Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books? Volume 4

By Richard Lung

To attempt to do some justice to myself (without too much bias) Volume 4, especially, is a confusing personal mix of limitations with originality.
My adult life-time of note-taking attempted more difficult topics. Perfection was not to be thought of. If need be, it was just a question of making the best of my limitations, which I did not dwell on too much, so as not to discourage myself unduly. I knew I was attempting too much. But I clung on to the hope that I might improve. It was an act of faith, somewhat.
My physics notes spilled over into an other volume. But this fourth volume, to some extent, did change its character from volume 3. Increasingly, works on recreational mathematics were beginning to appear. Obtaining them, via the public library selection committee. I knew one or two of its members, as fellow participants of a book club, for a while. And I have one or two of them to thank for their judgment.
My amateur note-taking finally drew to a close in 2012, after some forty years of private study.
I had convinced myself that my copious notes were of no use to myself, much less anyone else.
The following year, 2014, I published my first e-book. I had thought this not possible, but managed to jump thru the (circus animal) hoops, to achieve it. I had much material from my poems and my web-site, but certainly not from my notes.
Vast tracts of these scribbles, I regarded as unusable copy, not even understood by myself. This was true, but I think I was further dissuaded by distant memories of my monumentally useless further education notes, which were essentially exam-passing attempts on forgetable topics, I had no interest in, on a sociology course.
The difference was that my amateur post-education notes were enthusiastic, or at least determined, free choices, not tied to some set curriculum, other than I set myself.
Consequently, I found, to my surprise, that I could salvage some of these notes for publication, four decades worth of them, in four volumes.
Volume 4 varied my popular physics specialisation, especially with the emergence of more popular mathematics books.
I also contributed ideas of my own. mainly in later chapters. I found, at last, that re-reading my notes did add some little something to my understanding, and that they were not completely unrewarding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Lung
• Release date: May 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224263202

Richard Lung

My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

Book preview

Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books? Volume 4.

Preface to volume 4.

I once said Statistical Relativity Elections was by far my most difficult book. This is no longer true. But at least I thought I knew what I was doing, those years ago.

Volumes 3 and 4 follow many studies much more difficult than my own, as far as I could go, which was not far, by their standards. So, please forgive a foolish old man, who did his best, which was not nearly good enough. Some of his efforts may be worth a look.

To attempt to do some justice to myself (without too much bias) Volume 4, especially, is a confusing personal mix of limitations with originality.

My adult life-time of note-taking attempted more difficult topics. Perfection was not to be thought of. If need be, it was just a question of making the best of my limitations, which I did not dwell on too much, so as not to discourage myself unduly. I knew I was attempting too much. But I clung on to the hope that I might improve. It was an act of faith, somewhat.

My physics notes spilled over into an other volume. But this fourth volume, to some extent, did change its character from volume 3. Increasingly, works on popular mathematics were beginning to appear. Obtaining them, via the public library selection committee. I knew one or two of its members, as fellow participants of a book club, for a while. And I have one or two of them to thank for their judgment.

My amateur note-taking finally drew to a close in 2012, after some forty years of private study.

I had convinced myself that my copious notes were of no use to myself, much less anyone else.

The following year, 2014, I published my first e-book. I had thought this not possible, but managed to jump thru the (circus animal) hoops, to achieve it. I had much material from my poems and my web-site, but certainly not from my notes.

Vast tracts of these scribbles, I regarded as unusable copy, not even understood by myself. This was true, but I think I was further dissuaded by distant memories of my monumentally useless further education notes, which were essentially exam-passing attempts on forgetable topics, I had no interest in, on a sociology course.

The difference was that my amateur post-education notes were enthusiastic, or at least determined, free choices, not tied to some set curriculum, other than I set myself.

Consequently, I found, to my surprise, that I could salvage some of these notes for publication, four decades worth of them, in four volumes.

Volume 4 varied my popular physics specialisation, especially with the emergence of more popular mathematics books.

I also contributed ideas of my own in later chapters. I found, at last, that re-reading my notes did add some little something to my understanding, and that they were not completely unrewarding.

My cuuent profile page is: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/democracyscience

---

The Physicists. CP Snow. 1981.

Speaking from my own experience, most of what I know about physics and mathematics I have learned only when there was no alternative, when I simply had to learn something in order to get on with my own work. I suspect the same is true of most scientists.

The discovery of Subatomic Particles. Steven Weinberg. 1983.

Each type of atom has a particular set of numbers associated with it. Then, rules to calculate its observable properties. According to Heisenberg, each atom and each rule represented by a matrix. Multiplying for example the sodium matrix by the spectral lines matrix gives the matrix of wavelengths of sodium spectral lines.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle holds it is impossible to predict exactly where an electron or other particle will be at any time afterwards, from the impossibility to measure precise position and velocity at the same time. Therefore two physicists could send off two electrons at the same speed and direction as precisely as he could – and they would not necessarily end up in the same place: the same because produced two effects and the principle of causality violated.

In Feynman quantum electro-dynamics, electro-magnetic forces are the result of charged particles exchanging entities called photons, the quanta are units of radiation. They are exchanged so quickly, scientists cannot detect them passing from one body to another – owing to Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But they produce a force. It predicts for example the strength of the electrons magnetic field.

Gell-Mann using Galois group theory on new particles discovered missing particles in the pattern. And lay down rules governing the relations in the family groups: How you would need to alter one particle to turn it into another of the same family or pattern. This mathematical device corresponds to the physical interpretation that the fundamental particles produced in particle accelerators are actually composites of quarks. They're not individually detectable by experimental means: they exist, but in the formal world of the new equations. They show phases of behavior in those equations, to which are attached terms of discrimination, such as color, flavor, charm, – just labels in the equations, with no meaning in themselves.

1960, the Moral Unneutrality of science.

The doctrine of the ethical neutrality of science, I can't accept it for an instant. The moral blindness of Ricardo gave Marxism its apocalyptic force. The invention of comfortable categories to let the conscience rest by contracting out of responsibility for discoveries or inventions.

Science like art has an aesthetic joy. For example GH Hardy A Mathematicians Apology.

Graham Greene said along with Henry James prefaces, the best account of artistic experience. Scientific results have an aesthetic value in themselves also.

Scientists are overwhelmingly truthful and that is moral. They don't fake results, except in very few instances. [Snows first novel, The Search treats of this.]

But how many are less than generous to others ideas?

Finding the truth imposes a constant moral discipline. It is the moral responsibility of scientists to say what they know, Whether or not popular. Scientists know nuclear arms must be limited and reduced before so many nations have them they will start to go off. They know that the poor can be fed; all that's lacking is the will.

[Editor note: CP Snow had the misfortune to be an apprentice scientist who was deemed not quite good enough for the job. His first novel, The Search, tells of his failure, which must have been humiliating. He became a successful novelist, and wrote a series about politics, Strangers and Brothers. A book in this series, Corridors of Power was about an idealistic politician, who, like Snow, believed in nuclear disarmament, unlike his party, the Tory party. Colleagues stigmatised him as an adventurer.

He's brought down, as a married man, who has an extra-marital affair. The ladies in garden party hats, who were a real power in local party constituencies, in those days, ensured his deselection as an MP. Indeed the Tory party membership, well over two million in its hay-day was a significant part, and a real power in British, especially English, society, dominating public opinion, with its naively uncritical and unenlightened views.

For instance, it out-lasted Parliament itself in its single-minded devotion to capital punishment. Adherance thereto was a meal-ticket for local party committee selection of ones parliamentary casndidature, by perhaps up to twenty people; his real election as an MP, in a safe seat for that party; the First Past The Post election, monopolising a single member constituency.

Snow says he never forgave the Royal Society, the scientific establishment, as it were, when they refused the application , in his old age, of HG Wells, to be made a Fellow of that body. It was a fitting rejection of a great man, who never forgot his humble origins.

When universities never answer ones letters, a pen-friend, of the editor, put it down to snobbery.]

---

The Turning Point. Science, Society, and the Rising Culture." Fritzof Capra 1982.

Table of Contents

To transcend the classical models scientists will have to go beyond the mechanistic and reductionist approach as we have done in physics, and develop holistic and ecological views. Although their theories will need to be consistent with those of modern physics, the concepts of physics will generally not be appropriate as a model for the other sciences. However, they may still be very helpful.

No atomic object has intrinsic properties independent of its environment. But is waiflike or particulate – depending on the interaction with experiment.

The uncertainty relation marks the extent to which classical concepts can be applied to describe atomic phenomena. The probabilities are not finding things but inter-relations between processes of observation and experiment. Or inter-connections between things, in turn inter-connections between other things, and so on.

Hidden variables in physics are local mechanism e.g. the fall of dice. But in quantum physics, non-local but instantaneous connections to the universe as a whole are strong enough to be important at the sub-atomic level. And formulated in terms of probabilities as it becomes more difficult to separate any part of the universe from the whole.

Ask a wave in the question, get a wave answer. The sharp Cartesian division between observer and observed, and the objective description of nature is transcended, and has also challenged the myth of a value-free science.

Dead matters constituents looked at closely are sources of activity. Sub-atomic particles are not static objects, their forms are dynamic in space-time. A space aspect of objects with mass and space-time aspect as processes involving the equivalent energy.

Sigmund Freud is compared to Isaac Newton:

1) concepts of absolute space and time and of separate material objects moving in this space and interacting mechanically.

2) Fundamental forces essentially different from matter.

3) Fundamental laws describe the motion and mutual interactions of the material objects in terms of quantitative relations.

4) Rigourous determinism and the notion of an objective description of nature, based on the Cartesian division between mind and matter.

Compared to psychoanalysis:

Topographic; dynamic; economic, genetic points of view.

1) Topographically, the unconscious contains matter forgotten, repressed et cetera. Deep down, the id. The ego is caught between the id and super-ego.

Any part of the psychic apparatus could expand only by displacing the other parts. That is psychological objects have properties of material objects.

2) The dynamic aspect describes how the material objects interact thru forces essentially different from matter that have definite directions and can re-inforce or inhibit one another. Most fundamental are instinctual drives especially the sexual drive. Freud influenced by Darwin for conflict psychology but turned to Newton for psychological collisions dynamics. Forces always come in pairs, active and reactive: drives and defences; libido and destrudo; Eros and Thanatos. The force of gravity as problematic as libido – only its effects studied.

Neuroses especially hysteria, as trauma that prevent adequate expression of emotional energy generated by some often childhood incident. This pent-up energy sought release in neurotic symptoms of unacceptable out-lets.

3) Quantitative or economic aspect of psychoanalysis, whereby images represent instinctive drives, endowed with definite quantities of emotional energy, infered by the intensity of manifest symptoms (tho not directly measurable as mass, velocity, energy et cetera). The final outcome of a psychological conflict depends on quantitative relations.

4) Genetic approach follows a rigourous determinism of the psychological cause – and effect – history of symptoms and behavior thru developmental stages.

Objectivity in the psychoanalyst avoids all physical contact, merely observing mental processes.

Later, Freud believed personal influence is our most powerful dynamic weapon. particularly The transference neuroses.

Noted here are Freud followers Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and Otto Rank. Noted also in passing is the impasse of economics. Capra criticises social scientists for not making their values explicit in their assumptions. He describes the work of Schumacher as matter economics: assumptions are rarely made explicit in economic thought.

Armies of cost/benefit analysts convert social and moral and political choices into pseudo-technical ones.

Private property is defined, by Capra, as those goods individuals deprived the community from using.

[This is an echo of Prince Kropotkin asserting Property is theft. The no-time-for-anything-else mathematician, Paul Erdos knew, doubtless from experience, Property is a nuisance. Ed.]

Excessive investment in capital, energy and natural resources taxes the environment, affects our health, and is a major cause of inflation.

Excessive dependence on energy and natural resources, and excessive investment in capital rather than labour, are not only highly inflationary but also bring massive unemployment.

Social costs caused by undifferentiated growth of companies maximising profits and ignoring social and environmental costs, because pushed onto others and future generations. They add nothing to real production These costs accumulate and manifest themselves as the costs of litigation, crime control, bureaucratic co-ordination, federal regulation, consumer protection, health-care, and so on.

These costs add nothing to real production, only inflation. Yet social costs are added as positive contributions to gross national product.

Efficiency for whom? What about the ecological level?

Productivity by automation, however makes redundant workers then with zero productivity.

Profit – private profits at public cost.

Luxury goods when we can’t afford basic services. Vast inequality of wealth: on the one hand far higher than the Eiffel Tower, compared to most people within a yard of the ground.

Work is not considered work, if unpaid. Much paid work is done without responsibility or pride but is rubbish or war-like. Unlike useful, skilful, dignified traditional crafts et cetera. But high entropy work, done over again: cooking, agriculture, cleaning, house-work is of low status in a high-tech society. Ordinary work tends to be cyclical and ecological.

The words, hale, health and holy from the old English hal meaning sound, whole, healthy.

The fission process releases a tremendous amount of heat that is used to boil water. The resulting steam drives a turbine that generates electricity.

A nuclear reactor, then, is a highly sophisticated, expensive, and extremely dangerous device for boiling water. [A hell of a way to boil water.]

Agribusiness ruins the soil, perpetuate social injustice and world hunger; threatens the equal balance and health of the world.

Multi-national corporations controlling all stages of production to manipulate food supply and prices thru well established monopoly practices.

The primary problem is not the redistribution of food but the redistribution of control over agricultural resources. Only when this control is democratised will the hungry be able to eat what is produced.

A philosophy to transcend the isolated self and become aware of being an inseparable part of the cosmos, to shed all ego sensations completely and merge with the whole cosmos. If I am the universe, there can be no (outside) influences and all my actions will be spontaneous and free. Free-will like all other rational descriptive concepts is illusory.

There is self organisation in some chemical systems, Ilia Prigogene calls dissipative structures. Characteristic of life, self renewal, adaptation, evolution, and even primitive forms of mental processes. But not alive because they don’t reproduce or form cells; a link between animate and inanimate matter.

Reproduction as super repair replacing the whole organism rather than just an organ.

Symbiosis or co-operation central and intimate to life. Exponential population growth is without the checks and balances of ecology.

Stratified order, as a systems tree representing various levels of complexity within a living organism; a tree not a pyramid; a branch connected to larger social and ecological systems. Every sub-system is relatively autonomous as well as part of a larger organism. Order at one system level is the consequence of self-organisation at a larger level.

Stratified systems can decompose into their sub-systems without being completely destroyed, so evolution doesn’t have to start again from scratch. The only kind of living systems (stratified) that seem to have survived.

The various systems levels are stable levels of differing complexities – really the level of the observers attention (like in sub-atomic physics of the observed patterns of matter are reflections of patterns of mind).

The Gaia hypothesis regards the whole planet as a single living self regulatory organism.

Besides complementarity of self-assertive and integrative tendencies, at all levels of nature, as stratified systems, there are also essential complementary aspects of self-organisation:

1) self maintenance: self renewal, healing, homeostasis, adaptation.

2) self-transformation and self-transcendence by learning, development and evolution.

The systems view of (co-)evolution not dominated by blind chance. The unfolding of order and complexity is a kind of learning process involving autonomy and free choice.

Unpredictable but pattern comprehensible systems have greater complexity, co-ordination and inter-dependence, integration of individuals into multi-level systems, continual refinement of certain functions and patterns of behavior.

… From multiplicity and chaos to oneness and order.

Survival is not an entity but a pattern of organisation of an organism and its inter-actions with its environment. Evolutionary selection is on the basis of behavior. Gregory Bateson defined Mind is the essence of being alive. The criterions for mind, as similar to those of self organising systems. That the living world is organised in multi-level structures means that there are also levels of mind, of which we are only partly aware in ordinary states of consciousness.

Organisms are dynamic self-organisations. But process and stability are only compatible if the processes form rhythmic patterns – fluctuations, oscillations, vibrations, waves, – from which audit structures arise and which are manifest at all levels, for example, atoms as patterns of probability waves, molecules as vibrating structures.

Organisms are multi-dimensional, inter-dependent patterns of fluctuations. Life-forms go in cycles of activity and rest and their physiological functions oscillate in rhythms of various periodicies. Components of eco-systems inter-link thru cyclical exchanges of matter and energy.

But also, humans have their marked individual identities of rhythm: speech patterns, body moves et cetera. Frozen rhythms are like fingerprints.

Holonomy: the idea that the whole is somehow contained in each of its parts – like a hologram

Conversation is like an intricate dance rhythm of inter-locking speech and general movements.

At rare moments we may feel in synchrony with the whole universe: when all feels exactly right and done with perfect ease. Health is as this. And a dynamic balance, threatened by stress. Science and mysticism agree on the inter-dependence and dynamism of reality.

Stress released in unhealthy ways becomes the only way out, because of social conditioning. Illness as a problem-solving but maybe anti-self or anti-social.

Nurses as GPs going out into the community to discover or prevent illnesses in patients circumstances. Health from the whole context of life, instead of technology, intensive in a hospital-based system, and escalating costs. And liberated from the pharmaceutical industry.

Education of health servants in the common language of ecological context. Bodywork therapy, where our body language expresses for example emotional frustration, suppression, becoming muscular inhibition of free energetic flow of bodily motion.

The author cites homeopathy, nutrition ecology, herbal medicine.

Psycho-somatic balance thru the mind. Deep regular breathing and profound relaxation as techniques of meditation is an opposite reaction to that of stress in the organism.

Self-hypnosis; symbolic imagery contact with the unconscious mind, to understand what ails one, in a state of deep relaxation – as when achieving regulation of normally autonomous bodily functions, with the help of monitoring, amplifying and displaying or bio-feedback.

Simontons, on a psycho-somatic model of cancer. Emotional stress caused by threat to some role or relation central to the patients identity, suppressing the bodys immune system, and leading to hormonal imbalances, that result in an increased production of abnormal cells, the optimal condition for cancer growths.

Ken Wilbur specifies a spectrum of human consciousness broadly divided into:

1) Ego level – I have a body rather than I am a body. Certain facets of the ego repressed or projected, described in Freudian psychology.

2) At the bio-social level, family and cultural conditioning or learning.

3) Existential level has the mind/body system as an integrated self-organisation. Two other dualisms remain: subject versus object or self versus other and life versus death. Resolved only at –

4) the trans-personal level of consciousness: mystical feeling of the individual connected with the Kosmos as a whole.

To Stanislav Graf, LSD is the telescope or microscope of psychology. This self-observation is also experienced in meditation, hypnosis, existential therapies. Birth, like death is a suffering and struggle, and annihilation of all previous reference points.

Mapping flows of energy is more reliable than money accounting for economic efficiency.

According to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, entropy, the second law of thermo-dynamics, is relevant to economys dissipation of energy as it is to the steam engine. Unproductive activities are the social friction of the economic machine. Thermo-dynamic efficiency criteria makes military spending the most energy-intensive and dissipative; it converts stored energy into waste and destruction, without fulfilling any human needs. (Potential energy saver from preventing wars?) But thermo-dynamic theory has to be made consistent with the new theory of self-organisation.

Ecological balance requires full employment. Human resources, the only one we have plenty of, are under-utilised.

---

The Trouble with Physics. The rise of string theory, the fall of a science, and what comes next. Lee Smolin 2006.

Table of Contents

The polemic of this book has to be seen in the context of the 1990s. For instance, in a BBC Horizon program, there was loose talk of String theory having to progress physics by mathematics, without possible experimental confirmation. This turned out to be hubris, exploited by Smolin. If anything, the reverse has proved to be the case. Human technical ingenuity has been under-estimated. The progress outlined in Gravitys Engines is remarkable. And the virtually infinite number of possible mathematical solutions to String theory, only decidable by tests in the real world, grossly under-estimated. It is possible, in the future, that so-called computer experiments, even quantum computer experiments, may drastically cut down this embarrassment of possibilities. But not yet.

Formerly, in a world only of matter, electro-magnetism was considered as stresses in the ether. This however must be a fiction because special relativity said the distinction, and therefore notion, of rest or motion was meaningless. If fields were not made from matter, perhaps they are fundamental.

In 1914, the Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstrom united gravity and electro-magnetism in a fourth dimension of space plus time.

Kaluza was Nordstrom in reverse, applying general relativity to a five dimensional world, finding electro-magnetism. This was instead of Maxwell electro-magnetism, applied to a five dimensional world, finding gravity. Maxwell equations come out of Einstein equations, just by adding an extra dimension, Klein found.

According to Smolin, the only modern advance has been that the fields describing nuclear forces pop out, when yet more dimensions are added to general relativity. That is the Yang-Mills equations.

Similar artificial conditions for the extra dimensions, as too small to see, were imagined. In the cooling down of the expanding universe, perhaps came space-time and the freezing of their geometry. (More lately, the opposite possibility, of too big to see, emerged.)

There is a puzzle, and perhaps a clue, in nature’s lack of parity symmetry between left and right. All neutrinos are left-handed (the direction of their spin always is opposite to the direction of their linear momentum.) Seeing them in a mirror is to see a false world.

The standard model, three unified forces minus gravity, meant particles and fields could inhabit a fixed back-ground in space and time: a background-dependent theory going back to special relativity (not forward to general relativity).

Quantum field theory is much more challenging than applying quantum theory to particles, because a field has a value at every point in space. Special relativity assumes space is continuous, leading to a continuous infinity of variables. In quantum theory, each variable is subject to the uncertainty principle: the more precise one measure, the more it fluctuates uncontrollably (with respect to the complementary condition). So the theory easily leads to infinite and inconsistent answers.

For each electro-magnetic wave, a quantum particle, the photon. Next, charged particles were incorporated: QED. Quantum field theory was extended to 2 other forces for the standard model, depending on two new principles. The three forces have in common the gauge principle, leading to their unification. (The second principle explains why they are different, involving spontaneous symmetry-breaking for the electro-weak theory.)

All properties of a force can be determined by knowing the gauge forces. The forces, the gauge principle leads to, are conveyed by gauge bosons. And the three forces each turn out to be gauge forces with gauge bosons: photon; gluon; weak bosons.

In 1918, Herman Weyl understood that the structure of Maxwell theory was entirely explained by a gauge force. Yang-Mills theories constructed other field theories using a gauge principle but they had infinite range like electro-magnetism, whereas nuclear forces are short range.

Spontaneous/contingent symmetry breaking, like initial equality, that chance deprives or improves with a persons circumstances. Choice is unstable potential. The choice taken is stable actual experience. The historical or cosmos-evolving laws are dependent on conditions conceivably different in different universes. (That is, natural laws may not be eternal and unchanging.)

SU(5) group theory is the simplest way of inventing a symmetry that turns quarks (the particles ruled by the strong force) into leptons (ruled by the electro-weak force) but its prediction of proton decay has not so far been confirmed. (More complicated symmetries could fiddle the time of decay but that would be ad hoc.)

Back-ground independence means the laws of nature do not assume space has any fixed geometry, as in general relativity. Also there is no prefered time: any clock will do so long as it shows causes preceeding effects.

Maybe the number of dimensions, three, shouldn’t be part of the back-ground assumptions. The general wisdom is back-ground independence makes better theories, in which the assumptions are explained. Allow these things to evolve, subject to some law as with general relativity on the geometry of space.

Mathematical consistency requires a theory that never gives two results that contradict. A related requirement is that all physical qualities the theory describes involve finite numbers.

The Galileo principle of relativity of inertial frames Einstein applied to light. We don’t feel earth motion or our own motion as long as there is no acceleration; no prefered observer; no prefered frame of reference. The light-speed is constant, independent of the motion of light source or the observer. All observers attribute the same light speed to a photon.

GZK (Greisen, Zatsepin, Kuzmin) prediction/cut-off. Since Giovanni Arnehino-Camelia, experiments probe the Planck scale using the whole universe as an amplifier.

Smolin worked in deformed or doubly special relativity in which one of its two postulates relative motion and universally constant light speed is false.

At the Planck length, geometry is quantum mechanical, in some sense the smallest observable length. But special relativity suggests observers will disagree on the shortest length. An observer not moving with a metre stick, but moving with respect to it, will observe shorter. By moving relative to it very close to light-speed, you can make it ever shorter. A-C solved the paradox: the Planck length as another universal quantity as a length, as light is universal as a speed. If something is at light speed, all observers agree about that; if less, all agree about that. Hence if something is at Planck length, might all observers agree about that, and if more, might all observers agree about that.

This was a testable scenario for relativity with minimum length; also solved by John Moffatt before Joeao Magueijo and Lee Smolin with DSR II.

Speculation light travels faster in the early universe does away with the need for inflation to explain the causal contact between expanded universe parts, the same temperature.

In DSR II, photons having more energy may travel faster, so in the early universe, when temperature was higher, the light speed, on average, may have been faster; going further back to the temperature approaching the Planck energy, light speed becomes infinite. It took longer to show that this led to a DSR theory consistent also with general relativity.

DSR must be true in universes with two dimensions of space (plus one of time).

In some DSR, a maximal energy (usually the Planck energy) in others, only a maximal momentum.

DSR would prevent an absolute distinction between rest and motion.

String theories back-ground dependence means any answer possible by choosing the appropriate background, losing all predictive power.

The approaches to quantum gravity are on three lines: space is emergent, the more basic description being discrete, involving causality in a more basic way.

Ambjorn showed if no restriction of causality put in, classical space-time geometry emerges. Hawking time as imaginary, meaning just another dimension of space, shown to be wrong.

This was the book, in which Smolin complained, in America, about all the time-wasting administrative committees, on which to make presumably arbitrary decisions. It reminded me of all the bureaucratic lobbying, Solzhenitsyn had to make, in the nineteen sixties, attempting to get his books published in the Soviet Union.

Smolin says science is like democracy, except, in particular, science rules by consensus, whereas democracy operates by majority rule.

But this is the provincial point of view of nations ruled by majoritarian election systems. Democracy, by definition, is rule of all the people, and is not the tyranny of the majority, or maiorocracy, as John Stuart Mill plainly pointed out, in Representative Government, to be ignored ever since -- to the stalling of election science the world over. Except that Lani Guinier, a modern Mill, wrote a book about The Tyranny of the Majority.

---

The problem of political power. Editor.

Table of Contents

Power is a means to an end, but it can never be a substitute for an end. So, power is corrupted when valued as an end in itself.

People who do not strive for public distinction but rather, for instance, devote themselves to family life, know instinctively that love comes first.

In contrast to this, is what Winston Churchill called abject state worship which, in the fullness of time, seeks to supersede the functions of the family with state control, intolerant of criticism, as Churchill unpopularly foretold of socialism, meaning its typical bureaucratic form, in extremity, a patronising police state cradle to grave socialism.

Officials are rendered sacred by their authority, creating a double standards state. Whatever officials say (administrative law) goes thru on the nod, as if old England were old Prussia. They are presumed innocent without question. But the powerless public wears no such mantle of sanctity. And may be judged by the standards of exceptions, rather than the rule.

Exceptions are notorious, precisely because they stand out as exceptions. And are publicised for their notoriety.

This is an opportunity for a power-obsessed government, seeking re-election, to advertise itself as a public champion. By degrading family rule to its exceptions, it exalts the state over the family; essentially it exalts power over love.

By exhorting the Administration, to even more vigilance against wrongdoers (as Zahawi did, when health minister) it creates intolerable pressure on British families, of a vigilante state against the public, under presumption of guilt. Hence a failed Iron Curtain country of (secret) informers.

This is in sharp contrast to a presumption of innocence, in all that officials do.

British civil law standards are so flimsy, that the truth hardly more protects citizens than the toss of a coin. Whereas, criminal law is subject to due process, that the truth be ascertained beyond reasonable doubt.

A double standards state is set in stone in its political structure. Hence, it sees no reason not to give career politicians a free ride, in jobs for life, but leaves the public impotent in its democracy so called.

(Probably the closest this country ever came to a representative government was the Churchill War coalition, but it could not have been democratically elected without a representative electoral system, the super-vote or Single Transferable Vote.

Order

Politics should illuminate not obscure the nature of the vote. Many times repeated accusation, that a vote for a third-party candidate is a wasted vote, should alert to the fact that there is an order of choice for candidates.

Similarly, the practical politics of a strategic/tactical vote is an admission of a first choice or higher-order of choice, than such as two party candidates only, on offer. But one might have to largely waste ones vote on a second or lower choice to defeat a least choice.

For those voters, at least, the election is not an election at all, but a rejection. The two main parties, campaigning against a wasted vote, are in fact twisting the voters arm to hold a rejection or exclusion rather than an election, with a primitive election system (simple plurality) that is an election for some but an exclusion for others, blackmailing the electorate into two classes of positive and negative choice. And so denying the basic democratic principle of equality of choice.

If politics were interested in the truth, there would be