Log24

Friday, May 1, 2020

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 2:55 pm

The following passage is from Amanda Gefter’s  Trespassing
on Einstein’s Lawn  (Bantam Books, 2014).

“You know the story of Plato’s cave?” my father asked. “All the prisoners are chained up in the cave and they can’t see the real world outside, only the shadows on the wall? That’s supposed to be a negative thing, like they’ll never know reality. But the truth is, you have to be stuck inside a limited reference frame for there to be any reality at all! If you weren’t chained to your light cone, you’d see nothing. The H-state.”

I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.”

I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.

“If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.”

That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing.

My path to Gefter’s father’s musing led from a quotation attributed,
probably falsely, to John Archibald Wheeler on page 52 of Octavio
Paz’s  Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction  (Cornell, 1970)

“There is a point at which

‘something is nothing and nothing is something.’

The quote may actually be by AP writer John Barbour reporting
on a 1967 American Physical Society talk by Wheeler, “The End
of Time.”

Gefter mentions Wheeler 369 times:

See as well Introduction to Quantum Woo.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

One with Everything

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:08 pm

The title is of course from an old joke about mystic philosophies.

Related remarks by John Archibald Wheeler —

“Remarkable issues connected with the puzzle of existence
confront us today in Hermann Weyl’s domain of thought.
Four among them I bring before you here as especially interesting:
(1) What is the machinery of existence?
(2) What is deeper foundation of the quantum principle?
(3) What is the proper position to take about the existence of
the “continuum” of the natural numbers? And
(4) What can we do to understand time as an entity, not precise and
supplied free of charge from outside physics, but approximate and
yet to be derived from within a new and deeper time-free physics?
In brief, how come time?
What about the continuum?
How come the quantum?
What is existence?”

https://jawarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/hermannweyl.pdf

— John A. Wheeler, “Hermann Weyl and the Unity of Knowledge,”
American Scientist  74, no. 4 (1986): 366–75. Reprinted in
John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe
(American Institute of Physics, December 1, 1995).

The above bibliographic data is from . . .

Schrank, Jeffrey.  Inventing Reality: Stories We Create To Explain Everything .
Gatekeeper Press. Kindle Edition, March 14, 2020.

For further scholarly details,  see a version at JSTOR:

“…the article is adapted from the concluding address given at
the Hermann Weyl Centenary Congress, University of Kiel, 3 July 1985.”

— https://www.jstor.org/stable/27854250.

I prefer Charles Williams on “the Unity of Knowledge.”
See the 15 instances of the phrase “the Unity” in his 1931 novel Many Dimensions .

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Cold Comfort

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:25 am

“Where there is meat, there are flies.”
— John Archibald Wheeler

“ Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.
His eyes could not break away
and the Lord of the Flies hung in space
before him.

‘What are you doing out here all alone?
Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.
Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’ ”

— William Golding

Friday, April 17, 2020

Explosive Remarks

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:15 pm

Here is the background to Wheeler’s explosive remarks.

John Archibald Wheeler, director of the Center
for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas,
is one of the world’s top theoretical physicists.
In 1939 he and Niels Bohr published a paper on
‘The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission”
that laid the groundwork for atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Wheeler later played major roles in their development.”

For a rather different explosion of Wheeler’s views, see the previous post.

Friday, May 20, 2016

It from Bit*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

For Galatea 2.2 on Eliza Doolittle Day

My Google searches are set to ignore my own private
search history. Still, I am not sure whether others would
see the same results as those below, which do  seem to
reflect rather closely my own interests.  Google-as-Galatea
perhaps based the search results partly on associations
from this weblog. An exception: the "Family Circus " novel
in the list below. I have not heard of this book before, but
it seems to be a tale analogous to Stephen King's It ,
from which the searched-for quotation below is drawn.

I prefer a different Family Circus.

* A phrase coined by the late John Archibald Wheeler.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

A Lucifer for Walpurgisnacht

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

A politician as 'Lucifer in the flesh'

A more impressive Lucifer —

The late theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler,
author of the phrase "it from bit."

Related material —

"The Thing and I" (April 17, 2016) and an essay by
Julian Barbour, "Bit from It."

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Dead Reckoning

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:48 pm

Continued from yesterday.

The passage on Claude Chevalley quoted here
yesterday in the post Dead Reckoning was, it turns out,
also quoted by Peter Galison in his essay "Structure of Crystal,
Bucket of Dust" in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of 
Mathematics and Narrative  
(Princeton University Press, 2012,
ed. by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur).

Galison gives a reference to his source:

"From 'Claude Chevalley Described by His Daughter (1988),' 
in Michèle Chouchan, Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes
(Paris: Éditions du Choix, 1995), 36–40, translated and cited
in Marjorie Senechal, 'The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki:
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997,' 
Mathematical Intelligencer  1 (1998): 22–28."

Galison's essay compares Chevalley with the physicist
John Archibald Wheeler. His final paragraph —

"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"

See also posts tagged Wheeler.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Synesis

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

From a New York Times  weblog last night—

The Reconstruction of Rome
By ROBERT BEASER

The New York Times , Nov. 27, 2012, 9:00 PM

Logic Pro software enables us to layer complex
technolike tracks and simulate meta, sampled orchestras—
fake orchestras that have on more than one occasion
fooled a jury of the most discriminating composers
into thinking it was the real thing. …

Several decades of cultural relativism has helped to
hasten the decline of the dominance of Western canon….

This next generation is becoming adept at taking small
bits of information, unformed, and assembling it
into larger asynchronous maps, of nonlinear order. 

IT from BITS*

These failures of number agreement—
orchestras… it,  decades… has,  bits… it —
suggest a look at synesis.

Synesis is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term
derived from Greek σύνεσις (originally meaning "unification,
meeting, sense, conscience, insight, realization, mind, reason").
A constructio kata synesin  (or constructio ad sensum  in Latin)
means a grammatical construction in which a word takes
the gender or number not of the word with which it should
regularly agree, but of some other word implied in that word.
It is effectively an agreement of words with the sense,
instead of the morphosyntactic form. Example:
"If the band are popular, they will play next month." —Wikipedia

The conclusion of Wikipedia's synesis article is of particular interest:

See also…. Elohim , a Hebrew word whose number varies.

* A nod to the late John Archibald Wheeler

Friday, February 17, 2012

Pregeometry and Finite Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:35 pm

Today's previous post, on the Feb. 2012 Scientific American
article "Is Space Digital?", suggested a review of a notion
that the theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler called
pregeometry .

From a paper on that topic—

"… the idea that geometry should constitute
'the magic building material of the universe'
had to collapse on behalf of what Wheeler
has called pregeometry  (see Misner et al. 1973,
pp. 1203-1212; Wheeler 1980), a somewhat
indefinite term which expresses “a combination
of hope and need, of philosophy and physics
and mathematics and logic” (Misner et al. 1973,
p. 1203)."

— Jacques Demaret, Michael Heller, and
Dominique Lambert, "Local and Global Properties
of the World," preprint of paper published in
Foundations of Science  2 (1): 137-176

Misner, C. W., Thorne, K. S. and Wheeler, J. A.
1973, Gravitation , W.H. Freeman and Company:
San Francisco.

Wheeler, J.A. 1980, "Pregeometry: Motivations
and Prospects," in: Quantum Theory and Gravitation ,
ed. A.R. Marlow, Academic Press: New York, pp. 1-11.

Some related material from pure mathematics—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120217-Pregeometry_And_Geometry.jpg

Click image for further details.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wednesday April 16, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:10 am

Poetry for Physicists:
The Gates of Hell

From the obituary of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton:
 

In the fall of 1967, he was invited to give a talk…. As he spoke, he… [mentioned] something strange… what he called a gravitationally completely collapsed object. But such a phrase was a mouthful, he said, wishing aloud for a better name. "How about black hole?" someone shouted from the audience.

That was it. "I had been searching for just the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, wherever I had quiet moments," he later said. "Suddenly this name seemed exactly right." He kept using the term, in lectures and on papers, and it stuck.

From Log24 last year on this date ("Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI"):
 

"Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?"

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439

From Dante, The Inferno, inscription on the gates of Hell:
 

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter."

From Psychoshop, an unfinished novel by Alfred Bester completed by Roger Zelazny:
 

His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….

He purred a chuckle. "My place. If you want to come, I'll show you."

"Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?"

"That's what the locals call it. It's really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole."

"Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?"

"No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor."

"Here? In Rome?"

"Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here."

"How long ago?"

"No one knows," he said. "It was there six centuries before Christ, when the Etruscans took over a small town called Roma and began turning it into the capital of the world."

 

Related material:

Log24 on
narrative–

Life of the Party
(March 24, 2006),
and
'Nauts
(March 26, 2006)
 

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