Papers of John Von Neumann [Finding Aid]. Library of Congress
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6. Knowledge, Information, and Entropy the Book John Von
6. Knowledge, Information, and Entropy The book John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics contains a fascinating and informative article written by Eckehart Kohler entitled “Why von Neumann Rejected Carnap’s Dualism of Information Concept.” The topic is precisely the core issue before us: How is knowledge connected to physics? Kohler illuminates von Neumann’s views on this subject by contrasting them to those of Carnap. Rudolph Carnap was a distinguished philosopher, and member of the Vienna Circle. He was in some sense a dualist. He had studied one of the central problems of philosophy, namely the distinction between analytic statements and synthetic statements. (The former are true or false by virtue of a specified set of rules held in our minds, whereas the latter are true or false by virtue their concordance with physical or empirical facts.) His conclusions had led him to the idea that there are two different domains of truth, one pertaining to logic and mathematics and the other to physics and the natural sciences. This led to the claim that there are “Two Concepts of Probability,” one logical the other physical. That conclusion was in line with the fact that philosophers were then divided between two main schools as to whether probability should be understood in terms of abstract idealizations or physical sequences of outcomes of measurements. Carnap’s bifurcations implied a similar division between two different concepts of information, and of entropy. In 1952 Carnap was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and about to publish a work on his dualistic theory of information, according to which epistemological concepts like information should be treated separately from physics. -
Motion and Time Study the Goals of Motion Study
Motion and Time Study The Goals of Motion Study • Improvement • Planning / Scheduling (Cost) •Safety Know How Long to Complete Task for • Scheduling (Sequencing) • Efficiency (Best Way) • Safety (Easiest Way) How Does a Job Incumbent Spend a Day • Value Added vs. Non-Value Added The General Strategy of IE to Reduce and Control Cost • Are people productive ALL of the time ? • Which parts of job are really necessary ? • Can the job be done EASIER, SAFER and FASTER ? • Is there a sense of employee involvement? Some Techniques of Industrial Engineering •Measure – Time and Motion Study – Work Sampling • Control – Work Standards (Best Practices) – Accounting – Labor Reporting • Improve – Small group activities Time Study • Observation –Stop Watch – Computer / Interactive • Engineering Labor Standards (Bad Idea) • Job Order / Labor reporting data History • Frederick Taylor (1900’s) Studied motions of iron workers – attempted to “mechanize” motions to maximize efficiency – including proper rest, ergonomics, etc. • Frank and Lillian Gilbreth used motion picture to study worker motions – developed 17 motions called “therbligs” that describe all possible work. •GET G •PUT P • GET WEIGHT GW • PUT WEIGHT PW •REGRASP R • APPLY PRESSURE A • EYE ACTION E • FOOT ACTION F • STEP S • BEND & ARISE B • CRANK C Time Study (Stopwatch Measurement) 1. List work elements 2. Discuss with worker 3. Measure with stopwatch (running VS reset) 4. Repeat for n Observations 5. Compute mean and std dev of work station time 6. Be aware of allowances/foreign element, etc Work Sampling • Determined what is done over typical day • Random Reporting • Periodic Reporting Learning Curve • For repetitive work, worker gains skill, knowledge of product/process, etc over time • Thus we expect output to increase over time as more units are produced over time to complete task decreases as more units are produced Traditional Learning Curve Actual Curve Change, Design, Process, etc Learning Curve • Usually define learning as a percentage reduction in the time it takes to make a unit. -
Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the US Navy, And
PATRONAGE AND SCIENCE: ROGER REVELLE, THE NAVY, AND OCEANOGRAPHY AT THE SCRIPPS INSTITUTION RONALD RAINGER Department of History, Texas Tech University,Lubbock, TX 79409-1013, [email protected] Originally published as: Rainger, Ronald. "Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the U.S. Navy, and Oceanography at the Scripps Institution." Earth sciences history : journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society 19(1):58-89, 2000. This article is reprinted courtesy of the History of the Sciences Society from Earth Sciences History, 2000, 19:58-89. ABSTRACT In the years between 1940 and 1955, American oceanography experienced considerable change. Nowhere was that more true than at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. There Roger Revelle (1909-1991) played a major role in transforming a small, seaside laboratory into one of the leading oceanographic centers in the world. This paper explores the impact that World War II had on oceanography and his career. Through an analysis of his activities as a naval officer responsible for promoting oceanography in the navy and wartime civilian laboratories, this article examines his understanding of the relationship between military patronage and scientific research and the impact that this relationship had on disciplinary and institutional developments at Scripps. In 1947 Harald Sverdrup (1888-1957) and Roger Revelle, two of the leading oceanographers in the United States, made plans for Revelle's return to the Scripps 2 Institution of Oceanography (SIO). After six years of coordinating and promoting oceanography within the U.S. Navy, Revelle was returning to the center where he had earned his Ph.D. -
THE INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDY Princeton, New Jersey
THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY Princeton, New Jersey Some Introductory Information November, 195>1 HERBERT H. I AP£.rS N. Y. The Institute for Advanced Study is devoted to the encouragement, support and patronage of learning—of science, in the old, broad, undiffer- entiated sense of the word. The Institute partakes of the character both of a university and of a research institute; but it also differs in signifi- cant ways from both. It is unlike a university, for instance, in its small size—its academic mem- bership at any one time numbers only a little over a hundred. It is unlike a university in that it has no formal curriculum, no scheduled courses of instruction, no commitment that all branches of learning be represented in its faculty and members. It is unlike a research institute in that its pur- poses are broader, that it supports many separate fields of study, that, with one exception, it main- tains no laboratories; and above all in that it wel- comes temporary members, whose intellectual develop- ment and growth are one of its principal purposes, ^he Institute, in short, is devoted to learning, in the double sense of the continued education of the individual, and of the intellectual enterprise on which he is embarked. The Institute for Advanced Study was founded in 1930, by a gift of Mr. Louis Bamberger and his sister, Mrs, Felix Fuld, The Founders entrusted the general supervision and furthering of the Institute's purposes to a Board of Trustees of fif- teen members, and to a Director elected by them, who should have primary responsibility for its academic affairs. -
Are Information, Cognition and the Principle of Existence Intrinsically
Adv. Studies Theor. Phys., Vol. 7, 2013, no. 17, 797 - 818 HIKARI Ltd, www.m-hikari.com http://dx.doi.org/10.12988/astp.2013.3318 Are Information, Cognition and the Principle of Existence Intrinsically Structured in the Quantum Model of Reality? Elio Conte(1,2) and Orlando Todarello(2) (1)School of International Advanced Studies on Applied Theoretical and non Linear Methodologies of Physics, Bari, Italy (2)Department of Neurosciences and Sense Organs University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Bari, Italy Copyright © 2013 Elio Conte and Orlando Todarello. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The thesis of this paper is that Information, Cognition and a Principle of Existence are intrinsically structured in the quantum model of reality. We reach such evidence by using the Clifford algebra. We analyze quantization in some traditional cases of quantum mechanics and, in particular in quantum harmonic oscillator, orbital angular momentum and hydrogen atom. Keywords: information, quantum cognition, principle of existence, quantum mechanics, quantization, Clifford algebra. Corresponding author: [email protected] Introduction The earliest versions of quantum mechanics were formulated in the first decade of the 20th century following about the same time the basic discoveries of physics as 798 Elio Conte and Orlando Todarello the atomic theory and the corpuscular theory of light that was basically updated by Einstein. Early quantum theory was significantly reformulated in the mid- 1920s by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and Pascual Jordan, who created matrix mechanics, Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger who introduced wave mechanics, and Wolfgang Pauli and Satyendra Nath Bose who introduced the statistics of subatomic particles. -
Toward a New Science of Information
Data Science Journal, Volume 6, Supplement, 7 April 2007 TOWARD A NEW SCIENCE OF INFORMATION D Doucette1*, R Bichler 2, W Hofkirchner2, and C Raffl2 *1 The Science of Information Institute, 1737 Q Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20009, USA Email: [email protected] 2 ICT&S Center, University of Salzburg - Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society, Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse 18, 5020 Salzburg, Austria Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT The concept of information has become a crucial topic in several emerging scientific disciplines, as well as in organizations, in companies and in everyday life. Hence it is legitimate to speak of the so-called information society; but a scientific understanding of the Information Age has not had time to develop. Following this evolution we face the need of a new transdisciplinary understanding of information, encompassing many academic disciplines and new fields of interest. Therefore a Science of Information is required. The goal of this paper is to discuss the aims, the scope, and the tools of a Science of Information. Furthermore we describe the new Science of Information Institute (SOII), which will be established as an international and transdisciplinary organization that takes into consideration a larger perspective of information. Keywords: Information, Science of Information, Information Society, Transdisciplinarity, Science of Information Institute (SOII), Foundations of Information Science (FIS) 1 INTRODUCTION Information is emerging as a new and large prospective area of study. The notion of information has become a crucial topic in several emerging scientific disciplines such as Philosophy of Information, Quantum Information, Bioinformatics and Biosemiotics, Theory of Mind, Systems Theory, Internet Research, and many more. -
The Intellectual Journey of Hua Loo-Keng from China to the Institute for Advanced Study: His Correspondence with Hermann Weyl
ISSN 1923-8444 [Print] Studies in Mathematical Sciences ISSN 1923-8452 [Online] Vol. 6, No. 2, 2013, pp. [71{82] www.cscanada.net DOI: 10.3968/j.sms.1923845220130602.907 www.cscanada.org The Intellectual Journey of Hua Loo-keng from China to the Institute for Advanced Study: His Correspondence with Hermann Weyl Jean W. Richard[a],* and Abdramane Serme[a] [a] Department of Mathematics, The City University of New York (CUNY/BMCC), USA. * Corresponding author. Address: Department of Mathematics, The City University of New York (CUN- Y/BMCC), 199 Chambers Street, N-599, New York, NY 10007-1097, USA; E- Mail: [email protected] Received: February 4, 2013/ Accepted: April 9, 2013/ Published: May 31, 2013 \The scientific knowledge grows by the thinking of the individual solitary scientist and the communication of ideas from man to man Hua has been of great value in this respect to our whole group, especially to the younger members, by the stimulus which he has provided." (Hermann Weyl in a letter about Hua Loo-keng, 1948).y Abstract: This paper explores the intellectual journey of the self-taught Chinese mathematician Hua Loo-keng (1910{1985) from Southwest Associ- ated University (Kunming, Yunnan, China)z to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The paper seeks to show how during the Sino C Japanese war, a genuine cross-continental mentorship grew between the prolific Ger- man mathematician Hermann Weyl (1885{1955) and the gifted mathemati- cian Hua Loo-keng. Their correspondence offers a profound understanding of a solidarity-building effort that can exist in the scientific community. -
1 the Principle of Wave–Particle Duality: an Overview
3 1 The Principle of Wave–Particle Duality: An Overview 1.1 Introduction In the year 1900, physics entered a period of deep crisis as a number of peculiar phenomena, for which no classical explanation was possible, began to appear one after the other, starting with the famous problem of blackbody radiation. By 1923, when the “dust had settled,” it became apparent that these peculiarities had a common explanation. They revealed a novel fundamental principle of nature that wascompletelyatoddswiththeframeworkofclassicalphysics:thecelebrated principle of wave–particle duality, which can be phrased as follows. The principle of wave–particle duality: All physical entities have a dual character; they are waves and particles at the same time. Everything we used to regard as being exclusively a wave has, at the same time, a corpuscular character, while everything we thought of as strictly a particle behaves also as a wave. The relations between these two classically irreconcilable points of view—particle versus wave—are , h, E = hf p = (1.1) or, equivalently, E h f = ,= . (1.2) h p In expressions (1.1) we start off with what we traditionally considered to be solely a wave—an electromagnetic (EM) wave, for example—and we associate its wave characteristics f and (frequency and wavelength) with the corpuscular charac- teristics E and p (energy and momentum) of the corresponding particle. Conversely, in expressions (1.2), we begin with what we once regarded as purely a particle—say, an electron—and we associate its corpuscular characteristics E and p with the wave characteristics f and of the corresponding wave. -
Prizes and Awards Session
PRIZES AND AWARDS SESSION Wednesday, July 12, 2021 9:00 AM EDT 2021 SIAM Annual Meeting July 19 – 23, 2021 Held in Virtual Format 1 Table of Contents AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture ................................................................................................... 3 George B. Dantzig Prize ............................................................................................................................. 5 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition .................................................................................... 7 George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics ......................................................................................... 8 I.E. Block Community Lecture .................................................................................................................. 9 John von Neumann Prize ......................................................................................................................... 11 Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization .......................................................................................... 13 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize .......................................................................................................................... 15 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession ....................................................................... 17 SIAM Student Paper Prizes .................................................................................................................... -
Newtonian Mechanics Is Most Straightforward in Its Formulation and Is Based on Newton’S Second Law
CLASSICAL MECHANICS D. A. Garanin September 30, 2015 1 Introduction Mechanics is part of physics studying motion of material bodies or conditions of their equilibrium. The latter is the subject of statics that is important in engineering. General properties of motion of bodies regardless of the source of motion (in particular, the role of constraints) belong to kinematics. Finally, motion caused by forces or interactions is the subject of dynamics, the biggest and most important part of mechanics. Concerning systems studied, mechanics can be divided into mechanics of material points, mechanics of rigid bodies, mechanics of elastic bodies, and mechanics of fluids: hydro- and aerodynamics. At the core of each of these areas of mechanics is the equation of motion, Newton's second law. Mechanics of material points is described by ordinary differential equations (ODE). One can distinguish between mechanics of one or few bodies and mechanics of many-body systems. Mechanics of rigid bodies is also described by ordinary differential equations, including positions and velocities of their centers and the angles defining their orientation. Mechanics of elastic bodies and fluids (that is, mechanics of continuum) is more compli- cated and described by partial differential equation. In many cases mechanics of continuum is coupled to thermodynamics, especially in aerodynamics. The subject of this course are systems described by ODE, including particles and rigid bodies. There are two limitations on classical mechanics. First, speeds of the objects should be much smaller than the speed of light, v c, otherwise it becomes relativistic mechanics. Second, the bodies should have a sufficiently large mass and/or kinetic energy. -
Seeking Signals in The
$: t j ! Ij ~ ,l IOJ I ~ , I I I! 1I I 1 " Edited by Elizabeth N. Shor Layout by jo p. griffith June 1997 Published by: Marine Physical Laboratory ofthe Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California, San Diego We gratefully acknowledge the following for use of their photographs in this publication: Christine Baldwin W. Robert Cherry Defense Nuclear Agency Fritz Goro William S. Hodgkiss Alan C. Jones MPL Photo Archives SIO Archives (UCSD) Eric T. Slater SIO Reference Series 97-5 ii Contents Introduction: How MPL Came To Be Betty Shor 1 Carl Eckart and the Marine Physical Laboratory Leonard Liebermann 6 Close Encounter of the Worst Kind Fred Fisher and Christine Baldwin 9 Early Days of Seismic and Magnetic Programs at MPL Arthur D. Raft 10 Recollections of Work at the Marine Physical Laboratory: A Non-Academic Point of View Dan Gibson 23 Capricorn Expedition, 1952 Alan C. Jones 39 Que Sera Sera R. J. Smith 42 A Beginning in Undersea Research Fred Noel Spiess ....... 46 The Value of MPL to the Navy Charles B. Bishop 51 The Outhouse Fred Fisher ....... 54 Exploring the Gulf of Alaska and Beyond George G. Shor, Jr 55 Chinook Expedition, 1956 Alan C. Jones 59 Operation HARDTACK I W. Robert Cherry 62 DELTIC and DIMUS, Two Siblings Victor C. Anderson 65 MPL and ARTEMIS Victor C. Anderson 71 Early Days of MPL Christine Baldwin 78 There's Always a Way Around the Rules George G. Shor, Jr 82 iii A Saga from Graduate Student to FLIP Fred Fisher 85 Anchoring FLIP in Deep Water Earl Bronson 95 Then There was SLIP Fred Fisher ...... -
Introducing the 1966 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecturer
INTRODUCING THE 1966 ALFRED KORZYBSKI MEMORIAL LECTURER Eugene P. Wigner Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics, Princeton University, 1963 Nobel Laureate for Physics It is a very great pleasure to be called upon to say a few words about Alvin Weinberg . I have known him now for almost 25 years, but such is his modesty and inclination toward self-effacement that I know very little about him through himself . He was born in the windy city of Chicago in 1915, went to school there, both lower ones and the University, married there, and had his first job there . He is a physicist and had, among others, the great Carl Eckart as his teacher . He was just about 22 when he published his first paper, in collaboration with Eckart, on a subject of theoretical physics, then in the foreground of interest . He taught physics for a year, then became interested in biophysics . For a few years he was Research Assistant at Rashevsky's Institute at the University of Chicago and published about ten papers centered around the sub- ject of nerve conduction . Nevertheless, when the war broke out and physicists were urgently needed for the uranium project at the University of Chicago, it was natural to call on Dr . Weinberg for help, and he readily followed the call . This was an important turn in Dr . Weinberg's life . He had an opportunity to work in virgin territory, and his abilities and gifts unfolded rapidly . It was at this time that I met him . We were both members of the 8 theoretical team in charge of establishing a theory of the nuclear chain reaction as well as designing a large reactor, capable of producing large amounts of the nuclear fuel and explosive, plutonium .