Reversible Computing: An Introduction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Eftimiadi ◽  
Enrico Pugni Trimigliozzi
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Computing Systems ◽  
Reversible Computing ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Structural Aspects ◽  
Computing Models

Reversible computing is a paradigm where computing models are defined so that they reflect physical reversibility, one of the fundamental microscopic physical property of Nature. Also, it is one of the basic microscopic physical laws of nature. Reversible computing refers tothe computation that could always be reversed to recover its earlier state. It is based on reversible physics, which implies that we can never truly erase information in a computer. Reversible computing is very difficult and its engineering hurdles are enormous. This paper provides a brief introduction to reversible computing. With these constraints, one can still satisfactorily deal with both functional and structural aspects of computing processes; at the same time, one attains a closer correspondence between the behavior of abstract computing systems and the microscopic physical laws (which are presumed to be strictly reversible) that underlay any implementation of such systems Available online at https://int-scientific-journals.com

Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-107
Author(s):  
Melissa Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Adult World ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Physical Laws

Chapter 2 explores the use of the Arabian Nights as a familiar cultural narrative through which the burgeoning practices of archaeology, geology, geography and ethnography might be communicated. In this period, the imaginary voyage and adventures of the Arabian Nights, known since childhood, profoundly interacted with actual voyages above and below the ground, providing a narrative template for approaching new experiences that was already familiar to British readers. At the same time, this narrative strategy infused those emergent sciences with an enduring form of magic, or magical thinking, in the adult world, which informed processes of thinking about the physical laws of nature, the elements that comprise the globe, and new technological developments of the period. The magical possibilities and treasures of the Arabian Nights held an irresistible fascination for Western readers, who did not want to relinquish fully to the emergent discipline of science the potential meanings and possibilities of Eastern exploration.

Impossible Languages

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Moro
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Finite Set ◽  
The One ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Flow Of Information ◽  
Novel Structures

Understanding the nature and the structure of human language coincides with capturing the constraints which make a conceivable language possible or, equivalently, with discovering whether there can be any impossible languages at all. This book explores these related issues, paralleling the effort of a biologist who attempts at describing the class of impossible animals. In biology, one can appeal for example to physical laws of nature (such as entropy or gravity) but when it comes to language the path becomes intricate and difficult for the physical laws cannot be exploited. In linguistics, in fact, there are two distinct empirical domains to explore: on the one hand, the formal domain of syntax, where different languages are compared trying to understand how much they can differ; on the other, the neurobiological domain, where the flow of information through the complex neural networks and the electric code exploited by neurons is uncovered and measured. By referring to the most advanced experiments in Neurolinguistics the book in fact offers an updated descriptions of modern linguistics and allows the reader to formulate new and surprising questions. Moreover, since syntax - the capacity to generate novel structures (sentences) by recombining a finite set of elements (words) - is the fingerprint of all and only human languages this books ultimately deals with the fundamental questions which characterize the search for our origins.

Hobbes's Struggle with Contractual Obligation. On the Status of the Laws of Nature in Hobbes's Work

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Matthias Kiesselbach
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Contractual Obligation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Main Shortcoming

AbstractThis paper argues that throughout his intellectual career, Hobbes remains unsatisfied with his own attempts at proving the invariant advisability of contract-keeping. Not only does he see himself forced to abandon his early idea that contractual obligation is a matter of physical laws. He also develops and retains doubts concerning its theoretical successor, the doctrine that the obligatoriness characteristic of contracts is the interest in self-preservation in alliance with instrumental reason – i.e. prudence. In fact, it is during his work on Leviathan that Hobbes notes the doctrine's main shortcoming, namely the limitation of its dialectical potential to cases in which contract-breakers are publicly identifiable. This essay shows Hobbes's doubts about his Leviathan's treatment of contractual obligation by way of a close reading of its central 15 th chapter and an analysis of some revealing shifts between the English Leviathan and the (later) Latin edition. The paper ends by suggesting that Hobbes's awareness of the flaws at the heart of his political philosophy helps account for some striking changes in his latest writings.

scholarly journals XII. On the resistance of glass globes and cylinders to collapse from external pressure; and on the tensile and compressive strength of various kinds of glass

1859 ◽  
Vol 149 ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Compressive Strength ◽  
External Force ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
External Pressure ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Wrought Iron ◽  
General Law ◽  
Properties Of Materials ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Effective Distribution

The recently published experiments upon the collapse of tubes of wrought iron, led to results so novel and so much at variance with the ordinary rules of practice, as to exem­plify anew the caution and diligence which are requisite in investigating the physical laws of nature, in order to arrive at just conclusions in regard to the properties of materials and their most effective distribution for the purposes of construction. In the experiments alluded to, it was clearly shown that the prevailing ideas of the strength of vessels subjected to a uniform external force were erroneous and at variance with the laws of resistance to collapse under such circumstances; whilst in practice the prevalence of error in this matter had led to serious and sometimes fatal accidents, arising out of the construction of vessels of inadequate strength to sustain the pressures placed upon them. These errors, it is hoped, need no longer be perpetuated: the expe­riments on wrought iron indicated a means of increasing the strength of boiler flues and other vessels of that material, subjected to a collapsing force, to any required amount; and this was the immediate practical application of the general law then discovered, that the strength of cylindrical vessels, exposed to a uniform external force, varied inversely as the length between the rigid ends.

scholarly journals "Matter as effete mind": Peirce's synechistic ideas on the semiotic threshold

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Lucia Santaella
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Abductive Inference ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
Physical Laws

Following Peirce's broad concept of semiosis as a foundation of a field ofsrudy, the semiotics ofphysical nanrre, it is argued that we have to explore the interconnections of Peirce's semiotics with metaphysics. These interconnections will be analyzed in five steps: (1) Peirce's radical antidualism and evolutionism, implied in his synechistic ideas, (2) Peirce's semiotic statement that "all this universe is perfused with signs if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (CP 5.448, n.1), (3) Peirce's bold statement that "matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (CP 6.24), (4) his theory of final causation, which can only be properly understood in the light of semiosis, (5) his metaphysics and his methodeutics in relation to semiotics. The laws of nature are discovered by abductive inference revealing an affinity between the human mind and the designs of nature. Hence, the formal laws of thought are not simply laws of our minds but laws of the intelligibility of things.

Powers, Structure, and Thought in Empedocles

Rhizomata ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Curd
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Circular Motion ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Structural Aspects

AbstractHow is it that Empedocles’ world is is an organized system of diverse entities and how does this system of maintain regularity over long periods of time? I suggest that it is the impulses and thoughts of the roots and of Love and Strife that answer these questions. Love and Strife, working within the laws of nature provide the major structural aspects of the cosmos: the circular motion of the whirls created by the opposing forces produce the masses of roots that are worked up into the heavenly bodies and the living things that populate the cosmos. It is useful to conceive of Empedocles as a proto-power-structuralist. The basic ingredients of the world are ontologically prior to the medium sized objects of sensible experience: it is not the case that there are underlying Aristotelian subjects with properties and attributes depending on those subjects.

The Mirror between Two Worlds

2013 ◽  
pp. 166-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Ch’ng
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Structured Light ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Computing Paradigm ◽  
Rich Information ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Physical Laws

The information society manufactures, manipulates, and commodifies information. Heritage is one such area that is undergoing digital transformation. Heritage is increasingly being transmuted through digitisation devices such as laser and structured light scans into multiple representations of information. The rich information of a heritage object or an environment can be restructured, transmitted, and recomposed into a mediated form both textual and non-textual. Once digitised, it becomes free from its physical predecessor; it enters another world that defies the physical laws of nature where the imagination of the maker is a limit. Such worlds accompanied by their objects are accessible in new yet intuitive ways via surface computers. The horizontal nature of the multitouch-multiuser surface computer then becomes the mirror that links both worlds, allowing access into a virtual space via the touch-table computing paradigm. This chapter explores 3D surface computing, its technology, capabilities, and limits with developments of two multitouch applications incorporating heritage objects and environments, and the observation of the reactions of initial users. It addresses new issues and challenges surrounding the use of surface computing and how the access and transmission of heritage information via multitouch-multiuser tables are able to contribute to the accessibility, teaching, and learning of heritage.

Finding New Wine In Old Bottles: What Historians Must Do When Leontief Coefficients are no Longer the Designated Drivers of Economics

1995 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence S. Moss
Keyword(s):  
Process Design ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Deductive System ◽  
Pig Iron ◽  
Input Output ◽  
Output Analysis ◽  
Input Output Analysis ◽  
Engineering Data ◽  
Physical Laws

In 1951, Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief put his finger on what was wrong with economics. It had remained a “deductive system resting upon a static set of premises,” when what was needed was an economics that would “combine economic facts and theory.” The new economics would be called “interindustry” or “input-output” analysis (Leontief 1966, p. 14). According to Leontief it is easy to “compute the complete table of input requirements at any given level of output, provided we know its input ratios.” These input ratios could be calculated from “engineering data on process design and operating procedure” (ibid., pp. 24–26). For Leontief and, I suspect, a large number of economists in 1951, the technological facts dependent only on the chemical and physical laws of nature—what I shall call “Leontief coefficients”—were indisputable. It would take so many units of coke to produce a ton of pig iron whether or not there was a human being alive on earth to witness that transformation. The Leontief coefficients were the bedrock of subsequent economic analysis. They were analogous to what the philosopher John R. Searle has termed “brute facts” (Searle 1995, p. 27).

scholarly journals Humeanismo y leyes de la naturaleza: alcance y límites

2021 ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Cristián Soto
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Humean Supervenience ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Suitable Notion ◽  
Physical Laws

Nomological Humeanism has developed into a research program encompassing several variations on a single theme, namely, the view that laws are statements about regularities that we find in nature. After briefly revisiting an early form of nomological Humeanism in Hume’s critique of the idea of necessary connection, this article critically examines Lewis’ two-fold approach based on Humean supervenience and the best system account. We shall point out three limits of nomological Humeanism, which are widely recognized in the literature: its inadequacy in view of physical theories, its explanatory circularity, and its purported anthropomorphism, all of which advocates of nomological Humeanism have attempted to overcome Humeanism (Jaag y Loew 2020, Loewer 2004 y Massimi 2018). Lastly, we will argue that nomological Humeanism fails to provide a suitable notion of modality for laws of nature. This latter issue continues to represent a live challenge for empiricism in the philosophy of physical laws.

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