What, Why & How do we Know ?
Konrad Zuse is a new name to me, picked up from twitter mentions by @generuso and @rolyperera. Actually, like myself, an engineer rather than a scientist, but who apparently originally proposed a fundamentally information-based view of reality after considering causation from first principles. Apart from the fundamental causation and information aspects that recur here on … Continue reading “Konrad Zuse”
A bookmarking post only. Interesting to me as an one-time fluid-dynamicist, and I’ve mentioned the parallels before between Navier-Stokes et al in Fluid Dynamics and more fundamental physics. Especially point-based (Boscovich), quantum-loop-based (Rovelli) and integrated-information (IIT). Just capturing the link here. “fluid dynamics, is surprisingly pivotal to understanding some of the most elementary constituents and … Continue reading “Why Fluid Dynamics is not boring?”
Had this Aeon piece by Philip Ball on my desktop for a day or two, and had it brought to my attention today by Robin. Firstly I’m already a believer that the wave-particle duality and collapse of the wave function driven by the observer are fudges, as is the idea that many superpositioned states represent … Continue reading “Quantum Weirdness Ain’t So Weird”
I’m exploring available theories of consciousness that tie themselves in open-minded ways to fundamental physics, that is they don’t automatically exclude themselves from physical explanation by overly reductionist reliance on objects already (accepted as being) defined by physics. Yesterday, I summarised what I heard from Robert Kuhn’s Physics of Consciousness / Closer to Truth resources. … Continue reading “Integrated Information Theory”
Interesting to see today’s news on standardisation of units of measure, that time, distance and mass are now to be unified through the Caesium clock with application of the speed of light (c) and Planck’s constant (h). (Hat tip to Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter). Fascinating article in itself, however yet more evidence that the accepted standard … Continue reading “Carlo Rovelli – A Fresh Spin on Fundamental Physics”
Arthur Koestler’s (1959) “The Sleepwalkers“ proved to be an excellent read to the end. A slightly odd epilogue on the evolution of intelligence and knowledge; odd because it majors on the paradoxical thought that human mental brain power is too great for our current state of biological evolution. We have brains much bigger than we … Continue reading “Brain the size of the cosmos – is it too big?”
I mentioned noting that one of Rebecca Goldstein’s earlier works was Incompleteness – the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Since Gödel is an existing interest of mine, and Goldstein’s writing has never let me down yet, it was a no-brainer to obtain a copy. (I’ve since also obtained a copy of her fiction The Mind-Body Problem – … Continue reading “Comprehensively paradoxical Gödel – Rebecca Goldstein”
Interesting pair of papers, one from this week, and one from Nov 2012, on the “failure” of the Large Hadron Collider work to find any evidence of “supersymmetry” particles to support the standard model, and the idea that mass is not a particle property, and so maybe even the Higgs field / boson is a … Continue reading “No Such Thing as Failure in Science”