Eric Laithwaite on Understanding Analogues

This was recorded in 1968, which was over half a century ago! "Now you don't have to understand something in order to be able to use it as an analogue. For example, ..." see from 9 minutes 42 seconds ...

Now see On Physical Lines of Force, ... published in April 1861, ...

It is quite possible that this paper can explain more about the real cause of the American Civil War than any other historic documents, .... See The Long Road to Maxwell’s Equations:

Should you wish to pay homage to the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell, you wouldn’t lack for locales in which to do it. There’s a memorial marker in London’s Westminster Abbey, not far from Isaac Newton’s grave. A magnificent statue was recently installed in Edinburgh, near his birthplace. Or you can pay your respects at his final resting place near Castle Douglas, in southwestern Scotland, a short distance from his beloved ancestral estate. They’re fitting monuments to the person who developed the first unified theory of physics, who showed that electricity and magnetism are intimately connected.

At 11 minutes 59 seconds Laithwaite models Brownian Motion, ... See this video Diana made with 3Blue1What?! Sounds like eelectrical engineering in a ghoti pond, to me, ...

So what are its lizzardbandages?

Well, air and smoke particles are not necessarily the same kinds of thing, you know, ...

That is from Sylvie and Bruno - A Handbook for Global Revolution, which is a lot about science, and available here: Sylvie and Bruno, by Lewis Carroll - Vols I&II. I highly recommend browsing the index, it's fascinating to see what the author chose to include, and how he described it, ... anyway, back to smoke, ... as we said, air and smoke particles are not necessarily the same kinds of thing, ...

... oh no they ain't, ...

Ask Vincent van Gogh, if you don't believe George Gershwin, ...

... air computes, smoke doesn't, so far as I know, ... See The Night Café for an idea of what air looks like when it's thinking, ... and here's Prof. Mike Merrifield talking about how light travels through a medium like air or water:

At 12 minutes 45 seconds you see where the idea of quantum computing comes from, when you consider how light seems to explore a vast number of combinations of possible path elements through a medium like air or water. Then at 13 minutes 13 seconds Merrifield gives an example of another way of thinking about the underlying physics of light in a medium in terms of a pseudo-particle called a Polariton. This is an instance of an ontology emerging from a phenomenological description. See FT Illustrating The Problem With Modern Medicine:

So this movement from phenomenological to ontological description, which Itegrated Information Theory attempts to describe, is essentially the process of model building. In other words, the development of an underlying ontology, which gives us a set of building blocks which we can then use to synthesise systems which faithfully reproduce the sorts of behaviors produced as a result of our analyses of the systems we started with, is an instance of the same kind of pattern we see in the development of mathematics itself, as Penelope Maddy explains in her paper "How Applied Mathematics Became Pure". Early mathematics started out as a process whereby men abstracted certain forms which described generalisations of observed physical phenomena which appeared to them in their perception of their immediate concrete environment. The most general such abstraction was that of number, but that soon gave rise to notions such as quantity and proportion. Then theoreticians such as Isaac Newton were able to turn these abstract patches into a quilt, which described some aspects of phenomena in observed in the physical world which had not been amongst those phenomena, analysis of which gave rise to these abstractions in the first place. Thus the idea that through observing the phenomena around us, we could abduct an underlying ontology, became the basis for scientific explanation.

See Ernst Mach's essay "On the Economic Nature of Physical Enquiry" for an interesting discussion of how we could view science as an art of description of phenomena, rather than as a reduction of phenomena to some logically prior parts, ... I had a copy of a translation of this book, but much more complete than this Italian translation which is the only one I have found online. An American ex-pat guy called Ron Davies in La Paz "lost" my copy, which was a birthday present from my mother, ...

My copy had lots about using light from electrical sparks to photograph moving air without smoke. This is important.