Einstein wrote the following to Max Born (one of the fathers of Quantum Mechanics) in a letter sent to Born in 1926, and that was part of an extensive correspondence between these eminent scientists:
“Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe.”
Stephen Hawking thinks he does, referring to Black Holes:
In 1989 British mathematician Ian Stewart published a book introducing a wider readership to chaos theory, and using the famous quote from Einstein in its tile: Does God Play Dice?: The New Mathematics of Chaos.
Chaos theory
Q. Why chaos theory?
A. Because . . .
The main catalyst for the development of chaos theory was the electronic computer. Much of the mathematics of chaos theory involves the repeated iteration of simple mathematical formulas, which would be impractical to do by hand. Electronic computers made these repeated calculations practical, while figures and images made it possible to visualize these systems.
Edward Lorenz was an early pioneer of the theory. His interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961. Lorenz was using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again, and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He did this by entering a printout of the data that corresponded to conditions in the middle of the original simulation. To his surprise, the weather the machine began to predict was completely different from the previous calculation. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 printed as 0.506. This difference is tiny, and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have no practical effect. However, Lorenz discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in long-term outcome. Lorenz's discovery, which gave its name to Lorenz attractors, showed that even detailed atmospheric modelling cannot, in general, make precise long-term weather predictions.
"Chaos" is an interdisciplinary theory stating that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The butterfly effect describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state:
e.g. a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Texas.Small differences in initial conditions, such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation, yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction of their behavior impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.
Application of "chaos"
Chaos theory was born from observing weather patterns, but it has become applicable to a variety of other situations. Some areas benefiting from chaos theory today are geology, mathematics, microbiology, biology, computer science, economics, engineering, algorithmic trading, meteorology, philosophy, anthropology, physics, politics, population dynamics, robotics and psychology.
LODE 1992 and Re:LODE 2017, pattern recognition, psychology and the relationship between perception and environment
Some art-based research activities encourage access to a space for its audience that is, potentially, capable of provoking perceptions. The setting for LODE and Re:LODE is connecting to, and evoking, places that though "elsewhere", are made real through the artworks' relationship to an information environment that is also a "real" environment.
James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.
Gibson stressed the importance of the environment, in particular, the (direct) perception of how the environment of an organism affords various actions to the organism. Thus, an appropriate analysis of the environment was crucial for an explanation of perceptually guided behaviour. He argued that animals and humans stand in a 'systems' or 'ecological' relation to the environment, such that to adequately explain some behaviour it was necessary to study the environment or niche in which the behaviour took place and, especially, the information that 'epistemically connects' the organism to the environment.
It is Gibson's emphasis that the foundation for perception is ambient, ecologically available information – as opposed to peripheral or internal sensations – that makes Gibson's perspective unique in perceptual science in particular and cognitive science in general.
The aphorism: "Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of" captures that idea.
Gibson's theory of perception is information-based rather than sensation-based and to that extent, an analysis of the environment (in terms of affordances), and the concomitant specificational information that the organism detects about such affordances, is central to the ecological approach to perception. Throughout the 1970s and up until his death in 1979, Gibson increased his focus on the environment through development of the theory of affordances - the real, perceivable opportunities for action in the environment, that are specified by ecological information.
Gibson's tenet was that "perception is based on information, not on sensations", his work and that of his contemporaries today can be seen as crucial for keeping prominent the primary question of what is perceived (i.e., affordances, via information) – before questions of mechanism and material implementation are considered. Together with a contemporary emphasis on dynamical systems theory and complexity theory as a necessary methodology for investigating the structure of ecological information, the Gibsonian approach has maintained its relevance and applicability to the larger field of cognitive science.
Developments in cognition studies which consider the role of embodied cognition and action in psychology, or enactivism, can be seen to support his basic position.
Right now, as you are reading this sentence, ask what your head is inside of.
Thanks
The title of this page is a translation, from the French, of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard".
Your head is inside this poem . . .
The poem is spread over 20 pages, in various typefaces, amidst liberal amounts of blank space. Each pair of consecutive facing pages is to be read as a single panel; the text flows back and forth across the two pages, along irregular lines.
Feel the space . . .
Listen to the sounds of the gaps . . .
MIND THE GAP!
PROBE:
"The Gap is Where the Action Is"
Instant information reveals a wide diversity of new patterns of change; which entice everybody to anticipate changes to come. Ordinary people are thus inspired with the mania which is born of perception, not of the connection, but of the interval between the now and the rapidly approaching new situation.
This becomes a way of living "as if every moment were your next." The instant and simultaneous have no sequence or connections, but are characterized by resonant intervals and discontinuity.
In the new world environment of instant information there is need to pay attention to the neglected factor of the gap or interval as crux in creating inflation. As long as there is an interval of play between the wheel and the axle, there is a rotary action. It is the interval of play that keeps the wheel and axle in touch.
And the gap or interval is "where the action is." This fact has gained special attention from the new physics; and it is in the very opening of "The Nature of the Chemical Bond" that Linus Pauling explains there are "no connections" in matter. The development of the theory of quantum mechanics has also introduced into chemical theory a new concept, that of resonance ... and it is our resonant interval ..."
What is most relevant here to the nature of inflation may perhaps be seen from the way in which the gap or interval in things creates the mentality of the gambler: He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who fears to put it to the touch To win or lose it all.
It is precisely "touch that is the resonating world of the gap or interval. Touch is literally created by a resonant interval, between, say the hand and the thing. If there were any connection between the hand and the thing, there would be no hand.
The gambler is above all the man who must stay in touch, and in the new "physics of the instantaneous electric environment it is precisely the resonant interval or "touch" that characterizes the information that constitutes the universal accessibility of instant information.
Marshall McLuhan quoted on the McLuhan On Maui webpage
California Split is a 1974 film directed by Robert Altman and starring Elliott Gould and George Segal as a pair of gamblers and was the first non-Cinerama film to use eight-track stereo sound. This allowed eight separate audio channels to be recorded and helped develop Altman’s trademark of overlapping dialogue. To this end, he gave the supporting actors and extras significant emphasis on the soundtrack. A number of the extras were members of Synanon, an organization for ex-addicts. Altman also used champion poker player Amarillo Slim in the movie "to add drama to the poker game for the actors and crew. He elevated the game to a very high professional level." He had originally considered Haskell Wexler to be the director of photography on the film, but went with newcomer Paul Lohmann instead. Walsh remembers that Altman defended the choice by saying, "They could create a look together, and he might get into conflict with Haskell or other people about making it a little prettier than it should be." He ended up making the film in Los Angeles and Reno, with the latter location being very effective in keeping everyone in the spirit of the movie. Altman said in an interview, "Everybody was involved in that atmosphere, and there was a sense of reality because one minute you were downstairs in the Mapes casino losing money and winning money, and then a minute later you were upstairs on the set filming a crap game."
While on location in Reno, actress Barbara Ruick, who played a Reno barmaid, died at the age of 43, of a cerebral hemorrhage in her hotel room. Her husband, famed film composer John Williams, was left widowed with their three children.
The film was dedicated to her.
Detail
Pattern recognition and LODE 1992
Many of the stories from the 22 places, unpredictable stories from places chosen from an arbitrary vector, the LODE line and its zone that links Hull with Liverpool, are about the way increases in productive power (technology) presses on population.
Pattern recognition and Re:LODE 2017
The Cargo of Questions 2017 was equally unpredictable. The questions raised along the length of the LODE Line and its zone are clear, the actually existing globalised capitalist system of production and consumption is incapable of addressing the threat to humanity of climate change. So, there are two questions:
Q. 1. Capitalism or Post-capitalism? If the answer is capitalism, this will ensure that the planet becomes uninhabitable for future human populations?
Q. 2. Is this a choice?
End note:
A cup of tea . . .
In 1912 Picasso's papier collé Un Coup de The, the truncated newspaper headline suggests both a cup of tea and the phrase "coup de théâtre", that, as the French language Wikipedia page explains is;
un événement imprévu (pour le spectateur et, parfois, certains personnages), survenant au cours d’une pièce de théâtre.Translation;
Cet effet, imprévu, marque un changement soudain dans l’action dramatique et dans la situation des personnages. Ce rebondissement, ce changement brutal de situation produit de grands mouvements dans l’âme des personnages et des spectateurs. Il modifie le cours de l’action et relance l’intérêt. C’est le signal brusque, éclatant, d’une péripétie. Il consiste quelquefois en un seul mot contenant toute une révélation, plus souvent dans un incident, une surprise, une rencontre, une reconnaissance, un ordre du souverain, ou, comme chez les anciens, l’intervention d’un dieu.
an unforeseen event (for the spectator and, sometimes, certain characters), occurring during a play .
This effect, unexpected, marks a sudden change in the dramatic action and the situation of the characters. This rebound, this brutal change of situation produces great movements in the soul of the characters and spectators. It changes the price of the action and raises the interest. It is the sudden, brilliant signal of an event . It consists sometimes in a single word containing a whole revelation, more often in an incident, a surprise, an encounter, a recognition, an order of the sovereign, or, as with the ancients, the intervention of a god.
. . . or a throw of the dice?
In the article Mallarmé, Picasso and the aesthetic of the newspaper by Linda Goddard, in Word & Image - A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry
Volume 22, 2006 - Issue 4. Pages 293-303 | Published online: 01 Jun 2012, the Abstract runs thus:
In ‘Crise de vers’ (1897), Mallarmé wrote that the act of composing poetry ‘consiste à voir soudain qu'une idee se fractionne en un nombre de motifs egaux par valeur et à les grouper’. This principle of fragmentation and unity is embodied in the typographical arrangement of his 1897 poem ‘Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard’ much as it is in the assemblage of paper fragments in Picasso's 1912 papiers collés. Organized across the double spread of the page, words and phrases in ‘Un coup de Des’ belong simultaneously to different syntactic groups. The title, integrated into the main body of the text, and the surrounding white with which it interacts, are equally important components of the poem. The final line, ‘Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Des’, brings the work full circle so that the battle between chance and structure can begin again.
. . . so the work begins again!
