalling via autocrine binding of epidermal growth factor family ligands to the epidermal growth factor receptor.'. back

Walther, Philip, et al, "De Broglie wavelength of a non-local four-photon state", Nature, 429, 6989, 13 May 2004, page 158-161. 'Superposition is one of the most distinctive features of quantum theory and has been demonstratred in numerous single particle interference experiments. Quantum entanglement, the coherent superposition of states in multi-particle systems, yields more complex phenomena. One important type of multi-particle experiment uses path entangled number states, which exhibit pure higher order interference and potential for applications in metrology and imaging; ... It has been generally understood that in optical implemetations of such schemes, lower order interference effects always decrease the overall performance at higher particle numbers. ... Here we have overcome this limitation, demonstrating a four-photon inteferometer based on linear optics. ... We anticipate that this scheme should be extendable to arbitrary photon numersa, holding promise for realizable applications with entanglement-enhanced performance.'. back

Links

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