II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Twintelligent Gaiable Knowledge

B. The Spiral of Science: Manican to American to Earthicana Phases

Nicolescu, Basarab. Manifesto of Transdisciplinary. Albany: State University of New York, 2002. The Romanian-French physicist and author advocates a new phase of scientific inquiry and integration which can set aside the old mechanism model in favor of an animate cosmic genesis. In this view, Nature is seen not as a prefigured text but more a process of being transcribed and written. Universe and human are thus engaged in the same activity of “self-birth.”

Nicolescu, Basarab, ed. Transdiciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008. The University of Paris physicist and philosopher follows up on his 2002 ‘manifesto’ with the same title with the edited collection. Not yet seen, we quote from the publishers’ website.

In this fascinating volume, the contributors make it very clear that far from being a faddish and superficial phenomenon, transdisciplinarity is potentially the foundation for a new, and much needed, approach to inquiry. Transdisciplinarity goes beyond the dualism of opposing binary pairs: subject/object, subjectivity/objectivity, matter/consciousness, nature/divine, simplicity/complexity, reductionism/holism, diversity/unity which have marked the history of ideas for millennia. Because transdisciplinarity is radical, in the sense that is goes to the roots of knowledge, and questions our way of thinking and our construction and organization of knowledge. It requires a discipline of self-inquiry that integrates the knower in the process of knowing. Nicolescu's vision of transdisciplinarity, and that of the international contributors to this volume, goes beyond cognicentrism and the focus on analytic intelligence to propose a new type of intelligence that reflects a harmony between mind, feelings, and body.

Noble, David. A World Without Women. New York: Knopf, 1992. An indictment of science as an exclusively male, clannish endeavor, much to its detriment, which is only now beginning to be corrected.

Ntampaka, Michele and Alexey Vikhlinin. The Importance of Being Interpretable: Toward an Understandable Machine Learning Encoder for Galaxy Cluster Cosmology. arXiv:2112.05768. note this posting by Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore and Harvard Smithsonian Center cosmologists as an instance among many of our apparent Earthuman ability to proceed forth with such an intended participatory self-quantification across any multiUniVersal depth and breadth.

We present a deep machine learning (ML) approach to study cosmological parameters with multi-wavelength observations of galaxy clusters. The ML approach has two components: an encoder that builds a compressed representation of each cluster and a flexible CNN to estimate the cosmological model. From cluster catalogs, the ML method estimates the amplitude of matter fluctuations. Our interpretation schemes led us to find an unknown self-calibration mode for flux- and volume-limited cluster surveys. (Abstract sample)

Ogilvie, Brian. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst historian well details this humanist realization that our august earthly and cosmic environs is yet amenable to study, understanding and written record. The grand project now courses from muon to multiverse, but has lost and abandoned its original philosophical quest of deciphering and reading a greater creation.

Okasha, Samir. Alturism Researchers Must Cooperate. Nature. 467/653, 2010. The scientists who study the evolution of social behavior are seen themselves to have split into argumentative, “tribal” camps, rather than in common pursuit of knowledge. As a mostly male endeavor trying to explain within the Darwinian competitive standard why intragroup caring and sharing is so pervasive across natural kingdoms, it undercuts itself. Researchers ought to do the same and get on with a mutual solution.

Orrell, David. Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Reviewed more in Current Vistas and Gender Complements, this important work worries much over compromised scientific practice, and the imperative for a course correction.

The relationship between gender and aesthetics is frequently discussed in areas such as art and literature, but what does it tell us about science? Ever since Plato described women as originating from morally defective souls and Aristotle excluded them from his Lyceum, science has been a game dominated by men. This has affected both the kind of questions scientists ask and the way they interpret the answers. Nuclear weapons, atom smashers, and even the concept of reductionist science all reflect a gendered response to the world. This chapter traces the history of gender bias in science, explores the role played by the militarization of science following the Second World War, and shows how these related factors have shaped the scientific aesthetic. (116)

The left brain favors rational intellect over intuition, linearity over complexity, stability over change, analysis over a holistic approach, and objectivity over subjectivity. In aesthetic terms, it favors simple symmetry and straight lines. To say – in a rational, objective kind of way – that science tilts in favor of the left brain would not be a risky statement. What would the implications be for different areas of science, including physics, biology, and economics, if our scientific quest for beauty engaged both side of our brain? This final chapter argues that be adopting a new scientific aesthetic, we may come to a greater understanding of our place in the universe. (261)

Palla, Gergely, et al. Hierarchical Networks of Scientific Journals. arXiv:1506.05661. Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eotvos University biophysicists including Tamas Vicsek show that even self-organizing technical literatures exhibit the same nested structures and dynamics as everywhere else. In one more instance nature and text become similar in kind. See below a posting on the same day Using Network Science and Text Analytics to Produce Surveys in a Scientific Topic (1506.05690) by Filipi Silva that also explains how universal complexities are grace scientific networks.

Scientific journals are the repositories of the gradually accumulating knowledge of mankind about the world surrounding us. Just as our knowledge is organised into classes ranging from major disciplines, subjects and fields to increasingly specific topics, journals can also be categorised into groups using various metrics. In addition to the set of topics characteristic for a journal, they can also be ranked regarding their relevance from the point of overall influence. One widespread measure is impact factor, but in the present paper we intend to reconstruct a much more detailed description by studying the hierarchical relations between the journals based on citation data. We use a measure related to the notion of m-reaching centrality and find a network which shows the level of influence of a journal from the point of the direction and efficiency with which information spreads through the network. We can also obtain an alternative network using a suitably modified nested hierarchy extraction method applied to the same data. The results are weakly methodology-dependent and reveal non-trivial relations among journals. The two alternative hierarchies show large similarity with some striking differences, providing together a complex picture of the intricate relations between scientific journals. (Abstract)

Hierarchical organisation is a widespread phenomenon in nature and society. This is supported by several studies, focusing on the transcriptional regulatory network of Escherichia coli, the dominant-subordinate hierarchy among crayfish, the leader-follower network of pigeon flocks, the rhesus macaque kingdoms, neural networks, technological networks, social interactions, urban planning, ecological systems, and evolution. However, hierarchy is a polysemous word, and in general, we can distinguish between three different type of hierarchies when describing a complex system: the order, the nested and the flow hierarchy. (2)

Perc, Matjaz. Self-Organization of Progress across the Century of Physics. Nature Scientific Reports. 3/1720, 2013. In the 1890s when this span begins, science was pursued by individual theorists and investigators, before telephone or electricity. Max Planck, now with many Institutes in his name, is an archetypal figure of the age. The present author is a University of Maribor, Slovenia, systems mathematician. Via our worldwide noosphere Whom, as if a 21st century Max and Maxine Planet (Planect), is today carrying out such a retrospective survey which can perceive such long-range patterns of nonlinear complex dynamics, as if a global collaborative cerebral process?

We make use of information provided in the titles and abstracts of over half a million publications that were published by the American Physical Society during the past 119 years. By identifying all unique words and phrases and determining their monthly usage patterns, we obtain quantifiable insights into the trends of physics discovery from the end of the 19th century to today. We show that the magnitudes of upward and downward trends yield heavy-tailed distributions, and that their emergence is due to the Matthew effect. This indicates that both the rise and fall of scientific paradigms is driven by robust principles of self-organization. Data also confirm that periods of war decelerate scientific progress, and that the later is very much subject to globalisation. (Abstract)

Perlovsky, Leonid. Editorial. Physics of Life Reviews. 1/1, 2004. A new journal that seeks to move beyond the old isolation of scientific disciplines and remove their artificial divide between “physical” and “biological” realms. What is then implied is a novel creative universe where the same phenomena recur everywhere.

And today physics of life includes chemistry of biomolecules and their dynamics, evolution of genes, languages, and cultures, origins of life, systems at the borderline between disorder and chaos, the first principles of emergent behavior and phase transitions in complex systems, and mechanisms of the mind….fundamental laws exist at all levels of organization of matter, from quarks to consciousness. (1)

Pesic, Peter. Labyrinth. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. An essay on the historic quest to find the hidden secrets and meanings of nature that inspired scientists from Newton to Einstein.

Pontzen, Andrew. The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023. A University College London collegial cosmologist writes an initial book about this frontier 2020s turn to such computational methods which promise to radically advance our Earthuman project of multiversal quantification. Chapters proceed from Dark Matter, Energy and the Cosmic Web to Galaxies, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, Cosmic Origins and Simulations, Science, Reality. A current paper by AP is Explaining Dark Matter Halo Density Profiles with Neural Networks by Luisa Lucie-Smith, et at at arXiv:2305.03077. See also On the Decline of Star Formation during the Evolution of Galaxies at 2307.09526 for a separate instance. And in a planatural philosophia view, we note in amazement how incredible it is that our valiant intelligence is actually able to parse the parsec and articulate the ecosmic verses.

Over the last few years a new kind of physics has emerged to fill the gap between theory and experiment. By way of modern supercomputers, cosmologists can build simulated models that offer profound insights into the deep history of our universe. Today, physicists are translating their ideas and equations into computational code, finding that there is very much to be learned by this advance. Andrew Pontzen explains how physicists can now study exotic phenomena from black holes and colliding galaxies to dark matter and quantum entanglement, along with virtual realities. (Book)

My job as a cosmologist involves simulating the entire universe on computers. The goal is to understand what is out there, where it came from and how it relates to our lives here on Earth. (xiii) To understand the origins of our universe we need to trace them back into deep space and onto new galaxies, stars and planets. we need to simulate and interrelate them in a mini-universe by a careful appreciation of physical theory. (xxiii)

We use explainable neural networks to connect the evolutionary history of dark matter halos with their density profiles. The network captures independent factors within a low-dimensional representation to recover the relation between the early time assembly, inner profile, and the profile beyond the virial radius. The result thus illustrates the potential for machine-assisted scientific discovery in complicated astrophysical datasets. (2305.03077)

Cosmological simulations predict that during the evolution of galaxies, the specific star formation rate continuously decreases. To investigate the origin of this behavior, we use disk galaxies selected from the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Magneticum Pathfinder and follow their evolution in time. We find that the mean density of the cold gas regions decreases with time. This supports the idea of inside-out growth of disk galaxies. (2307.09526)

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