What, Why & How do we Know ?
Navier-Stokes to the Rescue – At the risk of being branded a mystic I’ll mention this spooky little synchronicity.I’ve just been reading Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain and written an article prompted by it (Stop Press – Article now on-line here). As an aero engineer I chose, in that article, to follow an aeronautical analogy, picking … Continue reading “Navier-Stokes to the Rescue”
Busy, Busy, Busy. Mentioned strange times regarding work-load and productivity a few posts ago; my pipeline stuffed with unread bookmarks and unresolved references, and a to-do-list with at least seven dimensions of priorities to juggle, personally and professionally. Not exactly “treading water”, but difficult to discern progress going anywhere. Ironic that the immediately previous Wittgensteinian … Continue reading “A remarkable book. It changes everything.”
There was a time when I followed John Brockman’s Edge regularly, it was a great way to pick up relationships between living thinkers you already knew and admired and others you didn’t, from across unlimited intellectual fields. The great thing about the annual Edge Question is that apart from the open question, there is no … Continue reading “Hidden Concepts – Edge 2017 – Let’s play Connections instead of Bulldog”
I have a zillion browser windows open on the laptop and phone, and after being away last week and being away this coming weekend I need to tidy-up, so I’ll capture a few here before I shut them all down. The links to AII are built into this morning’s post already. A fair review (?) … Continue reading “Link Round Up”
I saw the excellent Dave Snowden speaking at the Annual Mike Jackson lecture at Hull University yesterday evening. [Post Note: The recording now available here.] [Post Note: This post is the start of a conversation in that continues here and again here, in 2024] Excellent in every way – Dave’s presentation and his conversation with … Continue reading “Dave Snowden and Mike Jackson”
What goes around comes around – again – is a recurring feeling that suggests again that I should stop reading and focus on the writing. When I reviewed Unger and Smolin back in 2015 – on meta-laws being more fundamental than mathematical laws of physics – I noted another regular reference of mine – Brian … Continue reading “Life More Fundamental Than Physics?”
As an aeronautical engineer and an information modeller, I am more than averagely capable mathematically. Literate in the calculus and statistics of human-scale classical physics, natural science and business economics, including say, the compressible flow of Navier-Stokes for example. Several years ago I wrote of Peter Rowlands (2007) “Zero to Infinity – The Foundations of … Continue reading “Maths Left Me Trailing”
Although I’ve not being doing much original writing recently – very busy at work, home & garden, and learning some semantic-web programming(!) – I’m still following the panpsychism traffic via twitter and via hits on the blog. I still owe Tim Bollands a considered review – he’s in good company with my “close but no … Continue reading “Life, the Universe and Nothing New Under the Sun?”
Fundamentally – What do I know? Black holes ain’t so black, and science ain’t so different from the humanities. Singularities have horizons crammed with information. Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available. This is a summary of recent work ostensibly on quantum gravity and the role of humans more generally in the science … Continue reading “Fundamentally – What do I know?”
The early version of this Edward Witten interview by Natalie Wolchover – since corrected – was criticised for suggesting his M-Theory was the only current model (with any worthwhile credibility) attempting to unify quantum and gravity fields. His idea of (M-em)branes combining multiple string theories in multiple dimensions beyond 3 is now 22 years old. What … Continue reading “Emergence from Quantum Information”