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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Bryson
Read between
August 8 - August 27, 2018
In London, inoculation was championed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had learned of the practice in Turkey when her husband had been Ambassador there; in Boston, its great supporter was, oddly enough, Cotton Mather – he of the Salem witchcraft craze and Wonders of the Invisible World – who had been told of it by an inoculated slave from Africa.
Cotton Mather? Who knew?
Increasingly in the age of science we have confronted the dilemma that if we want to claim something is real, we have to posit its position in physical space. If one can’t point to coordinates on a map, then more and more one invites the accusation that whatever it is, is not real at all.
like climate change deniers
In the mathematically defined space of modern cosmology do any of us exist?
Ugh. The truth hurts.
I do not mean to propose here that every individual is personally feeling this rent;
word use of rent new to me
Stepped Reckoner, a mechanical computer.
Newton and his lifelong obsession with alchemy and his strenuous efforts to predict the exact date of the End Times by ransacking the Book of Revelation for encrypted clues.
Newton?
The true atoms – the fundamental, indivisible units that make up the universe – are not spatiotemporal and so are not bound by spatial and temporal constraints; rather, space and time are epiphenomena of their activities, which are mental (today we might say computational) rather than physical. Leibniz calls these mind-atoms by the name of monads.
quick explanatiin of monadism of leibnitz
subject matter of mathematics have a reality independent of the human mind. This assumption goes under various names, one of which is Mathematical Platonism.
Leibniz himself; building on earlier work by Blaise Pascal, he designed, and caused to be built, a mechanical computer, and envisioned coupling it to a formal logical system called the Characteristica Universalis.
He invented binary arithmetic, and, according to no less an authority than Norbert Wiener, pioneered the idea of feedback.
wow leibnitz !
Combined with the monadic property of being able to perceive the states of all other monads, this comes close to being a mathematically formal definition of cellular automata, a branch of mathematics generally agreed to have been invented by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann during the 1940s as an outgrowth of work at Los Alamos.
The impressive capabilities of such systems have, in subsequent decades, drawn the attention of many luminaries from the worlds of mathematics and physics, some of whom have proposed that the physical universe might, in fact, consist of cellular automata carrying out a calculation – a hypothesis known as Digital Physics, or It from Bit.
Consider, for example, the Pauli exclusion principle, which states (for example) that in a helium atom with two electrons in the same orbital, the two must have opposite spins. It is not possible for both of them to possess exactly the same state. Each of the two electrons somehow ‘knows’ the direction of the other’s spin and ‘obeys’ the rule that its spin must be different. The Pauli exclusion principle is Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles principle translated directly into physics. Moreover, the ability of an electron to ‘know’ the state of another electron, without any physical
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That space and time have an absolute reality, and that the laws of physics must be hung on a fixed spatiotemporal lattice, are metaphysical assumptions.
Barbour in particular has done seminal work along these lines, showing that general relativity is a realisation of a relational, i.e. Leibnizian, view of space and time.
Leibniz is credited with having written down the law now known as conservation of energy (which
I’m not talking about evolution itself, for that idea had occurred to many, including Lamarck and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus.
Mr Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had – to me it did not appear a discovery.
Slam!
while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact – an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.
and which set the cat among Darwin’s pigeons
Neat expression.
The coincidence extended to both Darwin and Wallace being inspired by Robert Malthus on population.
The number of species per gram of soil has been estimated, on the basis of molecular taxonomy, to be between 2,000 and 800,000 depending on what criteria are used (Dance 2008). Two
OMG!
single bay on the island of Flores, in the East Indies, has more species of fish than does the entire tropical Atlantic (Briggs 2005).
The Conservation International organisation names 34 patches of land as ‘hotspots’ that contain almost half the world’s known plant species and a third of its vertebrates. Together, they represent less than 2 per cent of the terrestrial world.
Together, in one two-hundredth of the total land surface, they boast a fifth of known plants and a sixth of vertebrates (Sodhi 2008).
series of laboratory containers containing samples of plankton from the Black Sea was cultivated for seven years, in – as far as they could be attained – constant conditions. The abundance of the various species varied dramatically with time, and the relative numbers of each type could not be predicted with any confidence over any period longer than a month (which is, incidentally, the longest period for which the British weather forecast is even slightly dependable). The system was driven by something close to chaos
Much is chance.
Basically the same process was invented in Kentucky in the late 1840s by an American inventor, William Kelly, but he had no commercial success with it and went bankrupt in 1857, in the process losing his patent claims to Bessemer.
Manganese also makes steel stronger, while nickel and chromium improve its hardness. And chromium is the key additive in stainless steel – in a proportion of more than about 11 per cent, it makes the metal rust-resistant. Most modern steels are therefore alloys blended to give the desired properties.
Henry Ford even experimented with an all-plastic car made from extracts of soya beans.
In the 1930s, the physicist Paul Dirac and the astronomer Arthur Eddington were struck by a strange relationship in basic physics and cosmology. The hydrogen atom is held together by an electromagnetic force between the proton and electron. There is also a tiny gravitational force of attraction between them. The ratio of these forces is a staggering 1040. How, wondered Dirac and Eddington, did such a large number come out of fundamental physics? (It remains a mystery today.) But the peculiar twist is that the same very large number crops up in a completely different context. The age of the
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Even as late as 1906, the astronomer Percival Lowell was convinced that Mars not only hosted life, but intelligent Martians, who had built a network of canals.
The ‘Goldilocks enigma’ – why our universe’s laws and initial conditions are, amazingly, just right for life – has been a source of puzzlement for a long time.
George Carlin summed up the true stakes with foul-mouthed pith: ‘There is nothing wrong with the planet – the planet is fine. The people are fucked.’
While nitrogen compounds can be pumped from sea to sky by microbes, once phosphorus makes its way from soil to the sea it has no easy way back to the atmosphere, and must wait millions of years before, incorporated into sediments, it is lifted up into new mountains to fertilise the soils again.
The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge. The carbon dioxide liberated in the burning renders the atmosphere less transparent to the flow of outgoing heat; with the flow thwarted in this way, the temperature at the surface goes up. The resultant warming is, in terms of energy flows, about one hundred times larger than the amount of energy released by the fossil fuels.
Because that ancient natural warming had a different cause (changed orbital dynamics of Earth around the Sun) from recent and near future warming caused primarily from current anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases, we can’t say with high confidence that a few degrees of warming from greenhouse gases will also cause a four-to-six-metre rise in sea levels.
‘When rapidly forced, non-linear systems are especially subject to unexpected behaviour.’
Einstein once remarked that what most interested him was whether God had any choice in his creation.
the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’
‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.’ It is remarkable that atoms on Earth are the same as in distant stars. And that our minds, which evolved – along with our intuitions – to cope with life on the African savannah, can grasp the highly counterintuitive laws governing the quantum world and the cosmos.
‘things are as they are because they were as they were’.
As Woody Allen said, ‘eternity is very long, especially towards the end’.
