|
 Oscillation,
the primordial pulse
re:
sounds like habit hb: Yup, it sure does. We grasp at a novelty like roller-skating,
take a few weeks to learn it, fall, make fools of ourselves, then begin
to get the hang of it, rollerskate for a year or two in the local park
with great gusto, then get bored and look for something new to add to
our kit of habits and skills. We take up the tango and make fools of ourselves
all over again, then, once we've mastered it, it eventually grow bored
and look for some other novelty--white water rafting, camping in Alaska,
rock-climbing, snowboarding. What do we do with the kit of skills we assemble
in this way. Is all play really a form of practice for the everyday...and
for emergencies too? When we enter a conference room, do we see the problems
tossed our way in terms of roller-skating, tango dancing, white water
rafting, or rock climbing? Once we've got a big kit of skills, do we see
problems and opportunities in terms of all of these tricks we've learned
to perform? Do these muscular habits give us tools of comprehension, new
forms of metaphor? Boredom and the lust for novelty add to what we feel
and know...but how does that show up in everyday life? Howard In a message
dated 5/16/2003 9:02:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: It also sounds
a lot like habit. "There is a law in this succession of ideas. We
may roughly say it is the law of habit. It is the great 'Law of Association
of Ideas,' the one law of all psychical action." - Charles Sanders
Peirce At 12:57 AM 5/16/03 -0400, wrote: bite, chew, digest, use up, get
hungry, bite, chew, digest, use up, get hungry-this is the basic oscillitory
pattern of the cosmos.
_________
amazing, thanks. Howard In a message dated 1/3/2003 2:53:45 PM Eastern
Standard Time, writes: At 1/3/2003 01:55 AM, you wrote: gb: In a linear
system, these forces would be in a stable equilibrium. In a nonlinear
system, ie the brain, turning up the gain might result in bistable behavior,
with apparently sudden shifts between the two states. hb: after decades
of building radios and operating oscilliscopes, it is time for me to finally
reveal my ignorance. What does turn up the gain mean? Turn up the amplification
of random bits that may make sense...or that may crash the system with
their incoherence? If that were the case, turning up the gain would be
exploration and novelty testing. Turning the gain down to exclude the
fuzz and buzz of possible discoveries, to focus only on what's tried and
true, would be the equivalent of the k phase, the conservative phase,
digestion and consolidation. gb: In neural systems, gain refers to the
steepness of an S-shaped input-output function. This is typically used
to model neural functions in which there is a floor effect, eg once you
inhibit a cell, it's pretty much quiescent and doesn't have negative firing
rate, and with excitatory inputs, you eventually reach a saturation effect
where no matter how much more you drive the cell it doesn't fire any faster.
The gain describes how sharp the transition is between these two extremes.
Increasing the gain is equivalent to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio,
and in the extreme is equivalent to a thresholding function (on or off).
very interesting behavior occurs when you connect two neurons like this
in which they inhibit each other. If the gain (steepness) is not particularly
great, then the system behaves linearly (as one goes up the other goes
down). If the gain is large, however, then you observe bistable behavior,
where one neuron is completely on and the other is off -- no in between.
g
________
Hmmm, so ants create order using lateral inhibition of precisely the same
kind that sweeps the debris from between batches of matter competing to
become stars. Ants use oscillation to produce the architecture of a burial
place. Termites use a similar "local activation and long-range inhitition"
to create the pillars, arches, walls, and architecture of their mounds.
There's many a form of ebb and tide, of crest and trough, of primal wave,
in the way this universe is made. Howard
Orderly Ant Corpses NYT July 23, 2002 By HENRY FOUNTAIN [What are the
human analogies?] When it comes to planned communities, there is none
more planned than a graveyard. To ensure that the departed truly rest
in peace, many cemeteries have regulations to govern plot location and
size, maintenance, placing of flowers and wreaths and even access. (In
addition to being planned, most cemeteries are gated communities, too.)
Some ants keep their cemeteries just as well organized. Ants will move
a corpse and pile it up with others to create a tidy final resting place.
There are no rules and regulations, of course, but as researchers from
France, Belgium and Spain have discovered, there are some principles at
work. The researchers conducted experiments on ant colonies, distributing
corpses around the edge of a circular arena and then watching as worker
ants tended to the dead. After six or more hours, the ants had moved the
corpses into a stable pattern of piles of roughly equal size. Out of the
initial chaos and without communicating, the workers had created order.
Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers
noted that the pattern was produced by application of two simple rules.
First, ants are more likely to put a corpse where there already are a
bunch of corpses. Second, the growth of any one pile is slowed as the
supply of nearby corpses is reduced. Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing
may recognize that this is a demonstration of a process that he first
described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account for patterns in nature like
a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The process is called local activation
and long-range inhibition. In the ant experiments, pile growth involves
local activation (a growing pile induces more growth of the pile) and
long-range inhibition (a growing pile means that there will be fewer corpses
elsewhere). The researchers, using a mathematical model, say it is one
of the first demonstrations of this kind of self-organized behavior in
a biological system. Signals From Cells When a single cell within an organism
dies, it isn't buried or tossed on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another
type of cell called a phagocyte. But just how does a phagocyte know not
to eat a healthy cell? Scientists have long thought that in apoptosis,
the programmed death of cells that occurs, for instance, as an embryo
develops, the dying cells produce a chemical signal that tells phagocytes
that there is prey around. But a new study by scientists at two British
universities shows that another pathway may be at work, one that involves
the removal of an existing signal. Writing in the journal Nature, the
researchers described their experiments with healthy and dying white blood
cells. They found that these cells and the phagocytes that consume them
both have a protein, called CD31, that binds them together. If a blood
cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays bound to it only briefly, detaching
after getting a "repulsion" signal through the protein. But
if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked, so the phagocyte stays locked
to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what the signal consists of is
a subject for further research. Pterosaur's Dining Habits The fossilized
skull of a new pterosaur species has been discovered in Brazil, and the
finding shows that this flying reptile had an odd way of eating: it skimmed
along the surface of a lake or ocean looking for food. Pterosaurs lived
in the time of the dinosaurs, but little is known about them. The fossil,
discovered by two scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural
History, shows that this pterosaur, at least, had long jawbones that the
researchers suggest are similar to those of skimming birds. Writing in
Science, the researchers say the pterosaur, with a wingspan over 12 feet,
probably glided along the water and dipped its head when it ran into food.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
________
even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of
just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen
struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these
whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to
separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen
and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by
the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit
interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the
World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309>
100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001;
Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page:
68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
corpse where there already are a bunch of corpses. Second, the growth
of any one pile is slowed as the supply of nearby corpses is reduced.
Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing may recognize that this is a demonstration
of a process that he first described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account
for patterns in nature like a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The
process is called local activation and long-range inhibition. In the ant
experiments, pile growth involves local activation (a growing pile induces
more growth of the pile) and long-range inhibition (a growing pile means
that there will be fewer corpses elsewhere). The researchers, using a
mathematical model, say it is one of the first demonstrations of this
kind of self-organized behavior in a biological system. Signals From Cells
When a single cell within an organism dies, it isn't buried or tossed
on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another type of cell called a phagocyte.
But just how does a phagocyte know not to eat a healthy cell? Scientists
have long thought that in apoptosis, the programmed death of cells that
occurs, for instance, as an embryo develops, the dying cells produce a
chemical signal that tells phagocytes that there is prey around. But a
new study by scientists at two British universities shows that another
pathway may be at work, one that involves the removal of an existing signal.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers described their experiments
with healthy and dying white blood cells. They found that these cells
and the phagocytes that consume them both have a protein, called CD31,
that binds them together. If a blood cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays
bound to it only briefly, detaching after getting a "repulsion"
signal through the protein. But if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked,
so the phagocyte stays locked to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what
the signal consists of is a subject for further research. Pterosaur's
Dining Habits The fossilized skull of a new pterosaur species has been
discovered in Brazil, and the finding shows that this flying reptile had
an odd way of eating: it skimmed along the surface of a lake or ocean
looking for food. Pterosaurs lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but little
is known about them. The fossil, discovered by two scientists affiliated
with the American Museum of Natural History, shows that this pterosaur,
at least, had long jawbones that the researchers suggest are similar to
those of skimming birds. Writing in Science, the researchers say the pterosaur,
with a wingspan over 12 feet, probably glided along the water and dipped
its head when it ran into food. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
________
even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of
just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen
struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these
whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to
separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen
and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by
the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit
interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the
World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309>
100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001;
Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page:
68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
________
Here's a bit of maniacal thinking with consequences that could prove powerful.
Take a look and see if how daft and delusional it looks to you.
Physicists believe that this cosmos is addicted to symmetries. Symmetrical
obsession, in fact, is one of the reasons the human aesthetic sensibility
so often comes up with fantasies that turn out later to reflect realities.
Einstein and many other physicists have cooked up with abstract mathematical
systems that seemed to describe the "proven facts" of their
day. But there was often something wrong-a fly in the aesthetic ointment.
The equations worked right but didn't FEEL right. They weren't "beautiful"-usually
because they were off kilter, their symmetry wasn't perfect.
Time after time, a mathematical physicist has cheated and re-tweaked the
equations to wipe out the imbalance and create a factually inaccurate,
but gorgeous result. Then, voila, some years or decades down the road,
the fudge factors tossed in to satisfy the physicist's artistic sense
have accounted for new data pouring in from new scientific eyes and ears
like the Hubble Space Telescope. The cheating turned out to be an unrecognized
form of prescience. Why? Usually the answer has been symmetry.
With symmetry in mind, try this necklace of connections on for size. I've
been blabbering for years about the universe's propensity to work in paradoxes,
and have repeated what may be an utterly fallacious phrase of my own devising:
"opposites are joined at the hip." Then there's another thought
Martin Rees' book Before the Beginning and this group's five years of
discussion of entropy have triggered in the last few days-the universe
abhors a stasis; a sit-in-the-middle-and-do-nothing or a wandering-around-aimlessly-ness.
Or, to put it differently, the universe abhors a thermodynamic equilibrium-the
state of ultimate randomness toward which Second Law of Thermodynamics
Fans claim we are constantly drifting.
Add in yet another thought-the notion that there's oscillation no matter
where you turn in the universe--
-in the pressure waves ringing the post-Big Bang like a gong
-in the rippling waves of electromagnetic rays traveling in straight lines
-in the waveforms of electrons circling an atomic nucleus
-in the lateral inhibition that sets up crests and valleys between photoreceptors
in the iris
-and in the cultural oscillations of fads, fashions, conservatisms and
radical rebellions.
Sounds like an agenda of babbling topics for a convention of madmen, right?
OK, now look at a key finding of the article below. What happens when
you get one learning machine, one neural net, to train another? The two
become alike. They meet, says the article, at a common point in their
center. So far, so good. Studies done in the 1950s and 1960s of patients
in therapy showed something similar. Put a patient and a psychotherapist
together and the therapist will say that the patient is moving toward
a cure once the patient begins talking like the therapist. Or look at
the studies done by Condon and others in the Edward Hall school of anthropology-put
two people in a room, let them talk, and the pair will begin to synchronize
their body language and rhythms, and will enter into a non-verbal duet.
The odd thing in the piece below is the appearance of an ordinary, everyday
cliché. When neural nets train each other, they become mirror images
of each other-"equal but opposite." Equal but opposite? What
a bizarre concept. How can two things be equal yet opposite. How can they
be utterly alike AND totally opposed? The answer is symmetry.
So what does symmetry produce? Opposite ends of paradoxes joined at the
hip-good and evil, day and night, boom and bust, depression and elation,
convergence and dissipation, attraction and repulsion, wrong and right.
And what is oscillation? A wavering between two opposite (but equal) poles
of this sort.
Symmetry=opposites=equals=paradox=oscillation. What's more, oscillation=music=math=the
rules of the cosmos. And music=emotion. Which, if there's anything more
than gibberish to this, might mean that there's more than meets the eye
to the connection between the human emotions and the cosmos, between anthropos
and the universe, and between anthropomorphism and the inanimate form
of morphing we call evolution. Or, to put it differently, nature may abhor
a stasis and a thermodynamic equilibrium, but she's drunk on generating
opposites and symmetries, then on twisting and jumping from one end of
a symmetry to the other. We call this dance craze of mother nature an
oscillation, a wave form.
See, I told you it would sound crazy. Howard
________
Don--Thoroughly agreed and wonderfully put. No matter how much you homogenize,
hegemonize, or globalize, humans are simultaneously drawn to aggregation
and separation, to intimacy and the need to avoid being smothered, and
above all else to squabbling--finding minor differences and making a big
deal over them. Peter Richerson would say that though we are going global,
we still need to satisfy our old family and tribe instincts by congregating
in small, contentious subgroups. He'd be right. So would your meme-stack
predictions. No matter where you look in this cosmos, attraction and repulsion
are paired and keep us literally throbbing with lateral inhibition, the
constant creation of what Darwin called variation and what some call creativity.
Even some of the microbits suspended in water I just wrote about to Greg
Bear often pull together then push apart in a constant pulse. So do the
convection cells Dorion Sagan has described so vividly.
Another note: your statement of the need for horizontal and vertical dimension
viewed simultaneously is a good one. But I suspect we need to add a fifth
dimension to our thinking. And here I'm speaking literally. It's late,
and once again I'll have to end before I can explain exactly what I mean.
Howard
We pulse upward with fracticality. That's the Spiral Dynamic theme. From
the smallest hint of things come vast and strange unravellings.
In a message dated 3/28/02 9:28:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
Yes, Howard, and we are also engaged in meme swapping at a rapid rate.
It should be clear, however, we are not melting into a primal soup-of-sorts
that dissolve unique human differences into a glob of tasteless uniformity.
Rather, the magnetic pull in our vMeme stacks provide a cohesion principle
and process that maintains the real diversities in our mass mind. While
we often curse clans, tribes, empires, holy orders, enterprises, communes
and natural meshworks, these are the essential pillars that support and
facilitate the evolution of our kind. They provide the foundation stones;
the organizing principles; the developmental tracks, and the game board
for your intergroup tournaments. Flatlanders can't play on these board
because they lack the three dimensional depth-of-vision to enable them
to play both on the horizontal and the vertical trajectories simultaneously.
It takes both the horizontal and the vertical insights and actions to
keep us slightly ahead in our struggle with microbes.
This is the memome's way of making the great escape.
________
<http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992067> newscientist.com
Neural network 'in-jokes' could pass secrets 19:10 23 March 02 Charles
Choi, New York Artificial brains could use "in-jokes" to deliver
secret messages, according to computer scientists. The technique relies
on neural networks, computer systems designed to mimic the brain. Just
as the brain's nerve cells are wired together in a complex mesh, neural
nets consist of a web of electrical switches, or a computer simulation
of these connections. When neural networks tackle a problem, connections
that are ultimately successful become stronger than those that give a
wrong answer. The more lessons a network trains with, the better it learns
which pathways to follow to find the right answers. What happens, then,
when two different neural networks are used to train each other? Wolfgang
Kinzel of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Wurzburg, Germany,
and Ido Kanter of the Minerva Center in Ramat-Gan, Israel, tried it with
old-fashioned hardware networks, and found that the two met in the middle,
becoming mirror images. Equal and opposite In each lesson, the scientists
asked the computers to categorise unique, random pieces of information
with the aim of getting the same answer as their partner. After each round,
they compared each other's results. In a surprisingly short time, the
two networks became aligned so that their properties are equal and opposite
at every point. Connections that flowed one way in one network went in
the opposite direction in its partner. From there, it is a simple step
for one of the pair to reverse all its weightings so the two networks
end up identical. They would have the same weightings, without ever having
told each other what they were. The researchers realised that this phenomenon
could be useful in cryptography. At present, computers that need to exchange
information securely use codes or "keys" based on huge numbers.
But one weakness of this system is that the sender has to secretly tell
the receiver what the key is before they can start exchanging messages.
An eavesdropper who hears the key will be able to decode any subsequent
communications. But synchronised neural networks could use their hidden
weightings as the key. Jumping to conclusions Imagine two friends talking
in public surrounded by eavesdroppers. If the friends share an in-joke,
the spies - not having shared the same unique experiences - will have
a hard time figuring out what is going on. Similarly, synchronised networks
will jump to the same conclusion, given the same limited information.
Immediate applications might include anything that needs to send information
rapidly and securely, such as mobile phones, video conferencing and Internet
communication. Kinzel even speculates that living organisms might be using
the same principle to transfer information between different parts of
the nervous system. The technique could be quite powerful, says computer
engineer Don Wunsch at the University of Missouri in Rolla. "I could
see it becoming an alternative when users need to create a cheap and fast
encryption with a minimum of shared communication, when security is of
moderate, but not life-and-death, concern." 19:10 23 March 02 Return
to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
_______________________________
why do photons pulsate? Why do they grow larger, then smaller as they
travel? This seems like something one would expect of organisms--which
use pulsation for numerous purposes, from searching the opportunities
and hazards of their environment to taking in nutrients and expelling
wastes. But that a basic particle should pulsate? This means that the
conjoined opposites of shrinkage and growth were operating when the first
leptons made their grab for the big time--which means during roughly the
first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang. Interesting. So we had not just
repulsion and attraction, but their cousin, oscillation, from the first
instant of all that ever was in this particular universe. And it's now
complexifying via iterative processes into what will come next and the
nextnesses beyond imagining. Howard
________
Alex Burns and hb 1130-01 >hb: I noticed that. The manifestos of goth
culture and of rave and >ecstasy cultures are resurrections of what
I went through in the >sixties. they appeal to me hugely. Your observation
of pop culture's >fracticality is brilliant. ab: Actually, there's
a key idea here, called Dark Renaissance, that Richard and I have been
kicking around. The idea was first expressed on an alt.satanism group
posting, so I mapped out the cultural dynamics and added a lot of depth.
It might be part of a Masters/PhD proposal, if I get faculty approval.
hb: sounds neat, and it also sounds isomorphic to the material in the
Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe including the
human soul on the fracticality and oscilatory patter of generation gaps
and how those reflect more basic patterns from the big bang on up. This
universe is simply nuts about oscillation--put another way, it has a jones
for self-contradiction.
_______________________________
Van Philpot and I were discussing the universality of liquid patterns
of pulsation, turbulence, and vortex-like movement in the universe a few
weeks ago on the phone. Van has developed some ideas about the connections
between the patterns of those masses of membrane-bound liquids which we
call our bodies and the flows of form in the cosmos. At first glance,
this sounds like a very far stretch indeed. But when one examines such
books as Philip Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), one realizes that there are
fundamental cycles of self-organization in this cosmos which repeat on
numerous levels of complexity.
Physicist Lee Smolin proposes that galaxies are very much like evolving
ecosystems--interlinked meshes of entities repeating large and small scale
patterns whose iteration yanks them ever-so-slowly up a ladder of complexity.
Those patterns are partially governed by the same rules which shape the
swirls of cream in a coffee cup. The pulsations of the sun are driven
by many of the same rules--convection, for example. So when the authors
of an article like the one below about new rhythmic swirls discovered
in the sun's center compare solar rhythms to a heartbeat, they may be
utilizing more than anthropomorphic metaphor. They may be hinting at the
patterns of self organization genes must harness to create a regularly
beating circulator of liquids like the heart. Or they may not. But looking
for these basic patterns could be highly important to the science of the
new millennium. The SCIENCE of the new millennium, not its superstitions.
This is one reason that the move of physicists like Eshel Ben-Jacob into
biology may signal a turning point in the way we understand the continuities
between inanimate matter and life. If we are lucky, comprehending these
continuities may help us tackle an even larger mystery--the jump from
that which is not alive to life, and beyond that, the leap from non-conscious
life forms to those with that internal cosmos we call consciousness. Howard
P.S. Spending a month researching Pythagoras for Global Brain, it seems
at first glance, may have shredded what little sanity I had left. Pythagoras
saw a continuity between mathematics, music, man, and the spheres. But
another ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus had an equally nutty idea--that
matter was made up of invisible particles called atoms. Old ideas in the
light of new findings sometimes turn out to have a validity of a sort
their originators could never have imagined.
---------
Source: National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov) Date: Posted
3/31/2000 Solar "Heartbeat" Discovered: The Beat Goes On --
Inside The Sun Astronomers from the National Science Foundation's National
Solar Observatory (NSO) have discovered a solar "heartbeat"
in the motion of layers of gas circulating beneath the sun's surface.
Their research shows that some layers speed up and slow down about every
16 months. This internal motion provides clues to understanding the cycle
of activity observed on the surface. Understanding the solar cycle is
a fundamental objective of solar astronomy. Every 11 years, the normally
quiet sun exhibits a high level of activity in the form of sunspots, solar
flares and coronal mass ejections. These eruptions can affect cellular
phones, power distribution systems, satellites and other sensitive technology.
Rachel Howe, Frank Hill and Rudi Komm of the NSO in Tucson, Ariz., and
their colleagues analyzed more than four years of observations from the
Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), a worldwide network of solar
telescopes, to detect and model motion inside the sun. They report their
results in the March 31 issue of Science. The sun is made up of layers
of gas. Scientists probe these layers by using helioseismic methods to
analyze sound waves traveling through the sun's interior. The techniques
are similar to the seismic techniques used to study earthquakes. Howe's
team examined layers extending almost halfway to the solar core and measured
the speed of movement at different depths. They believe the patterns in
these movements are connected to the cycle of eruptions seen on the surface.
"We listen to the sun's 'heartbeat' to understand what is happening
in its core," explains Hill. Unlike the earth, all points on the
solar surface do not rotate at the same rate. The solar equator rotates
once every 27 days, while the rotation rate at the sun's poles slows to
once every 35 days. This "differential" rotation, long a mystery
of solar physics, extends through the sun's turbulent convective layer,
located about 210,000 kilometers below the surface -- nearly one-third
of the distance to the solar core. Below this layer, the differential
rotation vanishes. At the edge of the convective layer, Howe and her colleagues
used GONG data to determine that the rotation rate varies periodically,
completing a cycle about every 15-16 months. The team used data from the
NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
spacecraft to confirm the pattern of these variations. "At first
we were skeptical of the pattern. Knowing the complexity of models used
to explain the solar magnetic field and its connection to observed solar
activity, we were expecting nothing, or chaos, in our observations at
that location," said Howe. The GONG network (http://www.gong.noao.edu/sites/sites.html)
is an international project led by the National Science Foundation. It
provides continuous observations of the sun, monitoring the surface and
tracking its tiny oscillations 24 hours a day. These oscillations are
visual evidence of the sound waves traveling through the sun's interior.
-NSF- Editors: Images and video are available at http://www.nso.noao.edu/press/tach/
Also see http://www.gong.noao.edu Editor's Note: The original news release
can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0015.htm Note:
_______________________________
The previous rant on the relationship between viscous flows of galactic
material, solar plasmas, and those which DNA orchestrates to construct
and maintain an organism was inspired by the following article submitted
by David Schwaderer. We now have a field called astrobiology, reports
this piece. Which means that the link between life and the cosmos has
been posited in one direction-that there may be life on other planets
or moons. Now to see the connection pursued in the opposite directions-how
do the rules which give form to the cosmos show up in the formation of
life? What elemental algorithms of self-organization are choreographed
to create not just the massive motet of a star but the micro-symphony
of a human being? Howard
-----------------
This artist's conception shows a proposed ice-penetrating cryobot and
a submersible hydrobot that could be used to explore a hidden body of
Antarctic water known as Lake Vostok as well as what appears to be an
ice-covered ocean on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Astrobiology: A down-to-earth
view The search for life in the universe begins in your back yard By Alan
Boyle MSNBC SEATTLE, March 31 - The word "astrobiology" may
summon up images of boldly going in search of Vulcans or even more exotic
aliens. You might think it has to do primarily with Mars, or Europa, or
planets around other suns. But the fact is, Topic A in the rapidly growing
field of astrobiology is good old Planet Earth. THE EMPHASIS on Earth
comes through loud and clear in the agenda for NASA's Astrobiology Science
Conference, scheduled April 3-5 at Ames Research Center in California.
More than half of the 51 presentations on the schedule focus on life on
Earth - how it arose in the distant past, how it endures in extreme environments,
how it can be affected by climate and chemistry. "We define astrobiology
in the broadest way as the study of life in the universe," said David
Morrison, who heads Ames' astrobiology and space research directorate.
And since Earth is the only place in the universe where we know life exists,
"we have to start with what we know," he said. "One of
the fascinating aspects of astrobiology is that it's asking the same questions
that mankind has been asking for thousands of years," said Lynn Rothschild,
a NASA evolutionary biologist who chairs the conference's local organizing
committee. "We tend to be a very self-centered species." IN
THE CLASSROOM There are many strategies in the search for extraterrestrial
life. Which do you think could be the most fruitful? Looking for traces
of ancient life on Mars. Exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Listening
for faraway radio signals. Investigating distant Earthlike planets. None
of the above (discuss on Space News BBS). Vote to see results Earthly
matters also figure prominently at the University of Washington's astrobiology
program in Seattle, where graduate students in such fields as oceanography,
atmospheric science, astronomy, geology, chemistry and mathematics pore
through scientific papers and classroom seminars about life's place in
the universe. It's considered the nation's first doctoral program in astrobiology,
supported by a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's
Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program. Eight
students were selected for this first year of the program. The topic for
a recent class was the Snowball Earth theory, which proposes that our
planet went through a global deep-freeze hundreds of millions of years
ago. In some ways, the "ice-covered Earth was similar to an ice-free
Mars," suggested University of Chicago geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert,
the guest speaker for the day. The discussion ranged from the roles that
clouds, volcanoes and carbon dioxide levels play in determining a planet's
climate ... to different models for photosynthesis ... to plate tectonics
... to the latest findings from Mars Global Surveyor ... to the potential
traces of ancient life left behind in fossil formations known as stromatolites.
That kind of scientific cross-pollination may sound dizzying, but it's
just what the students were looking for. "I like the way different
disciplines interrelate with each other," said Craig Brown, a first-year
graduate student in atmospheric sciences. The instructors like it, too.
"Four years ago, you couldn't get an oceanographer to listen to you
for five minutes about planets," recalled Conway Leovy, an atmospheric
sciences professor who is a co-investigator in the astrobiology program.
Since then, scientists have become increasingly interested in the potential
parallels between the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans
and the conditions that may exist beneath the surface ice on Europa, one
of Jupiter's moons. TO BE OR NOT TO BE? Biologists have been surprised
to find life enduring at the volcanic vents, within polar ice and in rock
miles beneath Earth's crust. At the same time, revelations about water
beyond Earth and planets beyond our solar system have led astronomers
to wonder whether life might have gained similar footholds in otherworldly
environments. Advertisement Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in
the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee Scientists say the quest
is worth taking on, even if it turns out that life is unique to Earth.
If astrobiologists find no signs of life in extraterrestrial environments
that are similar to Earth's, "it's equally important for us to know
... why not?" Rothschild said. Whether or not there's life out there,
it's essential to take a closer look at life down here, Morrison said.
He voiced particular interest in Earth's extreme environments and the
largely undiscovered world of microscopic organisms. "If you dug
up a bucket of dirt in your back yard, you'd find more microbes in there
than there are stars in the galaxy, and 99 percent of them are unknown,"
he said. That's why some of the presentations at the astrobiology conference
focus on microscopic organisms found within Arctic sea ice, or within
the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, or within boiling-hot sulfide
chimneys on the bottom of the Pacific. Such organisms seem to be the most
likely suspects in the search for life beyond Earth. Advertisement In
fact, two University of Washington researchers argue that microbes might
well be the only kind of life that scientists could ever expect to find
out there. In the book "Rare Earth," paleontologist Peter Ward
and astronomer Donald Brownlee say Earth benefited from a hard-to-match
combination of fortunate factors - ranging from its position in the solar
system and the Milky Way galaxy to global climate changes and the timing
of asteroid and comet impacts. "This may be as good as it gets in
terms of diversity," Ward said. Ward and a colleague, astronomer
Guillermo Gonzalez, are now looking into whether supernovae or other cosmic
factors may have played a role in winnowing down Earth's species. "We
still have a bunch of mass extinctions that have no (apparent) cause,
but certainly we know that something caused them," Ward said. Some
evolutionary theorists argue that the development of complex life was
driven by close shaves that required organisms to adapt or die - a cosmic
manifestation of the saying, "That which does not kill us makes us
stronger." If that's the case, then the path toward higher species
traced a narrow line between the torpor of unconsciousness and the terror
of extinction. Even researchers involved in the search for radio signals
from extraterrestrial civilizations acknowledge that intelligent life
must be far rarer than mute microbes. Otherwise, the galaxy would be busier
than the alien-filled cantina in the movie "Star Wars." But
they contend that even if complex life is exceedingly rare, the vast number
of stellar systems in our galaxy evens out the odds. Ward admits he's
had some healthy debates with SETI researchers and calls them "first-class"
scientists - who happen to hold a different point of view. "We really
have to agree to disagree on some of these unknowable questions,"
he said.
_______________________________
Steve Goldberg refers to a New York Times article on string theory and
asks, "doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?
"
Steve--I've enclosed the article you mentioned below. Why does string
theory sound ad hoc? Yes, it does sound like it may be a mathematical
widget of the type used by Copernicans to shore up their shredding theory
of the universe back in 1500 or so. But on another level, like all mathematical
systems, it's its own self-consistent universe. It may or may not resemble
reality, but it has a sort of Platonic reality all its own. Or, to put
it differently, it is a rigorous fantasy guided by rules based on axiomatic
premises which are possible in this world of conceivable multiverses,
but which may never sneak from possibility into solidity. So, yes, it
does have the feel of a quick-fix patch on a leaking inner tube.
When one looks at the history of physics, one realizes how leaky that
inner tube might be. It is still trying to incorporate laws derived early
in the 19th century. Even the Theory of Relativity was an attempt to get
these antique concepts to segue smoothly with the new observations which
had accumulated since the days of Maxwell and Faraday.
In this sense, all the current efforts to find a GUT, a grand unified
theory of physics, seem a bit creaky. All incorporate approaches which
may have outlived their time. Physics seems to ache for a new paradigm
which will remove the mess of patchwork complexities added to keep the
rickety old machine operating--a paradigm which will satisfy the demands
of Occam's razor and dazzle us all with its simplicity.
One thing that strikes me is the manner in which string theory and many
of the other approaches of modern physics are consistently described as
musical. George Johnson, in the piece below, says the string theory he
describes would unify "all the forces ...into one.. -- as a kind
of mathematical music played by an orchestra of tiny vibrating strings.
Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent one of the many different
kinds of particles that make up matter and energy."
Schrodinger's equations for quantum wave mechanics were based on mathematical
descriptions of the vibration patterns of stringed instruments and drums.
(Sternglass: 28-29.) This isn't surprising when one considers that sound
is a pattern of waves, and music a subset of this form of oscillation.
The music of the universe--an old Pythagorean concept--comes up in astrophysics
as well. One of its latest manifestations is the notion that for its first
300,000 years of existence, the universe rang like a huge gong. The plasma
of proton-neutron clusters colliding at superspeed with was more like
a thick, hyperactive soup than like the gaping black space with which
we're familiar. Dip a spoon in a soup and you get ripples--pressure waves--yet
another equivalent of the pressure waves in air which our ears decipher
as sound.
Making things all the more Pythagorean is the fact that according to former
head of the Apollo Lunar Station Program at Westinghouse Research Laboratories,
Ernest J. Sternglass, Einstein was insistent on taming the wildly abstract
quantum mechanics of his day and turning it into a visualizable, geometric
system with its probabilistic uncertainties resolved into hard and fast
predictabilities. Sternglass had the privilege of a bit of time with Einstein,
so may know whereof he speaks.
Once you reduce the universe to music, you reduce it to oscillations and
begin moving in the direction of some very strange things indeed. We can
see the fractal repetition of oscillating patterns all over the place.
Aside from the aforementioned first 300,000 years, when the universe chimed
like a bell, the sun has a beat, a rhythmic pulse, that in many ways is
like the pulse of the human heart. Then there are human things like romance,
which pulse back and forth like the sun or like the masses of matter which
collect in galactic whorls. Humans fall in love with someone distant whom
they'd love to get close to. Once they gotten close, they panic and run.
Commitment phobia hits women as well as men. So in a romance, men and
women move together, then apart as regularly as the beat of the heart
The music of the spheres is alive in the way we love each other.
Then there are our intellectual cycles, wavering back and forth between
holism and reductionism but raising the same questions in 2000 as were
raised in 1830 by the holists Goethe inspired or in 1848 by the reductionists
who were rebelling against Goethe's influence. Just as the ringing of
the early universe helped move it forward in degrees of complexity, our
oscillations from left-brain micro-slicing to right brain piecing together
of big pictures and back again produces continuous movement upward. The
old questions take on new dimensions when they're asked in a medium thick
with new and as-yet-incompletely digested ideas and discoveries. So we
thinkers, too, oscillate like a plasma ringing with pressure waves.
It would seem that our curiosities, our passions, our music, the sun,
and the Big Bang are all linked. This makes sense if one believes in a
fractally unfolding universe. Fractal unfoldings oscillate back and forth
between fresh wonders of intricacy and the reemergence of the old patterns
on which they were initially based. We may be mere manifestations of an
ancient algorithm, a basic cosmic rule. infinitely superimposed and retraced.
Howard
In a message dated 4/8/00 1:04:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:
The
NY Times Tuesday Science Section had a lead article on string theory
(which now introduces "branes" to overcome problems of mathematics
and
explanatory power).
I'm
sorry T can't provide the article; I don't have a scanner (keep meaning
to get one). However, it was no doubt reprinted in other papers and is,
I
imagine, available on the Times web site.
Question:
I don't doubt that the theory is mathematically beautiful, even if,
to this point, entirely untested and, possibly, intestable in practice.
But
doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?
Best,
Steve Goldberg
>>
New York Times April 4, 2000, Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring
Theory By GEORGE JOHNSON For a quarter of a century, superstring theory
has promised that the universe could be understood more deeply than ever
before, with all the forces unified into one, if it were seen in a startling
new light -- as a kind of mathematical music played by an orchestra of
tiny vibrating strings. Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent
one of the many different kinds of particles that make up matter and energy.
But despite heroic efforts to keep this strange vision alive, with one
mathematical embellishment after another, a seemingly fatal credibility
problem has remained: no one has been able to figure out how to test the
idea with experiments. To give the strings enough wiggle room to carry
out their virtuoso performance, theorists have had to supplement the familiar
three dimensions of space with six more -- curled up so tiny that they
would be explorable only with absurdly high-powered particle accelerators
the size of an entire galaxy. It's a fact of life on the subatomic realm
that smaller and smaller distances take higher and higher energies to
probe. In the last few months, however, new ideas emerging from the theoretical
workshops offer some hope of connecting the airy speculations to reality.
Physicists are proposing a revised view in which at least one of the extra
dimensions is vastly larger -- large enough perhaps to be indirectly detected
with existing accelerators. "This is a field day for the experimenters,"
said Dr. Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. "Now there are all these things they
can look for." In fact, he ventured, it is conceivable that experimenters
have already found subtle hints of other dimensions. They just have had
no way of appreciating what they were seeing. Though human brains are
not wired to picture a world beyond the familiar three dimensions of space,
one can begin to overcome this myopia by pretending to be antlike creatures
in a two-dimensional fantasy world like the one in Edwin A. Abbott's story
"Flatland." Confined to the surface of a plane, the Flatlanders
can move left and right or forward or backward, but the idea of up and
down is inconceivable to them. Now suppose this two-dimensional world
were rolled into a long tube. The Flatlanders could still move in only
two directions -- along or around the outside surface of their soda straw
universe. But if the diameter of the straw were made extremely tiny, this
second, curled-up dimension would essentially disappear. It has long been
assumed that if, as required by superstring theory, our own world is accompanied
by additional dimensions, they too would have to be extremely tiny, curled
up smaller than what physicists call the Planck length, which is a hundred
million trillion times smaller than the width of a proton. To every point
in space would be attached a vanishingly tiny six-dimensional ball. But
the price for curling up the extra dimensions and tucking them out of
sight has been rendering superstring theory untestable. The subatomic
realm is explored by smashing together particles with powerful accelerators
and then studying the debris. Peeking below the Planck scale would require
collisions of unimaginable energies. "For the first 25 years, the
thinking has been that superstring theory is so difficult to see experimentally
that you have to figure it out by its own mathematical consistency and
beauty," Dr. Lykken said. "Now that's completely changed. If
this new picture is true, it makes everything we've been talking about
testable." But the result is a picture of reality that is no less
weird than before. Imagine again the two-dimensional realm of Flatland.
Suppose now that it is surrounded by an infinitely large, three-dimensional
"hyperspace." And maybe there are also other Flatlands floating
around inside the third dimension -- parallel universes separated by what
to these two-dimensional denizens would be an uncrossable void. Take this
vision and move up an extra dimension and you arrive at the theory that
is currently causing all the intellectual commotion. Dr. Lisa Randall
of Princeton University and Dr. Raman Sundrum of Stanford University suggest
that what we think of as The Universe may be just one of many islands
-- three-dimensional versions of Flatland -- floating inside a surrounding
megaverse with four spatial dimensions. Each ruled by different laws of
physics, the various island universes would be inaccessible to one another.
But the tantalizing prospect exists that each would be able to barely
sense the other's presence through the weak tug of its gravitational pull.
The idea may be easy to dismiss as absurd. But in return for a suspension
of disbelief, the new theories suggest answers to some of the biggest
riddles of physics. Cosmologists have inferred that as much as 90 percent
of the universe must be made from invisible matter that emits or absorbs
no light, that is evident only through its gravity. But what is the source
of this mysterious dark matter? Maybe it is just ordinary matter trapped
on another island universe, with its gravity but not its light able to
cross the fourth-dimensional divide. Most significant of all, the new
theory could be a step toward the goal of embracing all of physics with
one grand picture -- a vision that unites the reigning theory of gravity,
Einstein's general relativity, with the Standard Model, which describes
electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Theorists have
discovered that it is possible to bring about this merger -- on paper,
anyway -- if each kind of particle making up the universe is described
as a different note produced by tiny superstrings vibrating in nine-dimensional
space. This picture includes matter-making particles like the proton and
neutron (components of the cores of atoms) and force-carrying particles
like the photon (the conveyor of light) and the graviton (the conveyor
of gravity). As the unification quest has forged ahead, physicists have
found it necessary to expand superstring theory to include vibrating membranes
-- called branes for short. These are not just two-dimensional surfaces,
like the skin of a drum or the world of the Flatlanders. Hard as it may
be to picture, there can be branes with three, four, five or more dimensions.
These "surfaces" can be tiny like the strings but they can also
span across light-years. What this additional filigree offers is a novel
way to hide extra dimensions without making them extremely small. Suppose
that our entire universe is a three-dimensional brane (think of it as
a bubble) floating inside the four-dimensional megaverse. The reason we
cannot explore the surroundings of hyperspace or even sense its existence
is that the strings that make up everything in our own world are stuck
solidly to the surface of the gargantuan home brane, like ants on a sheet
of paper confined to move in only a limited number of directions. We cannot
peer into the extra dimension because photons, the carriers of light,
are also anchored solidly to our home brane. Several people had toyed
with this idea, but they kept running into an obstacle: there did not
appear to be any way to get gravitons to stick to the brane. That would
create a big problem: It can be shown mathematically that if gravity were
allowed to roam throughout all four dimensions, it would be much stronger
than the gravity experienced in this three-dimensional realm. "This
would clash with everything we've observed, from the motion of the planets
to that of climbers falling off cliffs," said Dr. Steve Giddings,
a theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Randall
and Dr. Sundrum's theoretical coup was to show that if the hyperspace
was curved in just the right manner, the gravitons could be kept from
escaping and becoming unreasonably strong. With that hole plugged, the
possibility arises that there are other brane worlds floating out there
too, neighboring islands separated by this higher dimensional void. And
that suggests how dark matter could simply be regular matter waving to
us from another brane. While its photons could move only along the surface
of the foreign brane, the gravitons would not be so tightly confined.
They could seep across the fourth-dimensional divide. Thus we could dimly
feel the matter's gravity without being able to see its light. The theory
also suggests why dark matter tends to be found in the halos around galaxies.
Because of gravitational attraction, large masses on the other brane would
tend to line up with large masses on our home brane. Sitting behind a
galaxy in this universe, separated by the void of hyperspace, would be
a dark galaxy in the other brane world. Because most of it would be occluded,
its gravity would be apparent only around the edges. Conversely, luminous
matter on this brane would be dark to observers in the other universe.
"We'd look mutually dark to each other," Dr. Sundrum said. "We
could only talk through the gravitational force." That would require
signaling somehow with gravity waves. Unlike many of physics' far-out
theories, the idea of a large extra dimension may be possible to test
indirectly. Since gravitons are not so tightly confined as the other particles,
sometimes they will stray into the surrounding hyperspace, becoming heavier
than the ordinary variety. According to the theorists' calculations, it
just may be possible to create momentarily these denizens of the fourth
dimension using the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, where protons are
slammed into antiprotons to produce energies measured in trillions of
electron-volts. Physicists would not be able to detect heavy gravitons
directly -- they would immediately fly off into the higher dimension --
but their existence might be inferred. Energy going into a particle collision
must equal the energy coming out. If some is missing and all other possibilities
are accounted for, physicists could surmise that the energy was spirited
away by the heavy gravitons, carried off into hyperspace. In fact, it
might be possible to concentrate so many heavy gravitons into a tiny volume
of space that they would collapse in on themselves and create miniature
black holes, those cosmic sinkholes from which nothing can escape. Experiments
like this will be on the agenda when the Large Hadron Collider begins
operation in five or six years at the CERN accelerator center in Geneva.
"These black holes should be quite safe," Dr. Giddings said,
for they would rapidly evaporate. The intellectual fun may be only beginning.
Combining the Randall and Sundrum theory with a conjecture made a couple
of years ago by a young Argentinian physicist, Dr. Juan Maldacena, yields
the latest big idea: the physics governing the particles stuck to this
brane might be a kind of shadow of a more fundamental physics prevailing
in the surrounding megaverse. In laser holography, a three-dimensional
image is encoded onto a two-dimensional surface. Viewed at the proper
angle, the third dimension seems magically to pop out. So think of each
separate brane world as a hologram carrying a flattened version of the
Truly Universal Laws. Each would capture the view from a slightly different
perspective, resulting in different universes ruled by different laws
of physics. What denizens of this universe call the Standard Model would
not be standard at all, but more like a book of local traffic laws. Viewed
from the fourth dimension, however, universality would prevail. If they
were clever enough, scientists on each brane world could deduce the same
overarching law of gravity, the lingua franca of the megaverse. As they
await the data that will provide a reality check, the physicists on this
brane are enjoying their new intellectual toy. "We can look at any
question we were previously mystified by and get a new handle on it,"
Dr. Lykken said. "That doesn't mean this is right, but it makes theorists
very happy." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
**
the sun. Then MAP will settle down to capturing microwave photons that
have been traveling for about 13 billion years, almost since the beginning
of time. For its first 300,000 years, the universe was a hot cauldron
ofprotons, electrons, and other charged particles. Light coul&t travel
far in this boiling subatomic stew before it bounced off some electron,
just as light inside a cloud scatters off droplets of water. The early
universe would have looked rather like a thick fog bank-opaque. But after
300,000 years, it cooled off enough to undergo a profound change: Electrons
settled down and combined with protons to form hydrogen, which is transparent.
Once the fog dispersed, photons traveled freely throughout the universe.
Those photons -light from the dawn of creation-bathe us here on Earth;
about 400 of them fill every cubic centimeter. If you use an antenna for
television reception instead of cable, photons from the cosmic microwave
background cause some of the snow on your television screen. Lyman Page
likes to call that radiation "the universe's baby picture."
m" will study that image in unprecedented detail. For its Survey,
COBF divided the sky into about 6,ooo patches, each about as large as
400 fiffl moons. mAp will look at more than 3 million patches, each less
than a quarter the size of moon. If coBE glimpsed God, mAp will see the
deity's fmg!e@- prints. Cosmologists expect many of their answers to come
from an echo frozen in the microwave background. As strange as it may
seem, cosmologists believe that before the primbr- dial fog cleared, before
light could travel unhindered throli& space, sound waves reverberated
freely throughout the universe. The sound waves may have originated in
the first instant of the universe's life, when the cosmos underwent an
extra- ordinary expansion. In fact, some astronomers would rather call
the Big Bang the "Big Stretch." Within a billionth of a billionth
of a billionth of a second, a region of space smaller than a proton is
thought to have ballooned to the size of Earth. Cosmologists refer to
this extraordinary growth as inflation. No one really knows what drove
it, but by stretch- ing the very fabric of space, it magnified a weird
subatomic phenomenon that is today detectable only in the careful ex-
periments of particle physicists: the spontaneous material- ization of
particles from a complete vacuum. Vacuum-spawned particles are constantly
flickering in and out of existence around us, arising from and sinking
back into the void. During inflation, this process, Uc everything else
in the universe, was magnified mmendously.'Me rapidly expanding early
universe imparted enough energy to these particle wannabes that instead
of quickly subsiding into the vacuum, they remained in the real world.
The sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like a stone
thrown into the dense particle pond of the early universe, sending out
ripples -pressure waves. And pressure waves through a gas are nothing
more than sound waves. The en- Ltire universe rang like a bell. THOSE
REVERBERATIONS WERE ABRUPTLY SILENCED 13 billion years ago, when the universe
became transpar- ent. Once photons were traveling freely through space,
there was no longer enough pressure to support the sound waves. But before
fading forever, those echoes of creation had left their mark on the cosmic
microwave background. When sound waves were still spreading through the
uni- verse, they compressed the particle soup in some regions of the cosmos
and rarefied it in others. Pressure changes cause temperature changes
-increase the pressure in a gas and the temperature increases. Microwave
photons com- ing from these various regions have slightly different tem-
peratures. By looking at temperature patterns in the microwave background,
MAP Will give researchers the in- formation needed to reconstruct the
precise size and shape of the primordial sound waves. The temperature
patterns show the universe just as it was when the particle fog- and the
sound waves -vanished. "It's almost like you had waves propagating
in a pond, and all of a sudden the pond froze and the pattern ofwaves
stayed there says Hinshaw. "We're capturing that-' a snapshot of
the time when the universe became transparent." The single most important
thing the sound waves will re- veal is the amount of matter present in
the universe. If there is a Holy Grail for cosmologists, this is it. Whether
the uni- verse will expand forever, or collapse back onto itself in a
fiery "Big Crunch," depends on how much matter it holds. With
sufficient matter, gravity could slow down or even re- verse the expansion.
With too little matter, and thus too lit- tle gravity, the expansion will
never end; galaxies will gradually sputter out until the entire universe
darkens. Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire,
/ Some say in ice." mAp could settle the issue. Cosmologists have
struggled for decades to measure the matter in the universe. They've tried
to infer it by carefully studying the motions of galaxies and calculating
how much matter and gravity would be necessary to produce the ob- served
movements. Their calculations show that visible mat- ter- stars and galaxies
- accounts for less than zo percent of the required gravity. The rest
is attributed to an unknown entity that cosmologists call dark matter.
MAP will discover not only the total amount of matter but how much of
it is in the form of dark matter. One of the paradoxes of the early universe,*that
it is so easy to describe, says Charles Bennett. Si@@ the physics of sound
waves are very well understood, cosmologists don't need much more than
freshman phocs to model the phe- nomena mAp will be studying.just as a
wave traveling through viscous oil will have a different size and shape
than one mov- ing through water, so will the composition of the early
uni- verse strictly define the size and shape of the sound waves measured
by mAp. Bylooking at the shape of the waves, cos- mologists will know
how much matter the universe contains, and thus its fate -fire or ice.
mAp should also give cosmologists their best v@lues for a number of other
quantities, including the Ifubble constant, which indicates how fast the
universe is expanding. An accu- rate fix on the expansion rate will make
it possible to gauge how long it took the universe to reach its present
size. Know- ing the expansion rate and matter density will allow them
to establish the age of the universe. Of course, there's always the possibility
that mAp won@t find the evidence they expect to find of sound waves, meaning
the theory cosmologists have relied on for the past few decades to explain
the universe- inflation- is somehow wrong. "It may be that the universe
will have the last laugh and that none of the models will come close to
fitting the MAP data," says Neil Cornish, a 32-year-old cosmologist
at Mon- tana State University in Bozeman. 'Then we'll be back to the drawing
board." The odds, however, are better than even that mAp will detect
the sound waves. In fact, Page and his colleague Aluk Devlin reported
last fall that they had already found some tantalizing traces in ground-based
observations. The string of MAPs potential discoveries will satisfy most
cosmologists, but not a team of three astrophysicists and one mathematician.
The four men, only one of whom is of- ficiaffy on the mAp team, have devised
a scheme to use MAPs data to work out the overall geometric shape of the
universe. ON THE DOOR OF DAVID SPERGEUS OFFICE AT PRINCETON, a cartoon
clipped from The New Yorker shows a close-up of a city sidewalk, with
a fire hydrant and sewer grating. The caption reads: "The MilkyWay
(Detail)." Spergel, who has just returned from dropping his son off
at school, is ex- plaining why he has problems with an infinite universe.
"In an infinite volume, eventually I can find a patch in which the
atoms are arranged just the way we see them here in my office. We could
be having this conversation an infuiite num- ber of times. So a truly
infinite universe is strange." The alternative is no less strange.
"In a finite universe," article on Big Bang and new space probe
designed to explore it DISCOVER MAY 2000 49
_______________________________
Frank Fox has provided the following remarkable example of a diversity
generator at work. This one, in which flashy males bunting finches elbow
out their competitors-birds almost as spiffy as they are but not quite.
Instead the dominant males, the ones with the most splendid feathers,
make room for downright schlumpfy males as their neighbors. Then they
do a bit of hanky pankying with the females of the scruffy birds next
door.
Setting the sexual aspect aside, we've got a perfect example here of lateral
inhibition, a phenomenon which shows up in mass behavior from the level
of humans to that of populations of sensory neurons and even in the evolution
of galactic and solar systems. In humans, those who go for power tend
to attack most savagely their direct competitors-the folks most similar
to them in style and substance. Marx levelled his most ferocious salvos
against fellow socialists. Lenin was more intent on demolishing Marxists
from rival groups-such as the Social Democrats-than he was on exterminating
the capitalists. Stalin was the same. Trotsky was a greater threat to
him than Hitler or Churchill, despite the fact that Hitler's platform
promised the extirpation of socialism. Stalin also took Lenin's hatred
of Marxist Social Democrats to a greater level of ferocity than even Lenin
had-not an easy thing to accomplish, given Lenin's skill at mass murder.
Stalin called for the utter annihilation of Social Democrats, the death
of every last one. Global Brain calls this "creative bickering."
It increases the number of alternative hypotheses available in the group
mind.
In the inanimate world, would-be galactic masses appear to compete for
the loose matter of an expanding universe. Those which seduce scraps and
bits of dust and rock into joining them gain more gravitational pull and
are able to scarf up yet more of the debris in their vicinity. Micro gravitational
centers grow to macro size. Macro scraps like asteroids pull yet more
to their bosoms and race toward larger scale. Meanwhile the competing
bits clean out the spaces in between themselves, preventing their inanimate
competitors from acquiring yet more. Most, however, are in turm acquired
by yet more successful gravitational attractors. Those which succeed big
time swirl the junk they've collected around themselves in the familiar
galactic whorl. Meanwhile, lesser competitors circling in thrall to these
cental masters also compete and clean out the space between them, inhibiting
the further growth of those most like them and those competing in the
same geographic (or is that astrographic?) territory. The central dancemasters
of material substance are galactic nuclei-most of of which become black
holes. Their lesser subjects ignite as suns. The next rank of winners
in the gravitational game consolidate as planets. Planets like our earth
continue the practice of impoverishing the space between them by scooping
up loose bits of the junk-which-might-have-once-aspired to something grander.
Our atmosphere absorbs meteorites from the size of a speck to that of
a car on a daily basis. Lateral inhibition at work.
Sensory cells do much the same. Those which seize on a clue to the presence
of the important target of the moment (a female once mating season primes
the sensory system to seek sexual opportunity; a bit of food or a predator
on the pounce during more normal times) hush the sensory cells around
them and take over the perceptual process. To understand a self-organizing
universe, it's critical to recognize its key strategies, the master algorithms
whose repetition iterations at numerous levels of emergence yank new complexities,
wonders, nightmares, and possibilities from what was once a rush of nothingness.
Lateral inhibition appears to be one of those master patterns. Howard
Birds of bright feathers flock with dull boys
USA TODAY, DATE: 10/26/00
By Tim Friend
Scientists have discovered an unusual form of cooperation among lazuli
bunting finches that allows the most handsome and the least attractive
males
to share the top neighborhoods and have the best chance of mating.
The study, in today's Nature, illustrates a rarely observed phenomenon
called
''disruptive selection,'' in which nature favors extreme traits at both
ends
of the spectrum at the expense of moderate ones, experts say.
Normally, the forces of natural selection and sexual selection nudge a
species' sexual attractiveness (usually in males) in a direction that
ultimately exaggerates the desirable traits. The male peacock's tail is
a
classic example. The most brightly colored or ornamented males are known
as
''hotshots.''
Male lazuli buntings, which vary widely in the brightness of their plumage,
ordinarily appear to follow the standard rules, at least anecdotally,
when
their favored habitat of dense bushes or shrubs is plentiful. The dominant
males, which have the brightest feathers, have their pick of territories
and
are most successful at attracting females, which are mostly brown.
So the researchers, led by Erick Greene from the University of Montana
in
Missoula, were surprised when they discovered that the dullest males in
a
lazuli population were mating successfully and living unchallenged in
the
best shrubs as neighbors with the hotshots. Meanwhile, the hotshots forced
moderately colored males to settle for scrubby bushes, where they had
a
tougher time attracting mates.
The reason for the disruptive selection, in which the dullest males were
sharing at least some of the successes of the dominant males, is probably
explained by a shortage of good housing, researcher Bruce Lyon says.
The area where the disruptive selection was found had a patchy habitat
with
fewer available shrubs. Those conditions would intensify the competition
for
habitat and females.
But why would the hotshots be so generous to their dull buddies in such
circumstances? The answer appears downright Machiavellian.
''For the dullest males, it may be a bit like making a bargain with the
devil,'' Lyon says.
Equipped with a nice shrub, the dull boys, which appear to ''suck up''
to the
dominant males by hanging out with them on branches, easily attract mates.
That means the hotshots have lots of female neighbors, which accept less
attractive mates to get a good home.
The species is socially monogamous, which means females select one nestmate,
but being socially monogamous does not equal sexual monogamy. DNA testing
found that half the eggs in the nests of the dull dads belonged to other
males. So even though the dull boys get to offer their mates good homes,
the
females can't resist the hotshots next door and the chance to pass those
genes along to their offspring.
The trade-off is that the dull and subordinate males, which ordinarily
have
difficulty obtaining choice territory and mates, get a nice home and a
mate.
The hotshots, for their apparent generosity, fill the neighborhood with
females that find them more sexually attractive than their own mates,
Lyon
says.
GNviaNewsEDGE
Copyright (c) 2000 Gannett/USA TODAY Electronic News
Received by NewsEDGE/LAN: 10/26/2000 4:15 AM
______________________________________________________________
Fractals, fractals everywhere and nary a drop to drink. Lateral inhibition
is one of those basic principles of nature which shows up on so many levels
that one could swear the propulsive and creative powers shoving this universe
into creativity are habitual stutterers. Starting from the top and working
our way down, lateral inhibition appears in the competition between large
social clusters--ethnic groups, for instance. You know you've got a severe
case of lateral inhibition on your hands when two almost identical gangs
fight each other more viciously than they fight outsiders. Ireland's continuing
war between the Protestants and the Catholics of Ulster is one example.
The Palestinians' perpetual war against Israel is another. In the first
case the irony is that Irishmen are creating a greater distance between
themselves and other Irishmen than the two together have generated against
the traditional Irish enemy, England. In the instance of the Palestinian
Arabs and the Jews of Israel, each bunch is semitic, each group speaks
a language far closer to that of the other than to such tongues as English,
each has peoples with an unusual predominance of curly hair and oversized
noses (my nose and hair fit this pattern) and both trace their mythic
roots to a common ancestor, Abraham, and their religion to a common source--the
word of El (Hebrew for God) or Allah (Arabic for the very same deity)
as handed down to Moses and the prophets.
We'll leave the reason nearly identical groups fight each other with more
ferocity than they fight predators or more obviously different and dangerous
folk for another occasion. It's covered in Global Brain under the rubric
of "creative bickering" and proves to have its evolutionary
advantages--getting a group to diverge and seek out as many niches as
is humanly (or fishily in the case of cichlids, which are adept at the
trick of creative acrimony; or even anemonily in the case of sea anemone
colonies, which perpetually make war with the colonies of sea anemones
next door) possible. Thus does the gene team of a species manage to penetrate
as many nooks and crannies as possible before the next disaster comes
along.
But I digress. Lateral inhibition is critical to the operation of other
sorts of groups as well--crowds of neurons for example. Neurons in the
retina get the right to shoosh the neurons next door in order to get a
clear bead on what seems to be an image. I suspect that lateral inhibition
even plays a role in creating the large patches of empty space between
galaxies. Two neighboring galaxies use their gravity to suck the space
between them clean of the galactic building substance known as cosmic
debris. The more loose dust and other detritus each galaxy can snatch
from the potential grasp of a rival, the larger grows its collective gravity
and the more powerful it can become in this competition between inanimately
evolving whorls. Yes, galaxies are greedy swirls continually differentiating
themselves from the gluttinous whorls next door.
Hmmm, I seem to have digressed again. But digression and redundancy--repeating
the same old thing in brand new ways--is what fractal iteration is all
about. Come to think of it, lateral inhibition may be one of the ways
that each repetition manages to distinguish itself from its brethren.
Is the differentiation between levels of emergent properties-- the generative
hiccup we call a phase transition.--just another case of lateral inhibition?
Is the chaos which Ilya Prigogine says separates one form of meta-order
from another caused by the manner in which each form of structure hungrily
hugs its elements to itself and distinguishes the principles and parts
it has captured from the form they took in their highly similar predecessors?
If so, how could lateral inhibition take place in time? How could the
past exert a tug which counterbalances that of the future? New forms grab
the fragments of the old and reknit them. But to have true lateral inhibtion,
the past would have to seize hold of all it could retain or attract. Does
this form of absurdity occur? Yes. Old forms vigorously grab for all they
can retain or attract. When they do so, we call them regressive or conservative
tendencies. Life comes from inanimate form, then sinks back into inanimate
form again. From ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Animation pulls in one
direction. Death and dissolution tug in the other. The boundary between
life and death is sharp and absolute. Lateral inhibition. Similarly stars
eventually succumb to the pull of the chaos from which they came--but
make a new form of chaos in the process. From that clutter emerges a second
generation star with new emergent properties. The old fights the new and
the dividing line between them is absolute.
Yoiks, I've iteratively digressed again. When describing a universe which
stutters and hiccups, one becomes prone to this kind of thing. My point
is to reveal a bit of arcana exposed by cell biologist Gilbert Ling. There
is lateral inhibition in the competition between enzymes. Yes, enzymes,
the smaller members of that impressive family I like to think of as smart
molecules--molecules capable of carrying out complex tasks. Dr. Ling is
speaking of the action of potassium ions, busy little buggers which scoop
up things in their vicinity as avidly as do galaxies. Potassium ions,
however, do not use the snare of gravity but take advantage of the hooking
force of electromagnetism. My suspicion is that potassium ions gather
in crowds to pull off this act of electrochemical kidnapping. Dr. Ling
speaks of potassiums imperialistic tendency as an act of adsorption--the
attraction of atoms or molecules to the outer perimeter of the mob of
molecules known as a solid or a gas. (Here's a quick and handy take on
adsorption from Lycos' online version of Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia:
"the taking up by the surface of a solid or liquid (adsorbent) of
the atoms, ions, or molecules of a gas or other liquid {adsorbate}."
http://versaware.kidsreference.lycos.com/getpage.asp?book=FWENCOnline&abspage=/articles/001000a/001000351.asp,
12/2000)
How did enzymes elbow their way into this picture? When Dr. Ling plots
the activity of two competing populations of potassium on a graph, he
gets a "double reciprocal plot", which he explains is "a
familiar feature of _competitive inhibition_ in enzyme kinetics."
Dr. Ling assumes we all know what competitive inhibition in enzyme kinetics
is. Most of us don't.
However very few men on this planet have mastered chemistry, physics,
and biology, much less made breakthrough theories from this mixture. Dr.
Ling, in fact, may be the only one. So I hope he pardons those like me
who look with wonder at his achievement but sometimes must struggle to
keep up with him. If he doesn't, would that constitute another act of
reciprocal inhibition--two relatively smart people getting into a fracas
over something only relatively smart people could hope to comprehend,
thus ignoring all the lowbrow ignoramuses who occasionally get their kicks
by declaring intellectuals the scourge of the universe and attempting
to eradicate everyone in sight with an IQ over 110? Howard
-------
Gilbert Ling. Life at the Cell and Below-Cell Level: The Hidden History
of a Fundamental Revolution in Biology. Pacific Press--in preparation.
p. 34
_______________________________
quarks cannot stand alone, neutrons, protons and electrons cannot stand
alone, bacteria cannot stand alone, humans cannot stand alone, 'tis nature's
way--to make us incomplete and interdependent and ever-growing in our
inter-lacery. So being unable to stand alone proves that you are barking
up the wrong squirrel. You've just taken another step toward proving something
I've never claimed until you forced me to it--that machinery is natural!
<<or hop or skip or jump or even
bat their mechanical eyes when their batteries run down.
A magical phrase. One of the million reasons I called Michael Mendizza,
the man who made two of your Krishnamurti tapes, and begged him to recruit
you to write for his mini-publication Touch the Future. You'll like Michael.
His real-life-in-person mentor was David Boehm.
<<heteropoiesis as opposed to autopoiesis
No time to use my dictionary. I'm a long-time believer in autopoeisis
(there's a Shambala book on the subject you'd like, but I haven't got
time to run to my library--which has taken over most of the house--and
find its name for you). And if heteropoesis means the creation of one
thing through the agency of another, I believe in that too. Lizzy, I know
with 100% certainty that you are as ecumenical in your beliefs as I...perhaps
even more so. Why do you insist on seeing opposites when in fact what
APPEAR to be opposites are usually complimentary facets of a common whole?
Yes, we all set up strawmen. It is a useful way to prod our brains. But
I so seldom find a belief in either/or to be credible. And I know you.
If I take tails, you will take heads and fight like a lovely siamese to
convince me that heads is IT. But if I were to take heads, you would take
tails. Because the two are inseparable. This is one of the things which
makes us yin yang and makes your exquisite sailing poem so resonant not
only of the universe, but of you and me as Platonic lovers/siamese (not
the cat in this case) twins. <<Machines do NOT self-reference or
grow on trees or out of the ground or
hatch out of eggs or rub up against each other to trade DNA.
Ma chere Elisabeta, thou who wouldst starve me to death (it is now 10:10
PM). You have not been following genetic algorithms and artificial life.
Steven Levy has an extremely good book out on the topic. In paperback
no less. YOU MUST READ IT. With a stratospheric intellect/cum emotional
sensibility (the only kind of intellect that really works) like yours,
you cannot afford to get so far behind.
OK, I have not gotten even 10% of the way through your letter. But if
I don't begin my half-hour pre-dinner ritual, the jig will be up with
me.
HB e-mail 3/14/97
_______________________________
Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern
Daylight Time From: (Richerson, Peter J) To: ('Howard Bloom') Howard,
The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of
pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall
apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent,
excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including
mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach
a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more
complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology
implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful,
master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious
superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example,
with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and
fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire
in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack,
oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves
to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the
harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups
in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position,
then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and
are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday
by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as
top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again.
The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down
the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires
of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He
began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in
the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify.
Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out
an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult
process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of
thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him.
They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm
was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their
sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they
felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The
feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most
powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased
to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who
loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power
no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining.
He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male,
an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially
those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down.
And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog,
and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their
control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what
they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture
and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon
from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line.
Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization
is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent
sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists
compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on
belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people
suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with
neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political
problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small
scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being
"small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif
kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent
thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays
an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life
is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated
by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent
political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced,
fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together
in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions
that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective
coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances
could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient
long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position
of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such
tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves
into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries
in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman
politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic
geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and
small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North
African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation
of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed
to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know.
pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation
of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once
a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it.
Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty
sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play
one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations.
Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control.
hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese
frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used
them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands,
and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies
of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially
that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then
invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again
in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen
fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama
bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing
superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but
a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the
pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at
least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to
go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary
political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic
weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side,
etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events
fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of
state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak
differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical
records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these
details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to
sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing
it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of
their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited
to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps
now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics,
and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies
greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally
did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise
than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis
of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the
conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland,
Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and
its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their
towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity
farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland,
Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar
logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except
that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of
them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily
mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater
economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia
and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One
can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls
have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit,
the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite
firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans
would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps
the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization
does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then
the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it
does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor
people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World
(U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads,
with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All
thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of
thought. Howard -----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; Subject: re:
the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of
the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European
conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of
Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks,
Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea
pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the
periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts?
Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:
The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale
states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic
groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated
into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given
the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature
of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.)
statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed
a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered
margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout
most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced"
agrarians from time to time. _______________________________
The following comes from Eric Shinn, entertainment reporter of the Toronto
Star, to whom I forwarded our correspondence on the empires of the steppes--and
michael jackson. Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson
Date: 8/23/01 2:13:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Shinn, Eric) To:
('Howard Bloom') Thanks for the forward, Howard! There's a really good
article in the current Wired magazine about the Japanese communications
company DoCoMo, which has built its business model around providing a
content-neutral platform upon which independent parties can offer wireless
services to cellphone clients. hb: Docomo posted good earnings today while
more traditional Japanese communications companies showed downturns. You
may have explained why this occurred. es: This company is doing tremendously
well, and in light of your conversation with pjricherson, I think it has
a lot to do with the manner in which they formalized a process in which
the nomadic adaptibility of user demands fulfilled by flocking independent
parties can be maintained within a larger empire run by their neutral
tech. hb: this is a standard oscillatory pattern in the record and film
business. The major corporations lock into a proven formula and repeat
it until it bores the public silly. meanwhile small, independent production
companies or record companies put out the music and films of rebels, those
who dare create new formulae. Public interests shift from the films and
music of the majors to the film and music of the rebellious intruders.
Eventually the majors get the message and either immitate the indies or
buy them out and incorporate the creatives in their stable--often keeping
the indie presidents in place. What was indie eventually becomes mainstream,
the public gets overdosed on the new formulae, new rebels arise on the
fringes, and the process happens all over again. Film rebels I've worked
with include Harvey and Bob Weinstein (Miramax), Bob Shea (New Line),
and Chris Blackwell, (Island). Two out of these three were outsiders in
the 1980s and are the mainstream today. The list of music outsiders I've
helped bring into the mainstream--or have brought the mainstream to--is
too long to mention. But helping cultural and subcultural invaders succeed--something
I specialized in during my years of fieldwork--provides many insights
into the intricacies of cultural evolution. es: If only DoCoMo commanded
the Mongols, what would Asia look like today? Hmmmm...... So here's my
current dilemma: My roommate Chris (aka DJ C-Rat) and I are both heavily
into jungle music. (I know you said you're a relative techno music novice,
so suffice it to say this is a style of music with the ritual and rhythm
of Carribean reggae soundclash culture hybridized with european techno
production aesthetic. hb: it sounds neat. es: It's quite good! I write
about it for www.torontojungle.com, and if you're curious, you should
check the site out!) hb: I turned off Mendelsohn (some political music
of the 1800s) to pull up the site and listen. So far I've heard the sound
intro, which is good, but the main screen is coming up slowly--which may
be because I'm running 14 computer screens simultaneously. I'll be getting
a bigger microprocessor (this one's only 450 mhz) in the next two days.
es: The Toronto scene is essentially run by one particular crew, called
Vinyl Syndicate. They used to be the underdog, and they're damn good,
but they've become rather stagnant in their taste, and many fragmented
crews have gained increasing respect around them over time. hb: aha. the
typical electronic age pop cycle at work. by the way, the same pattern
also operates at the level of sensors on a cell membrane. they're very
much a mob with a mob "mentality." A few outsiders find something
interesting, and broadcast the message to the rest of the sensor community.
The other sensors take it up, it becomes all the rage, then gradually
it ceases to seem shiny and new. Then, once again, unconventional sensors
find some new molecule with a clever hook or twist. They broadcast its
novelty, gradually win over the masses, and the outré becomes mainstream.
Fractal patterns in this cosmos tend to repeat on many levels of emergence.
es: Chris and I would like to figure out a way to connect the suppressed
crews all over our province in such a consolidated front that Vinyl Syndicate
will crumble pathetically, or realize that they must adapt to survive.
Our concern is, of course, how to maintain our tribal underground functionality
while essentially achieving market domination. hb: a tricky proposition.
Call me some night between 7pm and 8pm when I'm free (what night that
may be I don't know, since I get booked up quickly) and we'll talk about
it. Howard -----Original Message-----
From: Howard Bloom [] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 3:58 AM To: Peter
Richerson; ; Eric Shinn; Aaron Hicklin; Ilya Marritz; Chris Campion; Alan
Edwards Subject: re: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson Subj:
RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight
Time From: (Richerson, Peter J) To: howlbloom@aol.com ('Howard Bloom')
Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics
of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then
fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb:
excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including
mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach
a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more
complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology
implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful,
master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious
superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example,
with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and
fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire
in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack,
oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves
to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the
harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups
in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position,
then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and
are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday
by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as
top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again.
The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down
the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires
of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He
began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in
the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify.
Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out
an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult
process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of
thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him.
They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm
was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their
sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they
felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The
feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most
powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased
to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who
loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power
no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining.
He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male,
an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially
those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down.
And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog,
and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their
control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what
they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture
and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon
from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line.
Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization
is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent
sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists
compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on
belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people
suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with
neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political
problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small
scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being
"small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif
kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent
thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays
an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life
is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated
by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent
political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced,
fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together
in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions
that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective
coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances
could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient
long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position
of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such
tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves
into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries
in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman
politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic
geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and
small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North
African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation
of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed
to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know.
pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation
of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once
a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it.
Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty
sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play
one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations.
Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control.
hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese
frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used
them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands,
and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies
of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially
that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then
invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again
in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen
fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama
bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing
superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but
a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the
pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at
least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to
go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary
political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic
weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side,
etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events
fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of
state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak
differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical
records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these
details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to
sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing
it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of
their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited
to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps
now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics,
and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies
greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally
did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise
than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis
of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the
conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland,
Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and
its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their
towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity
farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland,
Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar
logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except
that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of
them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily
mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater
economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia
and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One
can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls
have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit,
the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite
firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans
would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps
the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization
does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then
the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it
does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor
people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World
(U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads,
with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All
thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of
thought. Howard -----Original Message-----
From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To:
Peter Richerson; Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading
this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's
of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece,
and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known
as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from
north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you
think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly
organized mass cohorts? Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern
Daylight Time, writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an
ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other
East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett
wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes
outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes,
and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish
(and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the
steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states
on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their
independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered
the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
_______________________________
Those who can build a self-deceptive ego need the power to create their
own myth--the ability to conceive an autobiography that lifts them either
to greater achievement or to greater self-destruction. Self-destruction
arises if one merely dreams the myth but never attempts to live it. But
glorious deeds come from those who live their myth. howard
________
Irving--to the best of my knowledge, both what you say and what the chaos
researchers on cardiac rhythms say is true. We're talking about a continuum
here. Lack of chaos, on one end of the line, is unhealthy. A certain amount
of chaos, in the middle of the scale, is positive. Too much chaos (fibrillation)
on the far right hand end of the scale is deadly.
I keep talking about iterative principles in nature recurring as part
of the unfolding of corollaries from the handful of axioms implicit in
the initial vaccum ripple which precipitated the Big Bang (or at least
that's this year's theory of how things got started--it's called "inflationary
theory" and comes to us courtesy of physicist Alan Guth). You've
got one of these iterative algorithms by the tail. We might call it the
"golden mean" principle. A jolt of noradrenaline is a very helpful
thing indeed when we're in a situation which demands immediate mobilization
of our cognitive and motor abilties. But a longterm dose of noradrenaline
is extremely damaging to our system, ultimately crippling our perceptual
and motor abilities, not to mention eating away at portions of the hippocampus.
The same is true for the other stress hormones--corticosterone, cortisol,
cortisone, the remaining gluco-corticoids, endogenous opiates, etc. A
little is good. A chronic overdose is hideous. A radical underdose of
glucocorticoids and you have Addison's disease. The Golden Mean at work
once again.
I would suspect that the same principle applies to the chemical messages
used to mobilize bacterial colonies, ant colonies, etc. If anyone knows,
please tell me. And in a funny way you can see the same thing in the inanimate
world. A pleasant dose of gravity and you have planets. A heavier dose
and you have stars. An overdose and you have black holes. Or worse, you
have a collapse of the entire universe. An underdose and we go directly
from the Big Bang to a spray of fleeing molecules that never have the
privilege of meeting each other in the form of solar systems, Irving Wolfson
or even cosmic dust. Howard
[hb 12/17/01 oscillation keeps things swinging around the golden mean-seeking
out what "moderation" under a new circumstance might be. With
this universe, new circumstance is the name of the game. This cosmos is
one giant surprise after another, changing its nature only once in a while,
but then drastically. Meanwhile changing the petty details incessantly.]
In a message dated 98-01-23 15:55:30 EST, writes t hb:
<< "One of these is the heart, which degenerates in health
as its rhythms become less 'chaotic' and more predictable." Actually
the opposite is true. The more severe the arrhythmia, the less the heart
can perform its function as measured by cardiac output. With rapid rhythms
the return of blood to the heart is diminished per beat(less time for
cardiac filling) and the increase in rate is inadequate to compensate
for this, so that the output per minute is reduced, sometime enough to
cause syncope. With irregular rhythm(atrial fibrillation) output is also
reduced. And in completely chaotic rhythm(ventricular fibrillation) death
of heart and the whole organism results in a few miniutes. >>
_________
In a message dated 3/25/2003 9:09:58 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
At 01:54 AM 03/25/2003 -0500, wrote: Very interesting, and you're making
it increasingly accessible, which is quite an achievement. I've put in
a few comments way below. Howard ps by the way, it may just be my naivete,
but i still wonder what a field is and why it works. Let's take gravitational
force and Einstein's notion that something with gravity--a star, for example--creates
a dimple in space. Roll a marble toward the dimple made by a bowling ball
in a rubber sheet and the marble will be caught in in the dimple's downward
dip and increase its speed. But what, aside from the oversimplifications
made to satisfy relative simpletons like me, is the equivalent of the
gravity that makes the rubber sheet do it's trick when dimpled by the
bowling ball? Reminds me of many, many years ago... when 2 year old cousin...
John O'Mara... heard I was taking classes on what the whole world is made
of. "What is REALLY made of, Paul? What do they really think? Don't
say 'puppy dog tails' or stuff like that for babies... what is it really?"
(As best I recall, he WAS two. But maybe that part of teh memory got fuzzed.)
I said" Really, really? Well... they really think it is made of numbers."
"NUMBERS? Like a five over here and a four over there?" "Well,
maybe like three and a half and numbers like that, but basically, yes..."
We talk about "force fields," but then we say "field"
when we are more precise. So in Einstein's picture, all and everything
is made up of a finite number of "fields." A field is just a
mathematical function defined over space-time. So for example, there may
be a function phi(x,t)... a function which gives a REAL NUMBER at each
point x and t. It's not that this number DESCRIBES what is real. It **IS**
what is real. And a bunch of such numbers describes EVERYTHING. hb: description
is representation, not reality. It is translation from one frame of reference
to another, from one system to another. The fact that numerous systems
can be isomorphic and reflect each other is one of the things we examine
too infrequently. How does math map the cosmos? How does thought map math?
How do equations on paper equate with brain processes and the processes
that birthed a universe? Metaphor is one compression technique, one way
of representing "reality" in a more concise manner. Math is
another. Religion is yet a third. Poetry a fourth. But how do we manage
to convey the essence of something in so many ways? What quality of the
universe allows for this representation, this digestion down to something
more compact, something usable in entirely new ways, in ways that change
the cosmos as profoundly as the shift from atoms in streams of gas and
dust to the formation of galaxies? Yes, by representing things in new
frames of reference we piles of thinking quarks introduce new things into
the stream of cosmic evolution--space travel, physics, equations, visual
representations of nonlinear math, computers, cyberspace, and movies in
which we share our dreams. Compression and expansion, that's how the cosmos
reinvents itself. It is a cosmos whose profound fracticality explains
why brains and lines of paper can model the explosions of novas deep in
space. Patterns repeat on many levels because the repetition of things
on new levels is how this cosmos grows new patterns, processes, and things--from
singularity to a sheet of time-space expansion, from that sheet of hurried
departure from less than a single point to many points, to quarks, then
to nucleons, and onward 300,000 years later to atoms and straight-line-travelling
photons, then, 700,000 years down the road to galaxies, the ignition of
stars, and light. Now we take nearly infinitessimal streams of that light
and shift if from one frame of reference to another--from the tiny light-twitches
the human eye can't see to the twitching of electrons in a CCD sensor
to the image made by luminescent particles on a computer monitor, to the
pixels of an image, to the ink of wood pulp of a picture, to the mathematics
of an astrophysicist and from there to the technical language of a journal
article and the colloquial language of a press release. But that's not
the end of the condensations and translations from one from of reference
to another, not be any means. If the information officer in charge of
the press release makes just the right a bursts of electrons and photons
move on the telephone lines and rearranges the neurotransmissions in a
New York Times reporter's mind, the numerous translations of the twitch
of light can be reconstructed in the minds of millions as a vision of
a process that once occurred on the very edges (or at the very center)
of this spreading universe.
Then
prophets, preachers, and politicians can use the resulting genesis tale
to change the course of human history. Compression and expansion all over
the place. Representation and translation. Why does it all work? Because
the original ancestors of stars, of atoms, of photons, and of you and
me were a handful of rules that can be expanded and compressed iteratively--folded
over and under and upon themselves endlessly. Or endlessly until the positive
universe meets the anti-universe and they destroy each other, releasing
the energy that begins the spread of two new time-space manifolds, two
blank sheets on which a new anti and a new positive universe will write
themselves. At least this is the Bloomian view...the Big Bang Tango model.
However I don't dare put the Big Bagel into this book. It's treading in
territory I've been accustomed to since I was ten, but in which I have
never undergone the proper mathematical initiation. And without knowledge
of the math, I'm not allowed to be as sure as I actually am that there's
a good chance my toroidal compression of the cosmos is right. pw: The
modern quantum picture is not exactly the same as Einstein's picture...
though I personally think they can be reconciled with each other precisely...
and it is similar in flavor in any case. hb: my impression is that you've
shown a mathematical connection between the two that indicates the systems
are isomorphic--they are representations in different frames of reference
that represent a common reality. Your math, if I understand aright, has
shown that there is greater consistency between the two than the quantum
phyisicists of today would ever admit. And my impression is that your
math has said that the multiple outcomes of quantum dynamical math is
not the simultaneous alternative realities it's been interpreted to be.
Have I got it wrong? hb: Here's a simpleton's suggestion. The motive power
is...gravity. Take the bagel model I keep tossing around (or loxing up).
If both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos
on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then
the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper
side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity,
too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper
side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside
are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by
the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the
bagel's outer rim. Talk about tautological, I've got gravity working because
of….gravity. But my blithering doesn't remove the fact that it seems
to me there's more than mathematical description needed to explain attraction
at a distance. Math can map the manner in which gravity works. But does
it tell us why force at a distance applies? pw: In Einstein's picture
(and mine, for the next generation), it doesn't. hb: aha! a very important
statement. you've just pointed to a horizon we have to go over to find
what strange frontier awaits on the other side. pw: Einstein certainly
talked a lot about the picture with gravity. An OBJECT at a distance can
influence another object millions of miles away... BY "BENDING"
the gravitational field in its OWN neighborhood, which propagates through
space to the neighborhood of the other object. Local interactions produce
global effects. hb: neat. any bend in the sheet alters its total topography.
the topology remains the same. the sheet is still a sheet. but one topographic
lump or dimple can influence all the rest? pw: If it takes objects to
generate a field, and it takes an intersect of fields to generate an object,
ummm, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what is a photon-a
rippled, rapidly traveling intersect of electrical and magnetic fields?
pw: My opinion... is that electromagnetism is basically a collection of
four numbers (a "four vector") which vary over space and time.
One of the four numbers is basically just the level of "voltage"
hb: voltage=a sucking from one end of the trajectory and a push from the
other? If so, how does the trajectory exist before the photon has traveled
it? Does this bring us back to the short-term backwards causality you've
proposed? If a photon travels 13 billion miles, is there the a sucking
on one end of a 13-billion mile end straw and a push that comes from the
other? Doesn't that mean that future and past both influence the present
big time? 13.5 billion years is the age of the cosmos. And if this is
a 27-billion-light-year cosmos, as I suspect it is, and if we are at the
mid point, which I suspect we are, then this means the backward influence
of the future isn't short term at all. It's as long as the lifetime of
the universe. We are sucked forward by our future if this view is accurate.
But
two bizarre questions: 1) where is the wiggle room, the room for oddities
like free will? 2) I've defied the current wisdom, which says that even
if the universe is toroidal, we are very close to the beginning of things.
The meeting between branes is trillions of years in the future, or so
says Steinhardt. So are we being pulled by a future trillions of years
down the line? 3) We are sentient beings. We saddle and ride disasters
like Niagara Falls--we tame them and use their energy. Someday, if we
don't incinerate ourselves, we may tame the spurts of energy that flare
from black holes. And beyond that we may even tame and bend the saddle
curves of time and space. We are just one of many surprises this cosmos
has produced. What next? Will it have an ability to disaster-ride even
greater than we do? Will it harness the wild flail of entropy and turn
it into something useful, energy? Will that use reshape the cosmos? Will
the fifteenth step beyond sentient life become a race of brane riders
who can tell the cosmos not to end but instead can bend it up to any skyward
climb they choose? pw: free-floating in space. I personally believe that
there probably is no such thing as a"photon," really, as a distinct
object. Rather, there are quantized emitters and absorbers of electromagnetic
radiation. hb: hmmm--kurakin sees a photon as a range of possible transmissions
between sender and receiver. Which receiver gets the message is determined
by a process I haven't quite deciphered. Does this bring us back to mistaking
the limits of our observation for the limits of reality? A photon from
an early star 13.4 billion years away reaches the ccd of the Hubble, is
translated to electrons and beamed down to a community of astrophysicists
who decipher it--translate it into their math and into their conversations
made by tongues wobbling air over lunch. They publicize it and the news
gets to you, and later on to me. We are sinks and the star is source,
but is there really nothing in between? And how does that photon manage
its amplification--being translated into so many forms, being inserted
into the minds of so many human beings? You and I are not the only humans
who read the astrophysics news as it comes rolling in. The New York Times
makes sure this news excites (not sinks, but synchs) many, many a mind.
I'm sure there is something--call it a photon for the moment--that travels
the path of the trajectory. What is it? Is it a what at all? Is it a thing
or a process or both? Isn't every thing a process on a timescale too big
for us to see? So what, exactly, is a thing. I know darned well that on
the timescale of consciousness, it's distinctly different from a flow.
I say the timescale of consciousness because there are many "human"
timescales...most of them non-conscious. Right now 100 trillion cells
in me are loading phosphorus atoms onto molecules of adnenosine diphoshpate,
then passing the loaded molecules along to others that strip the phosphorus
from the backbone of the atp and extract a snip of energy. This is happening
at a speed my mere consciousness can only imagine--that is, represent
in another frame of reference. It's a timescale I can only grasp thanks
to the work of thousand of humans of generations that produced language,
culture, and science--generations working on another timescale I can only
represent but can't perceive. Are these inhuman timescales inhuman? No,
they're vital parts of what makes a human being.
But
still I can only comprehend them through imagination and representation,
through human-invented compressions, human uses of fracticality. pw: But
perhaps I might change my mind if the analysis of electroweak theory with
topological solitons points in a different direction. I am just going
by what I see in quantum optics. My ignorance is showing all over the
place, but sometimes it's worth asking naïve questions. Occasionally
we become so used to using words like "force" that we don't
recognize our ignorance anymore. It's like the doctor who feels he's explained
your stomach cramp when he tells you that you've got gastritis. Sorry,
you knew that before you walked in to his examining room. Gastritis is
Latin for irritation of the stomach. In other words, all your doctor has
done is parrot your question back at you in another tongue. You asked
why does my stomach ache and the doc has said because you have an ache
of the stomach. Howard pw: Don't worry. We are all ignorant. The problem
is to deal with the folks who don't KNOW how ignorant they are. hb: thanks,
Paul. Silly as it sounds, I needed that reassurance. You decoded the signals
of my insecurity very well. Limbic system shivers translated into subtext--more
shifting from one frame of reference to another, one more use of fracticality.
I needed your kindness. pw: which I have tried to explore. (As in arXiv.org/abs/patt-sol-9804003,
hb: yikes--tried to get the paper and arXiv says it's not there. Oops.
patt-sol/9804003. The archive can also be searched by author's name. hb:
bear with me. I'm inserting the abstract so everyone can see it. Indeed
you seem to have done it. If I read you correctly, you're saying that
that a photon IS a trajectory across time and space--and that it has room
for multifarcation--wiggle room. Rather an amazing proposition, Paul.
The more you can put it in English, the more minds you can blow--and the
more minds you can bing into thinking along new trajectories, thinking
along new lines. Ladies and gentlemen, Paul's abstract: Retrieved from
the World Wide WebMarch 26, 2003 http://arxiv.org/abs/patt-sol/9804003
Pattern Formation and Solitons, abstract patt-sol/9804003 From: Dr. Paul
J. Werbos <> Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 21:03:16 GMT (274kb) New Approaches
to Soliton Quantization and Existence for Particle Physics Authors: Paul
J. Werbos Comments: 60p., no figs, 200+ eqs. Companion to "Can 'soliton'
attractors exist in realistic 3+1-D Conservative Systems", Chaos
Solitons and Fractals, in press Subj-class: Pattern Formation and Solitons
This paper provides mathematical details related to another new paper
which suggests: (1) new approaches to the analysis of soliton stability;
(2) families of Lagrangian field theories where solitons might possibly
exist even without topological charge; (3) alternative approaches to quantizing
solitons, with testable nuclear implications. This paper evaluates the
possibility of strong energy-minimizing states in four families of systems,
two promising and two not promising. In these examples, it presents new
methods for second-order stability analysis, and analyzes persistent multifurcation.
Section 6 presents three alternative formalisms for quantizing solitons
(topological or nontopological), all of which have major implications
for the foundations of quantum theory: (1) the standard formalism, based
on functional integration, reinterpreted as an imaginary Markhov Random
Field (iMRF) across time and space, with parallels to fuzzy logic; (2)
two radically conservative formalisms, consistent with the core of Einstein's
vision, based on a true MRF model. Bell's Theorem, bosonization, time-symmetry
and macroscopic asymmetry are discussed, along with some testable alternative
possibilities and heresies, like nonDoppler redshift. Full-text: PDF only
References and citations for this submission: CiteBase (autonomous citation
navigation and analysis) Links to: arXiv, patt-sol, /find, /abs (-/+),
/9804, ?
pw:
Based on what I know, I would be VERY surprised if it weren't there. hb:
it's there. not to worry. hb: I suspect Witten went into superstring theory
because he saw it as one of many highways to the same place. Here's my
favorite Witten quote: "String Theory, as developed by the mid-eighties,
was characterized by the fact that there were five theories we knew about.
And that raised a rather curious question, that was always a little bit
embarrassing. If one of those theories describes our universe, then who
lives in the other four universes? We've come to understand that those
five theories we've been studying are all parts of a bigger picture. In
the last couple of years the picture has really changed to something which
is called Duality. Duality, is a relationship between two different theories
which isn't obvious. If it's obvious you don't dignify it by the name
duality. So, we have different pictures and it's not that one is correct
and the other isn't correct; one of them is more useful for answering
one set of questions, the other is more useful in other sets of questions.
And the power of theory comes largely from understanding that these different
points of view which sound like they're about different universes actually
work together in describing one model. So, those theories turn out to
all be one, so it's a big conceptual upheaval to understand that there's
only one theory, which is uncanny in nature." hb: Witten is saying
that you can view the cosmos through a variety of lenses. You can represent
it with a variety of translations from one frame of reference or language
to another. But all of these translations, these simple pictures, these
condensations of cosmic complexity, echo each other in ways that are hard
to grasp at first. The budding bubble of the Mandelbrot set repeats itself
in ways that at first seem very different. But if you look hard enough,
you'll the the ancestral patterns--the big bang or steady-state rules,
axioms, or commandments--reappearing. Five theories=one reality. Am I
wrong, or is this not an instance of iteration, of non-linear evolution,
of deconstruction, and re-evolution. Is it not a manifestation of fracticality?
pw: Here he was talking about different varieties of string or n-brane
theories. But in his paper in Chodos, he was talking about a totally different
TYPE of consistent theory. hb: aHA!!!! pw: Part of the problem is that
people were using topological soliton models mainly as a kind'of rough-and-ready
rule of thumb... in predicting practical nuclear experiments. (The sacred
Standard Model mostly can't be used for that purpose, because it is too
hard to use in making predictions. Thus mere experiments are studied using
a totally different flavor of model. MRS discuss that.) hb: this has amazing
implications. It undercuts the likelihood that Standard Theory is right.
It indicates that it's at best a very, very rough approximation of particle-level
reality. It's a convenient myth to see us through to the day when we can
cobble together something less primitive. Today's math always reminds
me of Olduwan stone tools--even if the formulae remain beyond my comprehension.
The oversimplifications it forces physicists to use are frighteningly
backward. And when you look at its history, it seems to have advanced
very little from the math of the 19th Century. I prefer the pretty pictures
of the Mandelbrot set. They resonate so much more to me. And I do demonstrations
when folks come here of the way the mandelbrot set is nearly identical
to the patterns seen in clusters of galaxies. I also can explain the mandelbrot
set in terms of attraction and repulsion, two things we know are basic
to this cosmos, two underlying fractal principles...principles that show
up on the level of elementary particles and on the level of the most complex
human problems--their bonding binges and battles...and their love affairs.
Remember, humans are piles of quarks. It shouldn't seem outlandish that
we repeat the ancient patterns of the stuff of which we're made.
pw:
The idea of using them to explain why electrons exist at all may simply
not have occurred to people. hb: aha--so electrons have been pulled in
here. Very interesting, Paul, since electon streams are the mistaken metaphor
from which the idea of source of sink, of voltage, is derived. But electrons
do not travel in currents. They merely bonk each other into motion. We've
agreed on that in past discussions. There is something wrong in the voltage
metaphor. It doesn't describe a trajectory. It describes a social transmission
of minimal motion from the electon shell of one atom to that of another.
I'm an idiot about these things, You know that. But isn't this an inconsistency?
Even a bit of a mystery? Let's run with it for a second. If a photon and
an electron work in a similar manner, then a photon is a tiny swirl that
bonks the next bit down the line into twirling too. Which brings us back
to the ether, something I believe Pavel Kurakin feels we shouldn't have
abandoned so hastily. Let's not call it the ether. Let's call it the space-time
manifold, Steinhardt's macro-brane, or Einstein's space-time sheet. If
a photon is a travelling ripple in the sheet--a bit of motion imparted
from one swirl to another, what are the swirlable twitches of which time-space
is made? What is the nature of time and space's weave? Let me propose
something. Suppose that nothing in this cosmos actually travels in straight
lines. Suppose that straight lines are an illusion, an emergent property
of curves and circles. What the heck do I mean. Download Rudy Rucker's
fractal program from http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/chaos.htm
. Watch a Mandelbrot set unfold. The set is based on two commandments--gather
around a common center, then rebel and bud. Attraction to a common center
makes a circle. Repulsion sends stuff fleeing beyond the circle's perimeter.
Attraction to a common center makes even the rebellious circle-breakers
make new circles of their own. Watch this pattern grow for a while. You'll
see it begins to make absolutely straight, straight lines. Now zoom in
on those lines and you discover that straightness is a matter of translation,
it's a matter of scale. On the microlevel those lines are made of fractal
bubbles and their rebels, fractal circles and their buds. Take your constrained
whirpool, your soliton. Let it pass its motion on. Let's imagine that
space is composed of swirlable, circular units on roughly the Planck scale.
A photon is a whirl around the center transmitted from one unit to another.
Or it's a cascade, a parallel surge of twists passed along from one phalanx
of top-like units to another. That's what an ocean wave is. A massive
series of parallel cascades, circular twists passing their twirl along.
Then what is the difference between a photon and an electron? Why does
a photon appear to go in straight lines.
Why
do electrons and nucleons have the freedom to wobble and bobble around?
Or do they? Is their motion very constrained? Electrons travel in straight
lines unless they're trapped in the enclosure of an atomic shell. Or,
like photons, they seem to travel in straight lines. If space is a weave
of twirlable bubbles, How does a sun assemble and move? A solar body works
on the basis of attraction to a common point, so its roughly circular,
fractally aping the atoms of which it's composed. But as it speeds around
the center of another circular attraction-whirl, a galaxy, how and what
is transmitted in the Planck weave of twirlable bubbles that in some way
stitches, knits, and nano-swirls all things? How is a galaxy woven on
the microloom? And how does it move on that fluid fabric, that nano-bubble
sea? See where working with metaphor instead of math will get you? Into
potential lunacy. (Thank God Einstein and Feynman worked primarily with
metaphor and secondarily with math or I'd be lost in space without an
oxygen tank.) hb: Paul, it sounds to me like you're probably the only
human with the ability to see this intersection, this new theoretical
approach, and to write it up. Which means that write it up you must. This
won't be the first time you've broken new ground and done something revolutionary.
For what it's worth, here's the latest email address I've got for Witten--.
pw: But then I remember of the time, back around 1972, when I tried to
recruit Minsky and Grossberg (and ...) to backpropagation.... pw: At some
level, the duty is real and important and life-and-death. hb: yes. the
first precept of science as I absorbed it at the age of ten was this:
The truth at any price including the price of your life. The truth you
see will someday die with you unless you write it up. By the way, the
second precept of the science I imbibed was this: Look at things everyone
takes for granted as if you've never seen them before, then work from
the awe and the questions thatnew view rouses in you. Hence the silly
questions I ask. And hence my gratitude that you let me get away with
it. pw: And it is really scary to neglect something so important. hb:
precisely. pw: But at another level, I DID mention some of these possible
directions (among others) in quant-ph 0202138 and the longer journal paper
that followed it up. That's probably not enough.. but.. I have to go with
the flow of what opportunities seem most likely to materialize in a real
way, hb: here's the bottom line--the one that neglects all the realities
of day to day life. You have a vision of what the work you've published
to date implies. No one has your unique experience and your mind. If you
don't write up what you see today, it may be gone tomorrow. Insights fade
and are replaced. Capturing them before they can get away is what computers
and paper are for. I have the same problem. My latest solution, which
isn't working yet--a tie-clip microphone I've gotten into the habit of
wearing every day. The wire is under my shirt, just as it is when TV crews
come in here and wire me up for sound. The wire goes to an amazingly tiny
digital voice recorder clipped to my belt. Then there's the part that
doesn't work--the voice recognition software that's supposed to transcribe
my brainstorming sessions or private mutterings into wordprocessor form.
I don't know whose language it understands, but so far it doesn't comprehend
mine. Things like this seem embarrassingly egomaniacal, but they're not.
Those thoughts that disappear so quickly, the insights that you have while
walking from one room to another and are so ridiculously important that
you know you'll never forget them,those insights melt before you can find
the time a day or two later to type them up or write them down. Let's
say only one out of ten of them is really meaningful, thought-changing,
solid and good. That could generate two culture-rearranging thoughts a
week or more. That's over a hundred minor culture-quake makers a year.
And, Paul, you are literally the only person I know who started seriously
in science earlier than I did, and who understands the variety of things
you do. So your cultural contribution is one of the rarest kinds, those
offered to humanity by only the rarest minds. pw: for the life-and-death
issues which have the greatest chance of emerging. _____ Howard Bloom
_________
In a message dated 3/26/2003 9:13:59 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
Is reality just numbers? We had a previous discussion: Howard replied:
hb: description is representation, not reality. It is translation from
one frame of reference to another, from one system to another. The fact
that numerous systems can be isomorphic and reflect each other is one
of the things we examine too infrequently. How does math map the cosmos?
How does thought map math? How do equations on paper equate with brain
processes and with the processes that birthed a universe? =================================================
Howard's reply reminds me very much of comments that Paul Prueitt has
made recently, accusing many people of "confusing description with
reality." The accusation seemed rather strange to me, but I realize
that there are some deep cultural divisions here that all are the deeper
for not being appreciated so clearly..... I strongly agree with Einstein's
bottom line in the Einstein/Heisenberg debate, and in many other real-world
debates they had. But as I said before... my cultural roots are really
more on the Heisenberg side. So I would try to respond to your point from
a philosophical starting point more like Heisenberg's. There is some real
irony here. Even though I disagree with the Copenhagen view of quantum
field theory (QFT), I would claim to fully understand it. Yet many of
the people who believe in it do not fully understand it, in part because
they do not fully understand or share the philosophical presuppositions.
(It is hard for people to understand something they do not believe in.
Possible but hard.) Crudely speaking, one might call this viewpoint "modern
German existentialism." Or a Pythagorean stream of it. And I suddenly
realize... some of the confusion in QFT today is that folks who try to
practice Copenhagen get messed up by the fact that they don't understand
what it really is. At some level... at the very most fundamental level..
the only REAL reality for any of us, as individuals, is the stream of
our sensory experience. Some of this is brutally clear, like the pain
when we stub our toe. Other inputs are subtle, and more easily ignored.
But in the end, that is all that we have. EVERYTHING else is just an internal
model or explanation that we use in order to predict or make sense of
that experience. hb: Whole heartedly agreed. Even sense data is nowhere
near as straightforward as it seems to be. If you study the system of
visual perception, you'll find that the body and mind translate the photons
falling on the visual receptors in the eye from one language to another
many, many times just to process a quick peek from behind a bush.
Here's
a description of the process from my second book, Global Brain. Note how
many different levels of coding, decoding, compression, expansion, recompression,
and translation the process uses. All of these mirror the many verbal,
written, mathematical, metaphoric, and pictorial shorthands we conscious,
culture-using humans whiffle through simply to have this conversation.
And all hint to me that this cosmos is profoundly fractal--the same patterns
show up on many many levels and can be forced to appear on many levels
more. Without further ado, here' visual perception as a multi-layered
cake of descriptions, representations, and reflections in new kinds of
mirrors: The image that we see is the product of slicing, dicing, coding,
compression, long-distance transmission, neural guesswork, and eventual
resplicing. The cut-and-paste begins at the frontier where our senses
meet the outer world--the eye, which edits and reshapes input rather than
faithfully recording just the plain facts of a sight. Cells in the retina
scrap 75% of the light which pours in through the lens of the eye. They
diddle mercilessly with what's left, transmogrifying the photons of which
light is made into pulses of electrons and bursts of unpronounceable chemicals
like prelumirhodopsin. They fiddle with the contrast, tamper with the
sense of space, and report not the location of what we're watching, but
where the retinal cells calculate it soon will be. Though we don't notice
it, the eye is constantly flicking back and forth. To pick shapes out
of the resulting blur, retinal photoreceptors take enormous liberties.
The ones which suspect they've got a handle on what needs to be perceived
clamp a blackout on the photoreceptors around them, and keep them from
reporting what they're witnessing. Then the domineering cells turn their
favored spot of mishmosh into the rough outlines of what we'll eventually
"see." Adding insult to injury, the eye crushes the information
it's already fuddled, compacting the landslide of data from 125 million
neurons down to a code able to squeeze through a cable--the optic nerve--a
mere one million neurons in size. On the way to the brain, the constricted
stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched and modified
with flows of input from ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating
the tilt and trajectory of the head, hands, legs, and torso. The rearranged
gumbo is sent off to the visual cortex, where it is divvied up again.
Some
areas of the cortex pick out horizontal lines, others work on the vertical,
some sort out diagonals for processing, and edge-detectors carve out silhouettes.
Each resulting sliver of the visual signal is tucked into a separate storage
belt responsible for gleaning a different type of meaning. If you're twirling
in a swivel chair, one belt will grab the smear of color whipping past
your eyes and retouch it as a freeze-frame. Meanwhile neurons nooked and
crannied throughout the brain will sift the tidbits for interpretation.
For instance, cells which signal if an oncoming human is friend or foe
will add their best guess to the moving information flow. Finally a council
of representatives from the superior colliculus, the thalamus, the locus
coeruleus, the hypothalamus, and the occipital cortex pool their squabble
of conclusions and cast a vote on what the twinges of light impinging
on the retina might be. Not until they've agreed on an image do they send
it to the left cerebral hemisphere, presenting it to the conscious mind
as a panorama accompli. What we see is not the product of direct perception,
but a reconstruction bordering on collage artistry.
________
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pw:
Even our notions of good and bad ultimately depend totally on EMOTIONAL
sensations or feelings which come to us directly -- hb: those emotional
sensations also involve translation through many layers of representation,
through many frames of reference. For example, the amygdala gives us our
jolt of fear and is first to get a crack at deciphering the emotional
meaning of the latest spurt from the incoming data-stream Then comes the
hippocampus, which gets its own crack at translation of the incoming signal,
a very different sort of interpretation. If the hippocampus' examination
of the incoming stream says everything's ok, that it all checks out with
what other parts of the brain (each with its own representational mechanisms)
feel comfortable with, then the hippocampus sums up its verdict in yet
another language, and sends a shut-up-already signal (an inhibitory signal)
back to the alarm-bells of the amygdala. Even the most elemental feeling
involves a whole mess of brain parts, each with it's own system of description
and interpretation, moving from a hub-bub to a general vote of agreement.
Here's the irony. Even consensus is a form of translation from the language
of the many to the seeming language of the one. So Bloom, in his idiocy,
asks why "reality" can be described, interpreted, symbolized,
or encoded in so many different ways. If Bloom were a Pribram-follower,
he'd say it's because of the holographic nature of things. Shatter a holograph
into a thousand pieces and you can still get the whole holographic image
out of each shard--though you'll pay with a bit of blurring for having
broken the merchandise. But that's the backwards way of saying things.
Nature starts with parts then builds up bigger or more complex structures
in which the shape of the parts reappears on scale after ascending scale,
over and over again. That's fracticality. Bloom, the dolt, says there's
a reason you can translate a reality into so many media, so many frames
of reference, so many different mixes of electrons, protons, chemicals,
photons, inks, papers, neural webs, computer settings, patterns of bits
and bytes, binary codes, hexadecimals, magnetic twitches of oxides, tribal
tapestries of ox hides, English, French, Russian, graphs, patterns of
phosphors on glass, and a good deal more.
The
cosmos began with a set of simple postulates, algorithms, rules, or commandments--call
them whatever you will. It's unfolded 13.5 billion years worth of the
implications hidden in those magic beans--13.5 billion years worth of
axiom-referential processes and things. That's iteration, non-linear processing,
fractals. And in a system of this kind, the same patterns peek out, poke
out, and pongle themselves together on nearly every side. pw: those are
the only real foundation we have. hb: yup, that's where we have to begin.
Though not really. We begin with a roughly 35,000 year accumulation of
cultural interpretations, a 3.85 billion year legacy of DNA and cell membrane
accomodations to experience, and with the interactions between these two
that we call "direct experience." We're already looking through
a thousand-layered glass the first time we ever open our eyes and attempt
to describe. pw: All the rest is deduced from there. (That's about what
I concluded at age 16, independently, in adolescent rebellion against
Anglo-Saxon metamathematics and logic, which had been my main culture
from age 8 up until then. But Heisenberg got it from his environment,
generally... though in the end, maybe he was more of a rebel in his thinking
and personality than I was... As I loook back, I would throw in some caveats,
based on what I have learned in the meantime about the mind, but let me
put those on hold.) And so... EVERYTHING in our head is just description.
That is all we are capable of. hb: in my humble opinion YOU HAVE SMACKED
THE NAIL ON ITS VERY HEAD. Yes, yup, si, oui, da, ja, I agree. pw: Some
descriptions fit experience better than others, but no description is
the reality itself. pw: Now here is the point: **IF** the description
is a good description, it is isomorphic to the reality. hb: agreed again,
mein herr. pw: In that case, there is nothing really there in the reality,
other than what is reflected in the description. hb: at first glance this
sounds very wrong. But if you fiddle with it, it sounds a bit better.
reality=what's reflected in description. Hence what's mirrored in description=reality.
And since we have many descriptions and could always generate lots more,
there must be a reality. So there's no real way of getting the reality
out of the equation. The more descriptions the more the isomorphisms pile
up. And the more strongly those isomorphisms point to a central locus,
something as real as a dust cloud's center of gravity. We may not be able
to see that center of gravity directly, but it is still a very compelling
reality. The first of these dust cloud centers roughly half a million
years after the big bang (or after one of Hoyle's leaks in space)--were
potent enough that eventually entire galaxies swung into shape around
them.
pw:
This is the key point. This is a lesson which physics learned most clearly
and most emphatically from what Einstein did to Maxwell's Laws and to
the "ether." In Maxwell's laws, of course, there are only equations.
And the equations predict the existence of waves. hb: very interesting.
pw: (The success of this purely theoretical prediction was one of the
great real-world empirical and technological successes of physics.) But
many people, using old common-sense views, said: "Hey, Maxwell's
Laws are just equations. Equations are just descriptions, not realities.
Of course, when there is a wave, there must be a motion of something.
There is not just the description, there is the thing itself which has
a wave in it. Let us call this thing 'the ether.'" And maybe Maxwell
himself went along, as he had to, to sell his heresy in a highly conservative
world. But there is no ether. We know that. hb: Pavel says this was a
hasty conclusion, and that we should step back and reexamine it. pw: But
again, let me be careful. Some people still believe there MIGHT be something
like an underlying fluid, solid or lattice. However, the real physicists
who study this theoretical possibility have thoroughly' assimilated the
modern viewpoint, which I also tend to take for granted. hb: remember,
priestly cults can go way off track. First they shelter behind indecipherable
languages (in this case, math). Then they develop their own self-consistent
worldviews. But the more insular the groups and their worldviews become,
the more they can stray from the realm of massive consensual validation
that keeps us on the path we call reality. Lord Kelvin told us that the
cosmos could not possibly be more than, I forget the exact figure, but
it was something in the range of 100,000 years old. A leading expert on
aerodynamics in the late 19th century proved conclusively that no heavier
than air machine could ever fly. (He also proved conclusively that bumblebees
couldn't fly either, by the way. Thank goodness the bees were never told
this news or we might not have bumblebees today.) And the entire community
of geologists knew with absolute certainty in roughly 1915 that the theory
of plate tectonics was crazed flapdoodle. The more isolated a community
of specialists becomes, the more likely it is to go offtrack. pw: The
view is that a model based on an alternative lattice would be JUST ANOTHER
MATHEMATICAL MODEL. In such a model, the electromagnetic waves would appear
as derived or approximate or emergent phenomena, in a universe governed
by yet another purely mathematical model. The model is credible as something
to talk about ONLY TO THE EXTENT that it can take that viewpoint. Why?
Because ONLY if it takes that viewpoint can it begin to promise different
predictions of SOMETHING measurable... something which has implications
for real experience. And so... talk about ethers and deeper levels is
"just heuristic half-baked rhetoric" until it becomes "real"
by being translated into an alternative mathematical theory. hb: Your
basic point is right. In science you have to somehow go eventually from
mere notions about things--like Democritus' loony notion of the atom--to
predictions you can test. I'm not very good at that in physics. My expertise
in prediction and validation is in the social and emotional terrain. But
there's a whoops or two.
Mathocentrism
rules out all the various languages your brain and body must use to do
math...the translation from what Einstein called "vision" to
a neuronal web-buzz that hints at an equation. The translation from that
web-buzz to a set of instructions the motor neurons can get a grip on.
The orders of outgoing nerve signals into which the motor neurons translate
that buzz so it can travel down your arms to your fingertips. The movement
of millions of muscle cells it takes to pick up a piece of chalk (assuming
chalk is still being used today) and to translate hand movement into a
coherent pattern that makes the chalk scrawl a bunch of Arabic numerals
and Greek letters onto a blackboard. Then there's the batch of nerve signals
sent down the efferent nervous system to muscles in nearly every part
of your body that swivels you around to address your colleagues without
tipping you over on your head. And the effort of the initial brain buzz
to translate itself into yet another set of signals that can be deciphered
by the motor neurons that move your mouth, your diaphragm, and tongue.
These nerve signals have to coordinate muscles in many locations to produce
the words that tens of thousands of years of humans have bequeathed you.
With that legacy, expressed in muscular control of breath, you manage
to explain what you've just done. Out of all those languages you use to
do math, you've picked just one. Or is it that the tangle of many, many
languages we call math has tricked us into thinking it's a single thing?
Another way of taking on the question. Remember my daft big bagel theory
of the cosmos? In Einsteinian terms, it needed no math to predict that
past a certain point the rush of matter away from a big bang center would
increase. That was implicit in the 5 dimensional picture of a torus with
a Klein's bottle twist that made the edge the center. The model was posited
in roughly 1959. Approximately 40 years later, surprise, surprise, the
acceleration it predicted showed up in our obsvervations of novas. Math
would have been helpful to predict WHERE the hump would be. But I doubt
it. Look at all the guys doing math who never anticipated the downslide
on the other side at all!!!!!!!!! pw: Einstein might not be happy with
German existentialism (though I am not so sure).. but I am sure that he
and Heisenberg would agree on this fundamental viewpoint. ====== By the
way, there are some corollaries. The Copenhagen viewpoint really requires
that QFT should be trying to provide a complete, well-defined, axiomatically
stateable prediction of what any individual person WILL SEE. Modern QFT
does not meet that standard. Most people DOING QFT do not even seem to
aspire to that standard any more. It often has the methodological flavor
of medieval theology more than of Heisenberg's point of reference. Let
alone Einstein's. hb: good point.
pw:
But... back to the task at hand. Putting the mathematical flesh (well,
bones) on a more modern and more complete view of the mind. (At least
in this case, there will be chapters by other people to take care of a
lot of the muscles.) hb: ") Actually, my aim is to do the opposite,
and you're helping me with it quite a bit. I have to go back where I began--to
cosmology, astrophysics, and the arts--to write The Big Bang Tango: Quarking
In the Social Cosmos--Notes Toward A Post-Newtonian Science. It's a book
that links the Big Bang and the history of the cosmos to corollary generator
theory (the idea that the cosmos started with a handful of axioms), fracticality,
oscillation, attraction and repulsion, compression and expansion, imagination,
creative inspiration, metaphor, math, and Einstein, Darwin, or T.S. Eliot's
forms of secular prophecy. You've helped me resume a train of thought
I abandoned at the age of sixteen when I went off on to find the dark
underbelly of mass emotion, from mysticism to mass fevers and mass-perceptions.
Now you're helping me explore something basic to The Big Bang Tango--how
the two ends of the spectrum--mass moodswings and mass perception on the
one hand and cosmology, astrobiology, and theoretical physics on the other--connect.
All thanks--Howard
_________
Very good and very helpful thoughts, Paul.
Comments below...
Paul Werbos
In a message dated 1/19/2003 5:14:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
At
12:53 AM 1/18/2003 -0500, wrote:
Paul--This is fascinating. To what extent do oscillations play a role
in adaptive optimization?
pw: In a way, the theme of oscillation recurs in different ways at even
more "sites" in the overall framework.
To one down in the trenches... the very first association which occurs
in my mind is Fourier transforms..
but, God help us, many colleagues would say Laplace transforms.
hb:
Paul--to once again reveal my ignorance, I've just looked up LaPlace and
Fourier Transforms, something I should have done long ago. I understand
math best when reducing it to one of its isomorphs--pictures. The pictures
illustrating Fourier Transforms and LaPlace Transforms both hint that
the two are both concerned with decomposing wave functions into component
forms, then recomposing an approximation of the original wave.
The bottom line is this: both these mathematical systems are all about
waves, which means, they are both all about oscillations. Am I anywhere
near understanding the reality of Fourier and LaPlace?
pw: Any linear time-invariant dynamical system is naturally analyzed in
terms of oscillations.
hb:
more of my lack of knowledge. A linear time-invariant dynamical system
is a system with an input and an output, right? How many sorts of things
on this planet and in this cosmos can be analyzed as linear time-invariant
dynamical systems? Meaning how many can be analyzed as simple input-output
systems? How many types of things in this universe and on (and in) this
globe can be analyzed using Fourier and LaPlace transforms--meaning how
many can be analyzed as waves and superpositions of waves?
For how many of empirical things do these various mathematical forms of
analysis apply--from the swing of an electron around a proton, the wave
of a photon in motion, the circle of stars around a galactic heart, the
cAMP pulsations of slime mold when they signal each other that food had
run out, the pulsations of the slimemold amoeba when they come together
and form something that looks like a crawling slug, the input and internal
signals that tell that sluge when to lift its head--its fruiting body--and
release its spores.
And in what cases would we be oversimplifying to the point of distortion
if we were to apply these forms of mathematical analysis?
pw: ("Time-invariant" does not mean that the STATE of the system
does not change -- only that laws
of the dynamics do not.)
hb: that helps, thanks. complex dynamical systems, the ones I play with,
change constantly. Are there unchanging dynamic laws that rule these change?
That's a question historians, cultural evolutionists, and paleopsychologists
have been asking for a long, long time. Ibn Khaldun, in roughly 1350 ad,
was the first mega-historian to say yes and to posit unchanging laws of
social change. His laws were a delight to read, but I suspect grossly
oversimplified, and wouldn't work in the world today.
However Osama bin Laden might beg to disagree. He's counting on the stability
of Ibn Khaldun's laws of social change. If they're right, Osama has a
good chance of doing what Allah has always willed--taking over the planet
for the purity of the one true religion, its one true god, and the laws
that god gave to his only unsullied prophet, Mohammed.
Am I getting of the point by hauling geopolitics and cultural evolution
into a discussion of Fourier Transforms? No, not at all. Culture-change
is cyclical. But each cycle changes the nature of the system. So each
cycle is very much like a many of those that have proceeded it, but also
very different. The system of all the societies on this globe is one that
is constantly changing itself.
But is the system of all cultures on this planet changing its laws? Or
is the pattern of periodical radical upgrade, invention, innovation, rearrangement,
and breakthrough a product of something like a Fourier or LaPlace wave
acting fractally? Is it a linear time-invariant dynamic system? Or is
it a linear time-invariant dynamic system that works upon itself orthoganally?
(I don't mean orthogonal in the mathematical sense, I mean it in the sense
of lifting above the dimension in which the Fourier Transforms are working,
what the dictionary calls, "involving right angles or perpendiculars".)
When it comes to mappings of mathematical systems onto the material I
study--everything from the Big Bang and the formation of protons (nucleogenesis),
atoms (nucleocosmochronology), galaxies, complex molecules, planets, life,
evolution, society, the brain, culture, and the mind--Mandelbrot's equation
seems to fit more than anything else I've seen.
However I am very mathematically naive.
pw: Thus almost any first-order approximation of the behavior of a
continuous system
look like oscillations. They occur at almost all levels of analysis.
hb:
great. fits neatly into the work I've been doing,
pw: And, of course, in nonlinear dynamical systems, there are often limit
cycles.
A major challenge in designing intelligent systems -- or even more mundane
control systems --
is to prevent the kind of oscillations one does not like. Like shaky cars.
Or positive feedback loops
in sound systems.
hb:
having but modest goals, I'm merely looking for the oscillatory patterns
that have helped build this cosmos from scratch and now manifest themselves
in mass emotion, thought, social floods and maelstroms, and calms within
these social-passion-and-aggression storms (all liquid turbulence metaphors,
and all presumably mathematecizable).
pw: One big difference between classical control approaches and more brain-like
modern approaches
is the acceptance of the fact that the best "controller" (even
for such things as aircraft control)
may not be one which damps out all change or movement in the world, but
rather, one which
converges to something like an optimal cycle or some other more complex
pattern of dynamics.
hb:
an optimal cycle wouldn't be good enough. or so I suspect. This cosmos
periodically settles down and optimizes, then it gets restless and pulls
itself up to a whole new level of suprise, a whole new toyland of reality,
then comes the optimization again--learning to play with the brand new
toys.
The mystery is in the saltation, the sudden jumps from a cosmos that has
never seen a "thing"--a particle--before to one that suddenly
has more than 10(89) of them; from a cosmos that has only seen particles
for 100,000 years to one that suddenly sees a whole new form of social
aggregation that we call the atom and the cornucopia of new opportunities
that open. Among other things, this cosmos had never seen the subtle attractive
force we know as gravity before atoms appeared on the scene. Then came
gravity wars between aggregations and we had the first matter--dust and
gas. Next cam huge gravity aggregations--dark swirls of enormous size--the
first galaxies.
This not a mere process of oscillation settling into a state of optimization.
There's a "wow" force periodically kicking this whole machine
up to whole new planes of being, whole new ways of mix-and-match-and-socializing.
Suns were a huge wow when they first appeared one million years after
the big bang.
Sun deaths in Nova crashes 100,000 years later were a totally unseen catastrophe.
The crunch of protons and neutrons in that fist of a dying star was another
big surprise. It gradually turned three forms of nuclei into four, then
five, then six, then 92.
Then
came complex carbon-based molecules forming in hot interstellar clouds
of gas, cold instersellar clouds, ice spicules, comets, and lord knows
what all else. Then came the frothing of complex molecules on this planet,
the evolution of just one life system, the system of DNA (shouldn't there
have really been at least six or seven life forms duking it out?), and
then came you and me.
Oscillation is everywhere in this genesis story. But what is the orthogonal
flipper? What is the generator of the jumps? What is the source of wow-power?
Right now I've got my eye on fracticality. But will the math of fractals
be enough to handle this cosmic creativity?
pw: Oscillation is a constant between the basic categories you outlined
below--hope and fear, emotion and reason-- plus a few that are related--bulls
and bears, conservatives and liberals, romanticism and classicism, war
parties and peace parties, short skirts and long skirts (I'm not kidding--the
anthropological literature on this mesure of mass mood is fascinating).
pw: The idea of oscillation is often used as a kind of placeholder for
more complex patterns of dynamics -- just
as Wiener himself may have slightly overstressed the thermostat or regulator
as a paradigm for
more complex decision and control systems. (Many followers went dangerously
overboard
on that particular simplification, perhaps causing overreaction in turn.)
Some of these "oscillations" could be cartoon-portrayed more
accurately as Hegel did,
as a kind of dialectic process for exploring a complex domain of ideas...
hb:
A good observation. I've taken that idea and run with it quite a distance
in my own work.
pw: Oscillation on some of these dimensions represents a kind of high-valence
inner struggle along
a certain dimension... which is ultimately resolved best by the system
identifying and paying real attention to
another dimension altogether, which relieves some of the ... systemic
tension...
This has various mathematical bases. For example, there is a kind of folk-theorem
I believe which says that
"there are no local minima when you allow for smooth changes in topology,
for new directions..."
Also, a lot of the vacillation has to do with "local forgetting effects,"
which turn out to have a direct relation
to that syncretism stuff I mentioned earlier.
hb:
I have vast amounts of empirical and theoretical material on these oscillations--but
I'm curious about the match between social reality and the math.
Oscillation between extremes shows up as a basic component in the behavior
of group-learning systems from bacterial colonies to brains (100 billion
neurons competing and agreeing) and from ant colonies to chimp tribes,
and to the history and mass culture of modern human beings.
pw: Again, THIS parallel has a lot to do with the power of Fourier analysis
as a first approximation to almost anything.
Anything except bits.
hb:
As for the question about fear, here are some excerpts from one of my
books, Global Brain: The Evolution Of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21st Century:
From Open Hand to Social Fist--The Clenched Society
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
I occasionally wonder how far the insights of Yeats or of Eliot might
have gone,
really. Some of their outspoken friends were a tad amateurish in some
ways, but...
well... it's a segment of history I have not tracked as much as some others.
I sometimes wonder if their female friends may have been more insightful
than their male friends.
Lately I have been drawn more to curiosity about Bacon and Newton and
that segment..
but not such an active pursuit... back to field operators.
Best,
Paul
P.S. Am curious about what that friend of yours has decided to do.
"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when
we are not sure that we are doubly sure." Reinhold Niebuhr
Groups
under threat constrict. They do it to gain leverage and force. Toss bacteria
onto a surface so hard that feeding becomes almost impossible, and they'll
abandon individual freedom, pull together their members, and form a tight-knit
phalanx which can, according to physicist/microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob,
carve through the obstacles around it like a blade. Human groups in times
of trouble stiffen up their unity, squelch ideas, rally 'round their leaders,
and spit out those who fail to ape the top dog faithfully. Group members
project their own forbidden emotions onto others, and in their ferocity
become enforcers for the group's norms. They spot the smallest sin among
their fellows and punish it intolerantly. In biology, emergency measures
like these have a tendency to cut two ways. In short jolts they produce
bursts of power. But used in the long run, they destroy. The oneness whic
h gives society the punch of a bayonet produces over the course of time
a paralyzing rigidity. Howard Bloom
-----------
references
.. Jamie Arndt, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon.
"Subliminal Exposure to Death-Related Stimuli Increases Defense of
the Cultural Worldview." Psychological Science, September, 1997:
379?385; J. Krause. "Differential fitness returns in relation to
spatial position in groups." Biological Reviews of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society, May 1994: 187-206. Complex dynamical systems theory
and theories of self-organizing systems may shed light on why group constriction
in the face of threat is so universal in biology. The Grand Dragon of
self-organization, the Santa Fe Institute's Stuart Kauffman, observes
that perturbed systems, systems knocked from their normal moorings and
threatened with eradication, respond with their own form of reactionary
conservatism: "In order to compensate and achieve coordination, such
systems would be expected to shift deeper into ordered regime. There the
convergence in state space is stronger, and hence provides a buf fer against
exogenous noise." In other words, when a self-organizing system is
in danger of being ripped apart it bunches and seeks refuge in the strategy
it "knows" best. (Stuart Kauffman. "What is life: was Schrodinger
Right." In What is Life? The Next Fifty Years--Speculations on the
future of biology. Edited by Michael P. Murphy and Luke A.J. O'Neill.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 109.)
.. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine. "The Artistry of Microorganisms."
Scientific American, October, 1998: 82-87. http://www.sciam.com/1998/1098issue/1098levine.html,
November 1998 (web version); E. Ben-Jacob. "From Snowflake Formation
to the Growth of Bacterial Colonies. Part II. Cooperative formation of
complex colonial patterns." Contemporary Physics, 38 (1997): 205-241.
.. H.J. Rothgerber. "External intergroup threat as an antecedent
to perceptions of in-group and out-group homogeneity." Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. December 1997: 1206-12; W.N. Morris,
S. Worchel, J.L. Bios, J.A. Pearson, C.A. Rountree, G.M. Samaha, J. Wachtler,
S.L. Wright. "Collective coping with stress: group reactions to fear,
anxiety, and ambiguity." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
June 1976: 674-9.
.. I.L. Janis. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-policy
Decisions and Fiascos. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1972; M.R. Callaway,
R.G. Marriott, J.K. Esser. "Effects of dominance on group decision
making: toward a stress-reduction explanation of groupthink." Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, October 1985: 949-52.
.. S.E. Taylor, M. Lobel. "Social comparison activity under threat:
downward evaluation and upward contacts." Psychological Review, October
1989: 569-75.
.. L.S. Newman, K.J. Duff, R.F. Baumeister. "A new look at defensive
projection: thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception."
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 1997: 980-1001; P. Laudedale,
P. Smith-Cunnien, J. Parker, J. Inverarity. "External threat and
the definition of deviance." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
May 1984: 1058-68; Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition
into the forces of history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995: 73-96.
.. The tendency of short (acute) bursts of energizers to produce benefits,
and of those same energizers to do damage in lengthy (chronic) doses shows
up particularly among stress hormones, which prime the body for reaction
to a crisis but, if not packed away quickly, do enormous damage. (Neil
Greenberg. "Behavioral Endocrinology of Physiological Stress in a
Lizard." The Journal of Experimental Zoology Supplement. 4, 1990:
171-172; Neil Greenberg. "Ethologically informed design in husbandry
and research." In Health and Welfare of Captive Reptiles, edited
by Clifford Warwick, Fredric L. Frye, and James B. Murphy. London: Chapman
&Hall, 1995: 253; Neil Greenberg. "Central and Endocrine Aspects
of Tongue-Flicking and Exploratory Behavior in Anolis carolinensis."
Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 41, 1993: 214-216; Cliff H. Summers and
Neil Greenberg. "Somatic Correlates of Adrenergic Activity during
Aggression in the Lizard, Anolis carolinensis." Hormones and Behavior,
28, 1994: 29-40; Robert M. Sapolsky. "Stress in the Wild." Scientific
American. January 1990: 116-123; M.R. Gunnar, K Tout, M. de Haan, S. Pierce,
K. Stansbury. "Temperament, social competence, and adrenocortical
activity in preschoolers." Developmental Psychobiology. July 1997:
65-85; Robert M. Sapolsky. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers : An Updated Guide
to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. New York: W H Freeman
&Co 1998; B. Moghaddam, M.L. Bolinao, B. Stein-Behrens, R. Sapolsky.
"Glucocorticoids mediate the stress-induced extracellular accumulation
of glutamate." Brain Research, August 1994: 251-4.) Strategies used
at one level of biology show up on numerous others. Hence it is not surprising
that the tendency of instant activators to become long-term poisons appears
not only within organisms, but within societies.
In
a message dated 1/17/2003 11:44:48 AM Eastern Standard Time, pwerbos writes:
>
>How does cybernetics deal with this issue of fear ... in theory and,
>perhaps more importantly just now, in practice?
>
>His question could be extended to other domains saying
>How does cybernetics, systems, information, organization, science,
>management, behavioral concern,... deal with this issue of fear ...
in
>theory and, perhaps more importantly just now, in practice?
This is a deep and subtle question.
I started to reply... then quit, because of lack of time... but really
should say
a LITTLE.
On one level ... the phenomenon of "fear," like "love"
or "creativity" or
"escaping from
local minima" (vicious cycles)... is really a diverse family of emergent
phenomena, which
are intrinsically not reducible to a quick unitary story. But there are
some interesting pieces...
For example...
There is a kind of ladder (or lattice) of designs for true intelligent
learning systems...
>From a computational viewpoint, all such designs are alternative ways
of
addressing the
general problem of how to optimize expected results over time over an
unknown environment....
All can be proven to converge, in time, to an optimal strategy of action,
if given enough time to learn....
But some are faster than others, exponentially faster when the environment
is complex...
as we rise up the ladder, the complexity of the learning system AND OF
the
environments
it can cope with effectively, both rise. (This is a quickie summary of
some
very complex stuff, with a huge amount of philosophical background I don't
have time to repeat just now.)
In my view, the very bottom of that ladder -- much lower than the learning
in the smallest mouse --
is class of designs I developed by 1972, which I call model-based adaptive
critic designs.
(But from an engineering viewpoint, they are a tad above the ladders they
usually teach people
about, ladders which don't quite reach all the way to basic intelligence.
The math is hard,
when one demands real convergence proofs. as in
arXiv.org/abs/adap-org/9810001. Real
cybernetics.)
The key to that kind of design is a type of neural network called a
"critic." The function of
a critic... is to learn hopes and fears.
In common English... the adaptive critic theory of intelligence is the
theory that our brain is
designed to learn hopes and fears -- more precisely, what to hope for
and
what to fear -- and
to respond to such hopes and fears in practical action.
More complex intelligent systems are more complex in how this works, but
the basic principle is
retained, in my view.
Engineering systems based on this principle have recently shown superior
ability to perform some
very important real-world tasks, like reducing NOx emissions from engines
and like keeping
generators up under disturbances three times as large as what the best
conventional power control
systems allow. (See the talk by Venayagamoorthy at
ebrains.la.asu.edu/~nsfadp for the latter.)
And so.. if hope and fear are hard-wired into our brains, and essential
to
their operation...
it makes no sense to think about trying to eliminate them IN GENERAL.
They
are givens of life.
I once heard a mystic say: "People should not try to eliminate or
repress
'negative emotions.'
Instead, they should work to channel them more constructively and
appropriately."
Thus if someone in a blue shirt or a person with black skin hurts us,
we
should not give in to
the temptation to hate all people wearing blue shirts or black skin. We
should try to engage in
more accurate "credit assignment." Our emotions and our intellect
need to
work together
in a more collaborative way -- the intellect providing awareness of the
real variables that cause
problems, and the emotions helping to warn the intellect when it is being
too simplistic.
Similar in some ways to the old idea of "alchemical marriage"
-- similar,
but not entirely the same.
Another key dimension of fear is the kind of thing Freud talked about,
regarding traumatic experiences.
There are new mathematical designs which begin to illustrate how this
kind
of thing works.
I referred briefly to "syncretism" in my paper in the 1977 General
Systems
Yearbook on intelligent systems -
and only now are people beginning to implement and understand a few pieces
of that.
But I don't have time right now to do full justice to that complex subject.
In fact... I probably should have written up
a lot more than I have for English-language publication. But my time is
ever more constrained.
(Emails are a lot easier and faster than journal articles, however.)
Best,
Paul W.
_______
Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web <http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/fourier/ftheory.html>
Fourier Transforms in Crystallography
What is a Fourier Transform? This question is best answered with the aid
of an example. A Fourier transform is a representation of some function
in terms of a set of sine-waves. The set of sine-waves of different frequencies
is orthogonal <http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/%7Ecowtan/fourier/ftortho.html>,
and it can be shown that any continuous function can be represented by
summing enough sine-waves of the appropriate frequency, amplitude and
phase.
Let us consider an imaginary one-dimensional crystal. There are three
atoms in the unit cell; two carbons and an oxygen. The electron density
in the unit cell looks like this:
:
Now
we will try and represent this function in terms of sine waves. The first
sine wave has a frequency of 2, that is there are two repeats of the wave
across the unit cell. One peak represents the oxygen, and the other the
two carbons:
The
second sine wave has a frequency of 3; three repeats of the wave across
the unit cell. It has a different phase, in other words we start at a
different place on the wave. The amplitude is also different:
Finally,
we introduce a sine wave with a frequency of 5. Two of the peaks of this
wave are lined up with the carbon atoms:
Now
we add them all together:
Note
that the sum of the three sine-waves is a good approximation to the original
unit cell. Thus we can see that the unit cell can be represented quite
well using only three sine-waves, given the correct choice of frequency,
amplitude and phase.
Now we will look at the Fourier Transform of the same unit cell. Note
that the result consists of a series of peaks, the largest of which are
at 2, 3 and 5 on the x-axis. These correspond exactly to the sine-wave
frequencies which we used to reconstruct the unit cell. If you look carefully
you will also see that the heights of the peaks correspond to the amplitudes
of the three waves:
The
smaller peaks in the Fourier transform correspond to additional smaller
waves which would have to be added to get a perfect fit to the original
density. Thus we can see that the Fourier Transform tells us what mixture
of sine-waves is required to make up any function.
Of course the sine-waves go on for ever, and so there will be lots more
copies of the unit cell beyond the pictures here. Also, the Fourier Transform
has some other features: it has values for both positive and negative
frequency, and the values are complex and not real. These features combine
to determine the phase of any particular sine-wave component.
A
set of functions is orthogonal if none of the functions can be made up
from linear combinations of the others. The set of sine-waves of different
frequencies is orthogonal.
A good analogy is with red, green, and blue light. However you vary the
quantities, you cannot make red from any mixture of green and blue. But
with all three colours, you can make any colour you like.
Similarly, by mixing sine-waves of every frequency in the right proportions,
we can construct any arbitrary function.
Retrieved
January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://staff.aes.rmit.edu.au/peter/LAPLACE.HTML
Retrieved
January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://www.efunda.com/math/laplace_transform/forward.cfm?FuncName=Graph
Encyclopædia
Britannica Article - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=48267
in mathematics, a particular integral transform. The Laplace transform
f(p), also denoted by L{F(t)} or Lap F(t), is defined by the integral
Involving
the exponential parameter p in the kernel K = e-pt. The linear Laplace
operator L thus transforms each function F(t) of a certain set of functions
into some function f(p). The inverse transform F(t) is written L-1{f(p)}
or Lap-1f(p). The Laplace transform has many applications, such as in
solution of linear differential equations with constant coefficients or
the study of boundary value problems. These problems often arise in connection
with calculations relating to physical systems. Notable early success
in solving this type of problem was achieved by the 19th-20th-century
British physicist-engineer Oliver Heaviside, who developed a procedure
called operational calculus. See also Fourier transform; integral transform.
integral transform Encyclopædia Britannica Article - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=43477
mathematical operator that produces a new function f(y) by integrating
the product of an existing function F(x) and a so-called kernel function
K(x, y) between suitable limits. The process, which is called transformation,
is symbolized by the equation f(y) = ò K(x, y)F(x)dx. Several transforms
are commonly named for the mathematicians who introduced them: in the
Laplace transform, the kernel is exp(-xy) and the limits of integration
are zero and plus infinity; in the Fourier transform, the kernel is (2
p )-1/2exp(-ixy) and the limits are minus and plus infinity. (See also
Fourier transform; Laplace transform.) The value of integral transforms
lies in the simplification that they bring about, most often in dealing
with differential equations subject to particular boundary conditions.
Proper choice of the class of transformation usually makes it possible
to convert not only the derivatives in an intractable differential equation,
but the boundary values, as well, into terms of an algebraic equation
that can be easily solved. The solution obtained is, of course, the transform
of the solution of the original differential equation, and it is necessary
to invert this transform to complete the operation. For the common transformations,
tables are available that list many functions and their transforms.
Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/teaching/projects/2000_01/tg7360/Limit%20Cycles.htm
Fig 2.7 A Limit-Cycle
graph for the inverted single pendulum, being oscillated with a/l=0.33
and w=10(g/l)1/2, obtained form an initial condition theta = Pi and angular
velocity = 2.6(g/l)1/2 at t=0, note that the corresponding Phase-plot
diagram is Fig 2.6
In a message dated 1/21/2003 9:32:23 AM Eastern Standard Time, pwerbos
writes: By the way, I wonder what happened with your friend, Skoyles...
is there something in motion, or pending, or...? hb: I wonder, too. John
is a very close friend and an extraordinary scholar and thinker. But he's
been depressed recently and I'm having a hard time reaching him. Since
email isn't working, I'll ask my assistant to track him down by phone
and see what's going on. >>To one down in the trenches... the very
first association which occurs in >>my mind is Fourier transforms..
>>but, God help us, many colleagues would say Laplace transforms.
> > >hb: Paul--to once again reveal my ignorance, I've just looked
up LaPlace >and Fourier Transforms, something I should have done long
ago. I >understand math best when reducing it to one of its >isomorphs--pictures.
The pictures illustrating Fourier Transforms and >LaPlace Transforms
both hint that the two are both concerned with >decomposing wave functions
into component forms, then recomposing an >approximation of the original
wave. > >The bottom line is this: both these mathematical systems
are all about >waves, which means, they are both all about oscillations.
Am I anywhere >near understanding the reality of Fourier and LaPlace?
Every once in a while, I am reminded that my native language and culture
-- which I take for granted on some level -- are shared by almost no one.
Well... in the electrical engineering community, which I see every day
here, one can take Fourier transforms for granted. But not beyond that.
hb: I suspect Fourier Transforms are standard knowledge for lots of folks.
Many an article I've skipped in The Sciences and The Scientific American
have made it clear that they are basic to a modern scientific vocabulary.
pw: For me, when I use the word "oscillation," I picture a sine
wave, first of all. If it's not a sine wave, hb: me too, as on an oscilloscope.
But when I picture a photon in motion, I picture a sine wave above and
below the line. I wish we could draw online. My vision of a photon is
of a two-dimensional blip and disappearance then blip and zip into the
nothingness of the central line again. However that, too, is an artifact
of the limitations of book pages. I suspect a photon really blips and
zips down to nothing then blips again in three dimensions. Am I right?
And if David Bohm and I are right, it also blips in five dimensions (depth,
height, width, time, and some dimension above the two that accounts for
non-locality). pw: I see it as a kind of dirty oscillation -- the sine
wave is the pure thing, sort-of-like the Platonic ideal of what an oscillation
is. hb: hmmm--you've just given me a vision. I've always wondered how
you can pack the sound of the 76 instruments of an orchestra into the
single electrical signal that makes the cone of a loudspeaker vibrate.
A Fourier Transform--a wave made up of waves--sounds like a rough analogy.
Except the Transform seems to be a way of dissecting such a wave down
to its basic components then reconstructing it. pw: And Fourier transformation
is... basically just the observation that ANY time-series can be analyzed
as the sum of components, each of which is a pure oscillation, a sine
wave, of a different frequency. hb: then if I'm reading you right, we
are on the same wavelength. pw: Thus can light always be decomposed into
different pure colors by a prism. Traditional linear dynamical systems
(made up of integrators, differentiators, multipliers...)
hb:
Paul, this could be very important to me. Remember, in my book Global
Brain I've defined the complex adaptive systems we see in the mass behavior
of bacterial colonies and of human civilizations as having five components--conformity
enforcers, diversity generators, inner-judges, resource-shifters, and
intergroup tournaments. Conformity enforcers sounds like integrators.
Diversity generators sounds like differentiators. And inner-judges and
resource-shifters sound like multipliers. Maybe Bloom with his thick-headed,
visualizing brain and mathematicians, with their subtle understandings,
have spotted parallel phenomena and have analyzed them in similar ways.
To what sort of systems do integrators, differentiators, and multipliers
apply? And how are those systems analogous to and different from societies
of microorganisms or of human minds? pw: have the property that is formally
stated: "Sine waves are the eigenfunctions of the dynamics."
What that means, in common English, is that each frequency goes its way
independently of all the others. You can predict the overall system by
analyzing separately what happens to each frequency of oscillation. Then
add up the rest. hb: this is wonderful clarity. So an eigenfunction--another
term I've never taken the time to understand, much to my shame--is the
uberfunction that emerges when a bunch of lesser oscillations--like the
76 instruments of an orchestra playing Beethoven--converge? And the Fourier
Transform helps you reduce the eigenfunction to the multiple oscillations
that go into its making? The Fourier Transforms help you pick out the
fibers that make up the thread and the threads that make up the weave?
pw: Electrical engineers, in particular, learn how to analyze basic circuits
by analyzing what happens to each frequency.. hb: aha. what sort of basic
circuits, and why do they need to analyze its waveforms? Isn't knowing
the machinery enough? Or does breaking down the uber-wave into the waves
that go to make it up tell you which components are in harmony and which
are acting up? pw: Nonlinearity changes the story drastically. And I have
spent almost all my life on nonlinear mathematics. hb: my understanding
is that nonlinearity emerges when you repeat an algorithm or rule of some
sort on its previous result. Which makes fractals and the fibonnaci series
nonlinear. Am I wrong? Or does non-linear math have to decompose a phenomenon
into numerous dimensions--as if you were performing a sort of hyperdimensional
Fourier Transform? How do decomposition into 27 dimensions or more relate
to the iterative properties of non-linearity? pw: Yet those who are good
at nonlinear mathematics (except for digital logic, which is a different
case) learn that sophisticated use of complicated linear mathematics is
essential to understanding nonlinear systems as well.
And,
yes, oscillation is everywhere, not because of God, but because of Fourier.
hb: Fourier recognized an existent pattern. God would have created a class
of patterns--and their components--from scratch. But there is no god.
So how did this universe manage to evolve waves with sufficient complexity
to be analyzable by Fourier Transforms? How were the first sub-oscillations
birthed and how did the differentiate then weave? How did they self-create
then reintegrate? And doesn't differentiation via self-creation then reweaving
happen in this cosmos over and over again? Thus making this a very fractal
and a very nonlinear place? If you had to tell the story of the evolution
of just one phenomenon describable by a Fourier transform from the very
beginning, how would the story go? pw: (By the way... instead of "sine,"
we usually do it as e-to-the-ivt, or exp(ivt). In most engineering or
physics texts, you will see that formula pattern all over the place.)
hb: my feeling is that pictures are more powerful than formula--at least
for helping our intuitive powers work. Feinman and Einstein did their
most creative math by picturing a formula as blobs or shafts or whatever
sprung to mind--picturing them moving in three dimensions (plus time),
in full color, and with muscular properties--properties they could feel
in the muscles of their bodies. My feeling is that formulae are more valuable
for precision, but that the mathematicians of the 19th century were fools
to try to banish pictures from math and reduce everything to formulae.
Fools, however, can be useful to cultural evolution. In going to extremes,
they can explore fringe territories and bring us back new things. Like
the rigorous formula-rization of what had previously been visual in math.
Now we have more instruments than we had before the days of the 19th century
formula craze. We've also got more instruments thanks to the quick and
complex visualizing abilities of computer graphics hooked painting the
gestation and the outcome of formulae. >>pw: Any linear time-invariant
dynamical system is naturally analyzed in >>terms of oscillations.
> > > >hb: more of my lack of knowledge. A linear time-invariant
dynamical >system is a system with an input and an output, right? How
many sorts of >things on this planet and in this cosmos can be analyzed
as linear >time-invariant dynamical systems? Meaning how many can be
analyzed as >simple input-output systems? How many types of things
in this universe and >on (and in) this globe can be analyzed using
Fourier and LaPlace >transforms--meaning how many can be analyzed as
waves and superpositions >of waves? pw: An LTI system... is when ...
the time-flux or rate of change of a vector x is equal to a linear function
of x. The linear function can be written in principle as Ax, where A is
a matrix or a linear operator. For example, the modern "Schrodinger
equation" (due more to Heisenberg than to Schrodinger!) is of that
form -- psi-dot = i H psi, where "psi dot" means the infinitesimal
change in psi, and H is the Hamiltonian operator. But in some engineering
situations, A also changes with time; systems with A(t) are not time-invariant,
and may possess different eigenfunctions. Usually such time-dependent
systems are really just partial windows into a larger system which IS
time-invariant... or else they are better linear approximations to a nonlinear
system. hb: yoiks. I'm lost. I am fascinated by our correspondence. It
moves into the areas I have to cover in the book The Big Bang Tango--areas
I've been working out theory on for decades.
There's
math underlying the theories all over the place. But, as you can see,
I do math in coloring book pictures. So having you to talk to is carrying
me into a very heady and very necessary realm. You're a delight, Paul.
But one result is that I generally answer you at 2 am or later, when I
just can't stop because it's a Werbos email and yet my brain is a bit
muddled. pw:ANYTHING at any level may be analyzed this way. It is mathematics,
not physics. hb: which means it has applicability all over the place,
right? In the Big Bang Tango I've worked out a theory about why this universal
applicability of metaphoric systems like math and, well, ummm, metaphor,
exists. I've worked out a theory of why we can use the metaphor of a wave
for a ripple in a pond, a wave in the ocean, a ripple of pressure waves
in the plasma just not long after the big bang, for the ripples of matter
that pattern galaxies, for the ripple of we-don't-know-what (electromagnetism)
in a photon. Why do the same patterns recur at each level? How is this
recurrence of patterns from the micro to the macroverse reflected in aesthetics,
poetry, and religion, not just science. I have an answer. Now I am learning
as much as I can from you to see if it holds up. hb: >For how many
of empirical things do these various mathematical forms of >analysis
apply--from the swing of an electron around a proton, the wave of >a
photon in motion, the circle of stars around a galactic heart, the cAMP
>pulsations of slime mold when they signal each other that food had
run >out, the pulsations of the slimemold amoeba when they come together
and >form something that looks like a crawling slug, the input and
internal >signals that tell that sluge when to lift its head--its fruiting
body--and >release its spores. pw: For the first three, the application
is meat-and-potatoes. For biological systems, there is a lot of effort
to try to figure out how best to model the dynamics. Certainly many biologists
talk to physicists, and use differential equation models; thus they end
up doing either Fourier analysis (which is quite common in biology, particularly
in neuroscience) or ordinary nonlinear dynamical system analysis (aka
"chaos theory"). hb: it's the fractal end of non-linear math
that has got me going. See www.howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion for
an example of what I mean. You won't see any math. Instead you'll see
poetry. But it's scientific poetry telling the story of the cosmos in
a brief amount of space using the recurrence of key patterns at different
levels to tell the tale. pw: Ironically, I have argued that neuroscientists
and neural modelers have overused such models in too straightforward a
way. They would say "Oh in artificial systems you can get away with
unnatural nonbiological things like discrete clocks.." But I think
THEY have lost sight of the complexity of reality, in their simplified
models borrowed from chaos theory.
hb:
I agree with you heartily. in neurobiology and neuropsychology, if you
try the sort of oversimplifications that are common in physics, you kill
the system. You are no longer describing a living--much less an emoting
and thinking--thing. pw: Neuroscientists like Llinas (NYU -- have you
ever met him?) hb: I'd love to but haven't had the time to chase him down.
pw: have found LOTS of centralized clock mechanisms in the brain, not
so different from clocks which control CPUs!! That tends to generate some
discrete-time effects.. which requires mathematics RELATED to the usual
continuous-time Fourier analysis, but not precisely the same. But still...
linear discrete time time-invariant systems STILL can be analyzed in terms
of oscillatory components; they still have the same basic eigenvector
property. hb: makes sense. In seeming contradiction to what I said above,
it makes sense that the zillions of clocks in the body have to integrate
with a grand controller, a great conductor, presumably the one in the
suprachiasmatic nucleus, and that they should produce eigenwaves, eigenfunctions,
like the one that carries Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic
to the magnet in my speaker via a thin twist of copper strands. pw: The
release of spores gets into the realm of discrete mathematics, which is
ultimately less tractable. There are certain mathematical problems which
simply cannot be solved in closed form, and life becomes an exercise in
finding patterns of approximations that help us make do... hb: the proposition
that Eshel Ben-Jacob and I worked out four years ago or so is that there
are no closed systems anywhere in this cosmos. Hence one aspect of classical
dynamics--the second law of thermodynamics--doesn't work in this universe.
Lee Smolin says that any particle in this cosmos could be defined by its
relationship to every other particle. In fact, it could be defined as
nothing but a sum of these relationships. This, too, rules out closed
systems. Though Smolin doesn't say this rules out entropy. Do you know
the work of Ben-Jacob? He's head of the physics department at the University
of Tel-Aviv and shows up in Physica A a lot. hb: >And in what cases
would we be oversimplifying to the point of distortion >if we were
to apply these forms of mathematical analysis? pw: That depends very much
on the specific case. And we do not yet know. Quantitative Systems Biotechnology
(QSB) is at a very early stage -- though NSF certainly is funding efforts
to find ways to make sense of such systems more quantittaively. (One may
search on "QSB" at www.nsf.gov.)
hb:
I just looked and the goals are awesome. >>pw: ("Time-invariant"
does not mean that the STATE of the system does not >>change --
only that laws >>of the dynamics do not.) > > >hb: that
helps, thanks. complex dynamical systems, the ones I play with, >change
constantly. Are there unchanging dynamic laws that rule these >change?
That's a question historians, cultural evolutionists, and >paleopsychologists
have been asking for a long, long time. Ibn Khaldun, >in roughly 1350
ad, was the first mega-historian to say yes and to posit >unchanging
laws of social change. His laws were a delight to read, but I >suspect
grossly oversimplified, and wouldn't work in the world today. > >However
Osama bin Laden might beg to disagree. He's counting on the >stability
of Ibn Khaldun's laws of social change. If they're right, Osama >has
a good chance of doing what Allah has always willed--taking over the >planet
for the purity of the one true religion, its one true god, and the >laws
that god gave to his only unsullied prophet, Mohammed. pw: Don't know.
I have always assumed he is into Ragnarok or Armageddon. But... I have
not done a really deep probe... not my favorite part of the mental landscape.
hb: >Am I getting of the point by hauling geopolitics and cultural
evolution >into a discussion of Fourier Transforms? No, not at all.
Culture-change >is cyclical. But each cycle changes the nature of the
system. So each >cycle is very much like a many of those that have
proceeded it, but also >very different. The system of all the societies
on this globe is one that >is constantly changing itself. pw: I have
certainly learned a lot from Spengler, Toynbee and MacLeish and even Max
Weber on such themes. But I would see the Spengler kind of vision as kind
of "life cycle" oscillation, like a limit cycle of nonlinear
systems dynamics more than a Fourier thing. And still as an approximation,
of course. Where the ancients would see a Great Chain of Being, I would
see a Great Chain (or Lattice) of Approximation. Approximations to approximations
to approximations. Maybe the old Hindus would appreciate this... not exactly
a chain of maya, but something a bit like that. And there are chains of
illusion as well in the minds which populate this system. (Is an approximation
a well-intentioned illusion?) hb: this is a heavy and a neat one. something
to ponder. This was a wonderful mental workout, Paul. You are helping
me get somewhere important. All my thanks--Howard P.S. Some folks would
call these views "orthodox reductionism." But it's not naive
reductionism -- I recognize the need to try to understand each level of
analysis and experience on its own terms. But I see no reason to abandon
the idea that they ultimately all fit together, that there is One Universe
here... More precisely, experience has shown there is great value in trying
to make sense of things in a coherent way, and I see no reason why we
should abandon that quest. hb: The Big Bang Tango--like Wolfram's A New
Kind of Science--says the universe is built on a few initial axioms, propositions,
rules, algorythms, or whatever one wants to call them. We not only all
evolve from a common single-celled ancestor, we all evolved from the magic
beans of rules that can be summed up in equations, in pictures, or in
words. I hope this doesn't sound like madness, but when one tells the
story of the cosmos from the beginning instead of from the present, it
makes a lot of sense. Enjoy--Howard
_________
Subj: Eshel, meet Paul and David Date: 1/23/2003 To: (Eshel Ben-Jacob)
Eshel Ben-Jacob, meet Paul Werbos and David Smith. Paul is a mathematician/physicist
with psychological leanings at NSF. David is head of the evolutionary
psychologically oriented New England Institute. Our trialog has led us
to your research. If you have the patience, follow along and you'll see
where you become vital to this discussion. Howard Wow, Paul, this is a
generous offer. My assistant got John on the phone for me tonight. John
had just gone to sleep--at 10:15 pm London time and had very little to
say. I jabbered a lot, but couldn't get a conversation started, then,
after hanging up, realized that John is probably in that superisolated,
no-structure state where all you want to do is sleep and any intrusion
is sort-of welcome but also an interruption to the long snooze and escape.
When I've gone through that having friends who called no matter what helped
pull me through. So if I can find the time, I may have to call periodically
to help him get a sense that there's still an outside world that wants
him. Being an independent scholar--someone who wants to put together all
the pieces and not just specialize--has its dangers, and structurelessness
and isolation are among them. John left the British Medical Research Council
so he could synthesize work from lots of disciplines, and he's superb
at it. In a message dated 1/22/2003 11:59:57 AM Eastern Standard Time,
writes: A >>By the way, I wonder what happened with your friend,
Skoyles... is there >>something >>in motion, or pending, or...?
> > > >hb: I wonder, too. John is a very close friend and
an extraordinary >scholar and thinker. But he's been depressed recently
and I'm having a >hard time reaching him. Since email isn't working,
I'll ask my assistant >to track him down by phone and see what's going
on. Hi, Howard! This is of the utmost importance. I hope he wouldn't take
it the wrong way if we suggested he should feel free to discuss whatever
is depressing him with this group, in confidence. I would expect that
David has rigorous standards about maintaining confidences, just as we
do. There is of course a lot to be depressed about in the world these
days... and it is good when people can share their serious concerns. >hb:
me too, as on an oscilloscope. But when I picture a photon in motion,
>I picture a sine wave above and below the line. I wish we could draw
>online. My vision of a photon is of a two-dimensional blip and >disappearance
then blip and zip into the nothingness of the central line >again.
However that, too, is an artifact of the limitations of book >pages.
I suspect a photon really blips and zips down to nothing then >blips
again in three dimensions. Am I right? > >And if David Bohm and
I are right, it also blips in five dimensions >(depth, height, width,
time, and some dimension above the two that >accounts for non-locality).
The photon and the electron are two special cases I have thought about
a great deal.
I
am told that Willis Lamb -- a Nobel Prize winner who is more than just
any old Nobel Prize winner, maybe not the VERY first (e.g. Feynman) rank,
but the rank just below that -- has come out clearly on his web page with
the statement "the photon does not exist. There is no photon."
After much thought... and discussion with some quantum optics folks..
I agree with Lamb. I still use the word photon a lot, because it is still
a useful approximate concept in some context, and it is useful as an abbreviation,
in effect. But in actuality... I now believe that everything we know about
light simply boils down to Maxwell's laws, and to INTERFACES between electromagnetism
and other more truly quantized fields. Planck's law "governs"
the emission and absorption of light -- the boundary conditions -- but
in-between it's plain old Maxwell. And Maxwell's equations are classic
wave equations, whose solutions are basically just sine waves in free
space. hb: but, as Archimedes and Newton put it, a fluction is a motion
in a soup of some kind. without ether, what is the soup? Is it simply
some sort of topological wrinkle in the sheet of the space time continuum?
Or is it, as I've suspected and you've hinted above, something that we
understand via two metaphors, meaning our culture has not yet evolved
a metaphor that can completely comprehend it? Remember, our metaphors
depend on a relatively small number of observations that stick in the
public mind and a relatively small number of technologies whose workings
give us models of "mechanisms." We are only roughly 35,000 years
into the cultural enterprise of machine, model, cliche, and metaphor-making.
We're still in our Olduwan toolkit days. There's many a metaphor yet to
come if we can survive and continue to reinvent ourselves and our pool
of experiences and verbal, visual, and mathematical cliches. Cliche should
not be a pejorative word. Cliches are our tools of understanding. Fourier
transforms, for example, are cliches in engineering and physics. Cliches
are useful...but we need more. Cliches are the equivalent to what economists
call commodities. Goods are a luxury when they are rare and spark our
sense of novelty. That sense is a set of pleasure centers in the brain
that light up in the presence of risk or of something new and different.
The novelty centers include as one of their most prominent members the
nucleus accumbens.
A
luxury is also something whose rarity and newness allows us to use it
as a status symbol--as something we have but others don't and that others
envy us for. When that new thing becomes readily available, those who
weren't able to get it before gobble it up so they, too, can be like the
elite--those who introduce novelties into the culture. Once everyone has
one, the experience grows old, the goody we once salivated for is something
even the lower class has, it's not hip, cool, or elite anymore. And it
becomes a commodity. It may lose its ability to amaze and awe us. But
we continue to use it every day. Which means a commodity is a novelty
we've added to our normal toolkit. A cliche is a conceptual, verbal, or
visual novelty that's grown old, stale, and often useful as all get out.
The phrases "she has her hangups," "she's got issues,"
"he's a control freak," and "he needs his space" no
longer have the gleam of inner-circle membership they had when they were
new in their respective eras--the 1960s and 1970s--but they are useful
as can be when we are trying to figure out why we just had a fight with
our mate. Hopefully you, Luda, David and I will add cliches that are more
incisive and more useful during our time on this planet. Meanwhile the
photon could be, as you say, a temporary construct with which we can work
until a more inclusive scientific or mass-cultural cliche comes along.
I still want to know what a field is and how attraction at a distance
works. I do not buy gluons. You don't answer a question about the communication
and attraction between two particles--their pattern of stimulus and response--with
another particle. That's like saying bacteria communicate by sending each
other communicator cells. They don't. They communicate with macromolecules
whose meaning is clear to every bacteria in the species. The species is
built with a genome that builds in a chemical dictionary with a molecular
vocabulary whose size we as yet don't know. So far all the experts in
this area--like my friend Eshel Ben-Jacob--have pinpointed are attraction
and repulsion cues. I suspect we are missing many macrochemical cliches
in the bacterial vocabulary. What will our cliches look like 20 years
down the road when we all understand that the shape of a macromolecule
creates a rich statement that triggers many a social reaction between
atoms and fellow macromolecules? What will our toolkit of cliches, metaphors,
and mechanisms look like when we have protein-based computers that do
things so radically different than what we've seen so far that the word
"computer" will no longer describe them?
Gary
Marcus, a friend who does computational cognitive science, grew up programming
computers in Basic. So he sees the brain as a bunch of computer programs.
What will his kids use as metaphors with which to explain minds and photons?
And what will his grandkids use? They will grow up with something that
makes Basic look primitive--just as Gary's Basic makes my Fortran (which
I have now forgotten) look antique. >pw: I see it as a kind >>
>>of dirty oscillation -- the sine wave is the pure thing, sort-of-like
the >>Platonic ideal of what an oscillation is. > > >hb:
hmmm--you've just given me a vision. I've always wondered how you can
>pack the sound of the 76 instruments of an orchestra into the single
>electrical signal that makes the cone of a loudspeaker vibrate. A
Fourier >Transform--a wave made up of waves--sounds like a rough analogy.
Except >the Transform seems to be a way of dissecting such a wave down
to its >basic components then reconstructing it. Actually, the design
of high quality sound cards is a big topic in electrical engineering in
industry these days. In theory, one precise time-series is all you need.
After all, there may be 76 instruments, but the pressure of air from microsecond
to second on your eardrum is still just one number (pressure) as function
of time. The TOTAL sound across all space has more information, but what
one ear hears is basically just one time-series, easily representable
(in theory) as a time-series. hb: but is that true? Could different parts
of the ear be parsing different aspects of the sound. The hairs that analyze
the vibration each pick out a different frequency. Couldn't the entire
topography of the ear be used to pick up something more complex than a
linear sequence? The ear, like a macromolecule, probably has evolved its
strange surface structure for a reason. And that reason may have to do
with non-linear complexity. Wait, that's a mathematical term. In math
terms it may have to do with something BEYOND non-linear complexity. If
topology is still what it was when I was a kid and first became aware
of it, it deals with fairly regular shapes. But a macromolecule, a bunch
of air shudders carrying the sound of 76 instruments, and the shape of
an ear are highly irregular. Are Fourier transforms too two-dimensional
and too simplified to cover such three and four dimensional irregularities?
Even a macromolecule twists and bends to receive and send messages. It
does so in highly irregular ways. Do we have forms of math that will deal
with such irregularities? Will fractals do the trick when they're extended
into four dimensions, as they are on my computer screen via Rudy Rucker's
fractal program? No, Rudy's fractals are too regular do describe an ear
or a histone bending and twisting in the genome. pw: But then with two
ears, you may need two numbers, and voila, you have stereo. hb: back in
the 1980s, I heard a demonstration of a 3-D, holophonic sound technology
at a music industry trade convention. It worked in ways that were astonishing.
You could hear the exact placement of a matchbox as it was being shaken
in front of you, behind you, below your head, above your head, etc.
I've
just tried to track down the person who devised it and have sent an email
to the most likely culprit--HUGO ZUCCARELLI--whose webpage (http://community-2.webtv.net/zuccarellix/holophonicstmand/)
says that he "invented HOLOPHONICS tm after discovering the processin
which humans can localize sounds, contrary to the binaural or stereo theories"
Whoops, I've just spent so much time tracking down Zuccarelli and writing
to him about our speculations that it's the usual two am. Let's see if
I can zip through the rest of this email. pw: And then there are debates
about whether the ear really has the power to hear more than one number
somehow... big debates.. and debates about how to make sound realistic
throughout the room... hb: Hugo did that 20 years ago and was ignored...well,
you had to wear headphones, but still, it was astonishing. pw: And then
a Fourier decomposition and other forms of compression may actually allow
more information per bit of computer storage... and so on. hb: a neat
application. Think of a protein, a macromolecule, as a repository of crunched
(compressed) data about fourteen billion years of the past that's used
to help in a macrosystem that predicts the future. The result is a nano-processing
device we call a cell. pw: But certainly, neuroscience treatments of the
ear -- particularly the ear drum stuff -- makes very heavy use of Fourier
analysis. The ear has been compared at times with a pipe organ.. hb: Hugo's
website says that he has invented a new speaker system based on linear
math that does remarkable things--but does not create the holophonic effects
he perfected 20 years ago. Which may indicate that linear systems won't
do in capturing the richness of sound...or the richness of macromolecular
communication. >>pw: Thus can light always be decomposed into different
pure colors by a >>prism. >> >>Traditional linear dynamical
systems (made up of integrators, >>differentiators, multipliers...)
> > >hb: Paul, this could be very important to me. Remember,
in my book Global >Brain I've defined the complex adaptive systems
we see in the mass >behavior of bacterial colonies and of human civilizations
as having five >components--conformity enforcers, diversity generators,
inner-judges, >resource-shifters, and intergroup tournaments. Conformity
enforcers >sounds like integrators. Diversity generators sounds like
>differentiators. And inner-judges and resource-shifters sound like
>multipliers. pw: Am running out of time... basically, these are highly
nonlinear functions. Diversity generators are like option generators in
"brain-like stochastic search" as in last slides of www.iamcm.org.
>Maybe Bloom with his thick-headed, visualizing brain and mathematicians,
>with their subtle understandings, have spotted parallel phenomena
and have >analyzed them in similar ways. To what sort of systems do
integrators, >differentiators, and multipliers apply? And how are those
systems >analogous to and different from societies of microorganisms
or of human minds? > >pw: have the property >> >>that
is formally stated: "Sine waves are the eigenfunctions of the >>dynamics."
What that means, in common English, >>is that each frequency goes
its way independently of all the others. You >>can predict the overall
system by >>analyzing separately what happens to each frequency
of oscillation. Then >>add up the rest. > > > >hb: this
is wonderful clarity.
So
an eigenfunction--another term I've >never taken the time to understand,
much to my shame--is the uberfunction >that emerges when a bunch of
lesser oscillations--like the 76 instruments >of an orchestra playing
Beethoven--converge? And the Fourier Transform >helps you reduce the
eigenfunction to the multiple oscillations that go >into its making?
The Fourier Transforms help you pick out the fibers that >make up the
thread and the threads that make up the weave? OK. I need to be more precise.
Simple dynamic systems (like ODE, ordinary differential equation systems)
are described in terms of a vector x(t), i.e. a set of numbers. Linear
dynamical systems can be analyzed in terms of the eigenvectors of the
dynamics. Eigenvectors are simply vectors which DO NOT CHANGE direction...
they are the directions which are unchanged by the dynamical process.
They change in MAGNITUDE, but not direction... hb: aha. all thanks. pw:
More complex systems (like PDE, partial differential equations) are described
in terms of fields of space. And then there are eigenfunctions of the
dynamics, functions across space... which would not be changed, if the
dynamics are linear, but... they get multiplied by some constant over
time. And then.. forgive me... it is often convenient to apply these concepts
"from above"... so that we can think of eigenfunctions of time
derivatives... Anyway, given time, I could fill it all in. The key point
is that eigenfunctions or eigenvectors are the elementary things, like
sine waves, which more general functions can be broken down into, for
purposes of analysis. Analysis of LINEAR systems. Nonlinear systems do
not have eigenfunctions or eigenvectors. >>pw: Electrical engineers,
in particular, learn how to analyze basic >>circuits by >>analyzing
what happens to each frequency.. > > > >hb: aha. what sort
of basic circuits, and why do they need to analyze its >waveforms?
Isn't knowing the machinery enough? Or does breaking down the >uber-wave
into the waves that go to make it up tell you which components >are
in harmony and which are acting up? pw: Circuits made up of resistors,
capacitors, inductors, batteries and wires. But then transistors provide
the gross nonlinearity necessary to generate really interesting circuits.
In linear systems analysis ... attached to each eigenvector or eigenfunction
is an "eigenvalue," which tells you whether that component will
grow, oscillate, or decline. hb: aha. >>pw: Nonlinearity changes
the story drastically. And I have spent almost >>all my >>life
on nonlinear mathematics. > > >hb: my understanding is that nonlinearity
emerges when you repeat an >algorithm or rule of some sort on its previous
result. Which makes >fractals and the fibonnaci series nonlinear. Am
I wrong? Or does >non-linear math have to decompose a phenomenon into
numerous >dimensions--as if you were performing a sort of hyperdimensional
Fourier >Transform? How do decomposition into 27 dimensions or more
relate to the >iterative properties of non-linearity? pw: If x(t) is
a vector... then linear dynamics means that the infinitesimal change of
x with respect to time equals Ax, where A is some matrix.
Sometimes
people say Ax+b is still linear or "affine." Nonlinear is basically
anything else ... for example, x-squared. But iteration is not nonlinearity.
if z=Ay and y=Bx, then z=(AB)x, and AB is still a matrix. >hb: Fourier
recognized an existent pattern. God would have created a >class of
patterns--and their components--from scratch. But there is no >god.
So how did this universe manage to evolve waves with sufficient >complexity
to be analyzable by Fourier Transforms? How were the first >sub-oscillations
birthed and how did the differentiate then weave? How >did they self-create
then reintegrate? And doesn't differentiation via >self-creation then
reweaving happen in this cosmos over and over >again? Thus making this
a very fractal and a very nonlinear place? > >If you had to tell
the story of the evolution of just one phenomenon >describable by a
Fourier transform from the very beginning, how would the >story go?
pw: Interesting emergent patterns require nonlinearity. I am tempted to
violate someone's copyright suddenly... Vaguely, you could say things
"start" as linear... just random waves through space.. and then
comes interaction or reflection... and the nonlinearity creates emergent
patterns... hb: neat. and very much in tune with what I've been working
on--though you've put it in a whole new way. pw: different in one system
from another, drastically different... some systems hardly diverge at
all from the early heat chaos. Others go to "fixed points,"
like being frozen in ice. But between the hot chaos and the ice... some
systems have the right parameters to generate interesting patterns of
complexity, of fractal dimension in effect. >>pw: (By the way...
instead of "sine," we usually do it as e-to-the-ivt, or >>exp(ivt).
In most engineering or physics >>texts, you will see that formula
pattern all over the place.) > > > >hb: my feeling is that
pictures are more powerful than formula--at least >for helping our
intuitive powers work. Feinman and Einstein did their >most creative
math by picturing a formula as blobs or shafts or whatever >sprung
to mind--picturing them moving in three dimensions (plus time), in >full
color, and with muscular properties--properties they could feel in >the
muscles of their bodies. My feeling is that formulae are more >valuable
for precision, but that the mathematicians of the 19th century >were
fools to try to banish pictures from math and reduce everything to >formulae.
True. But many physicists have gone to the opposite extreme, where the
hand is quicker than the eye. Lots of formulas but not such care to make
sure they follow rules or that the formulas mean something. hb: but then
folks like Riemann, who was following the beauty of developing an arbitrary
self-consistent system, produce tools that folks like Einstein can use.
Hmmm, I'm using a visual example again. Reimann's math was geometry--a
very visual thing indeed. >hb: it's the fractal end of non-linear math
that has got me going.
See
>www.howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion for an example of what I
>mean. You won't see any math. Instead you'll see poetry. But it's
>scientific poetry telling the story of the cosmos in a brief amount
of >space using the recurrence of key patterns at different levels
to tell the >tale. pw: In a sense... where fractals become real is
when we try to grapple with strange attractors, and their more highly
dimensional relatives ala Per Bak and whatnot. >hb: makes sense. In
seeming contradiction to what I said above, it makes >sense that the
zillions of clocks in the body have to integrate with a >grand controller,
a great conductor, presumably the one in the >suprachiasmatic nucleus,
and that they should produce eigenwaves, >eigenfunctions, like the
one that carries Leonard Bernstein and the New >York Philharmonic to
the magnet in my speaker via a thin twist of copper >strands. pw: Yes,
the conductor makes sure it all hangs together, makes sense, and that
the overall system does one thing at a time in some sense... >>pw:
The release of spores gets into the realm of discrete mathematics, >>which
is >>ultimately less >>tractable. There are certain mathematical
problems which simply cannot be >>solved in closed form, and life
becomes >>an exercise in finding patterns of approximations that
help us make do... > > >hb: the proposition that Eshel Ben-Jacob
and I worked out four years ago >or so is that there are no closed
systems anywhere in this cosmos. Hence >one aspect of classical dynamics--the
second law of >thermodynamics--doesn't work in this universe. Lee Smolin
says that any >particle in this cosmos could be defined by its relationship
to every >other particle. In fact, it could be defined as nothing but
a sum of >these relationships. This, too, rules out closed systems.
Though Smolin >doesn't say this rules out entropy. pw: Closed form
and closed systems are different things. Closed form... it's like the
old theorem that you CAN'T POSSIBLY write the value of pi exactly in terms
of fractions involving whole numbers... or even square roots and such...
Some numbers exist and can be given names, but cannot be written down
exactly within the limits of ordinary notation. hb: aha. thank you for
the explanation...and the patience it takes. >Do you know the work
of Ben-Jacob? He's head of the physics department at >the University
of Tel-Aviv and shows up in Physica A a lot. pw: No. If he could understand
and tolerate the paper I recently had published for Chua's journal, it
might be important for him and I to talk as well. I would expect him to
know all the stuff in this email alreday, if so. hb: Eshel just emailed
today saying that he's more available than in the past, so let me copy
him on this. >hb: The Big Bang Tango--like Wolfram's A New Kind of
Science--says the >universe is built on a few initial axioms, propositions,
rules, >algorythms, or whatever one wants to call them. We not only
all evolve >from a common single-celled ancestor, we all evolved from
the magic beans >of rules that can be summed up in equations, in pictures,
or in words. I >hope this doesn't sound like madness, but when one
tells the story of the >cosmos from the beginning instead of from the
present, it makes a lot of >sense. Enjoy--Howard pw: That's pretty
much what I am working from as well. Certain underlying dynamical principles
at the lower level.. hb: that's what I've partially worked out. I'd like
to compare my analysis with yours and see if they give heft and depth
to each other. pw: such that dynamics at higher levels are basically emergent
phenomena or approximations to what the simpler stuff tells us. Though
the word "dynamics" changes its meaning slightly with backwards-time
stuff coming in... hb: Just how far back do you feel the backward projection
goes? I know I've asked this before, so forgive me if you've already answered
it and my memory has failed to retain it. With pleasure and gusto (not
to mention exhaustion that's well worth it)--Howard
_________
Pavel--My apologies. As I just explained to Paul Werbos, I've been swamped.
A group has self-assembled around my work during the last few weeks and
has turned out over nine minutes of animation based on the concept at
http://howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion--something that would have
been inconceivable without huge budgets when the project was conceived
three years ago. The group has also committed to putting together the
books waiting in the 300 Mb and 3,700 chapters of the Bloom Grand Unified
Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul. This would
be astonishing if it came off...which it may well not. But so far the
group's track record of astonishments is extremely good. Here are a few
comments. But first, a word of qualification. I've been involved in theoretical
phyics since I was a kid. I taught what little I know to myself. Which
means that in many ways, I am an ignoramus on the subject. I only understand
math when I can picture it. I'm blind as a bat about formulae. I've looked
all over the place for some description of Maxwell's equations so I can
begin to picture what you and Paul have been discussing. I've had no success.
So there are extraordinarily elementary things I do not comprehend. Please
explain things to me as if I were a dunce, an idiot. Now for the comments:
pk: We all must accept that known wave equations hide much more than we
are accustomed to think normally. hb: this sounds very, very likely to
me. The reasons are too numerous to lay out right now...though I've written
quite a lot about them in the past. Two are: -- the vast oversimplifications
used in the mathematicization of physics -- and the tendency to mistake
our current level of knowledge--and of ignorance--for external realities.
The flaws often tend to be in the eye, not in that which the eye beholds.
pk: These equations are hints only, vague sketches in haze rather than
precise instruments like scalpel of a surgeon. hb: lovely way of putting
it. pk: Standard QM fails to calculate universal constants, what complete
theory should do, as Planck and Pauli insisted in. hb: an observation--when
the ancients bless a criterion of validity, it doesn't mean it's right.
I am very skeptical about such things as Occam's Razor and, in probability
and statistics, the Bell Curve, simply because they've remained unquestioned
for much too long. A question--what do universal constants mean in a case
like this? Physicists like Lee Smolin talk about roughly 27 key parameters
that are arbitrarily set at the birth of a cosmos. Is this what we're
talking about? Stephen Wolfram's view, in A New Kind of Science, is that
the standard mathematical systems we've been using--with equations that
deal with smooth gradients and demand arbitrary constants--are wrong.
Universes, he feels, self-construct from the bottom up, flowing from a
very small number of rules. I agree with him. This view is one I've been
working with for nearly 45 years. Wolfram also feels he's demonstrated
that we can not use standard methods to discover the handful of initial
rules. He may be right in saying that standard mathematical methods will
not let us reach back into the past and find those initial cosmic seeds,
those initial algorithms.
But
I've been working to find those initial axioms, postulates, or algorithms
anyway--using my mathematical blindness as an advantage and employing
intuition and metaphor. How do universal constants fit in? pk: From CITT
viewpoint a particle indeed exists in several states simultaneously, -
in inner time of theory, of course. hb: here's the problem. Inner Time
Theory sounds very intriguing. And this condensation, this short summary,
is extremely helpful. But please, please tell us in short-form what Inner
Time Theory is. pk: the first model of turbulent movement in fluid proposed
by L. D. Landau [18] in 1944. hb: something that Paul Werbos said a while
back made me curious. He seemed to imply that Maxwell's equations could
be interpreted in terms of vortexes. Is this true or was it my mistake?
Ernest J. Sternglass, a protege of Einstein's, has a vortex theory of
particles. Is there anything in mainstream physics that would support
this? Is there anything in field equations that would support it? (see
Ernest J. Sternglass. Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe.
New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.) pk: That model supposed that
turbulence is simply coupled oscillators, which, as we now know, is not
correct, since it leads to unobservable consequences. hb: coupled oscillators
are extremely important in many of the fields I study. Did Landau mean
that turbulence was the interaction of oscillators operating at different
speeds and sheering against each others' movement when they first meet--before
they synchronize? Did he see turbulence as the interference patterns that
eventually bring the oscillators into synchrony? pk: But coupled nonlinear
oscillators are one of most simple nonlinear object one can imagine. hb:
is there a difference between a linear and a nonlinear oscillator? Are
coupled oscillators nonlinear because of their iterative qualities? Because
of the repetition of two rhythms over and over again upon their joint
products? If so, how do the equations take into account the fact that
the rhythms of the oscillation sources themselves change as they influence
each other? Onward--Howard In a message dated 4/22/2003 3:34:42 AM Eastern
Daylight Time, kurakin writes: Dear Sirs! Since no one normally desires
to read long manuscripts on crazy theories (http://toyphoton.narod.ru),
here's the short squezzing of Concept of Inner Time of Theory. Can anyone
explain in a FEW words or give a reference why inner time can be rejected
in a SIMPLE way? Dr. Werbos, You are who is much interested in bacward
- in - time signals possibility. So, inner time gives IT quite elegantly.
What's wrong? I'll be much gratefull to Your qualified expertise. - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - VIII.
Conclusion 1.
Let
us look at Feynman - Wheeler - Cramer ideas of time - backwards spreading
of waves from a little wider, than their creators, viewpoint. Not so far
physicists from Omsk State University have got some very interesting results
[15 - 17]. They have found massless solutions for Dirac equation. Mass
is zero, while current of solution is not zeroing. Authors interpret these
solutions as Deutsch "shadow" electrons, which govern interference
effects. J. Cramer also says that any relativistic equations, not Maxwell's
only, allow backwards - time solutions. These are Klein - Gordon equation,
Dirac equation and some others. But Prof. Cramer looks only at possibility
for equation to have backward in time solutions. Physicists from Omsk
have shown that not only time sign is interesting as parameter for solution
to be "physical" or "non - physical". Sign of inertial
mass also can. These results can, on our opinion, eliminate prejudices
of physicists about what is really "physical" and what is not.
We all must accept that known wave equations hide much more than we are
accustomed to think normally. These equations are hints only, vague sketches
in haze rather than precise instruments like scalpel of a surgeon. We
should not delude ourselves by great results achieved in physics till
now - simple known equations still hide much greater than what we got
up to now. So we think that our search signals (and query signals as well)
for single photon are described by usual Maxwell equations. 2. "And
what is all this stuff needed for?" - asks a quantum mechanical orthodox
theoretician. In response we repeat as strict and clear as possible: §
Standard QM postulates that particle is complex - valued vector in Hilbert
space. Notions of superposition of states and reduction of state vector
are based upon this primary postulate. It's time to stop to call this
stating of experimental facts as theory. There's no any theory to explain
this fascinating theory, and it must be constructed. § Standard QM
fails to calculate universal constants, what complete theory should do,
as Planck and Pauli insisted in. So what we have now is intermediate theory.
Complete is still to emerge. 3. If we leave philosophic talks for philosophers
and just roll our sleeves up to solve these two problems, we should look
over all possible schemes. As far as we know, our scheme with inner time
is the first practical step in this direction. Concept of inner time of
theory (CITT) is very simple in its essence and, as we think, directly
shows a way to solve formulated problems: § From CITT viewpoint a
particle indeed exists in several states simultaneously, - in inner time
of theory, of course. § CITT shows (very naively, for the first step),
how exactly "electrons" (scattering centers) act, which allows
to penetrate in their intrinsic nature. This is a first step to calculate
real electron's charge. Further. If CITT is not correct way to go, it's
very important to understand why. To explain let us recall the first model
of turbulent movement in fluid proposed by L. D. Landau [18] in 1944.
That model supposed that turbulence is simply coupled oscillators, which,
as we now know, is not correct, since it leads to unobservable consequences.
But coupled nonlinear oscillators are one of most simple nonlinear object
one can imagine. This is exactly why the way with coupled oscillators
was extremely important to be done - just to convince physicists that
it's wrong. Wrong but simple ways must be checked anyway! "Inner
time of theory" is, on our opinion, also the simplest way to solve
key puzzles of quantum world. If this way is wrong, we must explicitly
understand why it is so. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - "Our line is right. The victory will be ours".
(c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin
|
|
The
infnitely networked universe
Paul
Werbos 2/25/2003 Paul--re "I do not believe in DIRECT action at a
distance, like the Bohmians, but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like
this. You might call them nonlocal emergent effects." Hb: First off,
we're in a universe whose every cubic centimeter seems to be flooded with
photons, neutrinos, and particles that range from the background radiation
spewed by the Big Bang (assuming there was one) 13.5 billion years ago
to high-speed particles and photons flung from star births, star deaths,
and even black holes up to 12 billion years old and 12 billion light years
away. That means that every nit and bit of time and space is zipped and
zapped by a bombardment that links it to events far, far from it in time
and space. The only thing that's unlikely is gravitational influence from
galaxies ten billion light years apart. But even that is not an impossibility.
Galaxies gather in galactic clusters. Galactic clusters gather in superclusters.
And the form and unity of the galaxies, clusters, and superclusters seems
to be evolving over time. Which means that galaxies far apart from each
other create a gratitational web that gradually draws them together around
a common center. To influence a distant galaxy with your gravity, you
have to exert that force at a distance over every bit of matter in that
galaxy's space. Every square centimeter of the cosmos is a nexus of influences.
It is pervaded by information and causation from nearly everything else
in this cosmos. This implies that one of the differences between one cubic
centimeter and the next is the sum total of a cosmos-full of influences,
influences which shift over every blip of space and over every unit of
Planck time. The web of the cosmos is enormous, ubiquitous, and interactive
beyond anything we imagine when contemplating two photons travelling from
a laser to a target three feet away. Look at how many cubic Planck units
those photons traverse. Imagine how many currents of influence they navigate.
Aside from gravity and cosmic rays, they have to cross many a loop of
magnetism--magnetic fields from this planet, from the sun, and lord knows
from what other cosmic whorls and teams. This relates to a wonderful observation
made by Eshel Ben-Jacob, head of the Department of Physics at The University
of Tel Aviv, several years ago. This is a universe in which entropy can't
exist. Entroy, he said, is based on the notion of closed systems. And
there are no closed systems in this universe.
No
photon is an island. Physics will probably remain primitive so long as
it's forced by the limitations of current math to grossly oversimplify.
Which implies that physics may be one of the most inexact sciences we
currently possess. And it implies what you and I and Kurakin have already
said. That the probabilistic equations of quantum physics are fuzzy not
because the universe is muzzy, but because our vision is. Howard PS re:
"I do not believe in DIRECT action at a distance, like the Bohmians,
but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like this. You might call them nonlocal
emergent effects." Paul, this sounds interesting. Can you give us
an example or two of nonlocal emergent effects? And just how the heck
does action at a distance work, anyway? Another ancillary question. What
does it mean to ask how something works? What mechanism of understanding
are we attempting to tap when we ask how something works? My guess is
metaphor based on something whose workings we know well--whose workings
we can not only visualize, but we can feel in our motor neurons, whose
workings we can feel in a muscular way. In a message dated 2/25/2003 1:02:47
PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: At 08:06 PM 02/25/2003 +0300, you wrote:
>Dear Dr. Werbos! > >I'm sorry, but this Your student (me) is
not only thick as a brick >(germans say 'betonkopf', as I know), >but
also obstinate ("And that's why I'm interesting", as Sergey
>Yesenin said). > >WDPJ> The fact is that you can turn on
a laser, and SOMETIMES pick up a >photon at >WDPJ> one place
>WDPJ> and sometimes pick up a photon at another. But it is NOT
a "fact" >that there >WDPJ> are two photons co-existing
in different states at the intermediate >time, which >WDPJ> you
do not observe. If you do not observe it, it is not a fact; it >is
a theory. > >I give up. This is a language problem - I accept. >So
I suppose another formulation. Please, check it. Actually, an idea does
occur to me. Maybe this is crazy... but... perhaps Ludmilla might be willing
to explain some of this in Russian. >The fact ALSO is - Wether photon
emerges here or there, depends (to >some degree of strictness) on ALL
the surrounding space, maybe all the >Universe, not only small >vicinity
of starting point or final point. Am I right? In some sense, I think so.
For most experiments, most people would say it is enough to know your
local inputs (like laser and crystal for Clauser-Theorem experiments)
and the local measurement devices -- like counters and polarizers. Only
these. Yet I believe that the larger thermodynamic environment is also
relevant, because it affects probabilities of states both on input and
on output. I do not believe in DIRECT action at a distance, like the Bohmians,
but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like this You might call them nonlocal
emergent effects. >You may tune complicated interferometer (like Mach-Zander's)
here or >there and get different outputs. > >I don't wanna say
that the photon 'actually' checks all the ways - save me the >God.
But the output - do we like it or not - IS such, AS IF the photon >DID
this. > In my view, the "photon" itself is only just light,
governed just by Maxwell's Laws, nothing more mysterious. (Well... there
is one caveat: it is actually the electroweak generalization of Maxwell's
Laws.) It ONLY responds to ITS OWN boundary conditions, from the place
where it is emitted to the place where it is absorbed. "Quantization"
is just a byproduct of meeting the boundary conditions at both times.
HOWEVER -- those boundary conditions for the photon depend on the state
of complicated big objects, which is related in turn to more distant boundary
conditions. Between the boundary conditions, the photon is never in a
mixed state, in reality, in my view. WE are uncertain about its state,
and WE must rely on probability distributions and wave functions, because
WE do not know what the exact boundary conditions are that the photon
faces in any given experiment, in reality. It is a situation of uncertainty,
BUT NOT a situation of indeterminism, in my interpretation.
------------------------------
In a message dated 99-10-25 13:05:46 EDT, writes:
Geissler
claimed a time quantum of 4.5 ms and supported that claim by findings
agreeing with that duration or multiples thereof. >>
Hannes--thanks
to your leads, I found the following two abstracts on Medline. They may,
indeed, indicate a quantum-like unit of perceptual time. However I strongly
suspect that there are many assemblies in the body which utilize different
rhythms. The enteric brain probably operates at a different speed than
that which regulates the Krebbs cycle within cells, for example. Whether
the jumble of very fast and very slow times in the human body (or in the
bodies of clams, whose daily, monthly, and yearly internal clocks have
been studied diligently since the mid-sixties) are synched to a common
rhythm is something I wonder about.
Here's
what really has me pondering. Anyone who's been patient enough to read
my postings over the last few years knows I'm working on a theory of the
universe and most of what's in it (well, actually, all that's in it) which
starts with roughly three axioms, algorithms, principles, or whatever
you want to call them, and generates a self-consistent system of tremendous
complexity by doubling, trebling, quntupling, and google-plexing its modest
initial dicta back upon themselves until the results are dizzying. Such
processes are easily modeled using several metaphorical marvels which
spell out the corollaries implicit in a handful of axioms. One of these
systems is geometry--such as the Riemannian geometry Einstein used to
build his model of the time-space manifold. Another is non-linear mathematics.
And a third is the use of cellular automata--which are built with a set
of extremely simple rules and proceed to produce pulsating whorls and
dances of complex form through nothing but sheer repetition. The universe,
according to this view, is a set of wheels within wheels within wheels.
All hark back to a common ancestral seed. Actually, that seed contained
roughly a trio of principles. Attraction, repulsion, and time are the
three rules of etiquette which I suspect are at the bottom of all which
has spilled from the pinprick cornucopia of the Big Bang.
If
this sounds fanciful, take a look at the following words from Lee Smolin,
considered one of the greatest minds in physics today:
To
understand a galaxy, he says, "one must think of ten thousand years
as if they were a second.... The time scale of the life of a massive star...is
ten million years from formation to supernova. Then, to understand the
whole system, we will have to see the life of that star as a day in the
life of a galaxy that lives at least ten billion years and rotates once
every few hundred million years. (p. 123)... Gerola, Shulman, and Seiden
invented a delightful game that models the star-forming process with a
few simple rules. The did this by making a few changes in the rules of
a game that already existed, which is called the game of life. Invented
by John Conway, a mathematician, this game is played on a simple chessboard,
each square of which can be thought of as living or dead... There are
some steps by which this is determined. A square will be alive on the
next step if it has next to it some, but not too many, squares that are
now alive. ...with a few simple rules, a large variety of beautiful structures
are produced which continually appear and disssolve in a kind of a dance.
(p. 134) ...The fact that the new model [of the formation and maintenance
of galactic systems) is based on an analogy to biological phenomenon is
not fortuitous. ...The key to both biology and computer games is that
the right set of simple rules, repeated over and over again, can lead
to the formation of enormously complex patterns and structures that reproduce
themselves continually over time.... They are well described by the newer
mathematical games that are described in terms of algorithm systems such
as the cellular automata that define the game of life ...the same logic
is governing both the spread of a star formation through the disk of a
galaxy...[and] biology and ecology." (pp. 136-137)
We
live on a planet whose time is measured in days and years. In our guts
and pores are colonies of bacterial relatives who operate on a vastly
different time frame than do we. For them, a generation is 20 minutes.
The cells within us operate in some cases in lifetimes of a day or two
For the grand assembly we call our "selves," a lifetime is roughly
70 years. For our species, a goodly run under our planet's sun may be
as many as 100 million years or as few as the four million we have reached
so far. For our sun a lifetime is perhaps six billion years. And for our
galaxy, life stretches on so long that it encompasses nearly the entire
existence of this, the only cosmos that we know.
A
galaxy's quantal tick of time is a species' eternity. A human day of work
and sleep is 1,400 years on the bacterial calendar. And our 24 hours spell
the knell of death for a trillion of our own blood cells. Do atoms tick
to yet another quantal beat? I do not know. But protons are forever. They
outlast us all. -------------- Lee Smolin. The Life of the Cosmos. NY:
Oxford University Press. 1997. ------------------- for more on quanail
units of perceptual time, see:
Ultra-precise
quantal timing: evidence from simultaneity thresholds in long-range apparent
movement. Geissler HG, Schebera FU, Kompass R Percept Psychophys 1999
May 61:4 707-26
Abstract
Conditions for the disappearance of long-range apparent movement were
investigated. In an experiment on beta motion, critical interstimulus
intervals (ISIs) of downward simultaneity thresholds for stimuli presented
in continuous alternation were determined for exposure durations (EDs)
varying from 3 to 160 msec. Each subject performed each test twice. Data
were collected in three sessions, each for one of three angular separations
(3 degrees, 6 degrees, and 12 degrees) and the full set of EDs. The distribution
of critical ISIs collapsed across subjects, EDs, and angular separations
shows sharp maxima at regular distances within a range of 0-110 msec ISI.
Significant or near-significant peaks were found at ISIs of 5, 9, 22,
27, 43, 55, and 107 msec. Although mean critical ISIs shifted with spatial
separation, no essential shift of the main maxima occurred. Evidence of
a periodic modulation with a period duration of 4.5 msec was obtained
from the distributions of differences between critical ISIs of the first
tests and their replications, which exhibit extremely low standard deviations
(< 10 msec). These results agree well with previous analyses (Geissler,
1987, 1992) that led to a taxonomic model of quantal timing, briefly summarized
in this paper. Further consequences are discussed and related to earlier
developments (Geissler, 1991, 1992, 1997).
MeSH
Adult, Analysis of Variance, Chi-Square Distribution, Female, Human, Male,
Models, Neurological, Models, Psychological, Motion Perception, Periodicity,
Signal Detection (Psychology), Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Time Perception
Author
Address Institut f_r Allgemeine Psychologie UniversitÓt Leipzig,
Germany.
[Temporal
code constants--a link between psychology and physiology in research of
cognitive processes? Hypotheses and considerations of quantum structures
in alpha activity of the brain] Geissler HG Z Psychol Z Angew Psychol
1991 199:2 121-43
Abstract
Temporal code invariants as possible links between psychological and physiological
characteristics of cognition: a tentative time quantum approach. Relationships
between alpha activity and short-term memory performance are discussed
referring to an approach suggested by Lebedev and Lutzky (1973). These
authors suggest a secondary relationship in considering processing as
well as storing of information as a result of the superposition of oscillatory
processes which differ from one another an elementary period (relative
refractoriness) specific to individuals. Some specifications of scan rate
and STM span suggested by the authors seem to be untenable for empirical
and logical reasons. Alternative explanations are proposed referring to
the time quantum model (TQM) by Geissler (1985, 1987, 1990, 1991). Straight
forward expansions of this model lead to the hypothesis of an ''alpha
band'' consisting of 9 discrete frequencies. Predictions on scanning rhythms
can be derived from this via the assumption that these represent segmentations
caused by pairwise resonance. A modification of the Lebedev-Lutzky assumption
on spans is proposed assuming an optimum code for stored information.
MeSH Alpha Rhythm, Brain, Electroencephalography, English Abstract, Human,
Memory, Short-Term, Psychophysiology, Reaction Time
Author
Address Sektion Psychologie der UniversitÓt Leipzig.
------------------------------
This
seems an extremely important point. It relates to epistasis, the manner
in which sets of genes are bound in an interdependent web, and which one
web may have dominance over another, meaning that even the "separate"
webs are tied together. It's very reminiscent of Stuart Kauffman's image
of a hundred buttons which we connect with long, loose, random stitches.
As the number of connecting threads grow, one finally reaches the point
at which by picking up one button, one picks up all 100. What Kauffman
doesn't say is that the button one chooses to lift will determine which
way the skein hangs, and each dangling form will be different.
The image applies on innumerable levels. No atom, molecule, gene, organism,
human, intellect, personal emotion, percept, family, clique, ethnic group,
subculture, nation, or species is an island. All are threaded together.
Since humans are made of interthreaded atoms, molecules, genes, organs,
intellects, emotions, and percepts, and since we are each a part of interthreaded
families, cliques, ethnic groups, nations, and species, pick one of us
up, and the rest come trailing along. In fact, pick up one element of
the universe--any one at all--and somehow you manage to lift them all.
So William Blake knew more than your average scientist when he wrote
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Howard
On
10/30/98 MJVelardo writes:
the
most overused and misunderstood model in biology today, the so called
"knock out mice". By deleting a gene in the embryo, a mouse
is obtained that theoretically is missing just one gene. THe idea is that
one then infers the function of that gene by looking at the defects/effects
in the mice. THis is as much of a misleading method as that favorite pastime
of neuroscientists...lesioning parts of the brain and then trying to discern
function. Everyone gets enamored of it because the idea is so simple.
However both models are fraught with false assumptions. In the case of
knock out mice...when the first knock outs of really important genes failed
to show the expected defects/effects the explanation became "oh yeah
well nature in her infinite wisdom has supplied "redundancy""
so that no one gene failure can kill the organism or cause it to seriously
malfunction. Then voila! came two back to back papers in Science no less
that did the obvious experiment and knocked out the same gene, but in
four genetically different mouse strains. And what surprise...the genetic
background of the mouse had a huge impact on the effect of the gene knock
out (deletion).
------------------------------
In a message dated 98-11-17 08:20:03 EST, writes:
Subj:
Re: Musafer Sherif and Uexkull Date: 98-11-17 08:20:03 EST From: (John
Fentress) Sender:
Howard,
I think you have the key. Its BALANCE between cooperation - isolation
- competition (I'd make it a three part story). The balance is also dynamic
and multilayered, as we have said in the past. I look forward to reading
chapter 18, but might skip a footnote or two.
hb:
given the fact that isolation and integration are interlaced, that isolation
is a matter of pulling the drawstrings taut and stretching the system
out as one pushes away from its periphery, but that isolation never allows
one to escape interconnection, how does isolation fit? By the way, this
principle of isolation as a stretch in the bonds of integration goes straight
back to the very bottom level of being. From the first instant of the
big bang, elements were precipitating, separating, setting up boundaries
which gave them identity. Yet all were laced together in spite of their
insistence on separation. When the strong force, the weak force, and the
electromagnetic force failed to hold them, there was always gravity. The
forces are more intricate in complex social systems, but the principle
is the same: you can run but you can never get away. You can put distance
between yourself and the center of the system, but the tendrils of connection
will never entirely break.
jf:
I still go for the image of systems that both interact and self-organize.
hb: the self organization is in the interaction. the more elements interact,
the more they tangle the skein. from the tangles are born new forms, new
ways to be.
jf:
The interaction part can be cooperative (synergistic) or competitive (antagonistic).
The cascade of consequences can flip pluses into minuses into pluses,
and so on.
hb:
yup, except competition is one form of synergy, and cooperation is another.
yeesh, I *hate* sounding like a zen monk, but this universe is ridiculously
zenish, so I'm stuck with it.
jf:
Its the orchestration of these events that carries the tune.
hb:
ah :) (that's a smile)
------------------------------
In a message dated 98-11-17 09:05:31 EST, writes:
Subj:
Re: Musafer Sherif and Uexkull Date: 98-11-17 09:05:31 EST From: (Don
Beck) Sender: To:
May
I add the context, the life conditions, the problems of existence to the
formula. Diversity generation and conformity enforcement phase in and
out based on the dynamics of the situation, rather than a predetermined
cycle. In some cases, both will be going full blast because there are
segments in a complex context that require them. Same goes for the patterns
and sequence of cooperation and competition. Complex Adaptive Systems
cannot be seen outside of the Complex Dynamic Context(s).
Don
Beck
hb:
Don--Agreed most heartily. if antogonism is a form of synergy, and if
it is a form which expands the search web, and if, indeed, we are all
part of a web searching possibility space, then we are constantly shaped
by that which we search. What are we searching? Each other, our possible
modes of interaction (including antagonistic interaction), and the realms
of what isn't which, with effort or sufficient undirected thrashing, we
can bring to be. In other words, conditions are as important as that which
acts within them. Figure and gound are equally formful. Conditions are
ground, or so they seem to us. Cheers--Howard
At 09:21 AM 11/17/98 +0000, you wrote: >Howard, >I think you have
the key. Its BALANCE between cooperation - >isolation - competition
(I'd make it a three part story). The >balance is also dynamic and
multilayered, as we have said in the >past. I look forward to reading
chapter 18, but might skip a >footnote or two. > >I still go
for the image of systems that both interact and> self-organize. The
interaction part can be cooperative (synergistic) >or competitive (antagonistic).
The cascade of consequences can flip >pluses into minuses into pluses,
and so on. > >Its the orchestration of these events that carries
the tune. > > >Cheers, >j. > > >> John--well,
according to the complex adaptive system model put forth in a >>
bunch of my published stuff, and in the ideas of innumerable thinkers
of >> grander reputation, without a balance between cooperation
and competition and >> a corresponding balance between diversity
generation and conformity >> enforcement, any system will seize
up and croak. in chapter 18 of global >> brain, i'm using the usual
scads of material (125 footnotes with lord knows >> how many citations
each) to show what happens when a system tilts toward >> conformity
in order to confront crisis, then stays there. it isn't pretty. >>
the conformity enforcers i'm looking at are fundamentalisms, fascisms,
and >> other authoritarianisms. the time frame is from now until
well into the 21st >> century. everything from historic precedent
to neural net modeling says that >> if these groups continue to
gain influence, the mass mind faces a lobotomy. >> Howard
------------------------------
On 8/23/99 David Smillie writes in response to Howard Bloom:
>hb:
A species is a large backbone of genetic vertebrae, an >integrated
squadron of genes, spreading tendrils in all >directions, adding refinements,
upgrades and attachments >to its exterior, accesorizing profligately
in the effort >to take advantage of as many niches as possible before
>the next act of nature or, far worse, glaciation, or, >even more
powerful a scourer of insufficiently adaptive >gene platoons, a mass
extinction, a sudden-death play >off for the gene-teams of species
which have evolved >since the last calamity of this kind washed clean
the >rigid failures from the earth.ds: What you say here applies to
sexual taxa, which we have often taken to be the basis of all evolutionary
change of living entities. It is clear, however, that asexual taxa, including
clonal taxa and also bacteria (Eubacteria, Archaebacteria) require different
definitions of species, since they don't have a systematic way of sharing
genes and establishing genetic isolation between one species and the next.
hb: very true. The global brain says that this has made the bacterial
global brain far more agile and adaptive than that of eukaryotes. We have
our genes locked up tight in the security vault of a nucleus, which means
our changes had to take place very slowly in the days when all multi-generational
learning was genetic. Only with the introduction of memes in approximately
300 million b.c. did we invent a form of information transmission which
overcame this problem. And even now, with words and all our multimedia,
we still have a hard time keeping up with the microbial brain as it learns
to totally undo the wonder drugs we've only had since roughly 1942. We
can't get cocky yet. Being locked into eukaryotic multicellularity is
a severe disability, a trade off in exchange for new capacities. We can
be big and have all kinds of tissue working within us cooperatively. But
even our societies are nothings compared to those erected by bacteria.
By the way, one thing to be aware of--in a bacterial colony, many arms
radiate from the center. Each of those arms is as genetically distinct
as an ethic group like the Jews or gypsies among human beings. Though
all the cells in the colony started from the same genetic Eve, each is
a descendent only of its predecessors in the thin snakey line within which
it lives out its days. The more generations over which the snaking contimues,
the further the genes in each line grow apart. This means that the conventional
way of looking at bacteria as all extensions of one gene is as utterly
false (or true, in Smillie terms) as saying that African pygmies carry
a genetic legacy identical to that of blond Norwegians who are 6'3".
Only the if the selfish genes regards Norwegians and pygmies as virtual
twins is it possible to say that all bacteria in a colony are vehicles
for the same gene teams. Turn that upside down and it says that the theory
of the selfish gene equals a theory for a selfish genome, and that by
consequence, all members of a species are identical vehicles for the selfish
genome of their kind. Though there is competition between individuals
and groups within a species, they take place to tighten and improve the
underlying gene team. This not only supports your argument but that of
the global brain, which says that all humans are part of competing organs
within a larger trans human mind and that that mega-inteliigence includes
every living speices, every living kind. ds: How should one characterize
the process of speciation in organisms without meiotic sexuality? That's
a question that badly needs answering but which has seldom been posed
as an issue. I, certainly, don't have an adequate answer although I sometimes
suspect that there is selection relative to the social surround which
means for any one organism all the others that surround it. Thus the establishment
of stromatolites, complex social arrangements 3 1/2 billion years ago,
persisting into the present. Thus the importance of symbiosis, stressed
by your friend Lynn Margulis. I know that you tend to reject a Darwinian
view of selection, as does Lynn, but it seems to me that there are all
kinds of virtues in the view that our conceptions of causality are limited
by our insistence that they follow our own experience of cause and effect
- Newton's falling apple. Indeed it seems to me that your 'corollary generator
theory' which integrates changes in living forms into a broad understanding
of the changes in the Universe, can best be phrased in terms of the selection
of those arrangements that work,
hb:
absolutely and totally agreed. I've stolen the term Evolutionary Stable
Strategies and have applied it to enduring forms of all kinds, from stars
and planets to the 109 different varieties of atoms (a very small number
in a universe which allegedly is subject to randomness at every turn).
Each of these has had to undergo the natural selection involved in proving
its ability to fit its environment. This includes not just the environment
of the raw vacuum of space, with its underlying rules determining what
coheres and what gets torn apart, but its fit to a *social* environment.
What do I mean by social in the context of inanimate matter? The most
basic rules filling the seeming emptiness of space are those pertaining
to the four forces--the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic
force, and gravity. Each of these is a social rule, a rule regulating
the manner in which two or more objects will interrelate. And inter relate
each thing in this universe does. Even the few floating in the vast loneliness
between galaxies (it's been proven that there are such things) are pushed,
pulled and influenced by the gravity and electromagnetic transmissions
of the galactic clusters throug which they thread their way. A galaxy
is a massive society. Its choreography is as social and as filled with
formalities as any structure maintained by Robert's Rules of Order or
Emily Post's Advice for Every Dining Occasion. Those forms which evolve
to hold the wrong fork on the wrong occasion will have to be very hearty
in maintaining their non-conformity or they will be torn apart by the
forces of the very society in which they live and from which they rebel.
I'm talking about the social rules which dictate that all stars shall
take one of five distinct forms and shall go through a similar series
of evolutionary phases. Miss Manners could not be more strict than is
the galactic and intergalactic environment, or, as its known to astrophysists,
the stellar set of sub populations (there are five types even of these
populations). The word evolution, as I've mentioned on other occasions,
is one which the biologists we know would claim has no business being
applied to objects without life, but astrophysicists would disagree strongly,
since it is the term they use to discuss the phases of development common
to all stars of a given type. So even stars, planets, and clouds of interstellar
dust must successfully fit into niches to survive. And those niches fit
the frame of an environment which is social to its very core--the five
forces of attraction and repulsion. After all, aren't attraction and repulsion
the basic forces not only regulating the relationships of quarks, electrons,
protons, and planetessimals, but also those of bacteria, fighting fish,
chipanzees, and human beings? ds: that are able to persist through time,
in contrast to the idea that we must seek out an underlying cause that
accounts for it all.> >What follows is a bit of information which
blows giant >holes in the current notions of what genes and species
>are and how they evolve. The indication from the >article I'm about
to give you bits of, Virginia Morell's >"Ecology Returns to Speciation
Studies." Science, 25 >June 1999: 2106-2080, is that environmental
pressures do >far more to shape the genetic structure and overall >engineering
features of an animal than genes alone.Strohman (Nature Biotechnology,
March 1997) speaks of a coming Kuhnian revolution in biology where we
get rid of the idea that all 'causes' in living systems can be reduced
to genetics.
hb:
funny but Strohman was a member of our group as long as I hand picked
items for him to read. When the time for such sorting departed, I was
forced to stop corresponding with him, alas.
He
is dealing primarily with epigenesis, the events which shape an organism
from its beginnings as a single cell to it's adulthood. That domain is
useful since essentially the same genes are operative throughout the developmental
process but what emerges is clearly not simply the reading of genes as
governing the whole process. I think you are familiar with Strohman and
his argument. I would only add that your own account fits right into this
picture. Morell speaks about 'big genes' being selected rather than 'small
genes' but that seems to me insensitive to the complex processes involved.
hb:
good point. Again, there's a complex social interaction here, and when
such interactions exist, they lead to emergent properties which dance
above the heads of their participants but are as real as the elements
from which they have emerged. The spiral arms of a galaxy are one example,
the multi-continental nouvel cuisine fad is another.
Seehausen
et al. show that when Lake Victoria in Africa becomes cloudy there is
a loss of the complex speciation process and a merging of differences.
She ignores this, despite the fact that it was published in Science! hb:
interesting point. Could you explain more of it to me?>Similar circumstances
seem to prod the billion-year-old >genetic backbone which underlies
the hereditary pattern >of every animal on earth to go through the
same tricks, >even if those tricks are performed thousands of miles
>apart.I would say 'NOT every animal on earth' nor even every living
being (plants, fungi, protists, Eubacteria, Archaebacteria) as well.
hb: hmmm, can you describe in vivid detail a few of the exceptions? In
fact, so powerful are the commands with which >circumstance orders
genes to perform preordained flips >and twists that species evolving
thousands of miles >apart are still able to mate with each other PROVIDING
>they have evolved in similar ecological niches. If they >haven't,
and their niches are radically different, they >may not be able to
mate even if they share a common >ancestor and live within a few miles
or less of each >other. How could the shape of an ecological niche
have >such amazing powers?There are several different definitions of
niche. Odum says "Ecologists use the term...ecological niche to mean
the role that the organism plays in the ecosystem". Morell certainly
is right to stress the importance of this role, but it requires that we
have a better sense of how sexual species play that role. One element
is that sexual selection operates to bring about a new role in a new ecosystem.
hb: however bacteria manage to evolve rapidly to turn what looked like
barren wastelands into a new and fruitful niche. In other words I'm making
two points at once. First, that a niche is in the eye of the beholder.
A new species invents a niche by seeing the opportunity in it--even if
it manages its scanning act via random mutation. Eshel Ben Jacob has set
us all the basic proposition that information is one of the most basic
of basics in this universe and has asked us for a better definition than
that provided by Claude Shannon. I've answered that information is in
the eye of the beholder. To the extent that an up quark is able to decipher
the come hither of a down quark, that come hither is information. To a
neutrino which couldn't care less, the same transmission is not information
but noise. So as with most things (like attraction and repulsion, for
example), you can see the same basic rules at work, the same etiquette,
in a niche being in the eye of a beholder and information being in the
eye of the beholder. Quarks and the rapidly speciating fish of Lake Nyas
or Lake Victoria are subject to a similar basic algorithm. And what is
an algorithm other than a way of doing things? A table manner which applies
to both the walrus and the oyster, to both the baryon and to those who
dine on carrion? Give me a book of algorithms at work from top to bottom
in this universe and I wll have Miss Manners rewrite it in English for
you. Help, David, it's nearly five AM and my prose is running away (or
amok) with me.>Corollary generator theory says that if you start a
>universe off with a handful of axioms, toss in an >"operator"
like, say, the forward surge of time, and use >that operator to derive
corollaries from the initial >axioms, the universe you end up with
will be forced to >do a not-exactly-random stagger down a set of >predetermined
paths. Corollary generator theory further >says that there will be
many choice points >(bifurcations) along the route, points at which
the >system could travel the path of several lemmas--equally >acceptable
outbranchings of the increasingly intricate >corollary map. So there's
a lot of room for "free will" >and its inanimate equivalent,
chance in a corollary- >generating universe. However the branching
paths are >constrained by the fact that each must be consistent >with
the original handful of axioms.I've already expressed my admiration for
your broad theory and the comments above are not meant to modify that,
just to give you my own version. > >In other words, the path an
atom, molecule, sun, planet, >galaxy, or species takes is constrained
like that of a >pinball rolling on one predetermined plane in a >predetermined
direction (down) through a series of set >pins and robotically rigid
flippers. Since genes are an >expression of the Big Bang's original
two or three >axioms, they can only branch in so many directions, just
>as self-assembling atoms can be inventive as all get >out, but
can only travel 109 paths. You might call >those 109 paths--the number
of shapes atoms are able to >assume--the only evolutionarily stable
strategies >available to combinations of subatomic particles. >
>Genes seem similarly constrained by their roots in the >interaction
between adenine, guanine, thymine, and >cytosine. Environment seems
one of the major >constrainers, and, in its turn environment is limited
in >its number of forms. Why? Environment springs from the >same
set of cosmic axioms from which life comes. It, >too, has its constraints,
its limited number of choice >points. Hence the similarity between
planets and stars. >For all their difference they are matter fallen
into >recognizably constrained forms. As Carl Sagan used to >love
to tell us, there are billions and billions of >things out there beyond
our atmosphere whose similarity >is so species-specific that we can
clearly tell a star >from a planet, a planet from a moon, and a galaxy
from >a relatively empty hole in space. > >The universe's initial
axioms are much like the fates of >Greek mythology, "Clotho, who
spun the web of life; >Lachesis, who measured its length; and Atropos,
who cut >it." (Description courtesy of the Columbia Desk >Encyclopedia.)
By the way, what those axioms may be is >still a matter for metaphysical
guesswork. However I'm >putting my money on attraction, repulsion,
and time-- >three magic beans from which all else has sprung. >Anybody
have other guesses?Does 'interaction' fit in as an addition? I haven't
thought through the issues the way you have.
hb:
absolutely. Attraction, repulsion, and time are all synonyms for interaction.
Repulsion means two or more entities interact by parting. Attraction means
they interact by coming together. And time even time is defined by interaction--the
amount of time it takes for a pendulum to swing back and forth for example.
A penudulum swings back and forth with respect to its pivot point, to
the ground below, to the graviaional object whose field influences its
movement, to the gears which record its movement, and to quite a few other
things with which it dances, coverses, and exchanges near-meetings and
repeated greetings. Howard ------------------------------
David Smillies' concept of a species as a long genetic backbone accessorizing
in every way it can to fit as many niches as possible continues to unfold
with new possibilties. Way back when this means that humans and the living
environments in which they reside had common ancestors--so the "enviroment"
with which we battle and cooperate, the ecosystem from which we draw resources
and with which we fight, are in reality our relatives--they are us. We
are both carrying a dna backbone which has branched out to become the
tangled underbrush through which we hack our way, the worms which make
soil in productive farmland, the bacteria which aid and attack us, etc.
We all carry a common legacy of dna-and-nucleic-acid-based mechanisms
which hold the files on our creation, growth, and maintenance. We're all
probing fingers of a common lifeform which has stretched its tendrils
over the surface of the planet in as many forms as possible. Howard
------------------------------
Subj: speciation and snowball earth Date: 10/29/99
A while back David Smillie sent a paper which indicated that a species
is an enduring genetic chain of substantial complexity which dresses itself
in genetic acessories to fill as many niches as possible before the next
major despeciation, the next major life-destroying catastrophe. One catastrophe
has dwarfed all others in the public imagination over the last decade--the
destruction of the dinosaurs as the result of a comet splash down. Stephen
Jay Gould went out of his way ten years ago to publicize another mass
despeciation--the Cambrian extinction--for which he gave no cause. Now
the snowball earth theories which first appeared roughly a year ago are
putting definite dates to eath's life extinguishing episodes, those which
some species managed to accessorize sufficiently to survive while others
less clever in their genetic adaptations died. Specifically, the data
suggests that the pre-Cambrian extinction occurred courtesy of a deep
freeze and the lack of greenhouse gases which may have triggered it. In
fact, the data suggests that one of these cataclysms hit in roughly 700,000
bp, just before the rise of the first Ediacarans and the first clams,
and another freeze-over coated the earth with ice around 600,000 bp, probably
triggering the pre-Cambrian die off which did the Ediacarans in and opened
the door for virtually all of today's major multicellular animal and plant
families. Hoefully we, too, will ornament ourselves with sufficient gadgetry
to endure the next disaster, whether it be by over greenhousing ourselves,
tossing ourselves into the cooler, or irradiating the planet in a manor
that only bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans could enjoy. My vote
for a species adornment of adaptive value is the space ship. Which may
give Mike Waller inspiration for yet another poem. Meanwhile, here's the
news on snowball earth and the dates of its reoccurances. Howard Source:
Penn State (http://www.psu.edu/)Date: Posted 10/29/99 Oxygen May Be Cause
Of First Snowball Earth Denver, Colo. -- Increasing amounts of oxygen
in the atmosphere could have triggered the first of three past episodes
when the Earth became a giant snowball, covered from pole to pole by ice
and frozen oceans, according to a Penn State researcher. "We have
convincing evidence that at least six of the seven continents were once
glaciated, and we also have evidence that some of these continents were
near the equator when they were covered with ice," says Dr. James
F.Kasting, professor of geosciences and meteorology. "Two of these
global glaciations occurred at 600 and 750 million years ago, but the
earliest occurred at 2.3 billion years ago. "According to Kasting,
if it is assumed that the magnetic evidence for glaciation at the equator
is correct, then only two possible explanations for equatorial glaciation
exist.One is that the Earth's tilt, which is now at 23.5 degrees from
vertical, was higher than about 54 degrees from vertical. This would have
positioned Earth so that the poles received the most solar energy and
the equator would receive the least, creating a glacier around the middle
but still leaving the poles unfrozen. The other possibility, which is
the one that Kasting leans toward now, is that the greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere fell low enough so that over millions of years, glaciers
gradually encroached from the poles to 30 degrees from the equator. Then,
in about 1,000 years, the remainder of the Earth rapidly froze due to
the great reflectivity of the already ice-covered areas and their inability
to capture heat from the sun.
The
entire Earth became a snowball with oceans frozen to more than a half
mile deep."For the latest two glaciations, carbon dioxide levels
fell low enough to beginthe glaciation process. However, for the earliest
glaciation, the key may havebeen methane," Kasting told attendees
at the annual meeting of the GeologicalSociety of America today (Oct.
27) in Denver. "The earliest known snowballEarth occurred around
the time that oxygen levels in the atmosphere began torise," says
Kasting, who is a member of the Penn State Astrobiology Center."Before
then, methane was a major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere inaddition
to carbon dioxide and water vapor."As oxygen levels increased, methane
levels decreased dramatically andcarbon dioxide levels had not built up
enough to compensate, allowing theEarth to cool. Oxygen levels need only
reach a hundredth of a percent ofpresent-day oxygen levels to convert
the methane atmosphere completely.Once the Earth is snow covered, it takes
5 to 10 million years for the naturalactivity of volcanos to increase
carbon dioxide enough to melt the glaciers.Regardless of the greenhouse
gas involved, the pattern of freezing anddefrosting would be the same.
Because the sun has been constantly increasingin brightness, it would
take more greenhouse gas in the past to compensate forthe fainter sun.
For the glaciations at 600 and 750 million years ago, estimatesare that
carbon dioxide levels equal to recent pre-industrial levels or up tothree
times pre-industrial levels would have been sufficient for snowball Earthto
occur.Because many continents existed in the warm equatorial areas during
the mostrecent glaciations, Kasting believes that rapid weathering of
calcium andmagnesium silicate rocks, which consumes carbon dioxide, lowered
levelssufficient to cool things."It would have taken nearly 300 times
present levels of carbon dioxide tobring the Earth out of its ice cover,"
says Kasting. "Then, once the highreflectivity ice was gone, the
carbon dioxide would have overcompensatedand the Earth would become very
warm until rapid weathering would removecarbon dioxide from the atmosphere."One
reason that many scientists initially rejected the snowball Earth theorywas
that biological evidence does not suggest that the various forms of life
onEarth branched out from the latest total glaciation. A variety of life
forms hadto survive from before the glaciation, which is difficult to
imagine on anice-covered world. Perhaps the ancestors of life today survived
in refuges likehot springs or near undersea thermal vents."The biological
puzzle of snowball Earth is very interesting," says Kasting."Events
suggest that life was more robust than we thought and that the Earth'sclimate
was much less stable than we assumed."Editor's Note: The original
news release can be found athttp://www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/news/snowballearth.htmlNote:
This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Penn State forjournalists
and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of
thisstory, please credit Penn State as the original source. You may also
wish to includethe following link in any citation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991029071 656.htm</
------------------------------
In
a message dated 1/29/00 11:58:09 AM Eastern Standard Time, (Van Philpot)
writes: vp: I am writing a book entitled"The Philosophy of Rheology"which
was inspired by research I did in the department of psychiatry at Tulane
about 18 years ago showing that the blood of schizophrenic patients had
an abnormally high viscosity and when they were effectively treated and
began to communicate with others, the blood viscosity went in the direction
of normal. vp: These findings were published in Biological Psychiatry
in 1984. From these studies, I have concluded that the flow of body fluids
and the flow of communication beteen humans and their environment are
intertwined. vp: that time itself began with the BIG BANG when particles
of matter began to move and mental function is intertwined with that movement
from the molecular to the celestial level. vp: As you have already suggested,
there is a greater mind which is the accumulated knowledge of mankind
and an individual mind that connects with the greater mind like a telephone
connected to Ma Bell. From a medical point of view, heath is dependent
on the integrity of the flow of natural phenomena, body fluids, the mind
and the spirit.
hb: now I am becoming more anxious than ever to email you the latest Global
Brain ms. Can you receive large files and print them out? My approach
to what you and I have both focused on is very down-to-earth and materialistic.
However dances of incedible divinity can arise from those concentrations
of infinity we know as quarks and leptons, atoms and molecules, galaxies,
black holes, stars, suns and the captured spin of sun stuff we call human
beings._______________________________
Subj: Husserl Date: 4/10/01 4:09:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: Starproxy
To: Howl Bloom A brief paper --more interesting parts are in bigger font--
25. Relations of coincidence among the contents of intimation and naming
Statements about desire, questions, imperatives and other statements informed
by the speaker's past experience relate to both the speaker's mental state
and to the objects to which s/he refers. But existential statements independent
of the speaker refer only to immutables external to the speaker. hb: are
there any such things? Liebnitz and Lee Smolin say that all things can
be defined by their relationship to all other things in the universe.
the view of truth, beauty, and inanimate evolution I've just been laying
out imply that all things can be defined by their current, past, and future
relationships to all others in the universe. Is subjectivity absent from
even that most unchangable of things--a proton? It's motion position relative
to others, and the various gravitational, solar radiating, or organic
bodies in which it participates makes it unique and gives it a subjectivity
without consciousness. jpm: Examples of statements that relate to the
speaker's subjectivity: The desire, "I should like a glass of water,"
refers to the speaker's past and present thirstiness. hb: and to future
intentions--to will and to the future movement of a liquid into the digestive
tract. jpm: The question, "Where is a glass of water?" refers
to the object's location and relies on speaker's ignorance of its location.
hb: however it asks for an answer in a frame of reference that would allow
the speaker to find it in the future. once again, it is a question related
to motion, to action, and to what lays ahead of the speaker. jpm: Similarly,
the imperative, "Give me a glass of water!" must include the
speaker's feeling about a glass to be imperative. But s/he makes no existential
statement about water. hb: hmmmm, there's a heck of a lot of knowledge
implied in this statement. knowledge of water's function with relation
to the speaker--of its use as a beverage, a solvent, a necessity for washing
,etc. it also implies knowledge of a glass and by implication the vast
social structure that makes the manufacture and retailing of the glass
possible. Then there are the molecules in the glass, the fact that they
will remain in the glass thanks to the gravity of an entire planet, the
fact that, if tipped, they will tumble out, etc. In a Smolinesque manner,
six words are slowly hooking us into economic units, production, consumpmption,
emotion, and the past and present of the cosmos. jpm: Statements of desire,
questions and imperatives combine the speaker's relationship to the statement
and the direct object. In, "I should like a glass of water,"
the direct object, "a glass of water," relies of the speaker's
desire designated by, "I should like." Husserl points out that
when a speaker expresses his desire for a glass of water his desire, the
subject ("I want") sentence's grammatical direct object/predicate
("a glass of water") are the semantic objects of the sentence.
Generally, when we talk about subject/object division in sentences we
divide subject and object to isolate each term, forgetting that each term's
subjectivity relies on it's relation to the other.
hb:
you hit it on the nose. The meaning of, "I want a glass of water,"
arises from the relationship between, "I want," and, "a
glass of water." Therefore, in Husserl's formulation, both the subject,
"I want," and predicate, "a glass of water," are semantic
objects of the sentence. This way of thinking about sentences puts the
speaker back into the sentence and emphasizes the speaker as architect
of meaning in sentences about desire, questions and imperatives. The speaker
occupies space in the sentence designated by "I" and uses "I"
to refer to himself. Husserl draws attention to the speaker as a subject
that cannot literally speak from within the sentence because emanates
from him and refers to him. The sentence divides the speaker between the
speech act and "I." Here, the speaker is sum object of the sentence.
The sentence speaks for the speaker but the speaker gets to be "speaker"
because of the sentence. Therefore, the speaker and sentence are objects
of each other. On the other hand, existential statements do not rely on
the speaker at all. For instance, "Water is H20," is a fact
independent of the speaker's the speaker's state of mind. hb: without
a community of minds--one that extends quite a distance back in time--there
would be no word "water," no sentence structure making an "is"
possible, and none of those millennia of speculation about the nature
of matter which led to the formulation of water as "H20." An
existential statement is a statement about existing things of all kinds--of
inanimate matter, with its 14 billion years or so of history--and of mass
and individual minds. jpm: So it does not matter if the speaker says,
"I judge that water is H20," because water's chemical composition
does not rely on the speaker. The speaker could say, "I judge that
CO2 is water," and he would be wrong. hb: ummmmm, the notion that
water is h20 is a hypothesis that we consider well proven. but later generations
often manage to make monkeys of us and show us newer and truer ways of
seeing things. so to a scientist who realizes that eternal skepticism
is his primary mandate, even the statement that water is H20 is provisional
and up for eventual challenge. jpm: Though Husserl recognizes the speaker's
object importance to sentences directly informed by the speaker's experience
(i.e. statements of desire, questions, imperatives, etc.) he maintains
that mathematical relationships exist independently of the speaker. Simply,
the desire, "I want a glass of water," implies a "someone,"
but, "2 x 2 =4," in Husserl's way of thinking does not. In defining
"intimation" Husserl stresses the speaker must refer to something
that relies on his subjectivity, not a general state of affairs. A statement's
meaning lies in the object referred to and in the mental state the speaker
communicates about himself except for existentials, which are themselves,
true or not-true. hb: a wonderful workout for the mind. all thanks, jp--howard
|
|
The
Universe is a Computer-Wolfram, etc.
Stephen
Wolfram's A New Kind of Science-what is it good for? A great many unkind
things have been said about this book. The word that stands out in my
mind from postings on various Internet groups comes from a self-professed
Wolfram fan who blesses the heavens for Wolfram's invention of the widely
used computer tool Mathematica. This Wolfram well-wisher went through
A New Kind of Science and pronounced it "silly." Dorion Sagan
wrote a brilliant satire of Wolfram's "my, my, my, my, me" style
of writing for the International Paleopsychology Project. Evaluations
and debates have popped up everywhere. The New York Times alone published
six articles on Wolfram before I stopped counting. One of the first Times
pieces praised A New Kind of Science for its "readability."
Which either means the reviewer had a far greater ability to glide through
difficult prose than I do (and most folks with a reasonable intelligence
do) or that he simply skimmed the first 30 or 40 pages of the book.
There
has been so much buzz about this book in part because there is a full-time,
in house publicist at Wolfram HQ-- Wolfram Research, Inc. in Champaign,
Illinois. And he's not just any publicist, he's a PhD-David Reiss, PhD
to be specific. Having a publicist, however, is not an unscientific thing.
Newton might have been a nothing without his savage dedication to self-promotion.
Darwin wrote out a list of those he needed to win over to make his ideas
stick and had his bulldog-Huxley-execute the pr plan. Every academic researcher
whose work shows up in the mass media owes his or her visibility in part
to a university communications director…or to a full-time wizard
of scientific promotion like scientific literary agent John Brockman.
I suspect that many an important scientific idea has been lost for lack
of promotional machinery. Science needs more idea-promoters, not less.
So
what's the real deal? Is Wolfram's book simply this year's Brief History
of Time? Is it going through printing after printing only because it's
a status symbol one MUST display on one's coffee table? Are any of the
reviewers reading it all the way through to the end that lies way, way
down the line-on page 1197? More important, what of value can be gleaned
from A New Kind of Science?
Quite
a bit, I think. I am not one of the reviewers who has read the book all
the way through. I'm only up to page 850. But here's what the book says
so far. You can start with a very simple set of rules and extract from
them a very complex system. Despite the simplicity of the initial rules,
the system you extract, evolve, or calculate from them can be so complex
that it looks absolutely random. And that randomness can fool you into
thinking that there's no comprehensible rule or law at work behind it.
So beware. There may well be simple rules at work literally everywhere.
Wolfram
has also shown that in a universe based on simple rules, some things are
unpredictable.
Or, to put it differently, fizzy, frothy, quirky, and chaotic looking
events can easily take place in a cosmos built on two or three simplicities.
There's even room for that philosophically-tough loose cannon called "free
will."
Wolfram
argues that the complexity of a system that starts with simple rules can
be enormous. So enormous that a mathematical theory constructed to predict
the system's next step might have to prove itself the really hard way--by
starting from the simple rules and spelling out their consequences step
by step. For example, if this universe had begun from a set of simple
rules and step-by-stepped its way fourteen billion years through the necessary
consequences, the most efficient mathematical theory one could devise
to sum the universe up in a nutshell might take fourteen billion years-or
more!--of running time to arrive at this moment in time and prove that
its predictions were accurate. A theory of the universe might take fourteen
billion years to validate itself. By which time this moment would be 14
billion years in the past; now would be fourteen billion years in the
future; and we still wouldn't know if our theory predicted all the latest
happenings produced by fourteen billion years of more cosmic blunders
and fecundity.
Comprehension
is a form of crunching, and there are some things that prove uncrunchable.
Wolfram certainly doesn't use such simple words, but that's the meaning
of two terms on which he spends at least 134 pages--Computational Irreducibility
and Computational Equivalency.
Wolfram
also implies that it's time to change our traditional, mathematical approach
to scientific understanding. Galileo reduced the acceleration of a falling
object to a mathematical formula-32 feet per second per second. Newton
built on Galileo's approach and worked out a math that predicted the manner
in which an idealized planet would revolve around an idealized sun. Then
Newton promoted his work like crazy. In fact, he overhyped it. He Wolframmed
it. He gave the impression that he'd found the mathematical key that unlocked
all the secrets to the heavens and the earth. The result? Scientists have
been aping Newton for the last 300 years. Everyone wants a formula! Even
folks in the psychological sciences are often formula-obsessed. And some
actually find formulae that work. Without highly accurate mathematical
formulae, we couldn't lob satellites into orbit and send land rovers off
to Mars.
But
there was a bug in Newton's number-crunching. His math could predict the
movement of one oversimplified planet around a sun, but not two. Why?
The extra wobble created by the gravitational attraction between the two
planets and the tugs on the sun produced by the pair of planets' constantly
shifting center of gravity-it was all far more than the equations could
account for.
Math,
Wolfram implies, works backwards. It works on the constraints, the outer
boundaries, and envelopes. Math works on what's restraining things. It
doesn't start from the bottom up, trying to comprehend how things self-construct,
how they self-generate.
Wolfram's system does go from the bottom up. It starts from initial rules
of very simple kinds, then runs their implications or instructions forward-often
for tens of thousands of times. Wolfram doesn't work from math, he works
from cellular automata. Cellular automata are like checkerboards in a
computer. Each square can be black or white (though Wolfram tosses in
grays and colors, too). Whether you-a square-are black or white depends
on simple rules. The best known cellular automaton is the Game of Life.
Imagine you are one square on a checkerboard. If you're white you're dead.
If you're black, you're alive. The same thing applies to the eight squares
around you-the four squares just touching your corners and the four flanking
your sides. White means they're dead. Black means they're alive. Got it?
OK,
here's the basic rule. If you have no living neighbors, the isolation
kills you. You go white. If you have just enough neighbors to keep you
happy, you come to life-you turn black. If you're overcrowded by living
neighbors, you are lost in the crowd. You go dead. You turn white. That's
it-if you have company you thrive, if you have too little or too much
you die. Now step out of the computer and grab your mouse. On your screen
is a white checkerboard-like grid. Everything is dead. Indicate your starting
conditions. Move your cursor to the squares on the screen you want to
fill in with black and give them a click. Then hit the run button. The
computer will calculate frame after frame what happens on the screen once
the first players-the first living squares-interact step by step, repeating
the rules. The results are pretty complex. New squares come to life. Old
living squares die. The computer repeats the old rules on the new board-pattern,
and once again the pattern of black and white cells changes. Self-assembling
shapes like flying wings will scud across the screen. Insect-like L-shapes
will skitter. Crosses with an empty cell where their horizontal and vertical
arms meet will stabilize and sit still, unchanging through frame after
frame of the game. Sometimes, if the initial conditions didn't prefigure
enough sociality, all the living squares on the board will eventually
blank out and you'll have an empty cosmos on your hands.
(To
play the game of life, see http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html
or download the game for your own computer from the bottom of the page
at http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/d95-aeh/get/lifeeng#what)
Among
the wonders of the game of life is the fact that self-maintaining shapes
can skedaddle around the board as if they had a life-and a coherence-of
their own. In fact, they don't. Underlying cells are living and dying
to give a flying wing its motion. It's like a whorl in a river that maintains
its shape even though the water molecules that make it up are flowing
downstream and being replaced by new ones from upstream. The whorl is
a constant that shouldn't be-one made of the power of constant change.
Cellular
automata are bottom-up devices. They're start-with-a-rule-and-live-out-the-consequences
machines. Wolfram's contribution is that he's run thousands-perhaps tens
of thousands--of different cellular automata. He's tried a wide variety
of simple and very tricky rules. He's run some of his cellular automata
programs for excruciating lengths of time. He's applied himself to devising
new programs and studying the results for ten years. He's pored over vast
scrolled printouts of the resultant patterns, printouts that must rival
the Bayeux Tapestry in length. He's analyzed pattern and lack of pattern
with the care of a taxonomist sorting through the species from a vast
new continent with whole new forms of life. He's given names and numbers
to categories, classes, species, and subspecies of cellular automata.
And what are his conclusions?
Basically,
they're the few I've mentioned above. You can start from simple rules
and get complexity. You can start from simple rules and get what seems
like randomness, like sloppy chance, like patternless scatter, like incomprehensibility.
Which
means that underneath every random thing we see, there may well be simple
rules. Beneath the many things that math can't grasp, there may be simple
rules at work…or play.
As
of page 850, Wolfram has not yet tried to retro-engineer his cellular
automata. He hasn't tried to find a way to look at 100 or 1000 runs of
a pattern and to detect the initial rules that started the thing. In many
cases, he implies, this would be impossible.
Is
Wolfram's work really A New Kind of Science? When Wolfram refers over
and over again to "the great discovery I made" while laboring
on his cellular automata, has he really discovered something great? In
a sense, yes, he has. He's presented a new method, a new way of doing
science. He's said implicitly, let's stop trying to find the outer boundaries,
the restraints, of things, and look at their generative principles. Let's
stop defining order as an absence of disorder and look at the way that
order self-evolves.
Let's
look for the simple rules on which this universe may be based. Let's respect
the power of simplicity to generate whirlwinds, voices, behemoths, and
leviathans. Let's use new metaphors to grasp the ungraspable. Math has
limitations. Now that we have computers, let's build more bottom-up systems
to see how close we can come to comprehending the way in which this cosmos
self-generates.
Wolfram
has presented one such metaphor. Others have used it before. Cellular
automata are one of the many bottom-up approaches that have been proposed
since those days in the early 1980s when it became possible for any grad
student with a vivid imagination to come up with a bottom-up invention,
a simple simulation like Tom Ray's self-evolving computer world Tierra.
I've used the example of cellular automata in the corollary generator
theory I've been developing for 30 years and will present in my next book,
The Big Bang Tango. The Big Bang Tango, in fact, is based entirely on
the implications of a cosmos generated from a handful of axioms, of magic
beans. But they're very different implications than those Wolfram arrives
at. And Ed Fredkin, who was chronicled in Robert Wright's first book,
Three Scientists And Their Gods, has proposed that the universe is a computer
working out a problem step by step. Each step is another tick of time.
But no one but Wolfram has explored the implications of the cellular automata
metaphor so thoroughly. No one but Wolfram has absolutely proven the manner
in which simple rules can produce the random and the seemingly formless.
No one has promoted the metaphor so resoundingly or visualized it in illustration
after illustration so incessantly. More important, no one has demonstrated
how difficult it may be for we mere human beings-with our perceptual limitations-to
dig back a zillion Plank units in time and find the initial Thou Shalts
and Thou Shalt Nots that may have given this cosmos its first kick. So,
yes, we do owe Wolfram thanks, not just for his book and the insights
in it, but for shoving it down our throats so effectively. He has done
us a great favor. Howard
_________
Hb & Paul Werbos 5/24/2003 Good stuff, Paul. Many thanks for this
explanation. It helps give me some clarity. Fractals, iterative systems,
and cellular automata make more sense to me as the basis for building
a universe. Deriving self-consistent systems from simple rules--call them
axioms, postulates, algorithms, or even commandments--the names don't
matter, but this makes sense to me too. I suspect that Wolfram is right.
When we try to start in the middle of things with simplistic systems we
get muddled and lost--everything beyond the simplicities of planets and
atoms--everything beyond objects that follow nice semi-circular patterns
and have convenient smooth gradients of force--looks like randomness and
white noise. We end up with a cosmos in which solar systems are possible
but biology is not. We end up with a system in which the math of uncertainty--probability--does
not mean that we are uncertain and have cataracts on our corneas, but
that particles are the ones with the cataracts, not us. We end up with
systems of social interaction based on game theory and other mathematical
formulations that utterly distort reality--we end up with optimization
systems in our economics and in our evolutionary psychology. These are
systems that just don't cut it. They don't belong where they're being
used. In fact, when we use the math of optimization truth and the facts
are utterly abused. If I understand the LaGrangian world you've portrayed
below, it seems too unlike the cosmos I know and love. LaGrangian systems
are neat and are probably good for a variety of things, but not the big
picture. You put your finger on the problem when you said they help you
find the peaks, but don't help you find the jumping point to peaks that
may be higher. This is a jumping universe, a universe that takes big,
big leaps. I hate to keep repeating the same litany, but look at cosmic
history: **The cosmos jumped from a nothing to a something in the Big
Bang. Or it jumps from nothing to something in the creases where steady
state production occurs. **the cosmos leapt from energy to matter when
it precitated quarks **the cosmos leapt from individuality to sociality
and a whole lot more when those quarks got together in groups of three,
and, along with leptons precipitated as roughly sixteen different particles.
We'll skip the huge surprise--the unbelievable peak to peak leap of being
able to precitate zillions of identical quarks and particles simultaneously.
I'll grant you this. An optimization equation might prove handy for describing
the precipitation of a quark from the slashingly fast expansion of time
space. And optimization equations might explain the identicality. ***the
cosmos took another giant jump 380,000 years later when it slowed down
and hit us with the shock of the attraction between electrons and protons,
the resulting properties of atoms, the emergence of gravity, and the competition
between gravitational cluster that led to cosmic dust and whisps of gas.
***then came another huge leap--the jump from mist of gas and dust to
galaxies. ***then a pole vault to another stunner--the ignition of stars.
And so on and so forth....right on into a future, which we stupidly imagine
will have no new surprises, but will mosey along as if the cosmos has
run out of the pogo sticks with which she leaps so easily from peak to
peak.
LaGrangian
peaks are puny compared to the impish ingenuity of this creative process.
Even the gradualism of Darwin's original conception, the gradualism of
fractals, the gradualism of Wolfram's cellular automata, the gradualism
of iterative math--like non-linear dynamics--and even the gradualism of
my corollary extraction from axioms--my corollary genertor theory--doesn't
seem to cut it. But these its from bits approaches (do I understand the
concept of its from bits correctly?) come a lot closer to what we see.
Fractals were the first form of math that allowed computer animators to
actually use equations to model a leaf, a coastline or a tree. That's
progress--but does it produce systems that can make megajumps based on
their previous properties? Watching a Mandelbrot pattern unfold can get
very dull. Yes, you get surprises when you cruise the pattern three-dimensionally--when
you dive in and find what look like very new properties. But they are
not surprises on a par with what the cosmos generates. Would they produce
creative flights that would floor us if the number of iterations we allowed
them to run went at Planck speed? I doubt that all of Wolfram's computer
runs put together have yet reached the number of clicks of Planck time
in a single second. And we've had 13.5 billion years of Planck clicks.
So my sketicism about simple iterative systems may simply be a lack of
vision. I suspect that Mandelbrot equations and other simple iterative
systems WOULD produce big surprises if their products were allowed to
interact socially. Imagine that the buds of a mandelbrot circle separated
from their mother circle and interelated. Imagine that their extensions
overlapped and created interference patterns--the equivalent of the coupled
oscillations you and Pavel have discussed. Imagine that those interference
patterns periodically separated, interacted, competed or cooperated, and
generated additional interference patterns that then went off on their
own and had to dominate, cooperate, subordinate, or die (my thanks to
Michael Waller for the phrase). Imagine that all individual units had
to exist within the total gel, the total background weave created by all
the patterns summed together and all of them taken individually. And imagine
that the iterations repeated almost endlessly. Allow individuality, sociality,
cooperation, competition, group formation, synergies, and battles to develop
in your system--as simple programs like Tierra do--and you might just
have a brew that can explode with concussive bursts of the radically new.
But this is based on iterative math, not the math of smooth and simple
surfaces, not the math of gradients that produce dips and peaks. On the
up side, this sounds intriguing: " But... most high-power mainstream
physicists would say the search for the "theory of everything"
is essentially the search for the true Lagrangian of the universe.)"
What do you imagine a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like?
This is also intriguing: "a 'saddle point,' which looks like a mximum
in some directions and a minimum in others." Howard In a message
dated 5/23/2003 7:49:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Hi, Howard!
hb: Paul, it's good to have you back. pw: The original Lagrange and Hamiltonian
formalisms were like strict gradient-based local optima. Therte is some
analogy between the new FIQFT extensions and the simulated annelaing kind
of mathematics people use to try to overcome local minima... which is
basically the foundation of creativity in intelligent systems. hb: Paul,
this sounds fascinating can you explain it to me? What's FIQT? What's
annelaing mathematics? What would be the opposite of a gradient-based
optima--aside from a gradient-based minima. Can you tell me in word pictures?
.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf
Sorry
to have taken so long to reply. My first impression was that I needed
to write something in English, pedagogical, to elaborate on what a Lagrangian
and Hamiltonian are. They have been fundamental to almost all basic physics
for some time. (Kurakin and Wolfram are exceptions. SOME its-from-bits
modelers would start out by trying to avoid the usual reliance on Lagrangians.
But... most high-power mainstream physicists would say the search for
the "theory of everything" is essentially the search for the
true Lagrangian of the universe.) But... looking at your questions, maybe
you did already did get the basic idea... When I talked about a "gradient-based
maximum" of a function f(x) -- I am thinking of a function f whose
value is always a real number, and a VECTOR x taken from an N-dimensional
vector space -- I am thinking about a "local maximum of f."
We could say that f has a local maximum at point x if there exists some
finite number u >0, such that f(x) is greater than f(y) for ALL vectors
y "close enough to x". "Close enough" is defined to
mean |x-y|<u. In fact, there is a huge literature out there in applied
mathematics on how to find minima and maxima of a function f. One of the
oldest methods is the "method of steepest descent." In that
method, you start out with a GUESS x0. Then you calculate the gradient
of f at x0. The "gradient" is just a vector which points uphill...
it points in the direction where f increases most rapidly. You move uphill
as far as you can, generarte a new x, and keep repeating the process.
This kind of gradient-based optimization will take you reliably to a LOCAL
maximum or minimum of f. But when you get to the top of a foothill, it
will not tell you how to jump off that foothill to a bigger mountain nearby.
The gradient doesn't tell you where the mountain is. This is a practical
issue of pervasive relevance in engineering and in physics, and even in
evolutionary theory. In my view, it is of pervasive importance to understanding
why humans often seem highly irrational; many cases of human irrationality
are really just cases of lack of creativity -- lack of ability to think
or work one's way out of a kind of local optimum in behavior. Notice that
I am talking about a function f(x) which is "deterministic"
-- no white noise in the discussion so far. Classical physics used Lagrangians
and Hamiltonians in a deterministic way. Thus even in Lagrange's version,
when he thought the universe was maximizing something, he was really just
using the assumption that the universe finds a local maximum. But in the
theories we have used for a long time, it is not even a local maximum
or minimum but a kind of "saddle point," which looks like a
mximum in some directions and a minimum in others. --- Then add noise.
Simulated annealing is one of many methods now used to look for a true
global optimum -- the peak of the highest mountain -- for a function f
which may have many local optima. It is like a gradient serach but with
white noise deliberately added, in order to encourage a certain amount
of exploration. (Many believe that "novelty seeking" in humans
is likewise a kind of genetically-programmed tilt towards a kind of exploration...)
Functional INtegral Quantum Field Thoery (FIQFT) looks a lot like classical
Lagrangian field theory, BUT WITH white noise added!! As if the universe
were maximizing BUT doing some simulated annealing! The simulated anneating
would allow it to "tunnel" from one local maximum to another.
But.. it's not so simple. It's LIKE what I just said, but factors of "i"
thrown in in ways that make it incompatible with any notion of reality
(or even with axiomatic mathematics, last I heard). FIQFT is basically
today's most orthodox modern latest formulation of quantum mechanics,
the "language" in which the theory of everything is assumed
to be written. The mainstream idea today is that the theory of everything
equals FIQFT plus the choice of the appropriate Lagrangian. But I myself
am not entirely mainstream. I suspect that we can do a bit better than
today's FIQFT, particularly in how we explain the process of quantum measurement
and the role of time. Best, Paul
_________
Eshel--this is extraordinary. Yes, paradox is key to understanding. When
you find the larger structure from which the apparent opposites protrude,
you are onto something--you are Godelian-Paradox-jumping. Yes, yes to
simultaneous top-down, bottom up, and diagonal and horizontal, multi-threaded
causality. But possibly the most important statement in your email is
this: "even the free electron is coupled to the electromagnetic backgraund
and to the gravitational field." You've put electrons in a cosmic
context. You've also supplied a medium in which they can oscillate, in
which they can wave. Archimedes, who developed the math of "fluctions,"
a math that helped lay the base for Newton's calculus, said that a fluction
(a curve, a ripple, a wave) must take place in a medium. What did he know?
He'd only seen puddles, ponds, and the Mediterranean Sea. Archimedes had
never glimpsed outer space or atoms imaged by a scan-tunneling microsocope.
But I strongly suspect that Archimedes was right. I also strongly suspect
that we've let the question of what a force field--a gravitational or
a magnetic field--really is and how it operates dangle for much too long.
Describing a field with equations helps make predictions, but doesn't
explain it. It's merely one form of translation from one frame of reference
to another. If you ask me why the sky is blue, and I answer that it's
because it is cerulean in character, all I've done is tell you the name
for blue in Latin (cereuleus is blue). Math, language, and metaphor are
isomorphic symbol sets. Translating from one to the other does amazing
things for our understanding. But there's a difference between translation
and explanation. Alas, I'm not quite sure what it is. Remember the two
core rules of science-- The truth at any price, including the price of
your life And look at things others take for granted as if you've never
seen them before, then ask the questions your new view unleashes from
your mind. We've taken the exertion of force at a distance for granted
for much too long. And we've viewed things like particles and minds in
isolation far too long as well. Howard In a message dated 5/26/2003 4:11:25
PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Taiking the riske of beeing unfair as
I dont have time to elaborate on my following claims I would like to emphesize
that "lagrangians" alone CAN NOT !! explain the emergence of
complexity they even cant explain the second law of isolated systems in
equilibrium. All great descoveries in the past followed a realization
of the existance of a paradox waves-particles quantum-special relativity.
For some reasone ( for Haward to figure out) currently the main centeral
paradoxes are percived as technical difficulties general-relativity-quantum
second law - complexity the evolution of complexity and even the emergence
of cognition With many taking the belife that digital computers can assume
cognetive capabilis. They can not. Niether is the second law can explain
complexity nore can Walfram explain nature just how clever Walfram is.
Look at nature or go back 2000 years to Greec. The secret is hybredization
of digital and analoge ( atomistic and continuum) Or go back to Libnitz
with his dificulties and the need to intreduce the notion of "monades"
Look at bacterial self organization ( I try to clarify in my paper in
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London appeared on the web this may) iT IS NOT A
TOP LEVEL EMERGENCE but rather CO EMERGENCE ON ALL LEVELS during self
organization the individual bacteria change themselves and assume new
properties DOWN TO THE GENE LEVEL which never can be observed or realized
by the studies of individual solitary bacteria. In this respect the whole
is not greater than the some of its parts but the sum of its parts in
the solitary state. Does it imply to the abiotic world ? I belive it does.
Unlike the Aplaton picture which is useful for computation in reality
there is no free electron ( taking it to the extreem) even the free electron
is coupled to the electromagnetic backgraund and to the gravitational
field which can not IN PRINCIPLE be screened. If we dont accept the principle
that the units must change during self organization having internal degrees
of state which also can change until at the very low scale we coupled
back to the macro ( general relativity is most relevant on the Quarks
scale and on the Cosmological one) I belive we will never be able to explain
the emergence of cognition without running into paradoxes. Dont try these
arguments on physicists right now they will tell you ( and most likely
be correct) that you dont understand well enough general relativity well
no body does. I had the luck to conduct a dialoge with Feymann 20 year
ago on these issues. Never let it known until I will not have to use his
name to convice people. But that some other time, Sorry it turned so long,Eshel
Eshel Ben-Jacob Prof. of Physics The Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex
Systems President of the Israeli Physical Society School of Physics and
Astronomy Tel Aviv University 69978 Tel Aviv http://star.tau.ac.il/
_________
Paul--First off, I thanks for your patience with me. I've been very cranky
about math's shortcomings recently...to the point of rudeness. I also
commented on one of your recent postings, then realized after the email
was sent that I'd missed a big chunk of your email. Second, please continue
to be patient with my ignorance. I'm learning as we go along. For example,
I just got an inkling today of how much data the equations of a waveform
compress or contain. I've been using the concept of the waveform for decades,
thinking I knew what it was. What I didn't know is its mathematical shape,
its mathematical intricacies. More comments below-- In a message dated
5/26/2003 12:44:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: I think I may have
some difficulty in translating/understanding/parsing exatly what you are
saying here. ----- Original Message ----- From: Good stuff, Paul. Many
thanks for this explanation. It helps give me some clarity. Fractals,
iterative systems, and cellular automata make more sense to me as the
basis for building a universe. Deriving self-consistent systems from simple
rules--call them axioms, postulates, algorithms, or even commandments--the
names don't matter, but this makes sense to me too. ---------------------------
pw: Are you saying "cellular automata make more sense apriori than
Lagrangian field theory, classical or quantum"? But Lagrangian field
theory really is a way of deriving a complex self-consistent system from
a very simple set of axioms. hb: then this is up my alley. My way of understanding
all this is based on eight months spent deriving the natural number system
from Peano's postulates. It was an amazing experience. But it was a step-by-step
experience. It was a stairway to heaven, not a ramp. It was closer to
the step-by-step approaches that Kurakin and I have been discussing when
talking about the cracks between Planck units of time or that your backward
causation across short stretches of time implies. I do not understand
Lagrangians and am still trying to get to know them. They can be viewed
geometrically or topographically. This is very helpful to me. I can't
calculate, but I can see. They can produce "an embedded torus".
Why only an embedded torus? Why not a self-standing torus. You know my
toroidal cosmos obsession. This sounds promising to me. But the torus
can not be knotted. Worse, it can't be turned into a Klein's bottle. Any
kid raised on Flatland and Einstein knows how deep the need is to see
the extra dimensions our sensory systems may be blind to. Wolfram, who
understands math, feels that smooth field equations, equations with smooth
variants, will never describe the cosmos. He feels the cosmos moves ahead
one step at a time. He feels you have to begin from simple rules and scroll
the cosmos out one row at a time. His reasoning makes sense to me. It
squares with my Corollary Generator Theory--which is based on the Peano
Postulate experience. Planck has always made sense to me too. And his
view is step-by-step, quantum unit by quantum unit. The moves an electron
makes in an atomic shell are disconstinuous steps. They are jumps and
hops, saltations. When I look at the universe from a panoramic view, I
see incredible saltations. These two clues hint strongly that this may
be a hopping cosmos, not one that smoothly skis along. The big picture
view of cosmic history also implies that the theory of entropy is wrong.
The cosmos does not ski downhill. It places its skis side by side perpendicular
to the direction of the hill, moves its right ski up a Planck unit, then
lifts its left ski up to the new Planck level as well. It climbs. Climbing
is cumbersome. It is ragged and fractal (breakable into tiny, repeating
bits).
Climb
one mountain and you discover not that you've reached the peak, but that
you've reached the bottom foothill of the next. This implies a leap beyond
optimization theory. It LITERALLY implies a leap. Perhaps it's time for
a theory of metaoptimization. A theory in which peaks optimize within
their local circumstances until a completed landscape is formed, one in
which the peaks are stuck and stable, no matter how dysfunctional to the
entire system of energy transmogrification their completed upstretch seems.
Then the entire landscape, is multiplied a millionfold or more. Each completed
landscape becomes a micro-unit in the newly-starting megalandscape on
the step above. Run the megalandscape until it reaches its peak. Then
make a milion copies and use them like carpet squares to start a new megalandscape
off from scratch. Each stage of completion is the seed of a beginning
for the next step up the chain. This idea is so obvious that it's probably
been tried a hundred times. Or am I wrong? Given the way that fractals
work, I'd suspect that the big jumps mirror the patterns of the little
ones. I'd suspect that the Planck moves have many of the same properties
as the great form-and-process saltations that gave us particles from energy,
atoms from particles, galaxies from atoms, stars from galactic gatherings,
new atoms from star deaths, complex molecules from the new atoms (a critical
jump that's too much overlooked), polypeptides from complex molecules,
self-reproducing weaves of membrane from polypeptides, cells from membranes,
and consciousness, art, science, and emotion from massive piles of cells.
But I am very, very curious to know how one extracts a Lagrangian system
from axioms. All tools are useful. Lagrangians may or may not be the answer
to wondermaking in this cosmos. But if I understood them better, I suspect
they'd open hefty new ranges of insight. Meanwhile a postscript. I was
entranced by Planck's ideas when I was a kid. And I've been fascinated
by one of Bohr's ideas as an adult: "The opposite of a profound truth
may very well be another profound truth." But Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum physics has always screamed out in my brain that it was wrong
as wrong can be. (The following has been my most useful source on Lagrangians
tonight: Lagrangian Embeddings and Symplectic Field Theory Klaus Mohnke
Retrieved from the World Wide WebMay 28, 2003 http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~klaus/research/researchplan_new/researchplan_new.html)
pw: The quantum version we have today doesn't meet that standard, I would
agree. We need a lot of more creative work to clean up the mess we have
inherited. And it is partly the rube goldbergs of science management and
incentives and institutions which have stopped us from cleaning up the
rube goldberg formulations of quantum theory, in my view. hb: sounds like
a good insight, one I'd like to know more about. Understanding the sociology
of science may help those of us in science--even outsiders like me--get
beyond bureaucratic obstacles and chimpanzee politics. pw: Strictly a
personal view, based in part on personal frustration with not being able
to find the time and energy myself to do some of what could be done...
hb: you've seen the bowels of the beast from the inside in ways few of
us ever achieve. --------------------------- hb: I suspect that Wolfram
is right. When we try to start in the middle of things with simplistic
systems we get muddled and lost--everything beyond the simplicities of
planets and atoms--everything beyond objects that follow nice semi-circular
patterns and have convenient smooth gradients of force--looks like randomness
and white noise. pw: Have not read Wolfram's book. But he did give a talk
locally last Thursday. He said many different things, which need to be
treated distinctly. In modeling the universe... he was reasonably close
to the core physics methodology the way trained physicists (in this case
even including many heretics like me) see it. He didn't say anything about
Bell's Theorems and whatnot... just said "read the book." He
did say he could find very simple Network Automata rule systems (NOT cellular
automata!!) which "reproduce general relativity." And I have
to admit he would have an interesting Occam's Razor argument there. Einstein's
R=T equation seems simple, in a way, but I can understand people arguing
that a seven-rule system of simple discrete network substitutions may
be "simpler" from some viewpoints. HOWEVER: he then went on
to say that this is only "near flat space general relativity,"
which may be cheating; I'd have to read the book to see.
hb:
Frankly, though I read the book in its entirety, his arguments on these
issues didn't get through to me. As I understood it, he was saying what
I've repeated endlessly--smooth gradient form of math won't cut it in
this cosmos. Starting out from the middle, where we are today, and trying
to build backwards mathematically won't work. If there are simple rules
at work, we may well be in a phase of the expansion of a simple-rule-based
system in which the simplicity has generated an illusion of randomness,
an illusion of white noise. Wolfram implies that we can not look backward
from a blizzard of apparent randomness and find the simple pattern that
produced it. I think a more accurate statement would be that Wolfram has
not been able to find a math that will march backward and uncover the
simplicity at the cosmos' core. But Wolfram has unwittingly laid down
a challenge--to find a way to go backwards in his system, a way to dig
down to the base of simple rules that started the whole thing. Whether
that can be done in standard mathematical ways--through theorems, proofs,
and equations, remains to be seen. Math, as I've said before, is probably
in its very early phase. It has many steps, and many quantum leaps, to
go. pw: And his effort to get beyond general relativity is still in its
early stages; he is thinking about something like the discrete-network
VERSION of topological solitons. hb: sounds like an interesting connection.
He has a conference on what his publicists call NKS (A New Kind of Science)
coming up and would, I'm certain, more than welcome a paper from you.
This is a slick PR move to aggrandize himself. But most of the great scientists
of history have been adept at self-aggrandizement. Newton smashed many
another's career so he could claim credit for the lifetime work of others.
This was inexcusable. But without an ethical pr sense, Galileo, Maxwell,
Planck, and Bohr couldn't have left us their contributions, their legacies.
pw: Would have tried to discuss this more with him, except that he was
then mobbed by constructivist deconstructivist antireductionist postmodernist
enthusaists and antediluvian metaphysical grumps, both lost in the realm
of hermeneutics. C'est la vie. hb: my lord!!!! hb: If I understand the
LaGrangian world you've portrayed below, it seems too unlike the cosmos
I know and love. LaGrangian systems are neat and are probably good for
a variety of things, but not the big picture. You put your finger on the
problem when you said they help you find the peaks, but don't help you
find the jumping point to peaks that may be higher. -----------------------------------------------------
pw: yes and no. Not quite so simple. The quantum guys would say... indeed,
the classical stuff doesn't tunnel, but the quantized Lagrangians do,
so the established FIQFT meets all tests... But in fact, that's an oversimplification
too. The simple dynamical laws which emerge even from gradient-based local
"optimization" of a Lagrangian... simple as they are, are quite
powerful enough to allow highly complex emergent behavior. They are not
impoverished systems. hb: the embedded torus mentioned above reminds me
of string theory. Can a Lagrangian landscape produce vast masses of embedded
topological shapes? We need a theory that will to account for the numbers
of identical quarks and leptons that came pouring from the rushing firmament
in the first seconds of this cosmos' birth. (I owe the word "firmament"
to Eshel Ben-Jacob, who feels that partitioning, separation, membrane
making, and the generation of closed systems are keys to the cosmos' evolutionary
track.) pw: Even Poincare's old example of classical chaos in planetary
motion all emerged from classical Lagrangian systems! The key point in
"emergence" is that the underlying AXIOMS don't have to be so
complex.
hb:
agreed heartily. ------------------------------------------------------
pw: By the way, Wolfram's story... is that basically, the laws of the
universe need to have merely a certain very basic level of complexity
-- a kind of "Turing capability" -- in order to be able to emulate
ANY level or type of greater structural complexity one might ask for,
through emergent behavior. That's an interesting thought, maybe the most
interesting in his talk. hb: wait. Bear with me, Paul. The laws of the
universe don't emulate anything, do they? If so what? It's an intriguing
proposition and one whose answer could prove very useful. But so far as
we know right now, it's our systems that attempt to emulate the universe,
not the other way around. The universe spilled from we-know-not-what.
But it didn't emerge from Wolfram's computer. What emerged was an attempt
at metaphor. Isn't it cheating to continue imagining that Turing machines--mythical
all-purpose computers based on logical rules of computation but in imagination
capable of anything--can be the building blocks of a cosmos? What's the
difference between a Turing machine and god? A Turing machine is all-capable,
unless my understanding is off base. All-capable means omnipotent. The
one thing a Turing machine can't do is solve Godelian paradoxes. One thing
this universe does very well is solving Godelian paradox. On the positive
side, a Turing machine runs step by step. Which should make Pavel and
me very happy. But it doesn't make me smile. Why? A Turing machine is
linear. From the beginning, this cosmos has been not just fractal, but
has operated via meshwork, an incredible weave of simultaneous interconnects...
more interconnects, by my usually erroneous calculations, than the number
of all the particles in this cosmos squared. A networked, parallel-distributed
processing cosmos may be an enormous weave of communicating Turing Machines.
But Turing's imaginary machines are not really "built" for communication,
they are built for computation. Only when they've completed the process
do the leak out the result. They're not built for mass communion, they're
not built to consult input from a zillion sources before they compute
each move. The its and bits of this cosmos communicate constantly. They
do it using the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force,
and gravity. They do it by turning these forces into a complex code once
they reach the level of complex molecularity. We call the sending, receiving,
and acting-upon this code "chemistry." hb: What do you imagine
a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like? pw: I actually have
some words about that in arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0202138. hb: This is a
paper I've admired you for since we met. I've downloaded it, have translated
it from .pdf to .doc, have filed it, and, from a quick perusal at 4:30,
get the impression that I will have a tough time understanding it. Is
there any way you can paint it in word-pictures? pw: It is rational for
us to expect many generations of possible future improved physics. At
one generation, I would envision a generation in which the Lagrangian
of the present standard model is reinterpreted as a classical Lagrangian,
in which "Skyrme" and topology-enforcing terms are added, and
it's all reconciled with general relativity simply by inserting appropriate
metric terms in exactly the same way that Wheeler did to Maxwell's Laws
for his "already unified field theory" (50's, which got him
the Nobel Prize). This is right-wing heresy, of course. hb: sounds intriguing
as all get-out to me.
I
anticipate quintupling our brain capacity with technologies that are near-arrival
today...and doing what Einstein told us to do: simplifying what's arcane
so folks with just one brain can understand it. I've probably paraphrased
this a thousand times, but Einstein said a genius is not a person who
can come up with a theory only seven people in the world can understand,
it's someone who can come up with a theory only seven on this planet can
understand and who can then express it so clearly and deliciously that
anyone with a reasonable intelligence can understand it. Paul, you are
a genuine genius. Einstein says that's a big responsibility. It's through
shifts from one system of representation to another--translations from
greek letters into vivid, visualizable and feelable insights--that Feynman
and Einstein derived their breakthroughs. Now we need to shift your breakthroughs
from sentences with ten greek letters to something a math moron like me
can understand. I think you are onto amazing things. I wish I could more
easily comprehend them. pw: The Lagrangian of the electroweak half of
the standard model is written out completely (as I recall) in Taylor's
classic book, Gauge Theories of Weak Interactions. Maybe the whole standard
model has been written out on one page somewhere else... but I am sorry
that I don't know where offhand. Most texts build up to it piece by piece.
Einstein's thoery of general relativity can be written in just one equation,
but it takes awhile to learn what "R" and "T" are
in that equation. hb: This is also intriguing: "a 'saddle point,'
which looks like a mximum in some directions and a minimum in others."
pw: The "saddle point" is really a piece of basic calculus --
a point where the gradient is zero, but the surface curves up in some
directions and down in others. hb: this sounds like saddleback geometry,
a term Google says does not exist but that was drifting around in my youth.
Several geometries were postulated for the cosmos--one was saddle shaped.
What happened to the term? And am I anywhere near first base? pw: And
indeed, the Lagrangians I have seen in serious classical field theory
or quantum field theory over Minkowski space... are not positive-definite
or negative-definite... and so we are always in saddle points. hb: yikes,
Paul, this looks as if it may play into the hands of big bagel theory.
A maxima in the ordinary universe is a minima in the anti-matter universe
and vice versa. Or something of the sort. Since the two universes are
separated by a kind of doubled parabolic arc of gravity (think wok with
a lid on), and since the two universes are traveling in opposite directions
in time, it's hard to see how things could manifest in the two dimensions
simultaneously.
I
don't buy Wheeler's quantum notion that particles are seething into and
out of existence in deep space. However this kind of cosmic plankton,
this form of cosmic froth, could, over a handful of Planck units, be manifested
in both cosmoses simultaneously. Maybe. It still doesn't feel right to
me. pw: Not a maximiztaion, and not a minimization, but a kind of "min
max." "Min max" solutions do occur in the theory of games.
hb: wow. where? pw: So in a sense... the patterns we see do NOT look as
if "God is mazimizing L" or "God is minimizing L"
but more like "the God of space is doing what it can to minimize
L, but the God of time is trying to maximize L, and what we see is the
outcome of their struggle." hb: L=the length we see of something
moving outside our stationary frame? The more time I gain by speeding
up the more space I lose in my length as seen by some schlubb who is sitting
still? Not to mention the way he looks distorted to me, in what I think
is my stationary frame of reference. pw: But I have never actually tried
to make a model of that. Nor has anyone else hat I have heard of. hb:
it might be interesting. Most wild stabs prove useful in the end, even
if their utility isn't seen for a generation or two (or three). pw: It
is funny to speculate... since stochastic things do emerge from zerosum
games, could a game-based model actually replicate..? hb: this sounds
intriguing too. But game models are very simplistic--much more so than
even the psyches and social systems the allegedly model these days. Games
are played by huge social groups against and with each other--in competition
and cooperation, in vast networks of alliances and alliance clashes and
of overlapping sets that twist each node of the net in tons of directions
simultaneously. You sit down for a game of prisoners' dilemma or a zero-sum
game with robert wright. It's your 100 trillion cells versus his--a major
contest between alliances. It's seven or eight or seventeen squabbling
intelligences in your brain and body against the seven or eight or seventeen
in his. It's his Princeton loyalties versus your Harvard loyalties. It's
the mindtribe that succored him when he first got into science against
yours--Hoyle and a mob of others in your case and despite knowing Bob
I-don't-know-whom in his. It's Bob's immersion in the intersect between
two massive communities--that of science and that of religion--versus
your feel for the relationship of your core scientists to your guiding
star religions, positive and negative. It's the two of you seeing the
game board thanks to streams of photons coming from the sun. It's a meeting
of your two teams of internal clocks (cellular clocks, organ clocks, multi-organ
clocks, circadian clocks, diurnal clocks, etc) set to many cosmic rhythms,
the hour, the day, the month, the year, the lifespan, and to your different
senses of the longterm past and future of humanity and the planet. We
won't go into what happens as the sun goes down, the stars come up, and
electrons reverberate or stream though lightbulbs giving you the kind
of photons you need to see. We won't go into the convergence of Democritus,
William Gilbert, Ben Franklin, Maxwell, Faraday, Mesmer, Edison, and all
the rest who made that light available and changed the nature of your
life and Bob's. The connections are unending. That's why every move one
of us makes is the result and the next cause of a four dimensional weave
that may include the entire universe. Perhaps it's even a five-dimensional
weave, if we toss in the curve that gravity bends in space. pw: Who knows.
I don't have enough time even for the most promising strands these days...
hb: many thanks for taking the time for such an extensive dialog. It is
now nearly 6 am. I must eat dinner and go to bed. I'm glad that we're
both sufficiently fascinated to keep each other up at such weird hours
of the day and night. Cheers--Howard
_________
In a message dated 5/29/2003 11:22:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:
At 05:52 AM 05/28/2003 -0400, wrote: Paul--First off, I thanks for your
patience with me. I've been very cranky about math's shortcomings recently...to
the point of rudeness. I also commented on one of your recent postings,
then realized after the email was sent that I'd missed a big chunk of
your email. Second, please continue to be patient with my ignorance. I'm
learning as we go along. For example, I just got an inkling today of how
much data the equations of a waveform compress or contain. I've been using
the concept of the waveform for decades, thinking I knew what it was.
What I didn't know is its mathematical shape, its mathematical intricacies.
Don't worry -- but still thanks for calming down. We are all ignorant.
The real problem is with the folks who are but don't know it. As has been
said before. And I know about my communication limits. A truly severe
problem. I try to contribute what I can, and hope better communicators
will somehow, someday fill in at least some of the gaps. But there are
so MANY gaps... Are you saying "cellular automata make more sense
apriori than Lagrangian field theory, classical or quantum"? But
Lagrangian field theory really is a way of deriving a complex self-consistent
system from a very simple set of axioms. hb: then this is up my alley.
My way of understanding all this is based on eight months spent deriving
the natural number system from Peano's postulates. It was an amazing experience.
But it was a step-by-step experience. It was a stairway to heaven, not
a ramp. It was closer to the step-by-step approaches that Kurakin and
I have been discussing when talking about the cracks between Planck units
of time or that your backward causation across short stretches of time
implies. I do not understand Lagrangians and am still trying to get to
know them. They can be viewed geometrically or topographically. This is
very helpful to me. I can't calculate, but I can see. Lagrangians are
EXTREMELY fundamental to almost all of physics, and many related fields.
(Like a lot of engineering. Like really advanced neural networks.) hb:
how do Lagrangians enter neural nets? I was first introduced to neural
nets in 1986, and have been using their model ever since. One thing puzzled
me--if most of our pictures of what neural nets do are not derived from
real neural nets but are taken from emulations of neural nets run in normal,
serial-processing computers, how can we say anything we know about neural
nets is true? It takes an actual neural net to see what the properties
of a real neural net can be. It may also take a neural net whose interconnects
are of many kinds-- **synaptic transmissions in which numerous kinds of
chemical messages, nay, entire orchestral chords of chemicals, can be
sent simultaneously **synaptic transmissions retuned by the fact that
the net of receptors on the synaptic receiving end are changing constantly--with
old macromolecular sensors being retired, new ones coming into play, receptors
for different neurotransmitters and forms of those neurotransmitters popping
up or going away, and with receptors set up in a mesh whose shape and
weave changes instant by instant **electrical signals traveling in multiplexed
ways--with different electric signals riding on each others backs--down
axons and dendrites **patterns of dendritic webs that shift from minute
to minute. To get an idea of how complex these webs can be, think of the
fact that just one Purkinje cell can have 200,000 synaptic connections
to other cells **chemical signals that bypass synaptic channels and wave
their magic wands in entirely different ways--by changing large-scale
patterns, mesoscopic patterns, like moods. Moods change the way we see,
think, and feel. They change the way which sensory signals we bother to
interpret, how we interpret them, how we interpret the signals going from
one part of the brain to another and from one ganglionic bunch to another,
then change the way that we behave. **over all circadian and metabolic
energy levels. These can take our brain from perky to, "I'm too tired
to even care about the blade hanging by a thread over my head right now".
It's been a long time since I last corresponded with John Hopfield, a
top neural net researcher of the 1980s, on this topic. How far from digital
emulation of neural nets have we come in the last decade or so? And how
far into neural nets with real properties of the sort I've outlined above
have we gone? To which kinds of neural nets are Lagrangians pertinent?
pw:
But Lagrangian and Hamiltonian theory are SO general that they allow for
a huge variety of systems that they can describe. Basically -- it seems
they can describe any system that moves forward in continuous time, in
which there is some kind of conserved "energy," hb: which leads
back to one of yesterday's questions--how is the law of conservation of
energy effected by black holes? And how would it be effected by a Hoylesian
steady-state production of new matter and energy? Is this a leaky cosmos?
If the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems, and
if this cosmos is leaky, what does this say about the applicability of
the second law of thermodynamics in universes like this one? pw: a quantity
which is mainly a continuous function of the state of the system. (And
they can be sued on static systems as well, and one can "fake"
a time dimension on systems with multiple time dimension and so on.) Classical
Field Theory (CFT), ala Einstein... focuses on the particular case where
the STATE of the universe at any time is defined by a set of continuous
functions or "fields" over space. An example of such a field
is "voltage" in space. Every point in our universe has a "voltage,"
a value of a variable physicists now call A-sub-zero. Knowing the voltage
at every point in space specifies the state of the electric field. Add
in the knowledge of a few other numbers, and you have everything. According
to CFT. Quantum field theory (QFT) is somewhat similar, but there are
at least 5 major variations of it lately. Conservatively. When you have
a filed theory in which the fields are all "independent" real
numbers... a set of N fields, each a number, each allowed to be anything
between minus infinity and plus infinity without regard to what the others
are.. that is called a "topologically trivial" field theory.
hb: Paul, you're trying to explain difficult stuff to us...and in English,
no less. I appreciate the effort, sluggish though my brain may be. See
if I've got you right. If five variables or fields were interdendent,
their relationship could be expressed as a form with a surface that could
be stretched or bent. Why? Because in a set of intersecting values that
influence each other, raise one to a peak and another will crease in a
valley. Am I anywhere near the idea? pw: Unfortunately, if you think **I**
have done a bad job in popularizing this, you should see the other guys.
hb: you've been trying...and trying hard. few make the effort at all.
pw: You really should. I basically learned the material up here from a
book called The Skyrme Model, by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk (Springer).
Remember the spooky story of the young mathematician who got hospitalized
after reading it? But if indecipherable cabbalistic books with true hidden
secrets buried in them do not drive you crazy... you might want it on
your shelf. Somewhat more readable (but less reliable, I think)... is
an equally important book called Solitons and Instantons by Rajaraman,
easily found in paperback on amazon. (It has many things that MRS do not,
as well.) In any case, for topologically trivial field theory -- like
the standard model, I believe, taken as a CFT -- the geometric picture
of "saddle points" is more or less valid.
Though
bear in mind that the possible states of a field form an infinite dimensional
space. Even in CFT, it's a "saddle" ... in a high-dimensional
space. hb: an infinite dimensional space? The number of relevant variables
is infinite? pw: But not a bagel. hb: so a bagel is not something that
Lagrangians can handle. Does what you've said above indicate that Classical
Field Theory and Quantum Field Theory can't handle bagels either? Max
Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines
several times over the last few months with his toroidal, doughnut vision
of the cosmos. He's apparently won attention for his doughnut not just
in the press, but in the astrophysical community. I wonder what Tegmark's
using. ====================================================== pk: Where
I **do** see things vaguely like bagels in space ... is in the topologically
INTERESTING field theories. More precisely -- for the next generation
of physics, I believe we need to start modeling elementary particles (like
electrons, not photons) as "topological solitons." I believe
we have not even begun to see how much power is there in that approach.
Now... some topological solitons really could be described as "little
bagels" or "knots" in space. The MRS book has lots of pictures.
I have even shown them to my kids. "I think the universe is made
of squirmy squirming skyrmions" (and fields). MRS and Rajaraman actually
write out the Lagrangians for some CFT systems which are "topologically
interesting" and support "topological solitons." Coleman
once referred to certain topological solitons simply as "lumps."
hb: see yesterday's ramble on photons as lumps and semi-solitons staying
in place but passing their motion on. pw: It goes on and on. They can
produce "an embedded torus". Why only an embedded torus? Why
not a self-standing torus. You know my toroidal cosmos obsession. This
sounds promising to me. pw: Maybe someone else said this. IN any case,
the topological solitons or skyrmions are basically localized... embedded
within a larger universe. They are patterns WITHIN an assumed set of topologically
interesting fields. old hb: But the torus can not be knotted. Worse, it
can't be turned into a Klein's bottle. Any kid raised on Flatland and
Einstein knows how deep the need is to see the extra dimensions our sensory
systems may be blind to. pw: Patterns of force in a topologically interesting
CFT certainly can be knotted. "Knotted" in a NONMETAPHORIC way...
people have worked out the topological groups, the "knotting groups,
winding numbers... hb: knotting is a property strands of dna make great
use of, by the way. pw: But I didn't need to know a real amount of topology
to understand MRS or Rajaraman. old hb: Wolfram, who understands math,
feels that smooth field equations, equations with smooth variants, will
never describe the cosmos. He feels the cosmos moves ahead one step at
a time. He feels you have to begin from simple rules and scroll the cosmos
out one row at a time. His reasoning makes sense to me. It squares with
my Corollary Generator Theory--which is based on the Peano Postulate experience.
pw: He was not so dogmatic here. He argued that he could provide a SIMPLER
description than Einstein of the same macroscopic dynamics.
He
used Occam's Razor to justify his approach. Occam's Razor allows for some
variation in taste. (There are theorems about that!) I am not so convinced
that I agree his taste here. But clearly it is a reasonable sort of argument
and approach -- if he gets somewhere. Until I read the book, I will not
know how far he has gotten. When he spoke, I actually fantasized the possibility
of taking a sabbatical, and seeing what could be done... hb: then he was
quite convincing. you'd see things in the book that I failed to perceive...and
presumable vice versa...so I'd like to get your take on its useful points.
pw: No one knows what the step-after-next may be. I still think that the
continuous approach is far more promising for the very next step ahead.
(Hmm. Different pictures at different levels here..) old hb: Planck has
always made sense to me too. And his view is step-by-step, quantum unit
by quantum unit. pw: Just replied to that on your different strand. hb:
Perhaps it's time for a theory of metaoptimization. A theory in which
peaks optimize within their local circumstances until a completed landscape
is formed, one in which the peaks are stuck and stable, no matter how
dysfunctional to the entire system of energy transmogrification their
completed upstretch seems. Then the entire landscape, is multiplied a
millionfold or more. Each completed landscape becomes a micro-unit in
the newly-starting megalandscape on the step above. Run the megalandscape
until it reaches its peak. Then make a milion copies and use them like
carpet squares to start a new megalandscape off from scratch. Each stage
of completion is the seed of a beginning for the next step up the chain.
This idea is so obvious that it's probably been tried a hundred times.
Or am I wrong? pw: Familiar in computer science, but not in that form
in physics that I know of. Again, I don't yet see a need for the extra
complexity, but who knows? hb: I see repeat upon repeat upon repeat--old
surprises become the building blocks of the new. The new gets old and
is subsumed in some new building process. Every level of saltation produces
huge surprises--wacky and uminaginable new properties. But every new level
has all the old levels scrunched into itself as components, as building
blocks, as ladders stacked on ladders but in quantities of ladder-stacks
that are astonishing. And, here's the weird part. It's like an Alfred
Hitchcock film where Hitchcock always hides himself somewhere in a scene.
Or perhaps it's more like Yogi Berra's deja vue all over again. The old
patterns, the old rules, show up in new forms on whatever level you mount.
In each new context they seem different. Yet in each new context, they
seem eerily the same. old hb: Given the way that fractals work, I'd suspect
that the big jumps mirror the patterns of the little ones. I'd suspect
that the Planck moves have many of the same properties as the great form-and-process
saltations that gave us particles from energy, atoms from particles, galaxies
from atoms, stars from galactic gatherings, new atoms from star deaths,
complex molecules from the new atoms (a critical jump that's too much
overlooked), polypeptides from complex molecules, self-reproducing weaves
of membrane from polypeptides, cells from membranes, and consciousness,
art, science, and emotion from massive piles of cells.
pk:
IN an ironic way, maybe I agree. Maybe the photoelectric effect really
is an emergent phenomenon like the others. hb: it has to be. The electromagnetic
effect doesn't manifest itself until there are particles that can be attracted
to each other...and until they have the freedom to approach each other
at a lazy speed and discover their photoelectric properties. Do electrons
absorb and emit photons in a plasma? That's all there was in the first
300,000 years or so, plasma, plasma, everywhere no matter where you chose
to go. Where there photoelectric effects in that plasma? Or did they,
like electromagnetism, emerge only after things slowed and cleared...and
only after there were atoms ready to jump from shell to shell? To what
extent is the revelation, the reification or instantiation of a new possibility
implicit in what has been...to what extent is this transubstantiation
an emergent property? It's what emergent properties are--the turn of an
ancient implication into hard and fast reality. The strange thing is that
each new saltative level of giant surprise seems to reveal new natural
properties we take for granted as having existed from time immemorial.
But properties like electromagnetic attraction didn't show up until 300,000
to 380,000 years abb (after the big bang). Gravity probably didn't reveal
itself until roughly 500,000 years abb. Fusion didn't show up on the scene
until after roughly one million years abb. Space spirals (advanced galaxies)
didn't show up until lord knows when. Black holes were beyond improbablity
until perhaps a billion years abb. Yet electromagnetism, gravity, fusion,
and gravity spirals in space had been implicit all along. pw: That's heresy,
but I believe it is rational heresy. hb: it is an EXTRAORDINARILY intriguing
heresy. Please, please explain more of your inklings on this when you
get a chance. pw: I have yet to write up those details. One more task
I am behind on. hb: it's nice to know that we're floating in the same
overload-boat. But there's a reason this conversation is addictive. It
is about very, very important things. old hb: But I am very, very curious
to know how one extracts a Lagrangian system from axioms. All tools are
useful. Lagrangians may or may not be the answer to wondermaking in this
cosmos. But if I understood them better, I suspect they'd open hefty new
ranges of insight. pw: Well.. what is an axiom? One of a relatively small
set of propositions, from which one can deduce... a lot. hb: yes. a small
set of rules, or constraints. an emily post etiquette book for a cosmos.
in other words, a set of social rules--of whom thought shall be allowed
to love and whom though shalt be allowed to hate, whom though shalt be
allowed to mate and whom though shalt be impelled to escape. Escape--repulsion--is
the rule that asserts itself in the the big bang's burst. What rule forces
that sheet of expansion to precipitate in quarks? From that point on,
attraction and repulsion are rules that repeat on level after level, with
new forces of attraction and repulsion appearing as the cosmos, like an
onion, grows. What other rules are needed to make a cosmos? This cosmos.
What
other postulates are necessary to get it going in the way it goes? pw:
The dynamics of the entire universe, which in turn generate all the emergent
phenomena (when combined with boundary conditions). hb: see if this simplification
fits. dynamics=motion=repulsion=rules of flight. Boundary conditions=constraints=rules=attraction?
It doesn't quite work, does it? What would set it straight? pw: In CFT,
the dynamics of the universe all follow from the assumptions one chooses
to make about the following two items: (1) WHAT are the fields -- e.g.
"171 real numbers" or "375 angle variables" or "224
vectors with 3 components each"; and (2) what is THE LAGRANGIAN,
the algebraic expression which tells us what the real number "L"
hb: for the purposes of my understanding, L=the kinetic energy minus the
potential energy of any point in a system obeying the rules of the conservation
of energy. Which leads back to last night s question. Is there absolute
conservation of energy in a cosmos punctured by black holes? Is there
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