The world is what it is, but how we know and think about it can change from person to person and moment to moment. Theology in one form or another is very old, and plays the role of a theory of everything, attempting to explain aspect of human life and the world we live in from creation in the beginning to the end of the world, if it is to every occur. The name, theology, means talking about god, or gods, powerful being believed to have control over every aspect of our lives, Guiding our destinies. In some theologies have omnipotent gods that go their own way other gods may listen to us, rather as powerful people sometimes do, granting our wishes if we folow the correct protocols.
we can imagine that over the milions of years that we have been aware of ourselves and our environment thousands of languages and corresponding theologies have developed to provide a context for the each language and its speakers.
A new theory does not, in the first instance, change physical reality, only the people who conceive it and understand it. What it does change is our appreciation of the possibilities. Newton's laws opened the way for space travel and Bernoulli showed us how to fly. The idea behind this new theology may totally change out vision of the world and ourselves. We could change from being sinners and aliens in an alien and damaged world to becoming divine members of god. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Revolutions
Western cultural traditions have deprecated the material world for many thousands of years. It is only recently, as we begin to understand that we totally depend upon it for our existence. If we kill it we kill ourselves.
About 2500 years ago Parmenides asked the fundamental scientific question: How can we have certain knowledge of a moving Universe? He concluded that there must be a core to reality that does not move. We now call elements of this core 'laws of nature' or symmetries. John Palmer - Parmenides
It is about 2500 years since the ancestors of our Western culture began to think seriousy about the world in a way that we might see as scientific rather than poetic or mytholgical. Parmenides was among them. Like many philosophers since, he based his understanding of the world on a theory of knowledge. He felt that we cannot have certain knowledge of ephemeral things so (given that certain knowledge is actually possible) that there must be a central, perfect, eternal core to the world where real truth resides. The visible ephemeral features of the world are not to be trusted.
Plato (c. 428-348 bce) took up Parmenides idea and divided the world into two: an invisible heaven of perfect forms, accessible only to philosophers, and the visible material world of change. In his Republic he presented the allegory of the cave to suggest that the majority of people are imprisoned in their ignorance of the reality of the world. Plato - Wikipedia: Herclitus and Parmenides, Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia
Christianity began as a small movement in Roman occupied Palestine. It grew and spread through the Roman Empire. The early theoretical development of Christianity by the Fathers of the Church was heavily influenced by Platonic thought, since it gave a role to the Christian god and the Christian heaven. The Constantine saw the value of uniting his empire with a common religion and pressed the Christian Bishops to draft a clear and succinct statement of Christian Doctrine. They produced the Nicene Creed, which, with some revision, has remained the core statement of Christian doctrine ever since.
The arrival of Aristotle led to a revolution in Christian theology. Aristotle's work was much more evidence based than Plato's and he was a keen observer of nature and human behaviour. His books cover logic, the heavens, physics, psychology, metaphysics, poetics, rhetoric, politics, ethics and poetry. Aquinas, in his Summa and many other works, embedded Aristotle into Christian doctrine and it has remained central ever since. The Code of Canon Law provides that the dogmatic education of the clergy will be trained using the the work of Aquinas. John Paul II (1983): Code of Canon Law, c. 252: §3
Aquinas accepted Aristotle's unmoved mover as a model of god and based his first proof for the existence of god on Aristotle's argument for the existence of the unmoved mover. True to his faith, Aquinas placed his god outside the universe, whereas Aristotle felt that the world was eternal and the unmoved mover was part of this reality. Aquinas followed Aristotle in understanding god to be pure actuality (actus purus) for which Aristotle used the terms energeia and entelcheia.
The middle ages saw the gradual rise of science as education and literacy became more common. The notion that the Heavens moved the Earth had given impetus to astronomy (for astrologers, navigators and farmers) since very early times. As people like Tycho Brahe increased the precision of astronomical observations led Copernicus and others to realise that things could be greatly simplified if Sun, rather than Earth was placed at the centre of the world. This view was considered heretical by the Church, since it appeared to contradict the Bible where in the Book of Joshua that the Sun stood still to facilitate Joshua's divinely sanctioned genocide of the inhabitants of the Promised Land. Joshua: 10:12-13
Kepler, using Brahe's observations and his own was able to show that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse and was able to formulate three laws of planetary motion. Newton was able to build on Kepler's work by finding the law of gravitation which explained the Kepler's observations. Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Wikipedia, Newtons Laws of Motion - Wikipedia
Newtonian mechanics is very simple in principle but difficult to apply to complex systems. In the 18th and 19th centuries Joseph Lagrange and William Hamilton developed major reformulations which opened the path toward quantum mechanics and relativity. Lagrange found a function, now known as the Lagrangian, which enabled the computation of a quantity known as action and found that the application of a variational principle to find the minimum action yielded a particle trajectory identical to that computed by Newton. Hamilton enabled Newtonian mechanics to be expressed in terms of the total energy of the system, that is the sum of potential and kinetic energy. In summary, Newton worked in terms of force, Lagrange in action and Hamilton in energy. Energy is a fundamental quantity in both quantum mechanics and gravitation. Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia, Hamiltonian mechanics - Wikipedia
Heat engines laid the foundation of the industrial revolution, converting the ancient power of fire into the mechanical motion used to drive most forms of machinery. This was the first technological approximation to the ability of animals to convert the energy in their food into mechanical motion. The theory of heat engines was initiated by Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) who devised the Carnot cycle to calculate the maximum efficiency of a heat engine. Subsequent work introduced a new physical quantity, entropy, which is conserved by the Carnot cycle. This cycle is reversible because it conserves entropy. James Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann used statistical methods to apply Newtonian mechanics to the vast number of particles in macroscopic quantities of matter to show that heat is equivalent to the kinetic energy of microscopic particles in motion. Carnot cycle - Wikipedia, Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics - Wikipedia, Entropy (statistical thermodynamics) - Wikipedia
Classical mechanics is concerned with the motion of massive bodies ranging from atoms and molecules to planets, stars, and the universe as a whole, but it has nothing to say about radiation, the ubiquitous vehicle that transports energy through space. Maxwell's discovery that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon showed that new mechanics was necessary to explain the relation of radiation to matter. A first step in this direction was taken by Gustav Kirchoff (1824-1887), who showed on thermodynamic grounds that there must be a definite relationship between the emission and absorption of radiation and temperature. Kirchoff's law of thermal radiation - Wikipedia
The most informative method of research in the radiation field is spectroscopy. Beginning with prisms and visible light, spectroscopy has enormously increased the range of observable frequencies and the precision of measurements. The heavy machinery used in particle physics extends spectroscopic technology, measuring mass, energy and other characteristics of experimentally produced particles. The search for Kirchoff's law led to many false starts. Finally Max Planck succeeded in finding an accurate expression to describe black body radiation as a function of temperature and wavelength. He assumed that radiation is emitted through discrete events at a minuscule scale measured by a new physical constant, the quantum of action. , Thomas Kuhn: Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894-1912, Planck's Law - Wikipedia
The word atom is Greek for uncuttable. We associate the idea with the Democritus (c. 460-370 bce). The modern idea that the world is made of atoms became established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Spectroscopic suggested that atoms were quite complex mechanisms. The first model of an atom was created by Niels Bohr in 1913. His most important insight was that the energy spectrum of an atom is determined by the energy differences between different states of motion of the electrons in an atom. The spectral frequency is related to the energy difference by the Planck-Einstein formula, f = E/h where h is Planck's constant. Bohr's ideas inspired further work which led to the the development of more complex and abstract quantum mechanics models known as matrix mechanics and wave mechanics. Democritus - Wikipedia, Atom - Wikipedia
Matrix mechanics was first mooted by Werner Heisenberg in 1925 and elaborated with the help Max Born and Pascual Jordan. Heisenberg's approach made explicit the notion that the electromagnetic spectra of atoms are the result of energy differences between different electronic states.
Modern physics sees the world in terms of particles and fields. The particles are observable. The invisible fields constitute the underlying process which is believed to be responsible for the nature of the particles and their creation and annihilation. This picture, built up over the last century, is called quantum field theory. Quantum field theory - Wikipedia
Implicit in modern physics is the feeling that the Universe has been carefully tuned to evolve in the way it has and that everything could have been otherwise. Our hypothesis that the Universe is divine suggests that the Universe embraces all possibilities and owes nothing to a creator outside itself. The only constraint upon it is that it, like the traditional God, it must be consistent with itself.
Quantum theory is now one hundred and twenty years old, and has brought us horrors like nuclear weapons and wonders like smartphones, photovoltaic cells and the instrumentation which reveals the world to us. It shows us how our bodies and minds work and enables us to design drugs and vaccines to improve our health. Since it has been around since the universe began as a structureless initial singularity, it is also very simple and easy to understand, yet powerful enough to build universe out of almost nothing.
The transformation from classical physics to quantum physics is built around reconception of the terms potential, action, and energy which have been embedded in physics and metaphysics at least since Aristotle's time. From my point of view, trying to be a cognitive cosmologist I am interested in coupling my personal potential to create interesting ideas to the potential represented by the initial singularity, god and the quantum of action. This is the subject of the (possible) first page of quantum theology "in the beginning".
Next we translate classical force into quantum processing in effect transforming violence into information processing. Then mathematics, logic and Hilbert space. The agent equals linear operator making unitary transformation (ie rotation) of state vector. Then quantum computation and communication.
Action is logical and does not involve space and time per se Enerqy is the rate of action, that is the rate of processing ie inverse time so that energy multiplied by time gives action nℏ = E.ω = Et.
The actual processing in the universe does not occur in space-time but in Hilbert space. Spacetime acts as the medium for memory and communication, ie the operating system of the universe.This is true even of classical computers where the actually processing is done by quantum systems embedded in chips and wires embedded in spacetime which is four dimensional in order to maintain orthogonality between the underlying processes. All computing is quantum computing and always was. What the co-called quantum computing business is doing is fiddling with the interface between Minkowski space and Hilbert space.
Here we accept that God is pure activity, but we see no need to place God outside the Universe. Like Aristotle's first unmoved mover, which also contributed significantly to the Christian idea of God, we place the source of the Universe inside it rather than outside. We see the stable and knowable elements of the Universe as instances of the fixed points in the divine dynamics predicted by mathematical fixed point theory. Aquinas: Does God exist, Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
From a theological point of view, the only constraint on an
observable God is that it be consistent. If the Universe is divine we
can look forward to the day when we understand why the Universe as we
see it is the only consistent Universe, and that (consistent with its
divinity) it fills the whole space of possibility.
In modern times, the names have changed, but this duality in our
conception of the physical world remains. The world as a whole is
dynamic, pure action. There are fixed point in this action. Some fixed points appear to last forever, others are temporary. The rate of change of fixed points is correlated with energy.
Energy is correlated with rate of change, so that an eternal unchanging form may be imagined as a consistent structure without any energy at all. Only those features of the world which do not change can be written down once for all. Nevertheless, we can record moving systems by sampling them fast enough. This is how we make digital recordings of music, sampling it about 40 000 times per second. The result is a kinematic representation of the music, like a movie. Sampling (signal processing) - Wikipedia
The emergence of science
On this site I want to follow the same path in modern terms, using the jewel at the heart of modern physics, quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics began as a physical theory to explain the interactions of light and matter, a quest that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. A century later the task was practically completed with quantum electrodynamics. It has gone on in the last half century to go deeper into the heart of matter with quantum chromodynamics. This is interesting, but a side issue here. Here we explore a new role for quantum mechanics which put it on the path to divinity: quantum communication and quantum computation.
A symmetry is something that stays the same independent of motion. The symmetry of special relativity is that all observers in inertial motion, regardless of their relative speeds, see the same laws of physics, in particular the same velocity of light. This symmetry implies the Lorentz transformation. The Lorentz transformation ensures that the every observer in an inertial frame sees the same speed of light, regardless of the speed of its source. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation
Special relativity describes a force free world. The dominant force in our lives is the gravity which holds us onto our spherical planet. Aristotle explained that the natural motion of heavy objects is down. Einstein explained this motion by introducing a new symmetry and a new transformation which defines the large scale structure of the Universe. Pais: 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, pp 111-291
The new symmetry is the invariance of space-time distance between events regardless of an observer’s state of motion. The new transformation is Einstein’s field equation. Newton understood space and time as fixed independent frames of reference in which massive bodies moved under the influence of force (Newton, op. cit.).
In Einstein’s theory, space and time are no longer a passive background. The geometry of space-time is itself the explanation of gravitation, an approach called geometrodynamics (Misner, Thorne & Wheeler 1973). Objects in inertial motion, that is in free fall, nevertheless accelerate toward one another, as we see in the motion of a satellite around Earth. We standing Earth feel gravitation because our free fall is prevented by the Earth, whose strength is the result of a non-gravitational interaction, electromagnetism (Misner, Thorne & Wheeler op. cit.)
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Kuhn, Thomas S, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press 1962, 1970, 1996 Introduction: 'a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man, and never overnight.' [p 7]
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Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia, Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to designate names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.' back
John Paul II (1983), Code of Canon Law, c. 252: §3, Canon 252: §3. ' There are to be classes in dogmatic theology, always grounded in the written word of God together with sacred tradition; through these, students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher. There are also to be classes in moral and pastoral theology, canon law, liturgy, ecclesiastical history, and other auxiliary and special disciplines, according to the norm of the prescripts of the program of priestly formation.' back
Joshua: 10:12-13, Joshua 10: 12-13, '12At that time Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel,
Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.”
13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.' back
Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Wikipedia, Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In astronomy, Kepler's laws of planetary motion are three scientific laws describing the motion of planets around the Sun.
1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.'
' back
Lyceum (Classical) - Wikipedia, Lyceum (Classical) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Lyceum (Ancient Greek: Λύκειον, romanized: Lykeion) or Lycaeum was a temple dedicated to Apollo Lyceus ("Apollo the wolf-god".
It was best known for the Peripatetic school of philosophy founded there by Aristotle in 334 BC. Aristotle fled Athens in 323 BC, but the school continued to function under a series of leaders until the Roman general Sulla destroyed it during his assault on Athens in 86 BC.
The remains of the Lyceum were discovered in modern Athens in 1996 in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament.' back
Medieval university - Wikipedia, Medieval university - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' A medieval university was a corporation organized during the Middle Ages for the purposes of higher education. The first Western European institutions generally considered universities were established in the Kingdom of Italy (then part of the Holy Roman Empire), the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Spain, and the Kingdom of Portugal between the 11th and 15th centuries for the study of the Arts and the higher disciplines of Theology, Law, and Medicine. . . . Pope Gregory VII was critical in promoting and regulating the concept of modern university as his 1079 Papal Decree ordered the regulated establishment of cathedral schools that transformed themselves into the first European universities.' back
Newtons Laws of Motion - Wikipedia, Newton's Laws of Motion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that together laid the foundation for classical mechanics. They describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it, and its motion in response to said forces. . . . The three laws of motion were first compiled by Isaac Newton in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687' back
Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians.
It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325.
The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back
Plato - Wikipedia: Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato, Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, ' The surviving fragments written by Heraclitus suggest the view that all things are continuously changing, or becoming. . . . Parmenides adopted an altogether contrary vision, arguing for the idea of changeless Being and the view that change is an illusion. . . . These ideas about change and permanence, or becoming and Being, influenced Plato in formulating his theory of Forms.' back
Platonic Academy - Wikipedia, Platonic Academy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Academy (Ἀκαδήμεια) was founded by Plato in ca. 387 BC in Athens. Aristotle studied there for nineteen years before founding his own school at the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic period as a skeptical school, until coming to an end after the death of Philo of Larissa in 83 BC. Although philosophers continued to teach Plato's philosophy in Athens during the Roman era, it was not until AD 410 that a revived Academy was re-established as a center for Neoplatonism, persisting until 529 AD when it was finally closed down by Justinian I.' back
