Fractal chaos meets quantum mechanics and metaphysics
Fractal chaos meets quantum mechanics and metaphysics
My review of "The Primacy of Doubt," by Tim Palmer.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
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There’s a great post with “wacky” speculations on frontier physics, by the one and only Ben Goertzel! Read it, and subscribe to Ben’s Substack newsletter.
After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk is making big changes. Content moderation is a hot issue. I think Twitter needs politically neutral content moderation, minimalist but strict.
I’ll host an open Turing Church meeting on Saturday, November 19, at 11am ET (8am PT, 5pm CET). The first part of the meeting will be recorded and published in the Turing Church podcast. The second part of the meeting will not be recorded, so if you want to speak off-the-record wait for the second part.
I’ll start with a talk on “More things in heaven and earth, Gods by any other name.” I gave this talk at the TransVision 2019 conference in London, but the conference was not recorded.
I look forward to seeing you! The Zoom access coordinates are in the Turing Church meetings calendar.
The second Terasem Colloquium of this year will be held on December 14, via Zoom, from 10am ET to 1pm ET. December 14 will mark the 50th anniversary of the last day astronauts have been on the Moon. You are invited! I look forward to seeing you on December 14!
Thanks to Micah Redding for bringing to my attention that, according to 19th-century computer science pioneer ante-litteram Charles Babbage, miracles are “programmed in” to the machine of the universe, rather than being disruptive interventions.
I researched this and found this Patheos article first, then the primary source, Babbage’s “Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.” There’s a free online version of the book.
Babbage argues that:
“it is more consistent with the attributes of the Deity to look upon miracles not as deviations from the laws assigned by the Almighty for the government of matter and of mind; but as the exact fulfilment of much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist.”
After this passage Babbage offers surprisingly modern mental pictures of God and physical nature, based on his theory of "calculating engines." In 1837!
God steers the universe without ever violating the strictest Laplacian determinism. Babbage says that the laws of nature can be fixed but complex enough to accommodate any conceivable “miracle.”
Babbages gives a simple example: a mathematical equation whose solutions include isolated point singularities besides a smooth continuous curve. This seems surprising and weird, but the “miraculous” point singularities are solutions of the equation just like the points on smooth curve.
Babbage consistently uses a computational metaphor inspired by his calculating engine to reason about divine action. God is the Builder of the engine, the numbers calculated by the engine represent physical reality, and we are observers of physical reality.
Nothing that happens in physical reality is ever lost: “No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.” Everything leaves traces in the physical fabric of reality. “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.”
Review of "The Primacy of Doubt," by Tim Palmer.
I have been reading the book “The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World” (October 2022), by Tim Palmer, and watching Palmer’s two hours interview with Michael Shermer.
Palmer is a physicist who started in theoretical general relativity research and then moved to weather forecasting. In parallel, he works on the intersections of chaos theory and fundamental quantum physics.
This is a longer version of my Amazon review of Palmer’s book, also titled “Fractal chaos meets quantum mechanics and metaphysics.”
The first part of Palmer’s book outlines the main sources of uncertainty in physics - chaos and quantum mechanics - and introduces chaos pioneer Edward Lorenz and quantum theorist John Bell. Palmer also introduces mathematical entities like the Cantor set, one of the simplest fractals, and the Lorenz attractor, a fractal attractor found in a simple system of mathematical equations. The Lorenz attractor is a conceptual model for the geometry of chaos and the often unpredictable evolution of chaotic systems like the weather.
The first part of the book ends with the hint that perhaps the geometry of chaos is deeply related to Bell’s theorem and quantum weirdness.