Theory of Thought

Stopping undersea oil leaks

When the deepwater horizon incident occurred I sent the following suggestion to British Petroleum and Washington:

"An explosion near the well head on the ocean floor could remove the blowout preventer and shear the pipe off at the sea bed.  A second explosion to one side but near the exposed pipe could push soil over the well and seal it.  It might also be possible to crush/crimp the pipe."

Problems with electronic submissions

Electronic submissions for publication have their problems.  In the old days when you sent in a paper copy of an abstract they might occasionally cut off an edge when it went under the camera.  I will report on my recent experiences with the Bulletin of the American Physical Society because they have been the worst but I have had similar problems with other journals and conferences.

My last submission to BAPS had a % symbol dropped.  This did not occur in the echo to my electronic submission.  I was using the American Physical Society's own software (Latex).

The submission to BAPS just prior to that one had no errors that I noticed but the one just before that had 5 extra characters inserted in various locations throughout the abstract.  In past years I have had as many as 3 or 4 words dropped in an abstract.  Sometimes the sense was lost completely.

Scientific Pluralism

Knowledge is of an approximate character.  Our formalisms abstract and simplify.  Each theory is an idealization, often times approximating in its own DIFFERENT ways, each offering somewhat different coverage of the domain of interest.  Having MULTIPLE overlapping theories of a field is then better than having just one.
(www.robert-w-jones.com, Philosopher, changing what science is and how its done)

Throughout my career I have followed this "scientific pluralism" by trying to work on both sides of the various important questions: (for example)

magnetic confinement of plasmas     -versus-     inertial confinement

low beta plasmas     -versus-     wall confined plasmas (beta>1)

open magnetic traps     -versus-     closed magnetic confinement

adiabatic traps (magnetic mirrors)     -versus-     nonadiabatic traps (cusps)

neural networks     -versus-     g.o.f.a.i. (good old fashioned AI)

scruffy AI     -versus-     neat AI

dualism     -versus-     monism

rockets     -versus-     tethers

rockets     -versus-     space drives

I also try to do theoretical, experimental, AND computational work.

Value system for a mind

Logic of the mind

While present day computers execute classical propositional logic using operators like AND, OR, NOT, and IMPLIES (and thence NAND, NOR, EXOR, ...) a mind would require a fibring with, at least, temporal logic with operators like SINCE, S(A,B), UNTIL, U(A,B) (and thence, F, "in the future", P, "in the past", ...) as well as spatial logic with operators like "in front of", "behind", etc. and a non-monotonic consequence relation. (And probably the logic should be fuzzified.)

In addition to the fibred logic a mind would also need a value function/system.

Computer simulations versus "real" experiments

In order to pursue online instruction there is a desire to use computer simulations in place of "real"
experiments.  We even hear those who claim simulations are "just as good as" real experiments.

There are various important ways in which simulations differ from real experiments but the bottom
line is:

simulations only contain the physics that you understand and were able to program in,
real experiments also contain all the physics you haven't thought of, don't understand,
and haven't included.