A flying trapeze.

 There are three articles on the Law of Optimal Knowledge (Information).

Review.

This is the name of a course of three lectures delivered in England in 1962 by the famous physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the American atomic bomb.” The subtitle: “Three crises for physicists” in the Soviet translation sounds like “Three crises in physics.” The translation is deliberately distorted, because Oppenheimer speaks precisely of crisis situations in the thinking of twentieth-century physicists.

Oppenheimer himself was a man of considerable erudition and not only in physics.

When the first experimental explosion of an American atomic bomb was carried out on July 16, 1945 in the Alamogordo desert, New Mexico, Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the entire Manhattan Project, was so impressed by this monstrous explosion that he involuntarily recalled the words from the ancient Indian epic Bhagavat Gita:

“With immeasurable and formidable power

The sky above the world would shine.

If there were a thousand suns

All at once it sparkled”

And the words of Vishnu:

“I am becoming Death —

The Destroyer of Worlds”

Leftist writer Robert Jung wrote a book about the creation of the American atomic bomb and named it accordingly: “Brighter than a thousand Suns.” The book is undoubtedly interesting and well written.

(In this epic, the hero Arjuna (emphasis on the first “A”) asks Vishnu, the Supreme Deity, who became the charioteer on his chariot, to appear before him in the true form of the Supreme Divine Personality. Vishnu tries to dissuade Arjuna from taking such a rash step. But Arjuna insists. And then Vishnu appears to him in his real form, which causes Arjuna to be completely shocked with horror. The words above refer to this very moment.

I must admit that I have read the Bhagavat Gita, but I did not feel much respect or admiration for it. I still remember one interesting phrase of Vishnu. Arjuna must enter into battle (for the kingdom) with opponents, among whom there are many of his relatives and friends. And he tells Vishnu that he doesn’t want to fight them, because he doesn’t want to kill them! To which Vishnu cynically replies to him:

“THEY’RE ALREADY DEAD! They just don’t know about it yet!”

A strong statement!

Oppenheimer’s book, despite such an intriguing title (de, physicists in their thinking should fly like circus acrobats from one flying trapeze to another. Or they may fall and fall to their deaths!) quite ordinary in the ideological sense. Personally, I found two points in it that interested me very much (Leonard Euler’s statement about the phenomenon of stellar aberration and the description of electron diffraction at two slits as the interaction of wave fields), but I do not consider it possible to occupy the attention of readers with this.

However, there is also a topic in this book that may be of interest to the public.

Oppenheimer speaks anxiously about the exponential growth of “everything” in our time. The growth of science, population, technology, vehicles, etc. For example, about science, Oppenheimer says that of all the scientists who were once on Earth and are now living, 93% are currently living! That is, all previous times accounted for only seven percent of the total number of scientists! Isn’t that GROWTH???

The volume of information is also growing enormously. One of his acquaintances calculated that the growth rate of an American physics journal is such that in the next century (that is, in our present 21st century) its mass will exceed the mass of the globe!)

We will not take the last joke seriously, as well as the words of the scientific secretary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who visited Oppenheimer at Princeton and answered his question about the growth of scientists without hesitation that in 50 years the entire population of Russia will become scientists! And now we have already crossed the border at the age of 55!!! That’s right, that’s right: there are a lot more crooks and weasels with or without an academic degree in Russia, but let’s not exaggerate: There are still a lot of decent people left!

What are the mistakes of Oppenheimer, who was a very talented scientist and an excellent supervisor?

First, the growth of science is not an increase in the number of officially registered employees.

The Gold Rush, the “Gold Rush” that swept America at the end of the 19th century, when thousands and thousands of “gold diggers” eager for quick profit rushed to the Klondike, no one calls “the unprecedented growth of the US mining industry!” The same in science. The number of “scientists” does not speak at all about its growth or its progress! Just as sharks have a high olfactory sensitivity to blood, so thousands and thousands of crooks and crooks are endowed with the sharpest sense of profit. Sensing where the smell of greasy pie was coming from and, being equipped with well-developed elbows and a complete lack of morality, they rushed en masse into a profitable and dust–free field of activity – science. So there is no growth of science, just as there is no growth and progress from the “multitudes” of their unscientific attempts. So, we are smoothly moving from the unprecedented “growth” of science to the unprecedented growth of “multi-science”.

Second: In the same book, Oppenheimer speaks with no less concern about the growing amount of information. After all, a scientist must be aware of all the innovations at least in his narrow field, otherwise you will hopelessly fall behind and you will not be able to create anything new! Does it look quite logical and reasonable?

YES, IT LOOKS LIKE IT!

Francois de la Rochefoucauld, whom I have quoted more than once in my writings, said:

“Truth is not so beneficial as its appearance is harmful.”

Wise words!

In this case, it refers to the growth of information.

I believe that such a “saturation with a huge amount of information” has always existed!

I think the Sumerian and ancient Egyptian learned priests also complained to their colleagues, friends and relatives that, de, the growth of information is terrible! That a lot of time and effort is spent only on dragging the poods of clay tablets and reading them. It is equal to carving whole epics of science and the laws of the universe on the rocks. It is equal to writing all this diversity on papyri. It’s just that this “information” was different for them, but in fact, in quality, the same misinformation is either false or just clogging the brains with billions of information, thousands of dogmas, prejudices and other pseudoscientific husks that do not give anything for real progress.

So, now we come to the most important thing.

It follows from the Law of Optimality of Information (ZOE) that in order to create something really new, one must have some Optimal stock of knowledge. Too little or too much is equally bad, because it does not stimulate creativity and either exhausts it with hunger or causes acute indigestion of the mental stomach from overeating!

The main thing is not the amount of knowledge, information, but the ability to process it all! With this skill, you can extract from even a small amount of knowledge everything you need for a leap of thought. In case of inability, the owner is likened to a stingy knight, greedily sorting through the contents of treasure chests in his scientific basement. That’s it!

And you need to be able to see the germs of new ideas in a certain amount of information, from which, with skillful “gardening”, a whole garden of trees and flowers grows, which, in turn, already carry new germs of the next newest ideas.

Of course, each person has their own optimum of knowledge. One requires more, the other less.

A textbook example of what has been said:

The amount of knowledge (information) in the field of physics and mathematics of two outstanding scientists, Henri Poincare and Henrik Anton Lorentz, was huge in depth and breadth and far exceeded the modest knowledge of a certain expert of the third class of the Bern patent office, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein. And these two scientists thought brilliantly and extraordinarily!

But it was he who possessed the most valuable quality of processing the information available to him and only on this basis created a great new one. He did it on the same basis as Lorentz and Poincare. Michelson’s experience was known to thousands of world-class physicists. The negative result of these famous experiments in 1881 and 1887 disturbed many minds! And only Einstein was able to extract something completely new from the same knowledge and overturn our basic ideas! The Special Theory Of Relativity.

But he did the same thing a second time, taking the next, even more grandiose step. All physicists of the world were aware of Etwes’ experience, in which the equality of inert and gravitational masses was proved. Few people, knowing about this result, even attached importance to this scientific fact. Well, big deal, a certain provincial physicist has established this very equality. So what? Well, they are equal, these masses! What an importance!

And again, only Einstein was able to see in this well-known fact the germ of a new theory, the theory of space, time and gravity! The General Theory of Relativity. But, again, EVERYONE KNEW ABOUT THIS EXPERIENCE!!!

Albert Einstein, in the same 1905, when he published his Special Theory of Relativity, was able to see in the idea of another, extraordinarily talented German physicist Max Planck, something that Planck himself did not see!!! The idea of portions, quanta, and radiation energy. Planck put forward this idea in 1900, but considered it not a reflection of physical reality, but only a convenient technique that removed the paradox of the so-called “Ultraviolet catastrophe”. Einstein “naively” took Planck’s idea seriously and immediately used it to give an exhaustive explanation to another physical mystery – the photoelectric effect!

So, the same sign of loyalty to ZOEY’s law: The ability to process information is incomparably more important than its quantity!

Julius Robert von Mayer, a physician by profession, discovered and formulated the most fundamental law of physics in 1842: The law of conservation and transformation of energy. Then supplemented by Joule and Helmholtz. He did not arouse the slightest interest among the herd of scientists then! Just think, some kind of “law” of some doctor! A great law, but Mayer was not a Physicist. And for any herd, a certain alien is “Tally-ho! Sick him!”

I will conclude with a statement by Igor Evgenievich Tamm, Nobel Prize Laureate and scientific supervisor of A.D. Sakharov.

“In this conversation I mentioned, he (Einstein) He said that, it would seem, the very fact of the existence of an electron should have been sufficient to build the foundations of the general theory of elementary particles. This is undoubtedly hyperbole, but it is very characteristic of Einstein, and it is instructive to contrast it with the widespread view that the solution of fundamental problems of science should be preceded by the accumulation of a huge amount of experimental data.

In fact, the example of both the special and, in particular, the general theory of relativity shows that a decisive role for the construction of a fundamentally new theory is played by a deep logical analysis of the NODAL experimental facts.”

What is wrong with the Law of Optimal Information?

What is this? A REVIEW of Oppenheimer’s book or a FANTASY on general topics???

I leave it to the reader to decide.

13 IV 2017