Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. (...) A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Includes chapters on scientific language, mathematics, probability, credibility and induction, scientific explanations, life, and science and values.

Deduction, explanation, and social scientific inquiry -- The alienation of political theory -- American political science, liberalism, and the invention of political theory -- Interpretation and action : political theory and the theory of action -- Interpretation and the history of political theory: apology and epistemology -- Interpretation and the autonomy of concepts -- Why there cannot be a theory of politics -- Speaking politically -- Reading Max Weber, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin -- "Leaving everything as it is" : (...) political inquiry after Wittgenstein -- An interview with John G. Gunnell : questions from Christopher C. Robinson. (shrink)

The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics is summarized and various points concerning the transactional interpretation and its relation to the Copenhagen interpretation are considered. Questions concerning mapping the transactional interpretation onto the Copenhagen interpretation, of advanced waves as solutions to proper wave equations, of collapse and the quantum formalism, and of the relation of quantum mechanical interpretations to experimental tests and results are discussed.

The realism grounding St. Thomas Aquinas’s pre-modern natural science defends the reception of similitudes of the forms of things known by abstraction. Modern natural science challenges this abstractio- nist account by recasting «form» in the leading role of principle of intelligibility—instead of forms, modern science discovers laws. Thomistic realism is prima facie incompatible with this account. Following Charles De Koninck, this essay outlines a rapprochement between the epistemology of pre-modern, Thomistic natural science and its modern successor. I argue that natural (...) forms are noetic limits towards which physical laws tend, and our grasp of this tendency uses a mode of knowledge comparable to what St. Thomas termed universal in repraesentando. (shrink)

The "relational mind" approach to the inner content of consciousness is developed in terms of various control structures and processing strategies and their possible neurobiological identifications in brain sites. This leads naturally to a division of consciousness into a passive and an active part. A global control structure for the "single strand" aspect of consciousness is proposed as the thalamo-nucleus reticularis thalami-cortex coupled system, which is related to experimental data on the electrical stimulation of awareness. Local control, in terms of (...) excitatory transfer from pre-processing sites to posterior working memory regions, is supported by data on subliminal perception timing and disambiguation of poorly defined percepts. The inner content of consciousness is understood as arising from the resulting relational features between inputs and stored pre-processing and episodic memories. Strong analogies are drawn between emergent properties of the model and suggested properties of "raw feels", supporting the thesis that working memories are the initial sites for the emergence of phenomenal awareness, and the frontal lobes for its further adumbration in terms of higher cognitive processing, including the creation of self. (shrink)

The relation between mind and matter is considered in terms of recent ideas from both phenomenology and brain science. Phenomenology is used to give clues to help bridge the brain-mind gap by providing constraints on any underlying neural architecture suggested from brain science. A tentative reduction of mind to matter is suggested and used to explain various features of phenomenological experience and of ownership of conscious experience. The crucial mechanism is the extended duration of the corollary discharge of attention movement, (...) with its gating of activity for related content. Aspects of experience considered in terms of the model are the discontinuous nature of consciousness, immunity to error through misidentification, and the state of 'pure' consciousness as experienced through meditation. Corollary discharge of attention movement is proposed as the key idea bringing together basic features of meditation, consciousness and neuroscience, and helping to bridge the gap between mind and matter. (shrink)

I live in Seattle, the city which last Fall was host to two major international conferences of interest to science fiction readers: The Annual International IEEE Symposium on Virtual Reality (VRAIS- 93) and The 5th ACM Conference on Hypertext (Hypertext-93). I was able to attend both conferences, and I'll use this column to provide an overview of what I learned there.

to energies of 160 GeV/nucleon, a total energy of 33.3 TeV for each lead nucleus. Now, with a week of beam time remaining, we are working very hard and the experiment is beginning to collect good data. In this column, I want to describe the situation here at CERN. I'll return to the experiment after that.

The largest flying creature alive today is the Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At maximum size it weighs about 22 pounds and has a wingspread of about 10 feet. But 65 million years ago in the late cretaceous period, the last age of dinosaurs, there was another larger flying animal, the giant pterosaur Quetzalcotalus. It had a wingspread of over 40 feet, the size of a small airplane. Other pterosaurs were also quite large. The pteranodons of the late jurassic period, the (...) classic flying dinosaurs of magazine illustrations, had a maximum wingspan of about 33 feet. (shrink)

On a mountain top on a clear moonless night the brilliant stars strewn across the sky press down almost oppressively, the Milky Way so full of them it seems about to burst. And yet, we have been learning in the past decade that the visible matter of the universe, the stars that we see, represent only a tiny fraction, perhaps less than one part in 200, of the mass of the universe. The question of what the remainder of the universe (...) is made of is called the Dark Matter Problem. It is one of the most vexing in modern physics. (shrink)

Wormholes are shortcuts through space time, constructs of general relativity (GR) that appear to offer a physics foundation for faster than light travel and even for travel back in time. They first appeared in the physics literature in 1935, when Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen discovered that implicit in general relativity is a tunnel like structure in the topology of space time connecting two separated regions. Einstein and Rosen were actually trying to explain fundamental particles like electrons and (...) proton. They suggested that if lines of electric flux were threaded through such a structure, the flux would be trapped and one end would appear to be an isolated positive charge and the other end would appear to be a negative charge. Later, however, general relativity was used to calculate the masses of such “particles” and it was realized that they would be have a mass of at least a few micrograms, far heavier than the mass of an electron or proton. (shrink)

I'm an experimental physicist. The basic physics research I do is funded primarily by the U. S. Government. As I write this, it is less than two weeks before the 1993 Presidential Inauguration. The new Clinton Administration is still of an unknown quantity. A new Presidential Science Advisor with excellent qualifications, Dr. John H. Gibbons, has just been appointed, but little is know about the science policies of the new administration.

Maritain's notion of Poetry contains both a creative and a cognitive aspect. His developed epistemology pursues only one of these avenues, however, and leads to his notion of Poetic Knowledge. After tracing the biographical and philosophical influences on Maritain's early development, this dissertation argues that it is possible to reconstruct the undeveloped cognitive aspects of Poetry by gathering the essentially similar insights that are contained in his discussions on the perception of beauty, natural contemplation, and select passages concerning Poetry. The (...) method of obtaining these insights is an historical/theoretical method--by considering Maritain's works from an historical perspective, the theoretical changes and developments are revealed. The development of Maritain's thought is obscured if this method is not employed. With it, however, it is possible to show that early in Maritain's writing career both sides of Aesthetic Exprience are treated by him: the knowledge proper to the creative artist and the knowledge of the one who engages the art-work appreciatively. The latter is discussed by him in his explanation of the perception of beauty. ;As Maritain's ideas develop, a progressive concentration on the knowledge proper to the creative artist occupies his attention with increasing exclusivity, leaving the cognitive aspect of Poetry undeveloped. This study argues that, by discerning the interrelation of Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation, a reconstructed notion of Poetic Contemplation may be advanced and defended as a legitimate prolongation of Maritain's epistemology. It is a notion which provides a suitable complement to his notion of Poetic Knowledge, and enables us to make sense of that aesthetic experience which possesses a Poetic Intuition but which is not ordered to the production of a work of art, as is the case with Poetic Knowledge, but rather is ordered solely to that joy and delight which characterizes the experience of the beholder. In this fashion a significant contribution is made, not only to Maritainian scholarship, but to the field of Aesthetics as well, since it articulates an aspect of aesthetic experience that previously has not been explored in this detail from within the Thomistic tradition. (shrink)

In October-2010 the headlines of the science press were dominated by the announcement of the discovery of a “Goldilocks Planetâ€, Gleise 581g, which has a mass not too different from that of the Earth and has an orbit squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of its parent star. It was supposed to be not too hot, not too cold, but just right for the evolution of life. Steven Vogt of UC Santa Cruz, the lead author of the paper, (...) was quoted (out of context) as saying, “The chances of life on the planet are 100%.†Now that some of the dust has settled concerning this reported discovery, I’d like to have a look at the work behind the announcement and consider its present status. (shrink)

Reading of this complex subject-matter is considerably simplified by a variety of devices: Brief summaries at the beginning of chapters and sections; theorems, definitions, etc. are clearly marked for easy cross-reference, the most important ones being specially marked by "+" signs. For a brief survey, the reader can read the summaries and the marked theorems and definitions.

One of the great and persistent technological dreams of science fiction has been the invention which would nullify or reverse the force of gravity. H. G. Wells in The First Men in the Moon did it in 1901 with Cavorite, a substance which shields objects behind it from gravitational lines of force. James Blish in the Cities in Flight series used the Spindizzy, a device which converts rotation and magnetism into gravity fields and forces. And, of course, "floaters", "null-g speeders" (...) and "grav sleds" have abounded as techno-props in science fiction stories for many years. (shrink)

MIT Press, 1999 Review by Paul Bohan Broderick, Ph.D. on May 26th 2002 Volume: 6, Number: 21.

_Western Philosophy: An Anthology_ provides the most comprehensive and authoritative survey of the Western philosophical tradition from ancient Greece to the leading philosophers of today. Features substantial and carefully chosen excerpts from all the greats of philosophy, arranged thematically and chronologically Readings are introduced and linked together by a lucid philosophical commentary which guides the reader through the key arguments Embraces all the major subfields of philosophy: theory of knowledge and metaphysics, philosophy of mind, religion and science, moral philosophy, political (...) theory, and aesthetics Updated edition now includes additional contemporary readings in each section Augmented by two completely new sections on logic and language, and philosophy and the meaning of life. (shrink)

In the December-1989 issue of Analog, I wrote an AV Column entitled “Cold Fusion, Pro-fusion, and Con-fusion” that described and gave my opinions about the recently announced “discovery of cold fusion” by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. These University of Utah electro-chemists claimed that by electrolyzing D2O on a tabletop, they had produced the nuclear fusion of deuterium nuclei.

This Alternate View column marks three milestones: This is the 3rd anniversary of my start as an AV columnist for Analog, this is the 20th AV column I've written, and it is also the 7th anniversary of my first publication in Analog. I enjoy writing these columns on scientific subjects, but it can be frustrating. Science is continually changing as new experimental results and observations are made, as new ideas and theories are conceived and old ideas are rejected. Often by (...) the time an Alternate View column on some new development in physics or astronomy appears in these pages the field has already progressed further and there is more to be said. So this third anniversary column will be used as an occasion for a backward look at some of the subjects covered in previous columns and articles, giving an update on more recent developments. An index of my first 20 AV columns and articles is provided below. This can be used as a reference guide to indicate which topics were discussed in which columns and articles. (shrink)

The path to a new discovery in physics is often a very twisted one. The subject of this Alternate View column is an example of this process. A major accelerator, built with with the prospect of discovering super-heavy elements, is now being used in an experiment to produce "super-atoms" with very large electric fields, and this work has quite unexpectedly revealed what looks like a new and mysterious particle. It is reminiscent of the SF of the 1930's where one of (...) the standard science gimmicks was the discovery of a new element with amazing properties. It also sounds a bit like the Paul Preuss novel Broken Symmetries, where the plot revolves around the discovery at a large accelerator laboratory of a mysterious new particle. But this is real science, folks. Honest! (shrink)

Science fiction writers, to avoid undue delays in the story's plot line, need a way of beating the speed of light speed limit of the universe. Most readers of this magazine are familiar with the gimmicks that have been used for faster than light travel: warp drives, detours through hyperspace, matter to tachyon conversion, trans spatial jumps, and dives past the singularity of a rotating black hole. But perhaps the faster than light mechanism which has the best credentials in orthodox (...) physics is the wormhole, also known as a Schwartzschild wormhole or an Einstein Rosen bridge. (shrink)

This column is a milestone. In 1983, while I was on a one year sabbatical at the Hahn Meitner Institute for Nuclear Physics in what was then West Berlin, I received a letter from Stan Schmidt informing me that Jerry Pournelle had decided that he no longer wished to be an Alternate View columnist for Analog and asking if I was interested in taking over as the AV columnist and “alternating” with G. Harry Stine.

What should be the Christian's attitude toward society? When so much of our contemporary culture is at odds with Christian beliefs and mores, it may seem that serious Christians now have only two choices: transform society completely according to Christian values or retreat into the cloister of sectarian fellowship. In this book, John Stackhouse argues that, rather than trying to root up the weeds in the cultural field, or trying to shun them, Christians should practice persistence in gardening God's (...) world and building toward the New Jerusalem. (shrink)

Albert Einstein taught us that c, the speed of light in vacuum, is nature's ultimate speed limit, the highest speed at which matter, energy, and information can travel through space-time. In several AV columns I've discussed ways for getting around this annoying natural law, the law that SF writers and fans most wish to violate. Two AV columns discussed the possibility of getting around the lightspeed limit by popping through a trans-spatial wormhole shortcut. See [ Analog-6-89, "Wormholes and Time Machines"] (...) and [Analog-5-90, "Wormholes II: Getting There in No Time"]. Two others discussed the possible use the faster-than-light nonlocal handshaking implicit in quantum mechanics for FTL messages and travel. See [Analog-11-86, "The Quantum Handshake"] and [Analog-9-88, "Paradoxes and FTL Communication"]. Both of those methods, however, are beyond our present technology, and the latter is probably impossible. (shrink)

The purpose of this AV Column is to describe a physical paradox involving what seems to be an loophole in a well established physical law, the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. The 2nd Law states that the amount of disorder (entropy) always either increases or remains constant for any isolated system of particles, whether they are gas molecules or light photons. An yet, as we will see, laser physicists seem to have provided us with a way of making the 2nd (...) Law work backwards for a system of photons, so that the disorder decreases. (shrink)