Log24

Monday, February 5, 2024

Quantum Kernel  Incarnate

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:44 am

The "quantum kernel" of Koen Thas is a version of the incidence
structure — the Cremona-Richmond configuration — discussed
in the previous post, Doily  vs. Inscape .

That post's inscape  is, as noted there, an incarnation  of the
abstract incidence structure.  More generally, see incarnation
in this journal . . . In particular, from Michaelmas last year, 
Annals of Mathematical Theology.

A somewhat more sophisticated "incarnation" example
related to the "inscape" concept —

"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

See also Numberland  in this journal.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

For Academic Decepticons:  The Kernel Trick

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:36 pm

For the meaning of the title, see the Dec. 27, 2023,  posts —
now tagged "Kernel Trick."

This  post was suggested by a Dec. 27, 2023,  A. O. Scott 
New York Times  essay

For The Spell of A.O.  see "Bullshit
in a Log24 search for "A. O. Scott."

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Quantum Kernels

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:19 pm

The previous post displayed a use of the phrase "quantum kernel"
by Prof. Dr. Koen Thas of Ghent University. Here is an example of
a rather different, and more widely known, meaning of the phrase —

Synchronology check (approximate) — Also from May 2023 —

Der Schlußstein des Gewölbes.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Kernels

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:37 am

Continued from yesterday's "Kernel" —

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) 
has a news release today on an expert on "kernels,"
in the sense that they are used in AI —

"Schölkopf [link added] is recognized for his
widely used research in machine learning,
advancing both mathematical foundations and
a broad range of applications in science and
industry."

From Schölkopf in 2002 —

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Kernel

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:32 pm

From a post of September 24, 2011 —

Weyl on coordinate systems,
Cassirer on the kernel of being,
and A Study in Art Education.

Friday, February 3, 2017

Hard Kernel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:13 am

Kamuf, 'Remains to be Seen,' Los Angeles Review of Books

Hermeneutics —

The above quote occurs in a search called up by clicking on the image
of Amy Adams in the noon post on Groundhog Day (yesterday).

For a "universal message" see the final post of Groundhog Day.
For an "unintelligible secret," see today's previous post.

See also kernel  in this journal.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

The Kernel Conundrum

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:09 am

See a Log24 search for kernel .

From that search, an image for cypher enthusiasts :

Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre in 'Angel Heart'

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Kernel and Glow

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 am

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Kernel — See Nocciolo.

Glow — See Moonshine and Moonshine II.

See also Cold Open (Jan. 29, 2011) and
Where Entertainment is God (Aug. 25, 2013).

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Kernel

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:24 am

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization
, Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Innermost Kernel (continued*)

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

A search on the word "innermost" in a PDF copy of a book
by Suzanne Gieser on Jung and Pauli yields no definite meaning
for the book's title, The Innermost Kernel  (Springer, 2005).

The author does, however, devote a section (pp. 36-41) to the
influence of Schopenhauer on Jung and Pauli, and that section at least
suggests that the historical  origin of her title is in Schopenhauer's
reformulation of Kant's "Ding an sich."

The Innermost Kernel , p. 37—

"… an expression of an underlying invisible world,
the one that forms the innermost essence of reality,
the thing-in-itself. This is the will, a blind existence
that forms an omnipresent entity beyond time, space
and individuality." *

* Arthur Schopenhauer, "Über die Vierfache Wurzel
  des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde" (1813),
  Kleinere Schriften, SämtlicheWerke III 
  (Stuttgart, 1962), 805–806.

* See also Mann on Schopenhauer and an "innermost kernel."

Friday, November 25, 2011

The Innermost Kernel and Physics

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Letzen Endes wird also der Materiebegriff in beiden Fällen auf Mathematik zurückgefürt. Der innerste Kern alles Stofflichen ist für uns wie für Plato eine Form, nicht irgendein materieller Inhalt."

"In the final analysis, in both cases [Plato and modern physics] the notion of matter is essentially a mathematical concept. The most fundamental kernel of all that is material is for us, as well as for Plato, a [mathematical] form, and not some material content."

— W. Heisenberg, "Platons Vorstellungen von den kleinsten Bausteinen der Materie und die Elementarteilchen der modernen Physik," Im Umkreis der Kunst. Eine Festschrift für Emil Preetorius , Wiesbaden 1953, pp. 137-140, as cited by Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein in Inventing the Universe , SUNY Press, 1995.

See also remarks by Pauli in For All Hallows Day.

Update of 1 PM

Related material —

IMAGE- Schopenhauer, 'innermost kernel,' and atman

"Zweiteilung und Symmetrieverminderung, das ist des Pudels Kern. Zweiteilung ist ein sehr altes Attribut des Teufels."

—Pauli to Heisenberg

Here "the poodle's kernel" is a reference to Faust , where the devil appears as a poodle.

On Schopenhauer's later years—

"In Frankfurt he spent the remaining years of his life, living quietly in two rooms with his pipe and his flute but with no friends or companions except a small poodle, the only creature to which Schopenhauer ever seems to have felt any real attachment. He named the dog Atman, a term taken from the pessimistic religion of India, in which Schopenhauer had become more and more interested in his later years."

— Robert F. Davidson, "Pessimism: Arthur Schopenhauer" in Philosophies Men Live By , New York, The Dryden Press, 1952

Innermost Kernel

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 am

Thomas Mann on an innermost kernel

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111125-Mann-InnermostKernel.jpg

"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)

See also previous quotations here of the phrase "innermost kernel."

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Kernels of Being

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:29 pm

For the Pope in Germany

"We wish to see Jesus. For somehow we know, we suspect, we intuit, that if we see Jesus we will see what Meister Eckhart might call “The Divine Kernel of Being”— that Divine Spark of God’s essence, God’s imago Dei, the image in which we are created. We seem to know that in seeing Jesus we just might find something essential about ourselves."

—The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, St. Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland, weblog post of Saturday, March 28, 2009, on a sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2009

See also this journal in March 2009.

Related non-theology—

Weyl on coordinate systems, Cassirer on the kernel of being, and A Study in Art Education.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

If It’s Tuesday…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:10 pm

Continued .

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was
not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only
as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of
moonshine.”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Thomas Mann of Zurich vs. Walter Tevis of Lexington

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:41 am

Mann on Freud, Schopenhauer, and 'the Will'

"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)

Thomas Mann died in Zurich on 12 Aug., 1955.

"The author left his works in his will
to the Thomas Mann archive at the ETH Zurich.
"

Related meditation from Lexington, Kentucky, on
the date of Mann's death —

 

Or not.

Related literature —

The Queen's Gambit 
by Walter Tevis

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

British Combinatorics 2023

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:35 pm

"Martin told us about his work on machine learning…."

Peter J. Cameron reports on last week's (May 10 and 11)
London Combinatorics Colloquia 2023.

Related material — Boolean Functions in this journal and in a book
from May 16, 2011 . . .

Some historical background on machine learning —

https://tripleampersand.org/kernelled-connections-perceptron-diagram/ .

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

For 6/15

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:39 am

Musical accompaniment, suggested by an Instagram post
of Kate Beckinsale today —

♪  Jump to the left, turn to the right
     Lookin' upstairs, lookin' behind.  

The musical accompaniment suggests a search in this journal
for "Reservoir." From that search, some remarks of perhaps
greater philosophical interest —

Saturday, February 12, 2022

Das Geheimnis der Einheit

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:13 pm

Thomas Mann on "the mystery of the unity"

Mann on Schopenhauer: Psychoanalysis and 'The Will'

"Denn um zu wiederholen, was ich anfangs sagte:
in dem Geheimnis der Einheit von Ich und Welt,
Sein und Geschehen, in der Durchschauung des
scheinbar Objectiven und Akzidentellen als
Veranstaltung der Seele glaube ich den innersten Kern
der analytischen Lehre zu erkennen." (GW IX 488)

An Einheit-Geheimnis  that is perhaps* more closely related
to pure mathematics** —

"What is the nature of the original unity
that throws itself apart in this separation,
and in what sense are the separated ones
here as the essence of the abyss? 

Here it cannot be a question of any kind of 'dialectic,' 
but only of the essence of the ground
(that is, of truth) itself." [Tr. by Google]

" Welcher Art ist die ursprüngliche Einheit,
daß sie sich in diese Scheidung auseinanderwirft,
und in welchem Sinn sind die Geschiedenen
hier als Wesung der Ab-gründigkeit gerade einig?
Hier kann es sich nicht um irgend eine »Dialektik«
handeln, sondern nur um die Wesung des Grundes
(der Wahrheit also) selbst."

Heidegger 

* Or perhaps not .

** For a relevant Scheidung , see Eightfold Cube.

Saturday, September 25, 2021

“Warm Enough for Ya?”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:46 am

The title indicates that this is a companion-post to
"Cold Enough for Ya?" (Friday, Sept. 24, 2021).

The above article summary links to an interview with 
Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan.  See also
Srinivasan in this  journal.

For those who prefer more rigor in their reading  —

Monday, August 16, 2021

In a Nutshell: The Core of Everything

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:32 am

“The great Confucius guided China spiritually for over 2,000 years.
The main doctrine is ' 仁 ' pronounced 'ren', meaning two people,
i.e., human relationship. Modern science has been highly competitive.
I think an injection of the human element will make our subject more
healthy and enjoyable." 

Geometer Shiing-Shen Chern in a Wikipedia article

See the "ren" character in Wiktionary.  See as well . . .

"The development of ren  ( 仁 )  in early Chinese philosophy,"
By Robin Elliott Curtis, U. of B.C. Master's thesis, 2016

Thus, we can conclude that several different forms of
the character ren , were in existence during the
Warring States period. This shows that etymological analyses
focusing exclusively on the combination of 人 and 二 are inadequate.
It should also serve as a warning against “
character fetishization,”
or giving “exaggerated status to Chinese characters in the interpretation
of Chinese language, thought, and culture.” 46

46  Edward McDonald 2009, p. 1194.

McDonald, Edward. 2009. “Getting over the Walls of
Discourse: 'Character Fetishization' in Chinese Studies.”
The Journal of Asian Studies  68 (4): 1189 – 1213.

Wikipedia article on Ren  in Confucianism:

人 + 二  =  仁  (Rén)
man on left two on right,
the relationship between two human beings,
means co-humanity. Originally the character
was just written as丨二  [citation needed] 
representing yin yang,
the vertical line is yang
(bright, traditionally masculine, heaven, odd numbers),
the two horizontal lines are yin
(dark, traditionally feminine, earth, even numbers),
仁 is the core of everything. 

"The core of everything" . . . Citation needed ?

Monday, March 8, 2021

Haunted by the Missing Other

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:15 pm

“The innermost kernel of the ego endures.” — Schopenhauer

Disco Pigs star Elaine Cassidy listens to Christopher Marlowe:

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Art Issue*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:25 am

"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”

— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times  on May 13

From a post of April 27, 2020 —

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

The beautiful object —

Something else —

* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.

Monday, April 27, 2020

The Cracked Nut

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:25 pm

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”

— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Crux

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:09 pm

This post was suggested by a David Justice weblog post yesterday,
Coincidence and Cosmos. Some related remarks —

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

See as well posts now tagged Crux.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Nocciolo

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:45 am

(Continued)

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

A revision of the above diagram showing
the Galois-addition-table structure —

Related tables from August 10

See "Schoolgirl Space Revisited."

Friday, March 29, 2019

The Blazon World*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:59 pm

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction,
the reason why the artist works and lives
and has his being — the reward he seeks —
the only reward he really cares about,
without which there is nothing. It is to snare
the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation,
to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful
substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves
the core of life, the essential pattern whence
all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

* Title suggested by that of a Siri Hustvedt novel.
   See also Blazon in this journal.

Monday, June 25, 2018

The Gateway Device

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:24 pm
 

<title data-rh="true">Frank Heart, Who Linked Computers Before the Internet, Dies at 89 – The New York Times</title>
. . . .
<meta data-rh="true" name="description" itemprop="description" content="Mr. Heart’s team built the gateway device for the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. Data networking was so new then, they made it up as they went."/>
. . . .
<meta data-rh="true" property="article:published" itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-06-25T19:16:17.000Z"/>

See also yesterday's "For 6/24" and 

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

“For Ten Years, We’ve Been On Our Own…”

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

See also May 9, 2008.

Update of 12:25 AM ET —

"And they were singin' . . ."

Christian Bale and Amy Adams in 'American Hustle'

Friday, January 5, 2018

Types of Ambiguity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:56 am

From "The Principle of Sufficient Reason," by George David Birkhoff
in "Three Public Lectures on Scientific Subjects,"
delivered at the Rice Institute, March 6, 7, and 8, 1940 —

From the same lecture —

Up to the present point my aim has been to consider a variety of applications of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, without attempting any precise formulation of the Principle itself. With these applications in mind I will venture to formulate the Principle and a related Heuristic Conjecture in quasi-mathematical form as follows:

PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON. If there appears in any theory T a set of ambiguously  determined ( i e . symmetrically entering) variables, then these variables can themselves be determined only to the extent allowed by the corresponding group G. Consequently any problem concerning these variables which has a uniquely determined solution, must itself be formulated so as to be unchanged by the operations of the group G ( i e . must involve the variables symmetrically).

HEURISTIC CONJECTURE. The final form of any scientific theory T is: (1) based on a few simple postulates; and (2) contains an extensive ambiguity, associated symmetry, and underlying group G, in such wise that, if the language and laws of the theory of groups be taken for granted, the whole theory T appears as nearly self-evident in virtue of the above Principle.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Heuristic Conjecture, as just formulated, have the advantage of not involving excessively subjective ideas, while at the same time retaining the essential kernel of the matter.

In my opinion it is essentially this principle and this conjecture which are destined always to operate as the basic criteria for the scientist in extending our knowledge and understanding of the world.

It is also my belief that, in so far as there is anything definite in the realm of Metaphysics, it will consist in further applications of the same general type. This general conclusion may be given the following suggestive symbolic form:

Image-- Birkhoff diagram relating Galois's theory of ambiguity to metaphysics

While the skillful metaphysical use of the Principle must always be regarded as of dubious logical status, nevertheless I believe it will remain the most important weapon of the philosopher.

Related remarks by a founding member of the Metaphysical Club:

See also the previous post, "Seven Types of Interality."

Friday, May 27, 2016

Raiders of the Lost Crucible…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

Continues .

Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz

For more on the modern physicist analyzed by von Franz,
see The Innermost Kernel , by Suzanne Gieser.

The above passage suggests a meditation on this morning's
New York Times * —

"When shall we three meet again?" — William Shakespeare

“We three have scattered, leaving only me behind
to clean up the scene,” Ms. Yang wrote.
“I am alone, missing us three.” — Amy Qin

Peer Review

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 am

A review of the phrase "Innermost Kernel" in this journal
suggests the following meditation

"Who am I?" — Existential cry
in "Zoolander" and "Zoolander 2."

A similar question occurs in "Peer Gynt" —

Ben Brantley in yesterday morning's print New York Times *
expressed a nihilistic view of Peer as an onion-peeler —

"Toward the end of Ibsen’s 'Peer Gynt,' a saga of self
under siege, the title character is discovered peeling
an onion, finding in the layers of that humble vegetable
a symbol for the chapters of an eventful life . . . .

[the director’s] approach is the same one that Peer
applies to the onion: Keep stripping until you find the core.
Of course in Peer’s case what is finally found is
plenty of nothing, an apt conclusion for a man
for whom a solid self remains elusive."

I prefer a view from what Fitzgerald called
"the dark fields of the republic" — the Dordt College view —

* The Times — "A version of this review appears in print on May 26, 2016, 
on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline:
'A Saga of Self-Identity, Stripped to Its Core, Still Provokes.' "

Monday, January 25, 2016

A Hateful Eight

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 am

In memory of physicist David Ritz Finkelstein,
who reportedly died yesterday —

"His sense of irony and precision was appreciated" ….

Precision

Irony

An illustration of the song "Stuck in the Middle with You"
(from the Tarantino film "Reservoir Dogs") was posted by
an academic at Christmas 2015 —

See also, in this  journal,
The Jewel in the Lotus Meets the Kernel in the Nutshell 
(December 16, 2015).

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Dividing the Indivisible

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

My statement yesterday morning that the 15 points
of the finite projective space PG(3,2) are indivisible 
was wrong.  I was misled by quoting the powerful
rhetoric of Lincoln Barnett (LIFE magazine, 1949).

Points of Euclidean  space are of course indivisible
"A point is that which has no parts" (in some translations).

And the 15 points of PG(3,2) may be pictured as 15
Euclidean  points in a square array (with one point removed)
or tetrahedral array (with 11 points added).

The geometry of  PG(3,2) becomes more interesting,
however, when the 15 points are each divided  into
several parts. For one approach to such a division,
see Mere Geometry. For another approach, click on the
image below.

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Soul Notes

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:02 pm

See pages 36 and 37 of Suzanne Gieser's The Innermost Kernel 
as well as PyrE in The Stars My Destination  and Old St. Patrick's*
in "Gangs of New York."

For some related aesthetic remarks, see a New Yorker  essay
published onlne today and this  journal's previous post.

* The older  version of the "Old St. Patrick's"
    of The Stars My Destination . (Update of 4/21/16.)

The Jewel in the Lotus…

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Meets the Kernel in the Nutshell.

This post was suggested by the title of Natalie Wolchover’s
article in Quanta Magazine today,
A Fight for the Soul of Science.”

The post continues a meditation on the number 6
as the kernel in the nutshell of 15.

For an illustration of the 6 in the 15,
see nocciolo  in this journal.

For an illustration of the jewel in the lotus,
see that  phrase in this journal.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Dirac and Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

(Continued)

See a post by Peter Woit from Sept. 24, 2005 — Dirac's Hidden Geometry.

The connection, if any, with recent Log24 posts on Dirac and Geometry
is not immediately apparent.  Some related remarks from a novel —

From Broken Symmetries by Paul Preuss
(first published by Simon and Schuster in 1983) —

"He pondered the source of her fascination with the occult, which sooner or later seemed to entangle a lot of thoughtful people who were not already mired in establishmentarian science or religion. It was  the religious impulse, at base. Even reason itself could function as a religion, he supposed— but only for those of severely limited imagination. 

He’d toyed with 'psi' himself, written a couple of papers now much quoted by crackpots, to his chagrin. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand— for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox. Quantum theory was inextricable from the uncertainty relations. 

The classical fox knows many things, but the quantum-mechanical hedgehog knows only one big thing— at a time. 'Complementarity,' Bohr had called it, a rubbery notion the great professor had stretched to include numerous pairs of opposites. Peter Slater was willing to call it absurdity, and unlike some of his older colleagues who, following in Einstein’s footsteps, demanded causal explanations for everything (at least in principle), Peter had never thirsted after 'hidden variables' to explain what could not be pictured. Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once. It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods. 

The psychic investigators, on the other hand, demanded to know how  the mind and the psychical world were related. Through ectoplasm, perhaps? Some fifth force of nature? Extra dimensions of spacetime? All these naive explanations were on a par with the assumption that psi is propagated by a species of nonlocal hidden variables, the favored explanation of sophisticates; ignotum per ignotius

'In this connection one should particularly remember that the human language permits the construction of sentences which do not involve any consequences and which therefore have no content at all…' The words were Heisenberg’s, lecturing in 1929 on the irreducible ambiguity of the uncertainty relations. They reminded Peter of Evan Harris Walker’s ingenious theory of the psi force, a theory that assigned psi both positive and negative values in such a way that the mere presence of a skeptic in the near vicinity of a sensitive psychic investigation could force null results. Neat, Dr. Walker, thought Peter Slater— neat, and totally without content. 

One had to be willing to tolerate ambiguity; one had to be willing to be crazy. Heisenberg himself was only human— he’d persuasively woven ambiguity into the fabric of the universe itself, but in that same set of 1929 lectures he’d rejected Dirac’s then-new wave equations with the remark, 'Here spontaneous transitions may occur to the states of negative energy; as these have never been observed, the theory is certainly wrong.' It was a reasonable conclusion, and that was its fault, for Dirac’s equations suggested the existence of antimatter: the first antiparticles, whose existence might never have been suspected without Dirac’s crazy results, were found less than three years later. 

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem— they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry."

Particularly relevant

"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him,
mere formal relationships which existed at all times,
everywhere, at once."

Some related pure  mathematics

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

The Nutshell

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:13 pm

See a search for Nocciolo  in this journal.

An image from that search —

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

Recall also Hamlet's
"O God bad dreams."

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Nine is a Vine

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:50 am

Backstory:  That phrase in this journal.

““The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine….”
– Don Henley

With Derrida, as usual, playing the role of
the serpent, see a philosophical meditation from
October 9, 2014, by a perceptive and thoughtful Eve
that includes the following passage:

“But, before this and first of all, there is
the resistance posed by the work itself,
the hard kernel formed when the intelligibility
of a universal ‘message’ is joined to the
unintelligible secret of a singularity.”

See as well the word “kernel” here.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Translation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:27 pm

From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —

In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything , David Bellos demonstrates many of the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi ."

— "Forensic Translation," by Benjamin Paloff

See also searches in this  journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Language Game

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:01 pm

Continued from December 5 .

The previous post dealt with video game pioneer Ralph Baer. 
Here is a link in honor of mathematician Reinhold  Baer 
(see Baer in  Zero System , a post from the feast of St. Ignatius
Loyola in 2014.)

The posts in Reinhold 's link (those tagged "Yankee Puzzle")
include a reference to the Zero System post. The link tag was
suggested in part by the devil's claws in yesterday morning's post 
The Kernel Conundrum and in part by last night's 
Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Tom Hanks.

Hanks as the Harvard "symbologist" from the
novels of Dan Brown —

Friday, July 25, 2014

Magic in the Moonshine

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”

— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Spectral evidence is a form of evidence
based upon dreams and visions.” —Wikipedia

See also Moonshine (May 15, 2014) and, from the date of the above
New York Times  item, two posts tagged Wunderkammer .

Related material: From the Spectrum program of the Mathematical
Association of America, some non-spectral evidence.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Moonshine

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Photo of full moon over Oslo last night by Josefine Lyche:

A scene from my film viewing last night:

Some background (click to enlarge):

Note:

The “I, Frankenstein” scene above should not be interpreted as
a carrying of Martin Gardner through a lyche gate.  Gardner
is, rather, symbolized by the asterisk in the first image from
the above Google search.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Game Show

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 pm

For the late Bob Stewart:

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'"

Translation Studies Continued:

See Cameron's Kernel and

Image-- The Three-Point Line: A Finite Projective Space
 (Click image for some background.)

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Baker on Configurations

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:11 am

The geometry posts of Sunday and Monday have been
placed in finitegeometry.org as

Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.

Some background:

See Baker, Principles of Geometry , Vol. II, Note I
(pp. 212-218)—

On Certain Elementary Configurations, and
on the Complete Figure for Pappus's Theorem

and Vol. II, Note II (pp. 219-236)—

On the Hexagrammum Mysticum  of Pascal.

Monday's elucidation of Baker's Desargues-theorem figure
treats the figure as a 15420configuration (15 points, 
4 lines on each, and 20 lines, 3 points on each).

Such a treatment is by no means new. See Baker's notes
referred to above, and 

"The Complete Pascal Figure Graphically Presented,"
a webpage by J. Chris Fisher and Norma Fuller.

What is new in the Monday Desargues post is the graphic
presentation of Baker's frontispiece figure using Galois geometry :
specifically, the diamond theorem square model of PG(3,2).

See also Cremona's kernel, or nocciolo :

Baker on Cremona's approach to Pascal—

"forming, in Cremona's phrase, the nocciolo  of the whole."

IMAGE- Definition of 'nocciolo' as 'kernel'

A related nocciolo :

IMAGE- 'Nocciolo': A 'kernel' for Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum: The 15 2-subsets of a 6-set as points in a Galois geometry.

Click on the nocciolo  for some
geometric background.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Realm of the Mothers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 am

See Jung on Archetypes and The Innermost Kernel.

For some backstory, see Christmas Eve, 2012.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

In a Nutshell…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 am

The Kernel of the Concept of the Object

according to the New York Lottery yesterday—

From 4/27

From 11/24

IMAGE- Agent Smith from 'The Matrix,' 1999

A page numbered 176

A page numbered 187

Saturday, December 22, 2012

For Larry L. King…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:26 am

… author of "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,"
who reportedly died on Thursday

IMAGE- Harper's magazine, Oct. 1970, pp. 94-95: John Berryman poem and Larry L. King Harvard article

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Sermon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Happy birthday to

IMAGE- Margaret Atwood, Kim Wilde, Peta Wilson

Today's sermon, by Marie-Louise von Franz

Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz

For more on the modern physicist analyzed by von Franz,
see The Innermost Kernel , by Suzanne Gieser.

Another modern physicist, Niels Bohr, died
on this date in 1962

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

The circle above is marked with a version
of the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

For the square, see the diamond theorem.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

— Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
  Canto IV of "It Must Change"

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Speak, Memory

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 pm

"… the effective work of memory is the very definition of art."

— "In Memoriam: Chris Marker," by Richard Brody,
      New Yorker  weblog post, July 30, 2012

New York Lottery this evening: 178, 0772.

Definition:  See 178 on May 25, 2012.
Art:  See 772 on Nov. 21, 2010 and Harvard Black Diamond.

Moonshine:
The time of this post, 8:28, may be taken as
a reference to the date, 8/28, of the Feast of St. Augustine.
Augustine's remarks on memory are not without interest.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Grey Screen of Death

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

For a mathematician who reportedly died on August 27

IMAGE- 'Mac for Dummies' from SNL 'Harlan Kane' sketch

"The Mac equivalent to a blue screen is a grey screen.
The info associated with a grey screen is in the kernel.log.
So you may have to look at this." 

See also Plan 9.

In a Nutshell

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(Continued)

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut.
But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out
only as a glow brings out a haze,
in the likeness of one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Simple Skill

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:18 am

But with good Will
To show our simple skill…

( Continued from Midsummer Eve, 1993 )

The "Black Diamond" search from Holy Cross Day 
leads to Talk Amongst Yourselves, which in turn
leads to PyrE in the Book, with Alfred Bester's
version of "Will and Idea."

This phrase may be regarded as a version of 
Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation."

Related material—

"Schopenhauer's notion of the will comes from the Kantian thing-in-itself, which Kant believed to be the fundamental reality behind the representation that provided the matter of perception, but lacked form. Kant believed that space, time, causation, and many other similar phenomena belonged properly to the form imposed on the world by the human mind in order to create the representation, and these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer pointed out that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated, so the thing-in-itself must be one and all things that exist, including human beings, must be part of this fundamental unity. Our inner-experience must be a manifestation of the noumenal realm and the will is the inner kernel* of every being. All knowledge gained of objects is seen as self-referential, as we recognize the same will in other things as is inside us." —Wikipedia

* "Die Schrecken des Todes beruhen großentheils auf dem falschen Schein, daß jetzt das Ich verschwinde, und die Welt bleibe, Vielmehr aber ist das Gegentheil wahr: die Welt verschwindet; hingegen der innerste Kern des Ich, der Träger und Hervorbringer jenes Subjekts, in dessen Vorstellung allein die Welt ihr Daseyn hatte, beharrt." 

— Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Kapitel 41

Added Nov. 16, 2012, a translation by E. F. J. Payne—

"The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence."

THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

by Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes
© 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.
© 1958 by The Falcon's Wing Press

Volume Two: Supplements to the Fourth Book, 
XLI. On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature

Friday, June 29, 2012

The Uploading (continued)*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 pm

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

Video uploaded on Jan. 26, 2008, of talk, 'The Lively Kernel,' on object-oriented software

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Beauty, Truth, Halloween

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

On Halloween…

"Remember that for Ockham there is nothing in the universe that is
in any way universal except a concept or word: there are no real
natures shared by many things. However, things do resemble one
another, some things more closely  than others. So the various
degrees of resemblance give a foundation in reality for our conceptual
structures, such as Porphyry's tree.
Now resemblance (or similitude or likeness) is a relation.
If such relations are realities, then we can say that there are realities
out there that correspond to our conceptual structures."

R.J. Kilcullen at Macquarie University, course labeled Phil360

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111031-Homomorphic.jpg

"The kernel of a homomorphism is always a congruence.
 Indeed, every congruence arises as a kernel."

Congruence Relation, section on Universal Algebra, in Wikipedia

"Beauty then is a relation."

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"An Attempt to Understand the Problem of Universals"
is the title of a talk by Fabian Geier, University of Bamberg—

"The talk was held at Gdańsk University on May 26th 2008."

Related material— Stevie Nicks turns 60.

Monday, October 17, 2011

The Craftsman

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:24 am

A follow-up to yesterday's Sunday School

(Click on images for some background.)

IMAGE- Dennis Ritchie, Amy Adams (Talladega Nights), and the Inferno operating system

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111017-InfernoOS-500w.jpg

 

Backstory—  "Plan 9 is an operating system kernel …."

Meditation— "How can you tell the craftsman from the craft?"
                          (Apologies to William Butler Yeats.)

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Now, Here’s My Plan

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:04 pm

"Plan 9 is an operating system kernel but also a collection of accompanying software."

Webpage pointed out by the late Dennis Ritchie,
     father of the programming language C
     and co-developer of Unix, who reportedly died on October 8.

From Ritchie's own home page

"A brief biography, in first person instead of obituary style."

From that biography—

"Today, as a manager of a small group of researchers, I promote exploration of distributed operating systems, languages, and routing/switching hardware. The recent accomplishments of this group include the Plan 9 operating system…."

Another operating system is that of Alfred Bester.
My laptop now includes his classic The Stars My Destination ,
downloaded this morning…

(Click to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-KindleLibrary-500w.jpg

Not much compared to Widener Library (see this morning's Lost Cornerstone),
but sufficient for present purposes…

"Simple jaunt." — "The Comedian as the Letter C"

See also Plan 9 from Outer Space in this journal.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Searchin’

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110614-BasicPictureSearch.jpg
 

"Turn your head and cough."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110614-SambinBPextract.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110614-SambinBPextractDetail.gif

Sunday, June 12, 2011

For Commencement Day at Stanford

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:30 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110612-SquareOfOpposition.jpg

See also June 2, 2007, and June 19, 2010,
as well as Kernel of Eternity in this journal.

Some background— Square of Opposition
in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
and Deep Structures in this journal.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

On to Chicago!

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Commentary on last night

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110403-Macushla.jpg

Tonight: The After-Party.

In related news

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110403-TorinoApocalypse.jpg

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning
of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."

– Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness , quoted here in
   Cold Open (Saturday night, January 29, 2011)

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Figure in the Carpet

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:02 am

"Why don't you come with me, little girl,
On a magic carpet ride?"

– Steppenwolf lyrics

"I like to fold my magic carpet, after use,
in such a way as to superimpose
one part of the pattern upon another."

Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110217-IndexTo202.jpg

See also Nabokov at Harvard in today's Crimson
and the Russian boxes of Henry James.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

An Abstract Window

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The sliding window in blue below

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-SymFrameBWPageSm.jpg

Click for the web page shown.

is an example of a more general concept.

Such a sliding window,* if one-dimensional of length n , can be applied to a sequence of 0's and 1's to yield a sequence of n-dimensional vectors. For example— an "m-sequence" (where the "m" stands for "maximum length") of length 63 can be scanned by a length-6 sliding window to yield all possible 6-dimensional binary vectors except (0,0,0,0,0,0).

For details, see A Galois Field

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110209-GaloisStamp.jpg

The image is from Bert Jagers at his page on the Galois field GF(64) that he links to as "A Field of Honor."

For a discussion of the m-sequence shown in circular form above, see Jagers's  "Pseudo-Random Sequences from GF(64)." Here is a noncircular version of the length-63 m-sequence described by Jagers (with length scale below)—

100000100001100010100111101000111001001011011101100110101011111
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123

This m-sequence may be viewed as a condensed version of 63 of the 64 I Ching  hexagrams. (See related material in this journal.)

For a more literary approach to the window concept, see The Seventh Symbol (scroll down after clicking).

* Moving windows also appear (in a different way) In image processing, as convolution kernels .

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Cold Open

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:16 pm

Kernel and Moonshine

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Some background—

Spider and Snake on cover of Fritz Leiber's novel Big Time

An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins

"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"

— "Massive Attack"

"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."

— "The Social Network"

"Live… Uh, check thatFrom New York, it's Saturday Night! "

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Search for the Basic Picture

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 pm

(Click to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101003-SambinBasicPictureSearch.jpg

The above is the result of a (fruitless) image search today for a current version of Giovanni Sambin's "Basic Picture: A Structure for Topology."

That search was suggested by the title of today's New York Times  op-ed essay "Found in Translation" and an occurrence of that phrase in this journal on January 5, 2007.

Further information on one of the images above—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101003-VisualThinkingSm.jpg

A search in this journal on the publication date of Giaquinto's Visual Thinking in Mathematics  yields the following—

Thursday July 5, 2007

m759 @ 7:11 PM

In defense of Plato’s realism

(vs. sophists’ nominalism– see recent entries.)

Plato cited geometry, notably in the Meno , in defense of his realism.
Consideration of the Meno 's diamond figure leads to the following:

The Eightfold Cube and its Inner Structure

For the Meno 's diamond figure in Giaquinto, see a review—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101003-VisualThinkingReview.jpg

— Review by Jeremy Avigad (preprint)

Finite geometry supplies a rather different context for Plato's  "basic picture."

In that context, the Klein four-group often cited by art theorist Rosalind Krauss appears as a group of translations in the mathematical sense. (See Kernel of Eternity and Sacerdotal Jargon at Harvard.)

The Times  op-ed essay today notes that linguistic  translation "… is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well."

The list of four-group transformations in the mathematical  sense is neither long nor complex, but is apparently profound enough to enjoy the close attention of thinkers like Krauss.

Friday, August 13, 2010

For a Bright Star

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:14 am

The Hunt for Blue August

From Wikipedia's timeline for 1991—

September

"CQ, CQ!" — Jodie Foster's character in Contact

http://www.log24.com/log10/saved/100813-Contact.jpg

Monday, July 5, 2010

Window

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 am

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.” — Nabokov

Image-- Example of group actions on the set Omega of three partitions of a 4-set into two 2-sets

Related material:

Thomas Wolfe and the
Kernel of Eternity

Monday, June 14, 2010

Birkhoff on the Galois “Theory of Ambiguity”

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:48 pm

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

by George David Birkhoff

from "Three Public Lectures on Scientific Subjects,"
delivered at the Rice Institute, March 6, 7, and 8, 1940

EXCERPT 1—

My primary purpose will be to show how a properly formulated
Principle of Sufficient Reason plays a fundamental
role in scientific thought and, furthermore, is to be regarded
as of the greatest suggestiveness from the philosophic point
of view.2

In the preceding lecture I pointed out that three branches
of philosophy, namely Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics, fall
more and more under the sway of mathematical methods.
Today I would make a similar claim that the other great
branch of philosophy, Metaphysics, in so far as it possesses
a substantial core, is likely to undergo a similar fate. My
basis for this claim will be that metaphysical reasoning always
relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and that
the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the
Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical
“Theory of Groups.”

If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished
harmony,” and the “best possible world” so
satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the
metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that
God thinks multi-dimensionally3 whereas men can only
think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is

2 As far as I am aware, only Scholastic Philosophy has fully recognized and ex-
ploited this principle as one of basic importance for philosophic thought

3 That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp.
______________________________________________________________________

the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency
in this respect.

The founder of the Theory of Groups was the mathematician
Evariste Galois. At the end of a long letter written in
1832 on the eve of a fatal duel, to his friend Auguste
Chevalier, the youthful Galois said in summarizing his
mathematical work,4 “You know, my dear Auguste, that
these subjects are not the only ones which I have explored.
My chief meditations for a considerable time have been
directed towards the application to transcendental Analysis
of the theory of ambiguity. . . . But I have not the time, and
my ideas are not yet well developed in this field, which is
immense.” This passage shows how in Galois’s mind the
Theory of Groups and the Theory of Ambiguity were
interrelated.5

Unfortunately later students of the Theory of Groups
have all too frequently forgotten that, philosophically
speaking, the subject remains neither more nor less than the
Theory of Ambiguity. In the limits of this lecture it is only
possible to elucidate by an elementary example the idea of a
group and of the associated ambiguity.

Consider a uniform square tile which is placed over a
marked equal square on a table. Evidently it is then impossible
to determine without further inspection which one
of four positions the tile occupies. In fact, if we designate
its vertices in order by A, B, C, D, and mark the corresponding
positions on the table, the four possibilities are for the
corners A, B, C, D of the tile to appear respectively in the
positions A, B, C, D;  B, C, D, A;  C, D, A, B; and D, A, B, C.
These are obtained respectively from the first position by a

4 My translation.
5 It is of interest to recall that Leibniz was interested in ambiguity to the extent
of using a special notation v (Latin, vel ) for “or.” Thus the ambiguously defined
roots 1, 5 of x2-6x+5=0 would be written x = l v 5 by him.
______________________________________________________________________

null rotation ( I ), by a rotation through 90° (R), by a rotation
through 180° (S), and by a rotation through 270° (T).
Furthermore the combination of any two of these rotations
in succession gives another such rotation. Thus a rotation R
through 90° followed by a rotation S through 180° is equivalent
to a single rotation T through 270°, Le., RS = T. Consequently,
the "group" of four operations I, R, S, T has
the "multiplication table" shown here:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100614-BirkhoffTable.jpg
This table fully characterizes the group, and shows the exact
nature of the underlying ambiguity of position.
More generally, any collection of operations such that
the resultant of any two performed in succession is one of
them, while there is always some operation which undoes
what any operation does, forms a "group."
__________________________________________________

EXCERPT 2—

Up to the present point my aim has been to consider a
variety of applications of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
without attempting any precise formulation of the Principle
itself. With these applications in mind I will venture to
formulate the Principle and a related Heuristic Conjecture
in quasi-mathematical form as follows:

PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON. If there appears
in any theory T a set of ambiguously determined ( i e .
symmetrically entering) variables, then these variables can themselves
be determined only to the extent allowed by the corresponding
group G. Consequently any problem concerning these variables
which has a uniquely determined solution, must itself be
formulated so as to be unchanged by the operations of the group
G ( i e . must involve the variables symmetrically).

HEURISTIC CONJECTURE. The final form of any
scientific theory T is: (1) based on a few simple postulates; and
(2) contains an extensive ambiguity, associated symmetry, and
underlying group G, in such wise that, if the language and laws
of the theory of groups be taken for granted, the whole theory T
appears as nearly self-evident in virtue of the above Principle.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Heuristic Conjecture,
as just formulated, have the advantage of not involving
excessively subjective ideas, while at the same time
retaining the essential kernel of the matter.

In my opinion it is essentially this principle and this
conjecture which are destined always to operate as the basic
criteria for the scientist in extending our knowledge and
understanding of the world.

It is also my belief that, in so far as there is anything
definite in the realm of Metaphysics, it will consist in further
applications of the same general type. This general conclu-
sion may be given the following suggestive symbolic form:

Image-- Birkhoff diagram relating Galois's theory of ambiguity to metaphysics

While the skillful metaphysical use of the Principle must
always be regarded as of dubious logical status, nevertheless
I believe it will remain the most important weapon of the
philosopher.

___________________________________________________________________________

A more recent lecture on the same subject —

"From Leibniz to Quantum World:
Symmetries, Principle of Sufficient Reason
and Ambiguity in the Sense of Galois
"

by Jean-Pierre Ramis (Johann Bernoulli Lecture at U. of Groningen, March 2005)

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Nexus

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
From Google today, some excerpts from the result of the search “define:nexus”–

  • link: the means of connection between things linked in series
  • a connected series or group
    wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • In computing, Nexus is the security kernel in Microsoft’s delayed NGSCB initiative. It provides a secure environment for trusted code to run in. Code running in Nexus mode is out of reach of untrusted applications.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(computing)
  • A Nexus is a place equidistant from the five elements as explained in the TV series Charmed. Using this as a point of reference, it is quite possible that there could be several Nexus points of power scattered throughout the world, though rare. …
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(Charmed)
  • A line-mode browser is a form of web browser that is operated from a single command line.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(web_browser)
This search was suggested by a book review in today’s New York Times that mentions both the Harvard classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and some religious experiences affecting my own Harvard class– that of 1964.

Cuernavaca, Mexico, in August 1960 was the site of what Harvard’s Timothy Leary later called the deepest religious experience of his life.

For some other experiences related to Harvard and Cuernavaca, see a search on those two terms in this journal.

The book under review is titled “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” My own experiences with the Harvard-Cuernavaca nexus might more appropriately be titled “The Harvard Alcoholic Club.”

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Saturday March 28, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 pm

The Rest
of the Story

Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.

The rest of the story:
 

The Revelation Game
(continued from 7/26, 2008)

 
Lotteries
on Reba's
birthday,
2009
Pennsylvania
(No revelation)
New York
(Revelation)
Mid-day
(No belief)
No belief,
no revelation

726
Revelation
without belief

378
Evening
(Belief)
Belief without
revelation

006
Belief and
revelation

091

Interpretations of the evening numbers–

The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
 

Will: Do you like apples?     
Clark: Yeah.                       
Will: Well, I got her number.
 How do you like them apples?

— "Good Will Hunting

Kate Beckinsale in 'Underworld: Evolution'

The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–

Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
 

Page 91 of 'The Innermost Kernel' by Suzanne Gieser, Springer 2005

The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
 

A particularly
marked circle
 from March 15:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.

Saturday March 28, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:28 pm
The Dance
of Chance

Today’s midday
lotteries:

NY 378
PA 726

Interpretation:

The 378 pages of
a book on Pauli and Jung,
The Innermost Kernel

The date, 7/26, of
birth for Jung and for
Kate Beckinsale,
star of
Serendipity

See also today’s previous entry
and “Bright Star and Dark Lady”
from 7/26, 2003.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Thursday March 19, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 4:00 am
An image from
 
Quintessence:
A Glass Bead Game

 
by Charles Cameron

Christ and the four elements, 1495

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought
,

by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge U. Press,
2002, p. 85

From
Kernel of Eternity:

Pauli's Dream Square from 'The Innermost Kernel'

From
Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard
:

The Klein Four-Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

From "The Fifth Element"
(1997, Milla Jovovich
    and Bruce Willis) —

The crossing of the beams:

The Fifth Element, crossing of the beams

Happy birthday, Bruce Willis.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Thursday March 12, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:30 pm
Aesthetics
 of Matter,

continued

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in 'Lost in Translation'

International

The Klein Four-Group (Click for details.)

Klein

 

Blue

Related material:

Aspects of Symmetry,
from the day that
Scarlett Johansson
turned 23, and…

"…A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity's bleak crown;

In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique…."

— "Crude Foyer," by Wallace Stevens

Friday, May 9, 2008

Friday May 9, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
Kernel of Eternity
continued from April 29

 
The Klein Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity


Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):

In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.

For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and Steven Erlanger in The New York Times— "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

The Klein Group as Kernel
of a Map from S4 to S3:

Portrait of O:  The Klein Group as Kernel in  the Symmetric Group of Degree Four

Click to enlarge.

For those who prefer Galois's
politics to his mathematics,
there is
MAY 68: STREET POSTERS
FROM THE PARIS REBELLION

at London's Southbank Centre
 (May 1 – June 1, 2008).

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Tuesday April 29, 2008

Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard:

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe
(Harvard M.A., 1922)

versus

Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss
(Harvard M.A., 1964,
Ph.D., 1969)

on

The Kernel of Eternity

"No culture has a pact with eternity."
George Steiner, interview in  
The Guardian of April 19

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image
of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things
proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time
and the River, quoted in
Log24 on June 9, 2005

 

From today's online Harvard Crimson:

"… under the leadership of Faust,
Harvard students should look forward
to an ever-growing opportunity for
international experience
and artistic endeavor."

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's
Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen

From a recent book
on Wolfgang Pauli,
The Innermost Kernel:

Pauli's Dream Square (square plus the two diagonals)

A belated happy birthday
to the late
Felix Christian Klein
  (born on April 25) —

The Klein Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color…. The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space– which he calls the mind or heart of creation– determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

— Wallace Stevens, Harvard College Class of 1901, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)

From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious  (MIT Press hardcover, 1993):

Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate… from its field."

— Arthur C. Danto in ArtForum, Summer 1993

Rosalind Kraus in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994):

For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64.

For related non-sacerdotal jargon, see…
 

Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):

In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.

For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and [update of 7 PM] Steven Erlanger in today's New York Times— "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search:

April 29, 2008, Google search on 'penrose space time'

Click on the above
 image for details.

See also yesterday's
Religious Art.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Thursday November 22, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:44 am
Aspects of Symmetry

For theoretical physicist
Sidney Coleman,

Sidney Coleman (photo from Harvard  home page)

who died on Sunday
(Nov. 18, 2007)

A comment at Peter Woit’s weblog today:

T says (3:43 AM today)

I still don’t quite understand what *EXACTLY* Sidney Coleman contributed that merits such deep reverence for him after his demise; was he like Weinberg – i.e. a very intuitive and thoughtful field theorist – or Feynman – a highly creative and original thinker; or simply a good teacher who taught at (world-famous) Harvard – and hence his stature?

My reply (4:26 AM today, awaiting moderation):

T: The following quotes may be of interest.

“Sidney Coleman comes as close as any active physicist to assuming the mantle of Wolfgang Pauli as a trenchant critic of research and as an expositor of ongoing developments in theoretical physics.” –Book review of Aspects of Symmetry

“He has… played the role of Wolfgang Pauli of his generation; he liked to disprove ideas, and he was also a genius in explaining things to others.” –Lubos Motl

Related material:

Faust in Copenhagen

and

Kernel of Eternity

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Tuesday August 21, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:29 pm
Shell Game

The Bourne Ultimatum, starring Matt Damon” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Part I:

Overview of Unix
at pangea.stanford.edu

Last revision August 2, 2004

“The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals. Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.

The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands, and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the public domain that can be installed.

The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program. The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special version of the program.” (My italics.)

Part II:

Programs

From my paper journal
on the date
“Good Will Hunting”
was released:

Friday, December 5, 1997

To: The executive editor, The New York Times

Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday

Match the speaker with the speech–

The Speech
“The son of a
bitch stole my…”
  The Speaker Frame of Reference
 1. rosebud A. J. Paul Getty The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97
 2. clock B. Joel Silver Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94
 3. act C. Blanche DuBois The Elysian Fields
 4. waltz D. Bob Geldof People Weekly 12/8/97
 5. temple E. St. Michael Heaven’s Gate
 6. watch F. Susanna Moore In the Cut (pbk., Dec. ’96) p. 261
 7. line G. Joseph Lelyveld Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97
 8. chair H. Kylie Minogue Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97
 9. religion I. Carol Gilligan The Garden of Good and Evil
10. wife J. John Travolta “Michael,” the movie
11. harp K. Shylock Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97
12. Oscar L. Stephen King The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317

Postscript of June 5, 2003:

“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”

Vladimir Nabokov

Part III:

The Bourne Shell

“The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations.” –Wikipedia

Afterword:

See also
the recent comments
of root@matrix.net in
Peter Woit’s weblog.

“Hey, Carrie-Anne,
what’s your game now….”

— The Hollies, 1967   

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Tuesday August 14, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Philip K. Dick,
1928 – 1982

 
on the cover of
a 1987 edition of
his 1959 novel
Time Out of Joint:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070814-timejoin15.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Cover art by Barclay Shaw reprinted
from an earlier (1984) edition

Philip K. Dick as a
window wraith (see below)

The above illustration was suggested by yesterday's quoted New Yorker characterization by Adam Gopnik of Philip K. Dick–

"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."

— as well as by the illustrations of Gopnik's characterization in Kernel of Eternity, and by the following passage from Gopnik's 2005 novel The King in the Window:

"What's a window wraith?"

"It's someone who once lived in the ordinary world who lives now in a window, and makes reflections of the people who pass by and look in."

"You mean you are a ghost?!" Oliver asked, suddenly feeling a little terrified.

"Just the opposite, actually. You see, ghosts come from another world and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and go like ghosts. You haunt us."

Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times. Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as simulations– in the minds of other people. These simulations may be accurate or may be– as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of Philip K. Dick– inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the simulatee.

The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry:

IMAGE- New Yorker cover echoing Hexagram 14 in the box-style I Ching

"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte

Monday, August 13, 2007

Monday August 13, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Adam Gopnik in
The New Yorker of
August 20, 2007–

On Philip K. Dick:

"… the kind of guy who can't drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe."

Modernity: A Film by
Alfred Hitchcock
:

"… the most thoroughgoing modernist design element in Hitchcock's films arises out of geometry, as Francois Regnault has argued, identifying 'a global movement for each one, or a "principal geometric or dynamic form," which can appear in the pure state in the credits….'" –Peter J. Hutchings (my italics)

More >>

Epilogue:

Adam Gopnik is also the author
of The King in the Window, a tale
of the Christian feast of Epiphany
and a sinister quantum computer.

For more on Epiphany, see
the Log24 entries of August 1.

For more on quantum computing,
see What is Quantum Computation?.

See also
the previous entry.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 pm

Schopenhauer on the Kernel of Eternity

Philos Website

“Ich aber, hier auf dem objektiven Wege, bin jetzt bemüht, das Positive der Sache nachzuweisen, daß nämlich das Ding an sich von der Zeit und Dem, was nur durch sie möglich ist, dem Entstehen und Vergehen, unberührt bleibt, und daß die Erscheinungen in der Zeit sogar jenes rastlos flüchtige, dem Nichts zunächst stehende Dasein nicht haben könnten, wenn nicht in ihnen ein Kern aus der Ewigkeit* wäre. Die Ewigkeit ist freilich ein Begriff, dem keine Anschauung zum Grunde liegt: er ist auch deshalb bloß negativen Inhalts, besagt nämlich ein zeitloses Dasein. Die Zeit ist demnach ein bloßes Bild der Ewigkeit, ho chronos eikôn tou aiônos,** wie es Plotinus*** hat: und ebenso ist unser zeitliches Dasein das bloße Bild unsers Wesens an sich. Dieses muß in der Ewigkeit liegen, eben weil die Zeit nur die Form unsers Erkennens ist: vermöge dieser allein aber erkennen wir unser und aller Dinge Wesen als vergänglich, endlich und der Vernichtung anheimgefallen.”

*    “a kernel of eternity
**  “Time is the image of eternity.”
*** “wie es Plotinus hat”–
       Actually, not Plotinus, but Plato,
       according to Diogenes Laertius.

Related material:

Time Fold,

J. N. Darby,
On the Greek Words for
Eternity and Eternal

(aion and aionios),”

Carl Gustav Jung, Aion,
which contains the following
four-diamond figure,

Jung's four-diamond figure

and Jung and the Imago Dei.

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

(See entries of June 19th.)

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."

Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

— Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler
 
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
Physics Today

 

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"

The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)


"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

The Innermost Kernel
 (previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry
"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph–

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically–

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic
(4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
  as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

Madeleine L'Engle 

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Wednesday June 20, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:06 am

Kernel

Mathematical Reviews citation:

MR2163497 (2006g:81002) 81-03 (81P05)
Gieser, Suzanne The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C. G. Jung. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. xiv+378 pp. ISBN: 3-540-20856-9

A quote from MR at Amazon.com:

"This revised translation of a Swedish Ph. D. thesis in philosophy offers far more than a discussion of Wolfgang Pauli's encounters with the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung…. Here the book explains very well how Pauli attempted to extend his understanding beyond superficial esotericism and spiritism…. To understand Pauli one needs books like this one, which… seems to open a path to a fuller understanding of Pauli, who was seeking to solve a quest even deeper than quantum physics." (Arne Schirrmacher, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2006g)
 

An excerpt:

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/PauliSquare.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

I do not yet know what Gieser means by "the innermost kernel." The following is my version of a "kernel" of sorts– a diagram well-known to students of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and art theorist Rosalind Krauss:

The four-group is also known as the Vierergruppe or Klein group.  It appears, notably, as the translation subgroup of A, the group of 24 automorphisms of the affine plane over the 2-element field, and therefore as the kernel of the homomorphism taking A to the group of 6 automorphisms of the projective line over the 2-element field. (See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.)

Related material:

The "chessboard" of
   Nov. 7, 2006
(as revised Nov. 7, 2012)–

I Ching chessboard. Previous version replaced on Nov. 7, 2012, by original 1989 chessboard arrangement

I Ching chessboard

None of this material really has much to do with the history of physics, except for its relation to the life and thought of physicist Wolfgang Pauli— the "Mephistopheles" of the new book Faust in Copenhagen. (See previous entry.)

"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
 

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Sunday March 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:09 pm
Readings for
St. Joseph’s Day

Cut Numbers and
In the Hand of Dante,
both by Nick Tosches,

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060319-Dante3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

and Symmetry,
by Hermann Weyl:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060319-Weyl.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:
Kernel of Eternity
(a Log24 entry of June 9, 2005)
and the comment on that entry
by ItAlIaNoBoI.

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Wednesday January 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am
The Shining

The Shining according to
the Catholic Church:

“The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public life…. Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished eyes.  St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est.   The Synoptics explain the true meaning of the word by adding ‘his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow,’ according to the Vulgate, or ‘as light,’  according to the Greek text.  This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity.”

— The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912

The Shining according to
Paul Preuss:

From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:

“He’d toyed with ‘psi’ himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand– for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after ‘hidden variables’ to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem– they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.”

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Thursday June 9, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:45 pm
Kernel of Eternity

continued

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity" indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in mathematics.  The Klein four-group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SambinBP1Pic2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what  Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." 

But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:

Klein four-group

This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.

Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:

Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:

"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!"

For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.

A recent Xangan movie review:

"Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not me….

So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"

Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."

A related suggestion from Google:

Give Dad a photo gift

These remarks from Xangans and Google
 suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050609-Fahne.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Wednesday June 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Kernel of Eternity

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”

— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)

“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!

— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Tuesday January 25, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Diamonds Are Forever

 
The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Modal-diamondinbox.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise:

" 'That old Jew gave me this here.'  Egan looked at the diamond.  'I ain't giving this to you, understand?  The old man gave it to me for my boy.  It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think.  It's got a meaning, like.'

'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?'  He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it.  '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means.  The eternal in the temporal.  The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion.   Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh?  That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.'

Pablo's eyes glazed over.  'Holy shit,' he said.  'Santa Maria.'  He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.

'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever!  You heard of that, right?  That means something, don't it?'

'I have heard it,' Egan said.  'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
 


"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box (box.gif (75 bytes))
and logical possibility
with the diamond (diamond.gif (82 bytes))."

Keith Allen Korcz

From

DIALECTIC AND EXISTENCE
IN KIERKEGAARD AND KANT

Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira

Pontifical Catholic University
at Porto Alegre, Brazil

"Such is the paradoxical 'encounter' of the eternal with the temporal. Just like the Moment of the Incarnation, when the Eternal entered the temporal, Kierkegaard refers to the category of the Instant (Danish Ojeblikket, 'a glance of the eye, eyeblink,' German Augenblick) as the dialectical kernel of our existential consciousness:

If the instant is posited, so is the eternal –but also the future, which comes again like the past … The concept around which everything turns in Christianity, the concept which makes all things new, is the fullness of time, is the instant as eternity, and yet this eternity is at once the future and the past.

Although I cannot examine here the Kierkegaardian conception of time, the dialectical articulation of time and existence, as can be seen, underlies his entire philosophy of existence, just as the opposition between 'eternity' and 'temporality': the instant, as 'an atom of eternity,' serves to restructure the whole synthesis of selfhood into a spiritual one, in man’s 'ascent' toward its Other and the Unknown. In the last analysis, the Eternal transcends every synthesis between eternity and time, infinity and finiteness, preserving not only the Absolute Paradox in itself but above all the wholly otherness of God. It is only because of the Eternal, therefore, that humans can still hope to attain their ultimate vocation of becoming a Chistian. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love (1847),

The possibility of the good is more than possibility, for it is the eternal. This is the basis of the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived, for to hope is to expect the possibility of the good; but the possibility of the good is eternal. …But if there is less love in him, there is also less of the eternal in him; but if there is less of the eternal in him, there is also less possibility, less awareness of possibility (for possibility appears through the temporal movement of the eternal within the eternal in a human being)."

Sunday, June 8, 2003

Sunday June 8, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:04 am

Of Time and the River

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Tuesday September 24, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:33 pm

The Shining of Lucero

From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:

The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”

The Eye of the Beholder:

When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.

— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake

From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:

He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.

………………

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”

“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”

“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”

“Bohr’s words?”

“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”

………………
 
Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.”

“We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”

From my journal note, “A Mass for Lucero“:

To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in Cuernavaca

From On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —

“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….

I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.

Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”

“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”

…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”

………………

 
Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”

Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“No I’m not.”

………………

“Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.” 

 From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:

Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card…. 

For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.

For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”

Powered by WordPress