$$\LaTeX$$ Formula Editor for Blogger

Friday, December 30, 2011

Statistical Analysis of Data

Nowadays there are hardware and software tools to analyze the ever expanding data stream we can get. When the speeds are Terabytes per second, and the storing devices reach tens or hundreds of Terabytes, it is clear we are in the Information Era. Theoretical Physics, as a search for ever smaller representations of bigger and bigger data sets, is the correct approach for this daunting task of the XXIst century.

Following the Fit and Leibniz Principles presented in previous posts, one can expect success, at least to the level that Physics, as started by Leibniz and Newton has had.

There is a whole Quantitative Finance section of the arXiv.

Furthermore, physicists have intuition for proper physical behavior, and a mathematical language to express it.

Let the children of Leibniz, and so many other diplomats, and government advisers, bloom.

Lety-Luis-Alma-Enrique


Luis-Alma-Enrique-Coral


Arturo-Ramiro-Chely-Fernando-Rosa


Arturo-Chely-Fernando


Ramiro-Vicky-Nayeli


Rosa-Ramiro-Vicky-Nayeli-Emilia

Vicky-Richard-Emilia

The dangerous complexity of our financial system - latimes.com

The dangerous complexity of our financial system - latimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Thursday, December 29, 2011

$8.76

That is all I have left from my Mexican salary. I cannot even take my boy to the movies.

This has to stop!

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

David Reshef, Harvard-MIT: Data mining without prejudice

David Reshef, Harvard-MIT: Data mining without prejudice:

'via Blog this'

Gauge Theory and Infeld-Hull

I know the factorization method of Leopold Infeld and his student Thomas Hull (I-H). The quest for exact solutions since the time of Evariste Galois has become an industry. I am pursuing the proposal that Theoretical Physics algorithms, can be systematized by the following two principles:


  • Fit Principle (FP)
  • Leibniz Principle (LP) 
The first could also be called Gauss Principle, the first example was the Minimum Mean Square Error Fit algorithm. Leibniz advised to use the simplest algorithm to represent data. Put together they are  useful, and a guide to understand the four Forces of Nature.

I-H has an intermediary step with the first variation operator additively modified by a gauge function. This function encodes the forces.

arXiv

Monday, December 26, 2011

Friday, December 16, 2011

My Children are Thinkers

I expect not to annoy readers writing about how good my kids are. It is mine and my wife's fault, which for good, or ill, they are as they are. Of course also it is their fault, that is how they were born. The point of this note, is to record an observation based on my being back in the States, and thinking about the many students I have had in the past.

These kids are good!

Mexico: Two Students Killed During Protest in Ayotzinapa · Global Voices

Mexico: Two Students Killed During Protest in Ayotzinapa · Global Voices:

'via Blog this'

PORTADA

“¡Madre, mataron a mi amigo madre, yo lo vi cuando cayó cerca de mis pies!”. No lloró.

Mother they killed my friend, I saw him when he fell at my feet!. He didn't cry.

Mexican student shot at in a peaceful demonstration in Chilpancingo.

"Chilpancingo, 15 de diciembre. Édgar David Espíritu Olmedo, el normalista de Ayotzinapa hospitalizado en la clínica de ISSSTE de Chilpancingo por herida de bala, era el de playera roja que el día de la represión policial en la autopista del Sol, pidió auxilio a los federales tras el disparo, y se lo negaron. Esa playera, era nueva. Fue un regalo de su tía, que vive indocumentada en Estados Unidos."


Chilpancingo, December 15. Édgar David Espíritu Olmedo, the Ayotzinapa, Education School student hospitalized in the Chilpancingo State Workers Social Security (ISSSTE) clinic for bullet wound, was the one wearing a red t-shirt, who during the police repression day in the Sun Highway, asked for help to the federal police after the shooting, which was denied. The t-shirt was new. It was a gift from his aunt, who lives as an undocumented worker in the US.


La Jornada Guerrero

I Love Leza!

Yesterday I was received in Warrenville by the warm hug of my daughter. The garage door was not working, the little one (not little anymore), stepped on top of the car, and reset the damn little computer controlling the door, and voilà, it worked!

Now, she wants her daddy to take her to the movies. :)

Monday, December 12, 2011

December 12, 2011

 I ate with Ricardo today. Almost nobody is here, today is  Our Lady of Guadalupe's  day, he is from El Ciruelar [link]. He had a test today, and didn't go with his family to the celebration. They gave us a special Banana Leaf Tamal for free, to celebrate this very special day in Mexico.He told me about his religious doubts; obviously he chose math over the Gudalupan Virgin today.

He recently wrote about the July 1, 2012 presidential election, [link]. I feel responsibility, with the rest of the faculty, for the direction these young women and men take in their future life.

I am convinced that a life with rational reflection, is worth living.

Welcome Ricardo!

Child Rearing

Today is my Wedding Anniversary.

Congratulations to us!

We were made for each other. We spent 10 years with the first little flower, and the next 10 with that beautiful boy! They even thought, he was a girl, so beautiful is he.

It did pay off to spend that lovely time with our children when they were younger.

He's so beautiful

Friday, December 9, 2011

December 8, 1980

From Obama's Speech to East Aurora High School Student

Today I was contacted through facebook by a former EAHS student of mine. He works in Lile, and is studying at Wuabonsee Community College.  I applied there last summer, and they didn't hire me after an interview. The good news is that I hadn't had an interview in a long time, the bad news is the outcome. Maybe I do not look so handsome as when I was twenty, who knows, and who cares?

After listening the great speech by the POUS, our POUS, I am inspired to try again.

How should I get back to the US?

I feel that it has to be through the private sector, but if Waubonsee, wouldn't hire me, when I am more qualified than most of their applicants, I think I should try to go through a community that sees value in my many years of study. Twenty four to be exact.

I feel that my high school students in the Chicago suburbs liked me; at least some of them, even though the hiring persons didn't like me enough.

I could leverage that fact.

Teaching Moments

I feel I have a teaching moment now. Not every minute of our lives is equal, as far as its consequences for future minutes, hours, days, years, and lifetimes, are concerned.

Finally I have an idea I can get behind. Revision of the Scientific Method, because of the digital economy we have already entered. Also kids are following me from Illinois to Guerrero. I have an audience many teachers will love to have. (Hi guys, and gals!). When I see the faces of my students I feel, their love sometimes . I cannot let them down.

The 1% has to step down!

It is wrong, that 1% own 40% of the wealth: That is WRONG.

From the link above:

a teaching moment was an unexpected and unplanned opportunity, during a planned lecture or lesson plan, to really connect and teach your students.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Bogdan Mielnink and Alexander Turbinov

Turbinov

"Each of them is a type of isospectral deformation of the isotropic harmonic oscillator."

arXiv

Mielnik

arXiv

These two gentlemen work in Mexico City, one in the North (Bogdan), and one in the South (Alexander). Both are Eastern Europeans.

Why do not they quote each other in their papers?

Maybe, I'm making too much of this. I know Bogdan, I don't know Alexander.

Life :(

pi - Wolfram|Alpha

pi - Wolfram|Alpha

My DynDns!

eduardocantoral.dyndns.org


Moodle


Tolkien

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.



Which Way?

OK, two principles to rule them all, (Tolkien had one ring ), but now which way should I go?

I can start with simple applications, like fit $$\pi$$:

If I try a Monte Carlo program, this will take forever ...

I guess the way to go, is to look at an unsolved problem, apply the method, and solve it.

Tall call.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Eric S. Raymond

All computer gurus are named Eric.

I wonder if the Greek Logicians would object to this statement.

I had the privilege of meeting, and driving around Eric in Naperville, IL. We invited him for our Software Symposium around 2000 at Lucent. That was great. I had written to Richard Stallman, but he wouldn't talk just for room and board. Our supervisors were not going to pay ANY speaker a gratuity.

It was funny when I later learned, through my friend Enrique Zeleny, that Stallman stayed in a squatters' place in Puebla! Go figure.

The point of this note, though; is to comment on a very good book by Raymond - I  have a friend that translated another of his great books, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to Spanish, José Soto - the other book is "Homesteading the Noosphere."

I finished a course in Moodle here in Chilpancingo, today. I already installed it, in my Ubuntu powered desktop.

My son has been running Apache in his Apple hardware for a long time now, but this is my first server!

I can now host my own private space in Moodleland!

I can put here my Algebra class. Here is the blogspot version.

I am homesteading the Noosphere.

BTW, I finally bought Pierre Teihlard de Chardin classic book: Vision of the Past.  I found it in a used book stand in a street in Mexico City! I paid four bucks! I will finally read what was his vision of the Noosphere.

It seems that slowly, but surely, I am finding my crowd in Chilpancingo.

I cannot do PyChilpo alone.

Dns [link]

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

AMLO and Obama

This is eerie.

Next year is the last one of a long Mayan count; and we have two politicians that sound like Messiahs.

Obama: "Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top one percent has gone up by more than 250%, to $1.2 million per year. For the top one hundredth of one percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about six percent."

AMLO: "Una vez elaborada esta constitución moral, debemos hacer el compromiso de fomentar estos valores mediante todos los medios posibles. Introducir en la enseñanza la educación moral, darle toda la importancia que tienen materias como el civismo, la ética y la filosofía; propagar virtudes y destacar ejemplos positivos en los medios de comunicación. El propósito no sólo es frenar la corrupción política y moral que nos está hundiendo como sociedad y como nación, sino establecer las bases para una convivencia futura sustentada en el amor y en hacer el bien para alcanzar la verdadera felicidad."

(Get Google Translate for this)

If the world is going to end, like my buddies have been telling me since I was nineteen years old or so, I expect to see signs, like thousands of twenty somethings filling the plazas of Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Athens, Rome, Madrid, London, Paris, New York, and Chilpancingo.

I've seen that all.

Tighten your belts, we are heading for a wild ride; I hope we survive.

Go on kids: If you don't save your own world, you won't have kids to give the world to.

Who Has the Money, and Why?

With all this talk of the 99% and so for, I've been telling my students that the 1% that has the money doesn't deserve it.

Here I'll try to come to terms with this notion.

Who deserves what, and why?

I got a little inheritance from my mother. She got it from hers, who after becoming a widow married an older man of comfortable means.

In what sense do I "deserve" the money?

I was given a good hand, compared to most Mexicans.

I even got a scholarship, with  Mexican tax money, to work on my Ph.D. degree, at the Physics Department of UCSB.

I have a better education level than most Mexicans. Do I deserve that?

Somehow these questions are sounding hollower, and hollower; at least coming from me.

I just saw Paul Krugman in a Q&A session with NYT readers, together with Joe Nocera, Carmen Reinhart, and Tom Friedman. Paul is smart, but nothing he said will take us out, right now, from the mess we inherited.

Does Carlos Slim Helú deserves to be the richest man on Earth?

I guess I am not going very far with this line of questioning. Say; I prove a Theorem that Carlos Slim money should come to me on the basis of me having a graduate degree from UCSB, and he only a Civil Engineering one from UNAM.

Who will give me that money after I prove the Theorem?

Hogwash, Stuff and Nonsense.  If Paul Krugman, and me are smart. We each have to change the world, more than we have so far.

I am in a nasty mood right now. My family doesn't have the money we need. Even worse, no Nobel Prize quality work coming from this head, and this keyboard, anytime soon. At least Paul already has his!

Oh well.

Carlos Slim has the money, for no good reason I can understand. I have my hypothesis ... here we go again.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Is the Moon There When we are not Looking?

"Strictly speaking what we proved is that the question of context in the macroscopic world is an ill-posed one because of the limited class of feasible measurements one can perform. The smaller set of measurements leads to a simplification of quantum theory that removes certain non-intuitive features such as contextuality while still preserving other features such as entanglement [10, 11]. Similar phenomena were observed in a toy model of quantum theory proposed in [12]. An interesting open question is to investigate the complexity of measurements needed for contextuality to emerge." arXiv

Does Ashtekar Like Penrose?


Book Review - The Information - By James Gleick - NYTimes.com

Book Review - The Information - By James Gleick - NYTimes.com

The Beginning of Infinity - By David Deutsch - Book Review - NYTimes.com

The Beginning of Infinity - By David Deutsch - Book Review - NYTimes.com

And So It Goes

NYT

Can't Keep Johnny Down

Do I Understand?

I was baffled in the early 2000s, when first I lost my job at Lucent, and then the rich "smart" investors of DuPage County were building houses that nobody could buy!

What am I missing?

Now I see that the US is woefully behind China, NYT, and the US is going through a financial mess, to put it bluntly. It is called Real State Bubble.

Yes I was right!

I do understand.

What is coming? First those Bozos running for the GOP Presidential Nomination, all have to collapse like the Big Balls of Hot Air, that they are. Then more and more centrist rational American BUSINESSMEN, have to take control. Let us end these nonsense.

The US has to get back in track.

We can do it, guys. Wake Up.

Leza Natalia Cantoral Bronstein

My daughter found out that we were going to name her Natalia, because of my Great Grandmother, but we named her Leza, after my wife's Grandmother. She liked Natalia, and told the administration in High School to write in her Diploma: Leza Natalia Cantoral.

She has chutzpah!

When I saw Natalia Lafourcade (below), I thought of my little girl.

Natalia Lafourcade

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Stock Market?

I have a friend from Lucent. He studied Physics at the University of  Colorado. Now he is working for the financial sector in Chicago. If I am right, and all Theoretical Physics is sophisticated curve fitting, I wonder if I can just as well fit financial behavior?

I'm reading an econometrics paper in arXiv. I was inspired by this year's Economics Nobel Prize in Cause and Effect in Macroeconomics. NYT.

I was biased against finances, I thought there was no way to guess right.

Now I wonder.

BTW, I'm studying R.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Sad

My Me'phaa student is getting checked next week for Cancer. I was reading Nicholas Kristof piece on the NYT today.

Give to underprivileged people of the world.

All I can do is teach her.  I have the ugly feeling that Mexican Indians have more deceases than the rest of us.

:(

Linux Mint

I should change platform, I guess.

Wikipedia

“life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places”

Ernest Hemingway 


Today I am supposed to be downtown Chilpancingo breaking a Guinness World Record. "Mexico Seeks New Guinness Record For Moon-Gazing With Telescopes".

I won't go.

Many years ago, I was 19 or 20, I don't remember, I found myself reading USSR propaganda; I completely forgot I had to be in soccer training. I played at a UNAM's junior team. UNAM soccer is strong, they've been champions of the Mexican Professional Soccer League; here is the Wikipedia link: Pumas.

Another break in my life path, another fork in the road, happened in 1998; when I left BUAP, to join Alcatel-Lucent.

Today I change path direction again. Following Roberto Bolaño, Abandon Everything, Again.

My acclimation period in Chilpancingo is over. I have to keep working on my PyChilpo project. 

Classes Over!

For all practical purposes I am thinking of the next term rather than the present one. One of my Simulation class  students  [link], is not coming next week, they are 2 only. Then I leave to Chicago, December 15. I have a Physics class that is used basically to teach my stuff of a New Scientific Method [link], then I have an "Analysis of the Contemporary World" class [link]. That's it!

These are the sunrise and sunset times, that day in Chicago.

So starting today, I am working on my stuff, even during my days in Warrenville.

I am reading Bill Byers' "How Mathematicians Think" [link].

The aha moment is crucial. Professor Wiles had it to solve Fermat's Conjecture in 1993, [link]. I cannot pinpoint a year, but I can put it around the past six months. Definitely Professor Fivel's post in the arXiv was crucial, [link].

I grant that it is not a discovery of: How is the Universe?, but rather of: How is it that we know it? But in any case, I am hopeful that something will come of it. On the other hand I do not have too much time left "Waiting for Godot", [link].

There are not mathematical equations or programs "up there" waiting for us to go fetch them. We have to make them, and the sooner I start, the better.

For starters I have two principles. The Principle of Fit (PF), and the Principle of Leibniz (PL). The first I have already described in this blog, we sort out all programs and equations, until we find the best fit to data, the second is described by Gregory Chaitin, [link], i.e., another requirement by the New Kind of Science here advocated, similar to Wolfram's [link], is that it has to be the shortest program.

From these humble beginnings, I hope to build a Numerical Computation Platform [link].

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Laszlo Tisza

Looking for material for my Online Algebra class I came across professor Tisza's class at MIT. I am reading his Integration of classical and quantum physics article. I have new eyes now. I remember going on the corridor at MIT, during my postdoc stay there in 1982-1983, and wondering what he was doing. I never talked to him though, I regret so many things, oh well.

Wikipedia

I hope I can use some of his stuff.

My First Online Course!

This is awesome!

 I have used the Internet since 1994 when I spent a sabbatical year at Fermilab, in Batavia Illinois. Even though I tried to teach in the US, ever since I was at UCSB, I was of the mind of: Go South Young Man!

By a series of unexpected twists of fate, I find myself booked for an Online Algebra class for next February!  Now that finally my thoughts are jelling in something I can call an Agnostic Scientific Method, I am going to have over twenty students online. I have till next February to digest this.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Jim Hartle

Here I comment on a paper by Gell-Mann and Hartle, [link].

First of all, I was Jim's T.A. for his Quantum Mechanics class at UCSB in the late 70s. That was good.

I have read Gell-Mann and Hartle's ideas on "histories", to tell you the truth, I never got their point. Now I have my own interpretation. Once I was visiting Jim after I got my degree under Bob Sugar, and he was surprised that I was interested in fundamental issues. Then I had an idea about fractal paths, in something I was calling a geometric theory of mass. Since nothing came of it, not much to report here.

Neverhteless, I look at these works with new eyes.

Murray and Jim want to give a consistent mathematical theory of , as they put it, "Decoherent Histories Quantum Mechanics with One “Real” Fine-Grained History". The key word is Real. Implying also, I suppose, a unique description.

In my new view, which I have been presenting in this blog, all I have to look for, is how this description fits data, all else be damned!

It is helpful if it also is a nice "History".

We love to tell stories.

"Quantum mechanics can be viewed as a classical stochastic theory of histories with extended probabilities and a well-defined notion of reality common to all decoherent sets of alternative coarse-grained histories".

Doesn't this sound like coming full circle?

To me it sounds like David Bohm, and Luis de la Peña Auerbach.

Also I can see Dick Feynman here:

"To describe these preferred variables we assume a particular Lorentz frame and let t be the time coordinate of that frame. We denote the preferred variables by qi or just q for short. For particles i might be x, y, z and a particle label. For fields i would include the label $$\vec{x}$$ of the spatial point. We denote the configuration space spanned by qi by $$\mathcal{C}$$. A fine-grained history is a path q(t) in $$\mathcal{C}$$ that we assume to be single-valued — one and only one value of q for each t. The set of all fine-grained histories between an arbitrary pair of times t0 and tf is the set of all such paths {qi(t)} between these two times. They are continuous but typically non-differentiable"
In modern times we could call these continuous and non-differentiable paths, fractals. I also see Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac:

There is something interesting in Murray's and Jim's world. God not only plays dice, but S/He also bets!

What is Wrong with this Picture?

"The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said."

  NYT

How could China have the fastest computer with American parts?

Sunday, November 27, 2011

It From Bit

What a great slogan!

Professor John Archibald Wheeler invented it. It is so deep that all of us have a take on it. Here is mine.

Reading professor Penrose's new book: Cycles in Time, I had the following idea.

It is more important to construct computer code, that produces experimental data than to tell a nice story of how the whole world works.

Maybe the Universe is or is not a Computer, but definitively, we have plenty of computer power just now.

Let's all get computing!


I'll Tell Maribel

Maribel is my colleague, she is a Me'phaa Indian. Yesterday she asked me a bit worried: Where have you been? You never miss classes and two of your students were asking for you. I apologized for telling so few people. I went to the Quantum Fest, I told her. I had forgotten which day it was supposed to be, and when I saw, it was the next day, I just took off.

I love this, this University exists in a parallel Universe. Even though Chilpancingo is the capital of the Indian State of Guerrero, it is surreal for my standards. My mother studied  in this University in the mid 40s of last century, but she and my father decided that Mexico City was a better place for us to grow up. So I have been away from my roots, for over forty years!

Coming to work this morning, I run across my friend  Miguel Ángel. I host a zombi page on Ovnis for him, [link]. I say zombi, not because it addresses zombies, but because it is undead. Nothing has been written there since SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2009.  I ask my friend then: What are you doing here? I came to finish up my work with the plants. I am in charge of the Botanic Garden here, we are having an exhibit. We are going to show some Olinalá trees. I felt like in "The Teachings of Don Juan", by Carlos Castaneda!

Let me explain the context, in over two years that I have met him, I thought he was concerned only about the paranormal, and the esoteric.  All of a sudden I realized that he is in charge of one of the most important treasures of humanity. Guerrero has one of the richest ecosystems anywhere on Earth, and as a consequence of the Universe!

Let me tell you about Maribel, and then I wrap this up.

Maribel asked me if I was coming today. I said, since it is Sunday I may not, but anyway, why? I asked a woman to come and clean this place, she said, I want to know if I have to give her the keys or not. Anyway, I'll give her the keys, said Maribel.

This morning Doña Toñita heard I was coming in the building, and asked who is that? When she saw me I told her about the cleaning lady. She said, there was no water yesterday, thus that lady couldn't wipe the floor, but this morning they got water and she could do it. I said: I'll tell Maribel.

This conversation, and the earlier one with Miguel Ángel, are surreal!

How will I tell Maribel? I do not have her phone number, besides I don't think she can contact anybody to come clean.

I'll try to do a little explaining here.

There is a Union, but they don't work on weekends: Union rules!

Maribel pays these ladies with the money she collects from the students!

These people that invited me run a parallel structure, inside the official bureaucracy. The University pays me from official channels, but I do get money on the side, for little things, like inviting a friend from Berkeley, that should be getting a Nobel Prize next December 15, in Stockholm, but is getting squat because the big honchos sidestepped him. He is very nice and took everything in stride, but that was a travesty. Read one of his reactions to the announcement here.

Chilpo's Bogdan is in a good place to find the meaning of it all. Read above.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Monadologie

"Et cette conclusion ne s'impose pas seulement au nom de l'expérience; elle se fonde aussi sur les exigences de la raison. On veut que l'être n'enveloppe que des puissances à l'état nu. Et l'on n'observe pas que c'est «une fiction, que la nature ne souffre point». On ne remarque pas qu'une simple faculté n'est qu'une «notion incomplète», «comme la matière première» séparée de toute forme; «une abstraction» vide de réalité, «comme le temps, l'espace et les autres êtres des mathématiques pures[25]». Il est bon de supprimer une telle équivoque et de donner des choses une notion plus compréhensive et plus exacte. Le vrai, c'est que tout est déterminé: le vrai, c'est que chaque substance «a toujours une disposition particulière à l'action et à une action plutôt qu'à telle autre»; «qu'outre la disposition», elle enveloppe «une tendance à l'action, dont même il y a toujours une infinité à la fois dans chaque sujet»; et que «ces tendances ne sont jamais sans quelque effet[26]». Tout être est une force qui se bande, un «conatus» qui passe de lui-même au succès, «si rien ne l'empêche»: toute substance est action et tendance à l'action[27]. Et de là une interprétation nouvelle du devenir. D'après Aristote, tout se meut par autre chose. Au gré de Leibniz, tout se meut par soi-même. Chaque être est gros de sa destinée et la réalise en vertu d'un principe qui lui est interne. C'est le règne de l'autonomie, qui se substitue à celui de l'hétéronomie."

"Malebranche a bien vu que les êtres créés ne peuvent avoir entre eux des relations dynamiques. Mais sa théorie n'en demeure pas moins sujette à deux objections, qui la rendent inadmissible. Elle veut, en effet, que le cours des phénomènes qui forment le monde ne soit qu'un tissu de miracles[68]. Or c'est là une extrémité à laquelle il semble difficile de se tenir. S'il y a des lois naturelles,—et la chose n'est pas douteuse,—il faut aussi qu'il y ait des agents naturels: il faut qu'entre la Cause première et les faits ordinaires s'interposent des causes secondes. Ou Dieu n'a pas le monopole de l'activité, ou il n'existe point de nature[69]. «Il est bon, d'ailleurs, qu'on prenne garde qu'en confondant les substances avec les accidents, en ôtant l'action aux substances créées, on ne tombe dans le spinosisme, qui est un cartésianisme outré. Ce qui n'agit point ne mérite point le nom de substance; si les accidents ne sont point distingués des substances; si la substance créée est un être successif, comme le mouvement; si elle ne dure pas au-delà d'un moment, et ne se trouve pas la même (durant quelque partie assignable du temps), non plus que ses accidents; si elle n'opère point, non plus qu'une figure mathématique ou qu'un nombre; pourquoi ne dira-t-on pas, comme Spinosa, que Dieu est la seule substance et que les créatures ne sont que des accidents ou des modifications[70]?»"

"A ce «système de la communication des substances» se rattache une théorie de l'espace et du temps, qui en est comme le corollaire.

D'après Clarke et Newton, l'espace et le temps seraient deux «êtres absolus», «éternels et infinis», distincts par là même des corps qui composent la nature[84]. Or une telle conception ne peut être que chimérique; elle contredit à la fois et la perfection de Dieu, et le principe de la raison suffisante et celui des indiscernables.

[Note 84: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la seconde réplique de M. Clarke, p. 751b, 3.]

Ou bien l'espace est un attribut de Dieu. Et, dans ce cas, Dieu lui-même se divise à l'infini; car l'espace «a des parties», et qui se sous-divisent sans fin[85]. Ou bien l'espace se distingue radicalement de Dieu, comme on veut qu'il se distingue des corps; et alors il y a «une infinité de choses éternelles hors de Dieu[86]». Dans l'une et l'autre hypothèses, les seules que l'on conçoive, l'idée fondamentale de l'Être parfait se trouve altérée. Et l'on peut raisonner de même à l'égard du temps; dès qu'on l'érige à l'état d'absolu, il faut que l'essence de Dieu en souffre ou du dedans ou du dehors.

[Note 85: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la seconde réplique de M. Clarke, p. 751b,3; Réponse à la troisième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 756a, 11; Réponse à la quatrième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 767b, 42.]

[Note 86: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la troisième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 756a, 10.]

En outre, si l'espace est un absolu, si c'est une réalité qui préexiste à la création du monde physique, les points qui le composent ne diffèrent en rien les uns des autres: ils sont «uniformes absolument». Or, dans cette uniformité sans bornes, il est impossible de trouver «une raison pourquoi Dieu, gardant les mêmes situations des corps entre eux, les a placés dans l'espace ainsi et non pas autrement; et pourquoi tout n'a pas été pris à rebours, (par exemple), par un échange de l'Orient et de l'Occident[87]. Et l'on se heurte à une difficulté analogue, lorsqu'on suppose que le temps, de son côté, est un autre absolu. Car, d'après une telle hypothèse, le temps existait avant la création: antérieurement à l'apparition du monde, il se prolongeait déjà comme une ligne à la fois infinie et homogène. Et, dans cette éternelle ressemblance, Dieu n'a jamais pu trouver une raison de créer à tel moment plutôt qu'à tel autre: ce qui revient à dire qu'il n'a jamais pu créer et que le commencement de l'univers est inexplicable[88].

    [Note 87: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la seconde réplique de M. Clarke, p.
    752a, 5.]

    [Note 88: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la seconde réplique de M. Clarke, p.
    752, 6.]

C'est aussi une loi de la nature que tout ce qui se ressemble s'identifie dans la mesure même où il y a ressemblance: «non pas» qu'il soit impossible absolument de poser deux ou plusieurs êtres qui n'aient entre eux aucune différence; mais «la chose est contraire à la sagesse divine», qui demande que le monde soit le plus beau possible et renferme de ce chef le plus de variété possible[89]. Par conséquent, supposé, comme le veut la théorie de Clarke et de Newton, que l'espace soit chose absolument homogène, il faut de toute rigueur que son immensité se réduise à un point géométrique[90]. Et supposé que telle soit aussi la nature du temps, il faut de même que tous les moments de l'éternelle durée se ramassent en un instant indivisible[91]: et, de la sorte, Homère sera le contemporain de Spinoza.

[Note 89: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la quatrième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 765b, 25.]

[Note 90: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la seconde réplique de M. Clarke, p. 752a, 5; Réponse à la troisième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 756b, 18.]

[Note 91: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la troisième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 756, 6 et 13.]

Il n'y a donc que des idola tribus, «des chimères toutes pures» et «des imaginations superficielles», dans l'hypothèse d'un espace et d'un temps absolus[92]. L'espace et le temps ne peuvent être ni des attributs de Dieu, ni des réalités éternelles et distinctes de Dieu. Ils ont commencé avec le monde; et ils n'existeraient point, «s'il n'y avait point de créatures». Il ne resterait alors que l'immensité et l'éternité de Dieu lui-même, lesquelles portent seulement «qu'il serait présent et coexistant à toutes les choses qui existeraient[93]».

[Note 92: Ibid., p. 756b, 14.]

[Note 93: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la quatrième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 776a, 106.]

D'autre part, il ne se peut pas non plus que l'espace et le temps soient eux-mêmes des substances créées. Car alors il faudrait supposer un autre espace et un autre temps; et l'on irait ainsi sans fin, comme le voulait Zénon d'Elée. Il ne reste donc qu'une hypothèse raisonnable: c'est de concevoir l'espace et le temps comme des rapports que les créatures soutiennent entre elles.
Soit un vase A, où se trouve une liqueur b; il existe entre les parois de A et les parties adhérentes de b un certain rapport de situation. Si l'on substitue à la liqueur b une autre liqueur c ou d, ce rapport, considéré abstraitement, ne change pas; et, considéré du même point de vue, il ne change pas davantage, si l'on remplace le vase A par un autre vase de même contenance et de même forme, quelle que soit d'ailleurs la matière dont il est fait. Ce rapport constant, c'est ce qu'on appelle «une place». Et l'ensemble de toutes les places constitue l'espace[94].

[Note 94: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la quatrième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 768, 47.]

De même, soit un changement m, au terme duquel commence un autre changement n. Ces deux changements, en tant qu'ayant une limite commune, soutiennent un rapport déterminé, et dont la notion reste identique, quels que soient les sujets qu'ils affectent. Ce rapport invariable est ce qu'on appelle une succession; et l'ensemble de toutes les successions forme le temps.
Mais, si telle est la logique des choses, il ne faut plus supposer qu'il y a de l'espace en dehors de nous, dans le monde absolu que constituent les monades. Car il n'existe entre elles aucun rapport analogue à celui que soutient un liquide avec les parois d'une ampoule: il ne s'y trouve ni contenants, ni contenus. Il ne faut pas croire davantage que les monades sont dans le temps. Le temps n'est qu'en elles. Elles durent sans doute; mais, conçues du dehors, elles demeurent essentiellement immobiles et ne peuvent, de l'une à l'autre, produire aucun cas de succession; l'espace et le temps n'existent que pour et par notre pensée: ils sont de purs phénomènes. Et c'est dans ce sens qu'il faut entendre les paroles de Leibniz, lorsqu'il définit l'espace: un ordre de coexistence[95], et le temps: un ordre de succession[96].

[Note 95: LEIBNIZ, Réponse à la troisième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 758a, 41; Réponse à la quatrième réplique de M. Clarke, p. 766a, 29.]
[Note 96: Ibid., p. 776a, 105.]


Idéalité de la matière, idéalité de l'espace et du temps: telles sont donc les conclusions auxquelles Leibniz se trouve conduit par une suite toute naturelle. Et cette conception originale, la plus compréhensive peut-être et la plus féconde en points de vue qui soit jamais sortie de l'esprit humain, ne devait pas demeurer stérile. Les philosophes postérieurs s'emparèrent de son principe dominant, qui consiste à interpréter le dehors par le dedans et la poussèrent jusqu'au subjectivisme absolu. A quoi bon un monde extérieur, existant en lui-même et inaccessible à tous les regards, puisque la monade enveloppait déjà l'univers dans ses mystérieuses virtualités? Pourquoi cette doublure du dedans, si difficile, d'ailleurs, à concevoir? Kant, d'abord, vint substituer à l'infinité multiforme des monades l'indéfinité de la matière. Puis Fichte parut, qui «fourra» la matière elle-même dans la conscience, suivant l'expression de Schiller[97].

[Note 97: Almanach des Muses, les Philosophes, 1797.]"

La Monadologie

Leibniz's Space and Time

"Although Leibniz continued to refine, develop, and extend his views on the laws of motion and impact, his work in the philosophy of physics was most prominently capped by his famous correspondence with Samuel Clarke — Newton's parish priest, intellectual disciple, and possible mouthpiece.[10] The controversy began when the Princess of Wales passed along to Clarke in 1715 a letter written by Leibniz decrying the decline of religion in England inspired by the rise of Newton's natural philosophy. Taking place against the backdrop of a bitter dispute over the priority of the calculus, Clarke responded in Newton's defense and a series of five letters and replies were exchanged. Among the many topics covered in the correspondence, the letters are best known for the opposing views of space and time which they offer: Leibniz defending roughly the view that space is an ideal system of relations holding between bodies, and Clarke defending the view that space is something more like a container in which bodies are located and move. The increasingly detailed and pointed exchange ended only with Leibniz's death in 1716, with Clarke, in the historical sense at least, having the last word."


Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Chilpo's Bogdan?

My kid brother is the head of the Mathematics Education Department at CINVESTAV, the premier math education center in Mexico. I visited him yesterday. I went to see an old friend Bogdan Mielnik, who has directed the work of two of my best students, David Fernández, and Oscar Rosas. Also from Poland I met my friend Piotr Kielanowski. I met new friends at the Physics Department, which I consider my Alma Mater: Gastón García-Calderón, Eduardo Gómez, Jean Pierre Gazeau, and another old friend Kurt Bernardo Wolf.

This was the Quantum Fest, and it was a feast for me.

The title of this note has to do with my, and Bogdan's habits. We work at odd hours, and to other people we may look absent minded. My brother made me aware that I may be considered Chilpo's Bogdan.

I actually feel honored by such comparison. I hope to live up to the resemblance to that great scientist.

It was a great event; I felt welcome.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Of Granmas and Leadership

I haven't even bothered to listen to Republican presidential candidates. That patriotic bunch that want to save the US. I just read Tom Friedman, urging Obama to take charge, [NYT].

Also there is a new study addressing the role of the third generation in every family. Our evolution has been sped up by their role in the family. I for one, know the investment our immediate ancestors put to make my wife, my children and I viable, as life forms to pass to future generations.

So what?

I believe we need brains, and care, and love, AND patriotism.

It is possible. Most of the people in the picture don't have a clue.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Epiphany

Feeling

I just bought a Chinese calculator for the Mexican Black Friday. It is ativa WCT9401J

I paid 5 5/9 dollars.

I have told anybody that wants to hear this, calculating power is going fast towards zero.

What next?

Let's all get calculating!

I went to Office Depot Mexico, at the US one you find a better one: ativa AT-30i for nine ninety nine,
just like Herman Cain announced for his economic plan.

Maybe I will endorse Cain after all.

I find it reassuring that Jeffrey Goldstone is doing computer work also. I met him at a get together party in Dan Freedman's home, when I spent a year as a postdoc at MIT. I was carrying my little girl, and Jeff also. A friend of mine, José Wudka did work with him at some point, but ended up getting his PhD with Eddy Farhi, that also is working on Quantum Computation. It is reassuring that people that had "dropped out" from Physics, turn out in the alley I am getting into now.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

93

My father was born 93 years ago today. He died, of a heart attack, the day before John Lennon, December 7, 1980, at the young age of 62; just my age today.

Reading Kristoff at the NYT right now, I feel overwhelmed. We live in a very unjust world. We let it become so.

My work, to honor my hero, my father, is to present as clear a view, as soon as possible, of how we do science.

This is for you Dad!

I read that a new Winston Churchill biography by William Manchester is available. He was the son of a noble man, and a poor  American woman who was a social ladder climber. The father and the mother did not stay close to him, it was a nanny who was in charge.

For my own reasons I feel that I am in a similar situation; my Mexican family was instrumental for the 1910 revolutionary war here. Some family members are wealthy because of that, but my father left his country, Guatemala, among other things, due to the social injustice still prevalent there. Here he was a poor man, helped by wealthy and powerful relative's of my mother, just like Churchill was helped by the coterie of "friends" her mother collected sleeping around on the aristocracy's beds.

I hope the contradictions in my own life, will lead me also, to good work.

What Do the Children Want?

There is not a darn thing those police officers can do (below) but take the students away. Listen them shouting shame on you, swine; and stay calm.

What has to be done, is beyond the hands of an individual, even of a Government.

But then again. It has to be done.

Go kids, go.

1968 is coming back with a vengeance.

I was so upset on October 2, 1968.

Nicholas Kristoff:

"The statistic that takes my breath away is this: The top 1 percent of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute."


NYT

Shame on You!

Joshua Clover

Riccati Equation

More than twenty years ago I had an idea. Riccati Quantum Mechanics. I was inspired by Bogdan Mielnik's students at CINVESTAV. I dawdle, and now other people have made progress in that direction: Marco Antonio Reyes, and Sergey V. Ershkov.

I feel I have to make out for lost time. Why am I interested in this, anyway?

Then it was a technical issue. I could solve differential equations in new ways, now I believe this interest is more general.

As I write in this blog, I see a new scientific method. This new method requires new interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, and even though, Riccati issues seem only technical. I hope I can make my point stronger this way.

As Bogdan showed, given a quantum spectrum, there are several quantum forces producing those observable numbers. Force is not a physical quantity in this new view, forces are devices to get good fits. What I care about is the fit, not the explanation. I see my point as neo-machian.

Maybe there are atoms, maybe there are fields, maybe there are forces, all I know is that there are good fits.

Gauss becomes the Prince of Science in my book.




Time?

Julian Barbour knew that no tenure was likely if he thought about time.

Wikipedia

Therefore he learned Russian and makes a living translating scientific papers.

Coincidentally, the Russians have an Institute.

Institute of Time Nature Explorations

What if they discover what time is?

Friday, November 18, 2011

The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically

"On a related, but more abstract note, the quantum state has the striking property of being an exponentially complicated object. Specifically, the number of real parameters needed to specify a quantum state is exponential in the number of systems n. This has a consequence for classical simulation of quantum systems. If a simulation is constrained by our assumptions - that is, if it must store in memory a state for a quantum system, with independent preparations assigned uncorrelated states - then it will need an amount of memory which is exponential in the number of quantum systems.


For these reasons and others, many will continue to hold that the quantum state is not a real object. We have shown that this is only possible if one or more of the assumptions above is dropped. More radical approaches [14] are careful to avoid associating quantum systems with any physical properties at all. The alternative is to seek physically well motivated reasons why the other two assumptions might fail."

arXiv

Friday, November 11, 2011

Rebel Roberto Bolano takes his position in the canon



ROBERTO Bolano was a renegade artist, always suspicious of success. Toothless, a heavy smoker with an atrocious diet and no sleeping habits to speak of, he died in 2003, age 50. This brilliant, rambunctious, hard-boiled literary nomad was born in Chile, moved to Mexico in his teens and went back to Chile in 1973 to support the socialist regime of president Salvador Allende. Arrested after the coup of September 11, 1973, that toppled Allende, he was forced into exile and eventually settled in the Catalonian town of Blanes.
Acclaimed in the Spanish-speaking world for his originality, he found a calling in Mexico, where he became the leader of a group of fringe poets (the infrarealistas, or "visceral realists") who ridiculed the Mexican literary establishment with a style that was triumphantly eclectic: part apocalyptic vision, part pulp and noir, existential meditation, surrealist dream sequence and more. But it is since his death that Bolano has become a totemic figure. Now he is seen as a martyr to literature when literature seems to matter less and less.
Such is the craze around the world for Bolano's oeuvre that almost everything he wrote is being made available in translation at a dizzying pace. In English, his luminous short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and his masterful novellas Distant Star and By Night in Chile have made it into the canon in Spanish departments and creative writing programs. In 2007 his magnum opus The Savage Detectives, which had been awarded in 1999 the Romulo Gallegos Prize, the highest distinction for a novel in the Hispanic world, was offered in translation. The story of Arturo Belano (the author's alter ego) and another visceral realist, who both search for the mysterious founder of the movement, it has been embraced by critics as proof that literature may be losing readers but it isn't losing its guts.
Free trial
Two other books by Bolano have also recently been released in English: a collection of poetry called The Romantic Dogs: 1980-1998 and his last, posthumous, novel 2666. They further serve to measure the extent of his genius.
His rhythmic sentences and his accumulating paragraphs build his plots tangentially, as if he wanted to make us impatient. He's showing us that while the world in which we live may appear to make sense, it is a chaotic landscape where everyone is lonely and confused, morality has broken down and the best anyone may do is escape - escape from one's self and from the idea of living with others - and indulge in the immediate satisfaction of instinctual needs.
In 2666, the central motif is moral inversion: good is evil and vice versa. The plot takes place in a US-Mexico border town called Santa Teresa, which resembles Ciudad Juarez and where hundreds of young women have been killed with impunity by a serial killer or killers in the past couple of decades. In Santa Teresa, nothing is real.
In one section that is a novella of its own, a group of international literary critics searches for Benno von Archimboldi, a German author and eternal Nobel Prize nominee who has disappeared from the public eye and may have ended up in Santa Teresa. In another, a black reporter for a Harlem magazine arrives in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, only to realise there's a larger story in the murdered senoritas. In a third part, a philosophy professor, Amalfitano, and his daughter make their way to Santa Teresa.
There are five sections and the diverse plots intersect by way of serendipitous connections among characters. 2666 is an extraordinary book, as ambitious a project as a Spanish-language fiction writer has embarked on. But it isn't altogether satisfying, not in the way earlier works such as The Savage Detectives were. Bolano wrote his last mega-narrative (in Spanish it has 1125 pages, 912 in English) in the last years of his life, with a death sentence hanging over him: He knew he would die soon of liver disease. So he gathered every bit of his energy to complete the manuscript just before he collapsed. What we have isn't quite a finished work. Ignacio Echevarria, a critic, Bolano's friend and executor of his estate, made some minor changes and sent the book to the printer.
Several sections feel incomplete, as if Bolano were merely accumulating material. And the last novella is somewhat of a disappointment. The mystery behind most of 2666, surrounding Archimboldi's Pynchonesque identity - Who is he? Where does he live? What does he even look like? - is resolved too easily, depriving the core of the plot of value. According to Echevarria, Bolano intended the narrator of 2666 to again be his alter ego, Belano. But the narrative is delivered in a third-person voice that belongs, at least as it stands, to no one in particular.
The novel (is that what it is?) feels like a tribute, if not a rewriting, of Jorge Luis Borges's fictitious review cum short story The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, which revolved around an invented Mumbai attorney and involved a search in which the searcher and the object of the search are the same. In similar fashion, The Savage Detectives was a stepchild of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, a playful novel that asks to be read in multiple ways, each allowing for a different narrative. In other words, Bolano wanted his books to feel infinite, and his readers to be mischievous.
Witnessing Bolano's canonisation in academe has been fascinating. Barely a few years ago, he was a supreme nobody; now The New Yorker puts its imprimatur on him with a review, he's a household name at symposiums and he's taught as a refreshing perspective, a kind of Jack Kerouac for the new millennium.
Alas, Bolano's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago I had a student who wrote his thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolano and illness, Bolano and the whodunit, Bolano and the beatniks, Bolano and eschatology, and so on. Since then, interviews, photographs, email messages - everything by or about him - are seen as discoveries, even though most of it was never lost to a Spanish-language audience.
The rapture must have been the same when Borges, long a commodity among a small cadre of followers in Argentina, shared with Samuel Beckett the International Publishers Prize in 1961. Suddenly he became an overnight sensation in translation across the world. Such instant celebrity occurs when writers are able to prove that the local is universal. They exist in their corners of the world but are able to re-create the world entire. For Borges, that happened because after World War II readers were eager to look at Latin America, and the so-called Third World in general, as a cradle of a world view that was different and refreshing.
And why Bolano now? Because once again, literature in the West seems to have grown complacent: it isn't so much written as manufactured. The genres dictated by mainstream publishing are suffocating. We're in need of a prophet - or an enfant terrible - to wake us from our slumber.
Of course, the way to neutralise a prophet is to tame him through acclaim. Bolano would have laughed at his arrival in Spanish departments. His mordant tongue frequently attacked the holy cows. He described writers such as Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende and Diamela Eltit as complacent, solipsistic and tedious. With Borges, he built his own parallel aesthetic tradition, a rebel's gallery of outlaws and pariahs. Yet he is moving steadily to the centre of the curriculum.
The attention, however, adds a welcome supplement to the repetitive teaching of the so-called boom masters of the 1960s. How many times should Carlos Fuentes's Aura, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Elena Poniatowska's Dear Diego be taught? They are all programmatic in their left-leaning politics. Bolano's work doesn't hew to any correct ideology. He is critical of the conformity of leftist writers, whom he describes as complacent and partners of the status quo. But he sees the right as bizarre. In the fictional Nazi Literature in the Americas (published in Spanish in 1996 and translated into English this year), the catalogue of perversions in an encyclopedia of right-wing writers emulates Borges's A Universal History of Infamy. And in By Night in Chile, an Opus Dei priest and literary critic reveals his connection to the Pinochet regime. Politics is often dark in the Southern Cone, but Bolano offers an underside that goes beyond easy-to-handle polarities.
All that produces a welcome whiplash for students. Studying him shatters the traditional boundaries of Latin American letters. This Chilean's Spanish is the most dazzling Mexican Spanish I've read. So translation is at the core of Bolano's endeavour: not the standard rendering of sentences from one language into another but the reimagining of a country's linguistic self.
Bolano didn't hold academic life in any esteem. Knowledge, his work suggests, comes to us in chaotic ways, when we least expect it. Whenever he portrays academics, they are dissatisfied types, looking for signs of intelligence everywhere but in their own profession. The model student for Bolano is irreverent, intolerant and self-taught.
Indeed, I doubt that a novel such as 2666 can be taught, for it begs to be found by readers in an accidental fashion, without instruction. Therein may lie the lesson to be learned from Bolano: rebellion and success do not rest easily with each other.
Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in the US. His latest book is Resurrecting Hebrew (Schocken, 2008).

New Scientific Method and Relativity

 Cafaro et al., just posted a paper: 1111.2348. They address the issue of how to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with Relativity. Of course Paul Dirac, did this many years ago, we have the so-called Dirac equation. The point is that the new ideas of Quantum Information, leave us a bit confused on how to make all that relativistic.

I find this relevant to my effort to state a New Scientific Method.

In my view there are two tasks, first to incorporate digital computers in the very essence of the Scientific Method: If you cannot program it, you don't understand it, as professor David Deutsch states in his new book, The Beginning of Infinity.

The second task is to define Physics, as the method to get mathematics to fit experimental data, no less and no more. If the booth fits ...

Along these lines of thought, how do I get ALL information tools to be relativistic?

I don't expect this to be possible, nevertheless, in every case, given the measurement situation, I will try to get the best fit, consistent with relativistic principles. If not successful in the relativization of the algorithm, so be it. Until and unless, I get a measurement, that seems to cry for a relativistic description, I will apply the idea again, the relativistic one should fit better, if not, I will be willing to put off relativity, for a better occasion, i.e., when it is needed to fit.

All this seems very ad-hoc; in my defense, I can only say, that given the powerful computers, and measurement instruments at our disposal today, we will manage.

The main point of my proposal is to make explicit, and thus understandable, the nature of the Scientific Method. What do we actually do?

Fit data.

My Daughter Was Born on 12/25/1981

I am informed, that adding these numbers one gets 29, which reduces to 11. Also her name Leza, can be assigned number 11.

I guess both coincidences bear well for her today.

Congratulations, dear one!

TKM (¡Te quiero mucho!, in kid's new shorthand)