Re: Phases Underlie Probability-Statistics: PI, FFE, VFE.

From: Osher Doctorow (mdoctorow_at_comcast.net)
Date: 12/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 14:21:06 +0000 (UTC)

On 22 Dec 04 19:54:24 -0500 (EST), Osher Doctorow wrote:
>At this point, I want to thank Tom Milner-Gulland and Steven Voss
>of a European philosophy discussion forum for their recent sugges-
>tions regard the importance of quality rather than only quantity,
>which further clarifies the nature of phases as qualitative non-
>chemical changes or differences of type (although there may be
>a quantitative variable that signals or discriminates between differ-
>ent types here).
>Logical implications are less concrete than most visible or audible
>physical objects, but so is usually energy, entropy, information,

The name should be spelled Stephen Voss, not Steven Voss.

Another very interesting paper on related topics is the Ph.D. thesis
of Michael Karl Wilhelm Happold at SUNY Buffalo, "Information,
Computation, and the nature of cognition: a critique of computation-
al approaches to understanding and creating minds," Dec. 11, 2000,
accessible under the title as keywords or under URL http://wings.
buffalo.edu/philosophy/faculty/smith/students/happold.pdf. This
has some fascinating material on the differences between semantics
and syntactics from philosophical viewpoints, which will undoubtedly
surprise some computer people as well as others.

Yet it is the Stanford Encyclopedia referred to previously in this
thread that first gives us a glimpse of a remarkable split between
the mathematicians/philosophers on the one hand and the physicists/
engineers on the other hand, although there is some crossover, in
relationship to black holes of all things! The decisive reference
is to Sir Roger Penrose's books in the late 1990s and early 2000s
objecting to regarding the mind as computable. Sir Roger is a
mathematician at Oxford as most people probably know on sci.stat.
math, who with Stephen Hawking of Cambridge pioneered black hole
research in the 1960s-1970s. He also has pioneered twistor theory
and tilings of the plane among other things, and is very interested
in geometry. If you look under "information encoded in space",
"information encoded near black hole horizons," and similar keywords
on the internet, or the same with "information" replaced by "entropy,"
you will get a glimpse of some rather energetic disputes between
the two schools and also a glimpse of the lack of scientific "detach-
ment" by many partisans of the schools who call each other derogatory
terms and even at one point attempt to brainwash a dissident among
their ranks!

On the one side, "representing" the mathematics/philosophy school
regarding black holes and to varying extents encoding of information
near black holes, are Sir Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, almost
the entire superstring community which despite my criticisms of them
are usually more philosophical than their opponents in physics. This
superstring community includes Andrew Strominger who in the late
1990s resurrected string theory by relating it to black holes, and
Juan Maldacena who in the second half of the 1990s related anti-
De Sitter (AdS) space and conformal field theory (CFT) in a major
breakthrough that has been pursued ever since (although both AdS
and De Sitter space have turned out to be valuable). Readers can
look them up under their names as keywords (both authors and spaces/
topics). While not everybody in the superstring theory school
agrees on encoding of information/entropy in the geometry of space
near black holes, there is a tendency to agree that this is what
occurs. Note that superstring theory has largely become brane/p-brane
/d-brane/M-brane or M-theory, but still includes strings as special
cases.

Representing the opposition who believe that information/entropy is
not encoded in the geometry of space(-time) outside black hole hor-
izons is the physics (and some engineers) "loop quantum gravity"
school whose main partisan in regard to this is J. or G. (I forget
the initial) Pullin, now at Louisiana State U. to my recollection,
but formerly at Penn State U. Pullin was closely associated with
Lee Smolin, formerly of Penn State U. and now at a Canadian research
institute, and Smolin has contributed most to loop quantum gravity.
The loop quantum gravity people are famous for their conclusion
that space(-time) is discrete "at or below the Planck level" and
that geometry "breaks down there", though it is not clear whether
any of them has actually been there (somewhat facetiously). They
are mostly topologists or else standard theoretical physicists but
seldom geometers.

Wandering between the two schools are a variety of famous people,
including Abhay Ashtekar who like Smolin began in London and moved
via the brain drain to the USA State Universities (SUNY Stonebrook
if I recall), while Smolin moved to Penn State U. and then Canada.
His 2002 paper seems to defend the Pullin school indirectly, while
by 2004 there are some indications that he has criticized the
Pullin school. Sir Roger Penrose himself has not been at least
overtly leading the superstring theory battle, and has research
connections with Smolin as well as Hawking over the years. Hawking
is either quoted or quotes himself as changing views repeatedly in
effect if not literally, which is not always a sign of any signifi-
cance but may indicate physicists' tendency to not have the faintest
clue regarding underlying philosophy and logic and probability-
statistics (and geometry, although they try harder in geometry). Sir
Roger, by the way, also has research connections with Ashtekar.

The loop quantum gravity school is very much interested in minimiz-
ing the "oddity" of black holes as an embarrassment to physics by
"rounding off" black holes as well as singularities like the Big
Bang, in which respect Stephen Hawking has sometimes given his
blessings by arguing that under certain conditions (not all of
course) black holes evaporate in finite time.

Osher Doctorow

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