Quantum Philosophy | Roland Omnes

Omnès emphasises throughout that no new principles, other than those described when quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s, are needed. Moreover, some additional principles which seemed to be required then (such as wavefunction collapse, or its slightly more formal sister, wavefunction reduction) are no longer needed. Classical behaviour can now be recovered in a system described entirely by a single, unitary^{[disambiguation needed]} (time-reversible) wavefunction.

The mathematical developments which allowed this progress have taken place in two fields: quantum decoherence and the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics.

The consistent histories approach makes mathematically explicit which sets of classical questions can be consistently asked of a single quantum system, and, conversely, which sets of questions are fundamentally inconsistent, and thus meaningless when asked together. We can therefore demonstrate formally why it is that the questions which Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen assumed could be asked together, of a single quantum system, simply cannot be asked together. On the other hand, we can demonstrate that classical, logical reasoning often does apply, even to quantum experiments – but we can now be mathematically exact about the limits of classical logic.

Quantum decoherence, on the other hand (in combination with the consistent histories approach), recovers classical behaviour at the macroscopic level. The formal mathematics of this approach allows us to demonstrate, finally, that is impossible (or rather, massively improbable) for a macroscopic Schrödinger's cat to exist for longer than a minuscule time (related to the macroscopic energy dissipation time by a factor involving the square of Planck's constant) in a quantum superposition of its |alive> and |dead> states. Even for a cat otherwise isolated from the rest of the Universe, and even with no observer present, there are so many unknowns in the quantum state of the whole cat, that the relevant mathematics determine that only the normally observed classical states of the cat are at all probable, except over the very shortest of timescales. This reasoning is developed formally within measurement theory, and applies to any macroscopic, non-super cooled measuring device, whether or not there is an observer to watch it.

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Indonesia War Over Atjeh: The Last Stand of Mecca Porch | Ricardo Side

Aceh (/ˈɑːtʃeɪ/; [ʔaˈtɕɛh]) is a special region (Indonesian: daerah istimewa) of Indonesia, located at the northern end of Sumatra. It is close to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India and separated from them by the Andaman Sea. Aceh was first known as Aceh Darussalam (1511–1959) and then later as the Daerah Istimewa Aceh (1959–2001), Nanggroë Aceh Darussalam (2001–2009) and Aceh (2009–present). Past spellings of Aceh include Acheh, Atjeh and Achin. The province of Aceh has the highest proportion of Muslims in Indonesia, mainly living according to Sharia customs and laws.^[4]

Aceh is thought to have been the place where Islam was first established in Southeast Asia. In the early seventeenth century the Sultanate of Aceh was the most wealthy, powerful and cultivated state in the Malacca Straits region. Aceh has a history of political independence and fierce resistance to control by outsiders, including the former Dutch colonists and the Indonesian government. Aceh has substantial natural resources, including oil and natural gas—some estimates put Aceh gas reserves as being the largest in the world. Relative to most of Indonesia, it is a religiously conservative area.^[5]

Aceh was the closest point of land to the epicenter of the massive 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which triggered a tsunami that devastated much of the western coast of the province, including part of the capital of Banda Aceh. Approximately 170,000 Indonesians were killed or went missing in the disaster, and approximately 500,000 were left homeless.^[6] This event helped trigger the peace agreement between the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), mediated by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, with the signing of a MoU on August 15, 2005. With the assistance of the European Union through the Aceh monitoring mission as of December 2005, the peace has held.

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The Price of Freedom: The Unfinished Diary!

The value of a thing is not determined by what you can do with it, but by what price you are willing to pay for it.

Freedom means that we take full responsibility for ourselves, our people, and our country; freedom means that we maintain the distance that separates us from others; freedom means that we are no longer afraid of hardship, difficulties, privation or death: he who has learned how to die can no longer become a slave or a colonial subject.

He who wants to be free must always be ever ready to go to war and to die for his freedom.

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The Battle For God-Karen Armstong

Armstrong's central case rests on the confusion between mythos and logos, using these in the technical sense suggested by Johannes Slok.^[2] Myth concerns "what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence...Myth was not concerned with practical matters but with meaning".^[3] By contrast "Logos was the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world". In religion, logos appears in legal systems and practical action. By the eighteenth century, "people in Europe and America began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious." Armstrong suggests that fundamentalists have turned their mythos into logos using the mindset of the modern scientific age.^[4]

The first part of the book, "The Old World and the New", compares the progression of the three monotheistic faiths between 1492, when Columbus discovered America, and 1870, when "The Franco-Prussian War had revealed the hideous effects of modern weaponry, and there was a dawning realisation that science might also have a malignant dimension."^[5] It traces the way Jews and Muslims modernized during this period.

This leads to the modern period described in part two, “Fundamentalism”, when there was a growing adoption of a literalist interpretation of scripture in the United States, which eventually gave rise to The Fundamentals, a series of 12 volumes refuting modern ideas published shortly before and during the World War I, of which 3 million copies were distributed to every pastor, professor and theological student across America by the largesse of oil millionaires. Though this led to a distinctive ideology, it was not till the 1980s that it emerged as a political force.

In Judaism, the growth of Zionism was given its biggest boost by the Holocaust which led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Although many traditional Jews migrated there, the most conservative rejected the secular interpretation of Zionism and it wasn't until the emergence of Gush Emunim after the Yom Kippur War in 1974 that fundamentalism emerged in Israel as a political force.

In Islam, fundamentalism did not emerge until modernization had taken hold, first in Egypt with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hasan al-Banna. Armstrong traces the development of Sunni fundamentalism under Sayyid Qutb and Shia fundamentalism under Ayatollah Khomeini.

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A Brief History of Time-Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time attempts to explain a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes and light cones, to the nonspecialist reader. Its main goal is to give an overview of the subject but, unusual for a popular science book, it also attempts to explain some complex mathematics. The 1996 edition of the book and subsequent editions discuss the possibility of time travel and wormholes and explore the possibility of having a universe without a quantum singularity at the beginning of time.

The author notes that an editor warned him that for every equation in the book the readership would be halved, hence it includes only a single equation: E = mc². Early in 1983, Hawking approached Simon Mitton, the editor in charge of astronomy books at Cambridge University Press, with his ideas for a popular book on cosmology. Mitton was doubtful about all the equations in the draft manuscript, which he felt would put off the buyers in airport bookshops that Hawking wished to reach. It was with some difficulty that he persuaded Hawking to drop all but one equation.^[4] In addition to Hawking's notable abstention from presenting equations, the book also simplifies matters by means of illustrations throughout the text, depicting.

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The Meaning of Relativity - Albert Eistein

in 1921, five years after the appearance of his comprehensive paper on general relativity and twelve years before he left Europe permanently to join the Institute for Advanced Study, Albert Einstein visited Princeton University, where he delivered the Stafford Little Lectures for that year. These four lectures constituted an overview of his then controversial theory of relativity. Princeton University Press made the lectures available under the title The Meaning of Relativity, the first book by Einstein to be produced by an American publisher. As subsequent editions were brought out by the Press, Einstein included new material amplifying the theory. A revised version of the appendix "Relativistic Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field," added to the posthumous edition of 1956, was Einstein's last scientific paper.

Review:

"A condensed unified presentation intended for one who has already gone through a standard text and digested the mechanics of tensor theory and the physical basis of relativity. Einstein's little book then serves as an excellent tying-together of loose ends and as a broad survey of the subject."--Physics Today

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Brian Greene vii

A Note on the Fifth Edition xxv

SPACE AND TIME IN PRE-RELATIVITY PHYSICS 1

THE THEORY OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY 24

THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY 55

THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY (CONTINUED) 79

APPENDIX FOR THE SECOND EDITION 109

APPENDIX II. RELATIVISTIC THEORY OF THE

NON-SYMMETRIC FIELD 133

Index 167

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Medical Pharmacology at a Glance

Widely recognised as the best starting point for pharmacology study, the internationally best-selling Medical Pharmacology at a Glance is an ideal companion for all students of the health sciences.

Key principles are supported by coloured schematic diagrams - invaluable as both an introduction to medical pharmacology, and revision in the run-up to pharmacology exams.

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The God Delusion Richard Dawkins Free Download

The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling^[1] non-fiction book by English biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford,^[2][3] and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's statement in Lila that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion".^[4]

As of January 2010, the English version of The God Delusion had sold over 2 million copies.^[5] It was ranked No.2 on the Amazon.com bestsellers' list in November 2006.^[6][7] In early December 2006, it reached No.4 in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list after nine weeks on the list.^[8] It remained on the list for 51 weeks until 30 September 2007.^[9] The German version, entitled Der Gotteswahn, had sold over 260,000 copies as of 28 January 2010.

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