Philosophy Is The Love Of Wisdom, But What Is Love And What Is Wisdom?

PHILOSOPHY: BRAIN ROOTED IN SELF-INTERESTED GREATER SMARTS:

Love is fundamentally gearing the mind towards appreciating and helping others, fellow souls, infants, births of intelligence and consciousness, the species, life…. And wisdom also means the same, in the end, the promotion of life. Thus philosophy can be viewed as the square of love, and the square of intelligence. In practice, deep down inside, love and intelligence are pretty much the same: they promote life. And life is happiness! I point this out, because most Twentieth Century philosophies with great impact have been in denial (Heideggerism/Nazism), or unappreciative (existentialism/absurdism), or exploitative (capitalism/Marxism) of life… Thus most dominant philosophies of the Twentieth Century have been fundamentally anti-philosophical, because fundamentally antagonistic, or alien, to love and wisdom. 

Indeed, searching for wisdom started with bacteria searching for sweets, billions of years ago. That was the birth of intelligence; it took billions of years thereafter to evolve brains. Wisdom is thus about finding how nature works and finding strategies to make it work in a more self-serving way, at the cost of increased logical complexity fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Wisdom searches for how to become smarter at promoting life.

This search for ever more elaborated strategies is engineered by ever more sophisticated mental networks. What wisdom is originally for in particular excludes at its roots philosophies like Heidegger’s or Nazism, which defined being and time with a count down to death: such ideologies don’t promote life, but its exact opposite, death. Bacteria’s earliest form of intelligence searched for sweets, not death. Actually it also searches to avoid death.

Similarly, when Nietzsche claimed intelligence is all about concentrating the will in loving fate, amor fati, the eternal return of the same, this suffering soul, half blind and soon to go insane, misses the point that intelligence appeared to find sweets, and improve life. Now, of course, Nietzsche had to embrace fate, considering his dreadful diseases. Otherwise he would have had to embrace opium (if he could afford it) and death. Amor fati is often a good strategy

Intelligence didn’t appear for more of the same, but better strategies of the similar drive to make life tastier. Life is not an eternal return of the same, but an evolution towards ever smarter self-sustainability, and ever increased complexity (as Lamarck pointed out in 1800 CE).

Bacteria never imagined themselves as little Sisyphuses, always doing the same thing for no improvement, and no enjoyment. More sugar was an improvement, a very sustainable improvement, as it could be repeated all the time, activating reward circuitry indefinitively. Camus didn’t need to order bacteria to be happy. Nor do bacteria need Camus to go away from poison.

The roots of wisdom are very pragmatic, and intelligence makes models of nature to outsmart it by creating newer and in a sense better nature. 

Wisdom’s roots may not be noble: it is smart to acknowledge this… but the towering heights of complexity and subtlety they sustain are. And as those complications blow in the winds of contingency they reach beyond themselves where no nature was there before.

California Western Monarchs, migrating butterflies, in love… and how much wisdom do you need to migrate?

Patrice Ayme

We Are Lions

I have walked to lions resting below trees in the shade, in the wild, in Africa, as a child. When healthy, lions consider such a situation, and out of caution and careful respect for humans, rise up to the occasion… and walk away. The exhibition of respect has to be mutual for this to work well. One never forgets half a dozen lionesses slowly rising and ambling away as disarmed human child approaches.

Lions used to be ubiquitous, during millions of years of human evolution in the savannah park, because lions live off big game but also smaller game, all the way down to rabbits. So lions influenced a lot of what became human psychobiology.

However, during the neolithic, the last 15,000 years or so, lions were replaced by massive quantities of human cattle and sheep, changing the composition of the atmosphere, with an abundance of methane which may have prevented serious planetary cooling.

Yet, lions stayed a symbol of … human power…. Because humans dominated lions, and lions had to be dominated, for life to get to space. Now we have to care for lions directly, and be grateful.

Because, deep down inside, we humans, to subdue lions as we had to, we became ourselves, to some extent, lions...

Coat of arms of Edward III, king of England, grandson of the iron king of France Philipp IV Le Bel… and thus Edward III was king of France, all the sons of Philipp The Fair, and his other grandson, having died in quick succession, in the real game of thrones... Some of them may have been helped by poison thanks to the famous Countess of Artois who had stolen that County from her even more formidable nephew who in turn incited Edward III to go get his due, the kingdom of France (so that he himself could recover his own County; his habit of leading battle in a scarlet outfit may have led to his death on the battlefield)… In any case this Franco-French quarrel,, the “100 year war” started around 1330 CE and lasted until 1815…

The three lions represent England, Normandy and Aquitania. The flowers of Lys represent the kingdom of France (actually technically an empire from the Tenth Century partition) . All over Europe, lions represented power. European lions went extinct less than 24 centuries ago…

Patrice Ayme

Aborting World Wars: A Timely Art.

World War Three is growing, but can still be aborted with decisive, that is, military, action.

Ian Miller asks: “So the strategy for avoiding a big war is to ramp up a small war?”

Absolutely! Same idea as cutting off a limb before generalized gangrene, or same idea as vaccination, or same idea as drenching a fire when it gets started. The point is that moods propagate. When tyrants see other tyrants thrive, they do the same, and make alliances with them. That’s how the Roman civilization collapsed within a few years, bringing demographic collapse of up to 90%, and extremely lowered standards of living for survivors. 

Generally big wars start as a more tyrannical or plutocratic regime invading versus a more democratic or benevolent regime defending. Or vultures or scavenging nomads against settled civilization. Examples of this are legions in the last 5,000 years. 

The model applies even to inter-European wars of the last millennium: if one digs, one can always find bad guys or bad acts fomenting the pits. A refined example was the Pitts Prime Ministers of the UK who absolutely wanted a war with France in the Eighteenth Century. Gross examples are the Huns, Avars and Mongols invading Europe. The latter were all stopped by force (including in China, see the Ming rebellion).

If a morally-worse regime is crushed early on, it will stop. Had the US joined France in 1914, or 1939, the world wars would have probably stopped in 1915 and 1940, respectively. The Kaiser would have run out of ammunition, and Hitler out of generals.

The strategy to prevent a world war is to crush decisively attempts of tyrants to get a cascading advantage. This argument was made by Themistocles regarding Persia. Athens followed him, and Persia got crushed at Marathon, and later on during the second invasion attempt, thanks to Themistocles’ trireme fleet.

The argument that one should crush the tyrant early was repeated ad nauseam by philosopher and statesman Demosthenenes regarding Philipp of Macedonia. And it failed, by a hair… resulting in a 23 centurie eclipse of democracy. Had the Spartans been at the decisive battle, Macedonia would barely be mentioned in history books: Philipp and Alexander nearly got defeated, a few thousands Spartans would have won the battle.

Notice that in the case of Putin, “ramping up” was his work, devastating Chechnya (1999); then invading Georgia (2008)… where it was stopped by US soldiers’ presence… more than a thousand of them, advisers; then Ukraine (2014) 

Themistocles

Patrice Ayme

METAMORALITY INTEGRATES CRUELTY As Part of ULTIMATE HUMANISM

As if cruelty and viciousness were forlorn orphans, traditional humanism tends to excuse and infantilize them. Confronted with the inexcusable… traditional humanists make excuses. Surely they would not have done it, with a proper education involving nature, as Sade pointed out. If cruelty always came from fear and insecurity, it would always be excused. For example one could apply the logic to mass murderers such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stalin or Hitler. The poor little ones felt afraid and insecure, so they had to invade and kill millions. Poor Kaiser, self-declared preferred grandson of queen Victoria, yet… with a crippled arm.

If one believed that fear and insecurity bred cruelty, one could say: Putin is very short, and he had a hard life, so he was very afraid and insecure. Now he is even more afraid and insecure, turning him even more cruel. Putin killed hundreds of thousands, soon he will kill millions. And guess what? It’s because he feels afraid and insecure!

So what to do? Send Putin flowers, express our undying love for him, make him feel safe and secure. Resisting the invasion of Ukraine was all wrong! We should have turned the other cheek! Made Putin feel good! We are the problem: we made Putin feel bad!

In truth, when Obama “reset” with Putin, the wittingly naive US president deliberately ignored Putin’s cruelty, blatant since 1999 with his holocaust in Chechnya. Later Obama turned fully conspiratorial, confidently informing fellow war criminal Medvedev: ”Tell Vladimir I’ll have more freedom after the election”. That’s how denial of cruelty is instrumentalized as an accomplice of cruelty.  

Not understanding the roots, importance and justifications of viciousness and cruelty makes it impossible to understand, and thus stop, Putin’s Russia, a brutalist state based on the worst dark side, lived and thus, expected by its deluded, raging folks.

Trying to explain viciousness and cruelty as the result of mistreatment is to try to deprive viciousness and cruelty of their own free will, and to devalue those primary agents into secondary effects.. 

In truth, cruelty is its own neurological space. It does make sense. Sometimes it has to do with fear and insecurity. Most often it is sourced by greed and viciousness. Even worse, it is sometimes a legitimate and optimal reaction.  

Greed, that’s the territory one wants to seize. Chimps do it. Obsessively. So do lions. And elephant seals. Sometimes, seizing territory is a matter of survival.

 

Viciousness is what one needs to re-establish ecological balance, as a last resort. Too many people somewhere, and eliminating some of them becomes an ecological virtue. The latter point became dominant when humans became dominant, two million years ago. It’s not pleasant, but it must be done: cruelty may as well be fun. I am not condoning, just describing. Those who refuse to describe, cover-up and become accomplices.

 

Greed and viciousness are parts of human nature, and the human brain. Denying that they exist, is a clear and present danger, and a moral pitfall. Indeed, deniers become their accomplice, wittingly or not. Metamorality requires to integrate those dark angels of behavior. Be it in the name of mental diversity, and prudent anticipation, accept them in the human community. The purpose? Debate and question them into oblivion… As much as possible.. 

Patrice Ayme

 

What do you mean you don’t love me?

***

NOTES:

And what of Will To Power in all this? (Nietzsche made a big deal of it!)

Will To Power is an enabler of humanity, good and evil. In that sense, WTP is beyond good and evil. But WTP can also serve only the Dark Side as when Napoleon said that Washington would be the greatest man who ever lived, if he left power of his own volition. Apparently, Napoleon had never heard of Solon, showing that his cognition was small…In the case of Hitler and Lenin, Will To Power was greatly a way to exact vengeance. And what does vengeance serve? Human culling, an absolute ecological, and, to a point, progressive good… As probably, overall, the war of all against all fosters a supplement of evolutionary pressure .

***

Real life data was given by the Marquis de Sade, who played an important role in the French revolution, both as an instigator and administrator. Sade’s role was not as expected by naifs, in the later case… I mentioned this in essays, long ago. More later.

Photons, And All Particles, Delocalize In Flight

Abstract: That photons delocalize in flight was so obvious, Huyghens described them as waves four centuries ago. That’s reinforced both from the math of Quantum Mechanics, and traditional diffraction math. Let alone 2023 Quantum Entanglements of Pions. Time to erect bolder hypotheses to try to understand what’s really going on.

***

That a photon is received as a photon, a single localized energy-momentum jolt, or quantum, explains the photoelectric effect’s characteristics, so we should accept that localized impact. This was Einstein’s hypothesis, and because it explains the photoelectric effect, one should assume it to be true. Einstein deserved his Nobel… And indeed, since then many experiments, including those of Nobel Haroche, have dealt with the single photon impacting or influencing something… In a very localized way.

HOWEVER, localization on impact doesn’t mean that, in “flight” the photon, or any particle is localized as much [1]. It just means that the photon behaved as if it had… “collapsed”. Einstein assumed localization in flight, I call it Einstein’s error. Modern QFT has discreetly strayed away from Einstein, as the “particle” has become an excitable Quantum Field (hence nonlocal) subjected to renormalizing perturbation theory. Moreover, Basic Quantum Mechanics assumes delocalization, but then claims only the math delocalize, not the whatever-is-going-on physically, about which CIQ (Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum) can say nothing.

Yes, maybe CIQos can say nothing, but smarter minds can make hypotheses, and then try to find out if observed effects derive from these hypotheses… Details that normal Quantum mechanics does not predict, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

The evidence, from diffraction, is to the contrary of the gratuitous and unnecessary Einstein’s in-flight-localization hypothesis. Both from the grossest observations (namely deflection by a pinhole/slit) and from the way the mathematical treatment of said pinhole/slit works… Because those classical mathematics of diffraction work, indeed, but they assume DELOCALIZATION… to make the computation. So the computation’s result being correct, one feels inclined to believe that its mathematical axiom, delocalization, is also correct… as a physical axiom.

Recently published research (February 2023) shows complicated quantum entanglement transmission in cascade between pairs of unrelated and distinguishable pions of opposite charges, which thereafter interfere at a large distance, enabling the exploration of gluon geometry inside nucleons… More evidence of extreme delocalization, and a new sort of what I call Quantum Interaction.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2023/02/05/nonlocal-quantum-entanglement-of-different-particles-used-to-detect-gluon-geometry/

As seen below the usual classical computation for diffraction assumes re-emission, thus delocalization, all along the throat of the slit:

Patrice Ayme

[1] SQPR assumes that “particles” in flight don’t really exist (de facto, so does QFT). The “particles” instead are of type NL + L, where NL is the NonLinear part, and L the Linear part (corresponding to the amplitudes of traditional Quantum Mechanics). L guides NL during dispersion (outward momentum from the singularization/particle state… the opposite of collapse, when the momentum goes towards the singularity). A mathematical description may involve a wave acceleration proportional to its amplitude… So that L can become unstable and grow into a NL, after interacting with another L from another “particle”.

How localized is NL? The Quantum Eraser experiment of Kim and Al., in 1999, indicates that NL is somewhat localized, at least in its apparatus… But it’s very far from a particle. Moreover, as NL feeds L, so to speak, one expects NL to get ever more nonlocalized…

Lesson Learned: 2023 Not Like 1936. So Far.

Chinese balloons crammed with electronics all over. The US shoots down four in ten days. What’s going on?

US Department of Defense confirmed that on two occasions F-22 jets took off from Anchorage, Alaska and objects were shot down, one with a Sidewinder AIM 9X missile.

Philosopher Nigel Warburton#FreeUkraine@philosophybites asked: What’s going on?

What’s going on is that tyrannies keep pushing, to see how far they can go. A tyranny makes war to its people, inside, and justifies that by claiming it is saving the people from a war, outside… which it self-engineered. As tyrannies get away with some aggressive actions, going further than any before, they feel encouraged, and encourage each other. Thus ever more excited, tyrannies repeat the process. This is what happened in the 1930s, after the invasion of Manchuria by a rogue Japanese army: Mussolonini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, and their ilk felt encouraged. It was truly the start of World War Two… because the military reaction, the declaration of war of Britain and France, waited until 1939, when the alliances of the tyrants Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Franco had been made official… And because, as late as 1940 and even 1941, the USA was de facto allied with the Axis powers (for example by fuelling the Japanese army invading China). 

 

What’s going on now is that what’s going on is not like what happened in 1936: instead of letting tyrannies fly from success to success, insolence to insolence, testing new weapons, and tactics, expanding territories, democracies have learned something from the 1930s and thus, woken up this time, and are fighting back, in a timely manner.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/world-wars-are-culminations-of-brutish-processes-wwii-started-when-a-rogue-japanese-armyinvaded-manchuria-in-1931/

F22 high altitude interceptor, balloon killer.

Scott Kelly, US Senator ex International Space Station Commander, wrote February 10 to @elonmusk:

“Ukraine desperately needs your continued support. Please restore the full functionality of your Starlink satellites. Defense from a genocidal invasion is not an offensive capability. It’s survival. Innocent lives will be lost. You can help. Thank you.”
Elon Musk replied, with some condescendence: @StationCDRKelly: “You’re smart enough not to swallow media & other propaganda bs. Starlink is the communication backbone of Ukraine, especially at the front lines, where almost all other Internet connectivity has been destroyed.

But we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.“

This is a problem with endowing single individuals with so much power. SpaceX is a sort of second foundation of NASA… As I pointed out long ago, it would not exist without the largesse of the US government. SpaceX was actually saved by US government contracts when it was so close to bankruptcy, around 2009, in spite of injection of funds from Tesla, that Musk had only a few hundred thousand of dollars left, and he had to meet payroll, let alone pay for equipment! Landing rockets was researched and done by NASA, starting in the mid-sixties.  

Musk: elite entrepreneur and engineer. He also has apparently diversified to historian of war, and knows what escalates conflict. How does one escalates when one has been attacked by a bear? Should one defend oneself just so, but not too much? However bear only fears personal injury. Passive defense that doesn’t look as if it were going to hurt doesn’t work.

Zelinskyi has compared in 2023 Putin to a dragon who muster devour. But Putin’s behavior is more reminscent of that of an aggressive bear. Musk has probably never fought a bear. Yours truly actually has had several confrontations with bears, caused by wandering unarmed many times where bears are found in abundance. I had to threaten very aggressive bears both brown and black. Hitting a proximal surface with stones was often enough of a deterrent. But I had to hit a charging bear (who had just attacked a dozen high Sierra campers, and was now interested by the food I was carrying) with a (very large) stone, once… Bears fear stones, because they have been hurt by them and they have respect for those who can muster stones… In any case, that bear fled for dear life. But that bear attacked people again, wounded a grandmother, and three weeks later, rangers executed it.

Putin will not stop. Like a serial killer, one who has killed now more than 200,000 people, for all to see, his only hope to survive, or to justify himself, is to keep on going, as Hitler once did. So he has to be stopped. World War Two would have been aborted if, even as late as 1940, the USA had stood with France and Britain. 

So this time is different. But this time the stakes are also higher…

So it is good that the US is not playing games, this time.

As in the 1930s, though, tyrannies have their agents. In the 1930s, many intellectuals were following either Hitler or his ally Stalin. This had disastrous consequences on the war readiness of France (new planes were not equipped with guns, from fear that workers, aligned with Stalin, thus Hitler, would seize them and make a revolution… As a consequence Nazi Germany was able to acquire air superiority over France where it needed it!) 

Putin knows all of this, and that makes him hope that he will be able to change public opinion. After all, he has just three democracies’ public opinion to work on….

Patrice Ayme  

Gravity Theory So Far

Buridan held that planets turned around the sun from inertia, pulled in by what would become gravity (circa 1350 CE). No doubt studying canon balls’ trajectory helped in the following centuries. By 1600 CE Kepler knew that masses attracted each other, and exactly reciprocally so… and inversely to the distance between them (it’s actually the square of the inverse). Gravity was theorized to be described by: Mm/dd… M and m being the masses of the object, and d the distance. Boulliaut aka Bullialdus, a French priest cum physicist suggested this. 

Bulliadus had a neat little reasoning still valid nowadays, in strict analogy with light. Bullialdius hypothesized that gravity was carried by particles emitted by the mass and was proportional to the density of said particles. That’s called the “inverse square law” as the force it depicts is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Bullialdus reasoning may look naive… But we have not progressed much since!

Bulliadus was made one of the initial members of the Royal Society, and has a crater on the Moon. Newton testified to the priority of Bullialdus during his quarrel with Hooke about who invented what). Newton more or less proved the equivalence of that law, plus the basic laws of mechanics…. with Kepler’s three laws.

Newton thought that instantaneous gravitation as he had it, made no sense whatsoever (he wrote in a letter).

The Turin born Simon de Laplace corrected this a century later, making gravity progressive, inventing in the process field theory and gravitational waves.

In June 1905 Henri Poincaré published relativistic gravitational waves. They have to propagate at c, the speed of light.

In the following decade, Einstein, with the help of his friends, including Besso and Hilbert, wrote down a relativistic version of Newton’s theory. One main ingredient is that time slows down next to masses, so star light deflection next to the sun is doubled, as light spends more time  next to the sun, giving it more time to be deflected, etc. Another is that light follows geodesics of 4 dimensional space whose (Ricci) curvature K = T. Where T is the energy-momentum tensor.

The first order approximation of Einstein’s gravity is the classical Laplacian-Poincaré version.

But what “causes” Mm/dd? We don’t know yet. QED doesn’t really help. 

Quantum ElectroDynamics (QED) reproduces the classical Coulomb potential (1/d) (giving the 1/dd force) with exchanges of virtual photons. The same is to be expected for gravity with virtual gravitons. Does that mean that virtual photons exchange “create” the 1/dd force? Not really: a critical examination of what happens says otherwise: QED starts with installing the “Proca Lagrangian” in the path integral. That Proca Lagrangian contains the Maxwell equations which contain in turn the Coulomb potential. So QED demonstrates its own hypothesis as far as (1/dd is concerned)…(That doesn’t mean QED is useless: it’s a perturbative theory which predicts some perturbations with great precision, and those are extremely technologically relevant!) 

Nevertheless it seems that we are progressing spectacularly from what is, for common high energy physicists, an unexpected direction . 

I hold that the true architecture of the world is given by Quantum Entanglement… And the progress there is spectacular: particles of different nature have been entangled.

SQPR hypothesizes that Quantum Entanglement has a finite range: if true it gives immediately Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Moreover, SQPR changes the nature of the vacuum. However the relationship with the 1/dd factor stays mysterious… So far, then, one can’t produce an explanation really deeper than Bullialdus offered…

Patrice Ayme.

Nonlocal Quantum Entanglement Of Different Particles Used To Detect Gluon Geometry

High Energy Physics was long completely isolated from foundational questions of Quantum Physics. The quip of HEP physicists was:”Shut up and calculate!”… instead of worrying about entanglement, nonlocality and the ultimate mature of reality. Well, this has now changed, big time. For the first time, quantum entanglement was used to probe gluon geometry inside nuclei. Gluon, which are bosns, have “color” hold the quarks together inside hadrons, but it turns out they can come out a bit. [1]

The STAR detector, itself about the size of a house, is the first detector sensitive enough to measure the entangled properties of the daughter particles arising from a relativistic heavy ion “near-miss” interaction. This early 2023 result is the first to demonstrate entanglement between two non-identical particles. (Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

***

Many will find baffling that matter waves from different types of particles can be antangled. Here is my take on it:

Careful considerations show that quantum physics is obtained by simplifying the facts and logic of classical mechanics as much as possible (warning: textbooks often say the opposite… without proof!)

Consider for example spin. Instead of an arbitrary angular momentum axis for each of two entangled particles, as classical mechanics has it, consider just one axis… for both particles, at the same time! And instead of continuous angular momentum, reduce angular momentum to just two values (+ or -)… for that one axis! Out of that most simplified description, this barebone reality, nonlocal entanglement of spin (photon polarization or silver atoms…), or nonlocal entanglement of two states systems in general, is obvious… being germane to the most simplified, aka, “quantum”, description of the system.

The spaces one gets that way, by simplifying the classical descriptions, “quantizing” them, often with discrete outcomes, have as basis the quantum outcomes (“states”). To compute therein, use the simplest math: complex numbers and linear algebra operating on amplitude waves. As evolution equations, use the simplest partial differential equations, where evolution is driven by energy. And so on.

Simplifying to the max a barebone description of the electron with the simplest amplitude wave is how Dirac got his equation, out of which popped antimatter, and precise measurements…

The metalogic of quantum mechanics as the simplest description of classical mechanics extends throughout… As long as one is willing to generalize the notion of space (for example electrons live in 4 dimensional complex space).

In other words, far from weird, quantum physics is exactly what you would expect by making the simplest parody of reality that one can still compute with. Nonlocality pops out naturally, as soon as one realizes that many “particles” can be entangled in one outcome. That the “particles” are of different nature is besides the point… and now we have the experimental proof of that! Classical mechanics did not forbid nonlocality of quantum amplitudes, but the simplest-description axiomatics obtained by simplifying classical mechanics to the max, required it..

A spacetime foam has been evoked by relativists as the ultimate nature of reality. Now high energy physics is revealing its nature: inter alia, quantum amplitudes are transferred from one type of particle to another, in the EPR, nonlocal way. Quantum Physics happens in Quantum Spaces (aka “phase space”) spanned by Quantum Outcomes (“Quantum states”). Local, classical reality is a statistical effect from a hidden thermodynamics of nonlocal entanglement.

Patrice Ayme

Reference: Tomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions

“We measure two outgoing particles and clearly their charges are different – they are different particles – but we see interference patterns that indicate these particles are entangled, or in sync with one another, even though they are distinguishable particles,” said Zhangbu Xu, a (Chinese) author of the study (this was a very multinational collaboration).

***

[1] Gluons do not interact with photons directly, because photons don’t have color. But a photon can transform in an ephemeral quark-antiquark pair, which will interact with the gluon. Ultimately the inner geometry is revealed by the outgoing entangled yet distinguishable pions (with opposite electric charges!)

What Happened When France Fought Hitler In 1939-1940? Huge Fighting, Followed By A Temporary Ceasefire. Then War Again Until Nazi Defeat.

WAR FROM And FOR CIVILIZATION:

History, in first approximation, is the history of war. Civilization is, in first approximation, how to achieve military supremacy. This is what the powers that be never want We The People to perceive, here, there and everywhere, because, if they did, they have a higher probability of revolting.

Putin is, not kindly, reminding us of this. And now the tyrant from the Kremlin intends to win, with meat waves tactics: start by killing on the battlefield thousands of convicts.Putin and his gang have adapted to their surrprise, dismay and despair. Just like the Nazis, who knew they were probably doomed as early as 1939, hope springs eternal, even, and especially with, the most hellish miscreants one can find anywhere.

It is therefore timely to remember that World War Two proceeded by fits and starts in a stop and go fashion. As I have advocated, WWII truly started in 1931, when a rogue Japanese army invaded Manchuria. WWII started, because the rogue Japanese high command got away with it: a massive war crime was found to pay handesomely. Same when Putin invaded Georgia, Crimea and the Donbas, or Hitler Austria.

Any strong coordinated reaction of the leading democracies in the next eight years, would have aborted WWII. But it didn’t happen, as the Anglo-Saxons refused to collaborate with the French until it was too late to prevent the alliance of the tyrannies: Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mussolini’s, Franco’s, and others… until 1942, much of US plutocracy was more interested in financing Hitler, Franco and Stalin…

Similarly WWIII may have started with the invasion of Georgia, and certainly Ukraine in 2014, with the active complicity of Obama (who disguised his collaboration with infamy, by claiming infamy had no power, thus was a friend…) A firm war now of all the united democracies against tyranny could well abort WWIII, as other tyrannies may think twice to join Putin if he looks like a loser.

***

FRANCE FOUGHT THE NAZIS FOR 6 YEARS… With A Little Intermission While The US Was Not Even In The War:

With these admittedly violent and sinister observations above, out of the way, let’s have fun with Quora and its often debasing, perverse and twisted sense of exploitative reality. Here is a Quora question: 

Are the French proud of their military history despite surrendering early in WW2? [1]

France’s military history is 17 centuries when about the Franks/French alone. If one counts the Gauls, 30 centuries… My answer:

Please be informed and learn that a ceasefire is not a surrender. France did not surrender in 1940. France and the Nazis instituted a time out…an armistice…and that’s what the Nazis wanted too, because the Nazis had no hope of conquering French North Africa , or defeat the French Navy, and would soon find themselves fighting a three-front war (as they did anyway, but just over a year later).

A French junta agreed to a conditional ceasefire on June 26, 1940 with the Nazis, upon the dissolution of the French Republic. Within two years, both sides would violate the ceasefire and parts of French territory would be liberated, as the French armed forces continued the war. In 1944-1945, more than a fifth of the Allied forces in the west belonged to the French army which liberated the major cities of southern France, and was going to enter and liberate southern Germany from the Nazis (more of 5,000 French soldiers were killed in the last weeks of the war fighting Nazi formations inside Germany).

The fact is that in May-June 1042, a small French force under General Koenig prevented Rommel from winning his war by surrounding the retreating British Eighth Army… So the facts say, and Winston Churchill himself. That French force was eleven times more numerous than the Spartans at Thermopylae. It suffered a casualty rate of 50%, but succeeded in its mission, which was to prevent Rommel’s Afrika Korps to encircle the Eight Army.

The Nazis’ losses in France in May-June 1940 were such that it took them a year to regain enough strength to attack Stalin. It was Hitler himself who said it, and more than once. Hitler even specified that this was why he, Hitler, was losing the war against the Russians: he had to attack the USSR 18 months later than he wanted, because of those cursed Frenchmen… This delay allowed Stalin to over-arm himself… said the Nazi leader.

In May-June 1940, more than 13,000 soldiers were killed or injured every day. The total of Allied and German-Italian military losses in May-June 1940, in six weeks, is heavier than the three months of the Battle of Normandy in June-August 1944: 610,500 Allied and German-Italian soldiers hors de combat ( killed or wounded) in May-June 1940, compared to 466,000 German and allied soldiers (killed or wounded) in June-August 1944. The Nazis admitted to having lost 50,000 killed… But these were soldiers and elite airmen. The losses of the Nazi aviation are also gigantic.

France therefore participated in the Second World War more than the United States (which cowardly, but profitably, waited for Hitler to declare war on them).

Claiming that France did not fight in the Second World War, when in fact it declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, is an attempt by the Anglo-Saxons to hide the culpable and voluntary collaboration with Hitler, Mussolini , Franco, Stalin and even Hirohito of the Anglo-Saxon oligarchs… Collaboration which allowed the existence of fascism. This allows, in passing, to refute the existence of these.

Interestingly, the same pattern of Western oligarchs collaborating with abject tyranny and the same type of cover-up has resurfaced in relations with the Kremlin, yet again, over the past few decades… This time, however, the French oligarchs and Germans helped the tyrant become all he could be…

Patrice Ayme

Nazi tank destroyed by the French army in 1940. And what were the US doing then? Money from Hitler’s hell.

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[1] This question is not phrased with neutral and sincere language  Its wording makes a derisive statement, rather than looking for an helpful answer. This is typical of the old racist anti-French Anglo-Saxon attitude, which is worse than racist, as it is a cover-up of something much worse: friendliness to Nazism and supremacy of the profitability race.

The QUANTUM Is NOT “WEIRD”. Instead The Quantum Is The Most Abstracted Classical Mechanics

QUANTUM PHYSICS IS THE SIMPLEST ROOT OF CLASSICAL REALITY IMAGINABLE

Abstract: Quantum Mechanics is the simplest imaginable description of the world obtained by reducing all what is known from Classical Mechanics to its simplest parody. Simplest space, simplest math, simplest equations, etc. The organizing metaprinciple of QUANTUM PHYSICS IS Classical MECHANICS MADE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. We will focus on the simplest, two state systems.

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Simplicia: Physicists usually describe Quantum Mechanics as “weird”. You are the first one to claim Quantum Physics is NOT weird.

Tyranosopher : In his famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman describes Classical Mechanics as a “shadow” of Quantum Mechanics, or a mnemotechnical trick. Well, he was wrong, there is more to it than that. It took me many decades of deep study of the Quantum to find that in truth, arriving from the first approximation of Classical Mechanics, Quantum Physics is not philosophically weird, but the LOGICAL ROOT of Classical Mechanics. Let’s suppose you were God, and you wanted to devise the simplest barebone theory as a basis for Classical Mechanics… What would you find? Quantum Physics! 

Simplicia: God is useful after all! What do you mean by barebone?

Tyranosopher: Logically barebone: the fewest and simplest axioms animated by the simplest logic. Take for example angular momentum. Classically, Angular Momentum can take any value in any direction: a classical massive object can rotate this way or the opposite, and more or less, along any axis, and can be measured again and again, ad vitam eternam: that’s a lot of freedom. 

Simplicia: To make Angular Momentum barebone, if you were God, what would you do? 

Tyranosopher: Instead of Angular Momentum having any value, you would decide, as God, that Angular Momentum could have JUST TWO VALUES: clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Then, instead of being able to point its axis in any direction, as God, you would decide ONE SINGLE direction is enough. And moreover, you measure it JUST ONCE. So barebone Angular Momentum takes only two values, and in only one direction, one time: and it turns out that this is the simplest version of Quantum Spin. When Quantum Spin is reduced to a two state system (automatically entangled).

And it is what the Stern Gerlach theorem reveals for silver atoms. Similarly for photons.   

Simplicia: What do photons and silver atoms have in common?

Tyranosopher. Photon polarization and silver atoms are both two states’ systems. Apply the simplest mathematics to them, and you get the same mathematical, hence physical result. So they both exhibit nonlocality, entanglement, etc.

Simplicia: What are these “states”?

Tyranosopher: Quantum States are the outcomes of experiments with set-ups sensitive to Quantum effects. The presence of states is all very relative, or as Quantum Foundations theoreticians say, CONTEXTUAL. There is a theorem saying one cannot have non-contextuality.

Simplicia: Please elaborate.

Tyranosopher: Once again, suppose you are god, and you look at angular momentum or polarization. As I said, the simplest situation where something non-trivial happens is if you have built, or found, a device with two outcomes only: spin up, or spin down. Or polarization horizontal, or vertical. Each of these two distinct outcomes is called a state. Label these two distinct outcomes: I+> and I->. Then what’s the simplest non-trivial computational setup you can invent?

Simplicia: A vector space where I+> and I-> are the basis vectors?

Tyranosopher: Exactly. Let’s consider H, the complex vector space with basis I+> and I->.

Simplicia: Why complex?

Tyranosopher: Because you are God and you want to use the largest commutative field and that’s the complex numbers, called C. There all algebraic equations can be solved, with the help of the square root of (-1), called i.  Turns out that this has all immediate deep physical meaning

Simplicia: Complex numbers, also called imaginary numbers, are natural?

Tyranosopher: Yes the number i corresponds to the rotation by pi/4, an angle of ninety degrees, around the origin in the plane.

Simplicia: What’s the connection of complex numbers and (i) with physics?

Tyranosopher: A photon is characterized by its momentum, which is a vector p which points in a direction, and has a frequency E. (hE, p) is the energy-momentum of the photon. It tells you where the photon is going and with how much energy. However, that does not characterize the photon fully. Experiments already conducted by the Vikings show that the photons have polarization.

Simplicia: The Vikings were physicists?

Tyranosopher: They navigated the North Atlantic, going from islands to islands, all the way to America. They needed to know where the sun was, say at noon, to know where the north was. The weather is often so cloud covered there, that one can’t say where the sun is, for weeks on end. Fortunately, the Vikings had stones which gave the direction of the sun. That’s because the atmosphere partially polarizes sunlight.

Simplicia: So the complex numbers characterize polarization?

Tyranosopher: A photon is made of an electric field paired to a perpendicular magnetic field, both perpendicular to momentum p. It’s enough to know where the electric field points to know the polarization. A complex number gives you polarization.

Simplicia: Why can’t a single real number give you that, like, you know, the angle?

Tyranosopher: Complex numbers give you more information. Let’s backtrack. God is trying to build the most powerful yet most complex mechanics possible. By considering complex numbers, you augment the power, but also the simplicity, because all algebraic equations, the ones with powers, are solvable. So, in an important way, C, the complex plane, is simpler than the real line R. Physically speaking it also turns out that quantum waves multiply, to make quantum amplitudes, which are probability waves, and probabilities multiply, but only as complex waves. 

Simplicia: So let’s recapitulate. You reduce angular momentum to simply + or -, plus or minus… instead of a continuum of numbers. You also reduce the direction of angular momentum to a single one, the one along which you measure it. You then build a vector space with I+> and I-> as base vectors, and you simplify maximally by choosing complex numbers instead of real numbers.

Tyranosopher: Absolutely. Isn’t it funny that complex numbers are actually both simpler and more powerful than real numbers? Complex numbers live in a plane and contain in their description light itself!

Simplicia: Are you identifying the complex plane with light?

Tyranosopher: Take a complex plane P, brandish it in space, and pick up a (complex) number N in it. That represents all the information we have on a photon.

The perpendicular to P through its origin gives you the direction of the photon, the norm c of N gives you the frequency and the angle a of c gives you the polarization. So the information (P, c(exp ia)) gives you the photon fully. You can’t do that with real numbers 

Simplicia: Photons are points in flying complex planes?

Tyranosopher: Yes, but we are not finished. 

We have this complex vector space H = C (I+>, I->)… that means it has two basis vectors. Consider a vector v in that space. It has coordinates in function of I+> and I->; the square of the norms of those coordinates are real numbers. They express the probability of v being in state I+> versus in state I->. 

Once again the guiding meta-principle here is the same: make it the simplest for getting a non-trivial result, depicting reality which is what we know, namely that any experiment will give either I+> or I->.

Then we introduce another ingredient: that light and matter behave in a wave-like fashion. So make the coordinates of v into waves depending upon space and time. Also, at the simplest, when v is operated upon, it will give another vector w. To go simplest again from v to w, one should use a linear operator.

Simplicia: Is that the famous “matrix mechanics”?

Tyranosopher: Exactly.

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Simplicia: What of weird effects like tunneling, and Quantum Entanglement?

Tyranosopher: Tunneling comes from the wavy nature. It would require a bit more elaboration to explain as one needs to introduce energy and how it affects waves. Basically, not all of a sudden, hence (probability of presence) waves penetrate a bit, that’s tunneling. 

Simplicia: And what about nonlocality? 

Tyranosopher: The nonlocal nature of Quantum Entanglement is in plain sight. The simplest is two particles sharing the same two state spin system with total spin zero. :Choose an axis of measurement, call it Z. Then measuring gives the spin of the other particle along Z automatically even 4 lightyears away. But choosing Z was an act of will. So will acted 4 lightyears away.

Simplicia: Minds change the universe light years away?

Tyranosopher: Yes, indeed. Sub Quantum Physical Reality assumes that the propagation of that change is progressive.

Simplicia: What if the distances are too great?

Tyranosopher: Then entanglement fails, and, or Dark Matter and, or Dark Energy are created. That’s what I say.

Simplicia: Does spacetime make some sort of foam at the smallest scale?

Tyranosopher: It’s worse than that. It’s a topological foam, and it’s nonlocal. There again, as God, you would have been confronted with the following problem: how to describe the infinitesimally small? 

Simplicia: By making the infinitesimally small ever smaller.

Tyranosopher: That was tried in biology. It was called the homunculus theory: a human being would start as a tiny reproduction of itself. In truth what happens is that bacteria divide, so they never get that small, and animals… more generally eukaryotes, start with molecular (DNA, RNA) and cellular formations which enter in a constructive dialogue with the environment (some of which is self-created). So basically sophisticated life doesn’t start as itself at all, but in a  nonlocal way. Same thing for spacetime and particles.

Simplicia: Does Quantum Entanglement hold objects together?

Tyranosopher: It has been difficult to find when, where and how an object switches from Quantum behavior to Classical behavior. It is imaginable that Quantum Entanglement holds objects together. After all the more massive an object, the higher the probability that an entangled state will collapse. Collapse is the glue.

Simplicia: How so?

Tyranosopher:  De Broglie associated a matter wave to every single massive object.

Simplicia: Are photons massive?

Tyranosopher: Yes they are, in the sense of inertial mass. Poincaré published and taught in 1899 that a photon has inertial mass m = E/cc. That’s coming straight out of electromagnetism. Photons of course have no rest mass, because they are never at rest. But they contribute to gravity as E/cc, from the axiom: inertial mass = gravitational mass (Einstein called that the “Principle of Equivalence”).

Simplicia: Let’s go back to matter waves. 

Tyranosopher: An object of mass M has wavelength L = h/M, where h is Planck’s constant. A deep question is how that L is generated. Clearly L should be equal to a sum, what is called an integral in mathematics: Sum(m(i)), where m(i) are the zillions of zillions of particles constituting M: all the gluons, quarks, photons, electrons inside. However, the sum should be extended to entanglement itself. I mean what’s called the “particles” are actually the states. Most of the time Quantum systems are actually delocalized Quantum fields.

Simplicia: Are Quantum Entanglement and Delocalization the same? 

Tyranosopher: No. QE is an example of delocalization. Sometimes 

Simplicia: What happens to mass during these delocalizations?

Tyranosopher: Good question! The experience has not been made. Einstein postulated, in 1905, as an axiom that a photon was localized always… and this may have led him to the EPR thirty years later, and introducing the doubt of “spooky action at a distance”… He was a bit arguing with himself.

From the introduction section of Einstein’s March 1905 quantum paper “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the emission and transformation of light”, Einstein states:

“According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of “energy quanta” that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole.“

This statement has been called the most revolutionary sentence written by a physicist of the twentieth century. However, it’s probably not completely true, and I have called it “Einstein’s Error“. First, Quantum Field Theory, and even QED, its predecessor, which Einstein tried, but failed to learn, has replaced “particles” by (delocalized) Quantum Fields: no more localized particles at a point. Moreover, and worse, if one believes the Quantum amplitudes that one computes with have some physical reality, as SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, believes, Einstein is not completely correct, and the difference is Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Indeed, in SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, some mass-energy is spread out. Experimentation will have to decide, although the existence of DM and DE is massive proof enough for me. But this is all speculative, whereas deducing Quantum from Classical, as the maximal non-trivial abstraction from Classical, the original subject of this essay, is not.

Simplicia: Feynman often put philosophy is a bad light.

Tyranosopher: Feynman, like, Mach, Boltzman, Planck, Einstein, De Broglie, and all great physicists, was a philosopher. Dirac deduced his equation for the electron field according to the principle of abstraction from Classical Mechanics and simplicity. Dirac looked for the simplest Partial Differential Equation the square of which would be the relativistic mass-energy-momentum formula for an electron. That’s the Dirac equation! It produced correct quantum electrodynamics, spin and anti-matter! It was deducted according to the general machinery I advocate! So in a way the method I exhibited here to deduce Quantum Physics had already been used, at least in particular cases.

Simplicia: Is your own SQPR deducted similarly?

Tyranosopher: Yes, from classical obvious to fully abstracted and still obvious. Newton said, in a private letter, that it was madness to suppose that the gravitational interaction was instantaneous. A century later, Laplace filled in the idea, making gravitation into a field, and thus predicting gravitational waves. SQPR assumes that Quantum Entanglement, like Delocalization in general, is a field with finite speed: present Quantum Mechanics assumes that QE and nonlocality propagate at infinite speed. This finite speed assumption produces Dark Matter and Dark Energy quasi-instantaneously.

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Conclusion: This is as it should be: after all, Classical Mechanics is the appearance, the first order approximation, and Quantum Physics what generates that appearance. One can deduce Quantum Physics from Classical Mechanics.  One just has to expand the notion of “deduction” beyond what Feynman was familiar with. A love of wisdom helps with science, as it allows us to expand what logic means.

Patrice Ayme