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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

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

Chaio, Raymond, et al, eds. Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. A large edition that stems from a 2005 Templeton conference in honor of the 90th birthday of Charles Townes, discover of the laser. Some 37 men (e.g. Freeman Dyson, George Ellis, Paul Davies, Max Tegmark) and 2 women (Nancy Cartwright and Nancey Murphy) profess on these areas: The History and Future of Physical Science and Technology, Fundamental Physics and Quantum Mechanics, Astrophysics and Astronomy, New Approaches in Technology and Science, Consciousness and Free Will, and Reflections on the Big Questions: Mind, Matter, Mathematics, and Ultimate Reality. But as such titles convey, while trying to glimpse a modicum of presence and meaning, the endeavor remains caught, mostly unawares, in a Ptolemiac peering down in matter, back in time, and out in space, while losing any true organic vitality on the way.

Chang, Hasok. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taking how thermal properties came to be quantified as an example, an historian of science proposes a novel “complementary science” which would combine both analytical and narrative approaches.

Chang, Kevin. Alchemy as Studies of Life and Matter: Reconsidering the Place of Vitalism in Early Modern Chymistry. ISIS. 102/2, 2011. In a section on Alchemy and the History of Science about new admirations for this often maligned precursor to modern chemistry, an Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, historian makes the point that these early, rudimentary delvings into materiality took place within a prevailing, medieval sense of an organic, animate natural world. Such a “metaphysical Hermeticism,” broadly conceived, sought an intrinsic “seed, soul, or spiritus” that spans Creator and creatures. But this “vitalist cosmos” was later set aside as a mechanical model took over to this day. In our late 21st century how might a grand closure be availed by a worldwide discovery of a truly living cosmic gestation?

Would recognition of alchemists' interest in medicine make alchemy a less worthy subject within the history of science? Today we are witnessing an inverse form of vitalism. Medicine again is chemistry, although science no longer assumes any spiritual causes and steers well clear of the soul. In the Renaissance the vital principle, as the first principle of all things, united chemistry and medicine. Today it is the material compound that governs both sciences. Many would see this as the outcome of the materialization of nature by mechanists since the Scientific Revolution. Yet an idea held dear by Renaissance vitalists—that life unfolds according to a plan implanted in the inner seed of the fundamental unit of organic matter—is no longer myth, but confirmed science. Scientists have, in their own structures of explanation, found the semina that alchemists sought—the DNA or genomes that dwell at the kernel of the organic material (i.e., the cellular nucleus). In so doing they continue the early modern alchemists' urge to identify, extract, and manipulate the principles of life. (329)

Chavalarias, David and Jean-Philippe Cointet. Phylomemetic Patterns in Science Evolution. PLoS One. 8/2, 2013. As the Abstract describes, Complex Systems Institute of Paris researchers view the course of scientific studies as if a descriptive genetic phenomenon, which can be analyzed by similar methods.

We introduce an automated method for the bottom-up reconstruction of the cognitive evolution of science, based on big-data issued from digital libraries, and modeled as lineage relationships between scientific fields. We refer to these dynamic structures as phylomemetic networks or phylomemies, by analogy with biological evolution; and we show that they exhibit strong regularities, with clearly identifiable phylomemetic patterns. Some structural properties of the scientific fields - in particular their density -, which are defined independently of the phylomemy reconstruction, are clearly correlated with their status and their fate in the phylomemy (like their age or their short term survival). Within the framework of a quantitative epistemology, this approach raises the question of predictibility for science evolution, and sketches a prototypical life cycle of the scientific fields: an increase of their cohesion after their emergence, the renewal of their conceptual background through branching or merging events, before decaying when their density is getting too low. (Abstract)

Connor, Thomas, et al. Enhanced X-ray Emission for the Most Radio-Powerful Quasar in the Universe’s First Billion Years. arXiv:2103.03879. We cite this entry by eleven astronomers based in the USA, Germany, the UK, Italy, and Chile as one example among many of active worldwise studies about every aspect from quantum to, in this case, quasar phenomena. How could it be so that we tiny human beings who can yet now communicate in a super-organic way are able to gain such infinite knowledge. On the face of it, our global sapience seems as the phenomenal way that a self-creative universe can necessarily achieve a written, quantified description of itself.

We present deep Chandra X-ray observations of a quasar that, with a radio-to-optical flux ratio of R>1000, is one of the radio-loudest quasars in the early universe. Modeling the X-ray spectrum of the quasar with a power law, we identify a diffuse structure 50 kpc to the NW of the quasar along the jet axis that corresponds to a 3σ enhancement in the angular density of emission. (Abstract excerpt)

A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.

Costanza, Robert. A Vision of the Future: Reintegrating the Study of Humans and the Rest of Nature. Futures. 35/651, 2003. A founder of the field of ecological economics proposes an alternative, integral path to a consilience of knowledge from that of Edward O. Wilson which reduces everything to chemistry and physics. In Costanza’s approach, the emergent fractal scale of nature that springs from self-organizing complex systems would marry analysis and synthesis so as to find similarities everywhere. By these lights, a shared, realistic vision of a sustainable future results.

Crosby, Alfred. The Measure of Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A study of the European penchant to quantify the natural world. This endeavor to parcellate, dimension, count, number, and arrange propelled the West to technologically surpass China, the Middle East and the Americas.

Dai, Zhenyu, et al.. Physics-informed neural networks in the recreation of hydrodynamic simulations from dark matter. arXiv:2303.14090. Here is another 2023 instance whereby our Earthkinder cosmological studies are shifting and rising to a global genius phase, but properly by our human guidance. As the quotes say, in this plane, University of Houston, University of Edinburgh and University of the Western Cape, RSA astrotheorists appear to have awesome abilities to explore and learn about all wide and deep reaches

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have become a vital framework for predictive models that combine statistical patterns with domain knowledge. Hydrodynamic simulations are a core constituent of modern cosmology, but the computations are time-consuming. This paper presents the first application of physics-informed neural networks to baryons by combining advances in algorithmic architectures. By extracting baryonic properties from cosmological simulations, our results have improved accuracy based on dark matter haloes, metallicity relations, and scatter distributions. (Abstract excerpt)

The ΛCDM model, coined the standard model of cosmology due to its widespread adoption and explanatory power, plays a crucial role in modern cosmology and astrophysics. Galaxy formation evolution occur within virialized structures resulting from density perturbations in the early Universe, subjected to gravitational collapse. This leads to large-scale structure in
the form of a cosmic web evolving from a somewhat smooth starting
point, with dark matter halos as gravitationally bound over densities of the postulated main contributor to the matter content of the Universe. (1)

Our experiments demonstrate that PINNs as a revolutionary endeavor, offer a way to directly uncover novel baryonic properties and inform galactic dark matter halos. As such, they can be used to complete cosmological N-body simulations based on full hydrodynamic simulation suites. Our present framework is applicable to large-scale cosmological simulations and contributes to the use of modern machine learning in astrophysics. (13)

De Arruda, Henrique, et al. Knowledge Acquisition: A Complex Networks Approach. arXiv:1703.00366. University of Sao Paulo computational physicists Henrique, Filipi Silva, Luciano Costa and Diego Amancio show how the scientific process itself which discovers these dynamic natural topologies can be quantified as an iconic exemplar.

Complex networks have been found to provide a good representation of the structure of knowledge, as understood in terms of discoverable concepts and their relationships. In this context, the discovery process can be modeled as agents walking in a knowledge space. Recent studies proposed more realistic dynamics, including the possibility of agents being influenced by others with higher visibility or by their own memory. However, rather than dealing with these two concepts separately, as previously approached, in this study we propose a multi-agent random walk model for knowledge acquisition that incorporates both concepts. In order to evaluate our approach, we use a set of network models and two real networks, one generated from Wikipedia and another from the Web of Science. (Abstract excerpt)

Dieleman, Sander, et al. Rotation-Invariant Convolutional Neural Networks for Galaxy Morphology Prediction. arXiv:1503.07077. Since the Galaxy Zoo (Google) crowdsourcing project to characterize astronomical topologies has limitations, Ghent University and University of Minnesota researchers lay out a deep neural network method to further empower the communal project. See also Teaching a Machine to See: Unsupervised Image Segmentation and Categorization Using Growing Neural Gas and Hierarchical Clustering at 1507.01589 and Machine Learning Based Data Mining for Milky Way Filamentary Structure Reconstruction, 1505.06621, for similar cognitive algorithms. Might one imagine the actual formation of a global thinking brain?

Dijksterhuis, E. J. The Mechanization of the World Picture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. The standard work on the transition from a cosmos as sensitive organism to particulate mechanism due to the analytical, reductive method.

Dong, Yuxiao, et al. A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations. arXiv:1704.05150. From our late vantage Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA scholars survey the past 115 years of scientific activities and findings. A progression then becomes evident from an early incipient, individual stage, mainly in the US, UK, and Germany, to expansions after WWII to Japan, Israel, onto China, India, Australia, and lately over oceans and continents. But as the Abstract cites, and our website avers, into the 21st century an historic change has occurred from loners and small groups to large international teams fostered by the vast Internet. But we add it has not yet dawned, here or anywhere, that this transition to a worldwide sapiensphere could actually be learning and discovering on her/his own.

Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the 20th century. In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015. We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90\% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s. We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around. Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively. (Abstract)

In this work, we study the evolution of science over the past century according to three dimensions. First, we examine the evolving process of collaborations between scientists of different career-ages, institutions, and countries. Second, we characterize referencing behavior over time, with an emphasis on both its individual and collective dynamics. Finally, we investigate the rise and fall of scientific impact across the planet since 1900. Our study is performed on a large-scale scholarly dataset comprised of more than 89 million publications, 795 million citations, and 1.23 billion collaboration relationships spanning from 1900 to 2015, making this the largest-scale and longest-spanning analysis yet performed on academic data. (1)

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