On The Shoulders of Giants

Nathaniel Libatique

Science and Society Topic 1

Updated 10 Nov 2010

Our Modern Civilization • Greeks: Nature is inherently

ordered and can be apprehended rationally. Mind.

• Romans: ius civile, ius gentium, and ius naturale. ius scriptum and ius non scriptum.Body.

• Judeo-Christian: Wisdom 7:22b-24,30b. Proverbs 25:2. Proverbs 8:30-31. Soul.

Photos from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras, Solomon and Roman_law

Jus NaturaleAlthough the natural law tradition has roots in ancient Greece, it was first codified in Roman law under the categories of jus naturale (“natural law”) and jus gentium (“the laws of nations”), and contrasted with jus civile (“civil law”). Roman jurists understood natural law as the universally applicable expression of right reason, eternal and unchanging. Natural law provided a guide to proper action—it underwrote ethical behavior, as well as social divisions between “natural” categories, such as the roles of the two sexes and the differences between children and adults.

(http://social.jrank.org/pages/2520/natural-law.html)

Jus Gentium

Jus gentium, Latin for "law of nations", was originally the part of Roman law that the Roman Empire applied to its dealings with foreigners, especially provincial subjects. In later times the Latin term came to refer to the natural or common law among nations[citation needed] considered as states within a larger human society, especially governing the rules of peace and war, national boundaries, diplomatic exchanges, and extradition, that together with jus inter gentes makes up public international law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_gentium)

Wisdom permeates creationYahweh gave Solomon immense wisdom and understanding and a heart as vast as sand on the seashore… He could talk about plants from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop growing on the wall; and he could talk of animals, and birds and reptiles and fish. (1 Kings 5: 9-14)

It was he who gave me true knowledge of all that is… the structure of the world and the properties of the elements… the revolution of the year and the position of stars … the medical properties of roots … All that is hidden, all that is plain, I have come to know, instructed by Wisdom who designed them all. (Wisdom 7: 17-21)

A brief history of science

• Κόσμος – the orderly intelligible universe

• Cumulative Progress – Individuals matter in the march of history: “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” (Isaac Newton)

• Distinct Method of Inquiry: Logic and Experiment go hand in hand

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Science Hall of Fame

Parallels

• The beginnings of numbers and number theory and RSA

• Gutenberg and Google

• Plato’s concept of Essence vs. Object Oriented programming

• Find your own parallels!

• Look for the ancient or medieval roots of a modern scientific field, application or world view!

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Babylonian_numerals.html

1 603 + 57 602 + 46 60 + 40 which, in decimal notation is 424000.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Number_theory

Plimpton 322 (Larsa, Mesopotamia, ca. 1800 BCE)

http://wiki.cs.miami.edu/pages/_media/home/burt/adleman_r_s.jpeg

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci214273,00.htmlv

To do this Use whose Kind of key

Send an encrypted message

Use the receiver's Public key

Send an encrypted signature

Use the sender's Private key

Decrypt an encrypted message

Use the receiver's Private key

Decrypt an encrypted signature (and authenticate the sender)

Use the sender's Public key

http://img.tfd.com/cde/ENCRYPT.GIF

Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) A highly secure cryptography method by RSA Security, Inc., Bedford, MA (www.rsa.com), a division of EMC Corporation since 2006. It uses a two-part key. The private key is kept by the owner; the public key is published.

Data are encrypted by using the recipient's public key, which can only be decrypted by the recipient's private key. RSA is very computation intensive, thus it is often used to create a digital envelope, which holds an RSA-encrypted DES key and DES-encrypted data. This method encrypts the secret DES key so that it can be transmitted over the network, but encrypts and decrypts the actual message using the much faster DES algorithm.

RSA is also used for authentication by creating a digital signature. In this case, the sender's private key is used for encryption, and the sender's public key is used for decryption. See digital signature.

The RSA algorithm is also implemented in hardware. As RSA chips get faster, RSA encoding and decoding add less overhead to the operation

http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/alice_and_bob.JPG

Phytagoras

Plato

Newton

Einstein

Essence

Geometry

The Calculus and the Mechanistic World

Special Relativity

Aristotle

Aesthetics

Euclid

Fermat

Principle of Least Time

Feynman

Quantum Electrodynamics

http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/~scipop/Obsetion/eratos/image008.jpg

Ideas and Theories Develop

Triangles Time and Tides

• Phytagorean Theorem

• Special Relativity: time is not absolute, but the speed of light is!

• Principle of Least Time: light thinks?

• QED

tlab = tufo / Sqrt[ 1 – v2/c2 ]

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~kallos/feynman.htm

Light goes everywhere

Richard Feynman

Aesthetics

• Truth is beautiful … symmetry

• But anything that breaks “symmetry” is even more interesting … maybe a new theory emerges!

阴阳

Energy and Momentum

time and frequency

electric and magnetic fields

voltage and current

electric charge and magnetic monopole

The Memristor

Voltage Current

Magnetic Flux

Electric Flux ?

C

R

L

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/abs/nature06932.html

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-mysterious-memristorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua

http://raffysaldana.blogspot.com/2009/02/heart-equation-and-mathematics-of-love.html

• "The equation is another way of saying that love can sometimes be complicated..."• "It also implies that Love can be quantified..."• "Another implication of the Love equation is that Love has symmetry..."• "Love is not a FUNCTION, it is a RELATION..."• "Love is REAL; it is not IMAGINARY..."• "Love has an ABSOLUTE VALUE..."• "Love is a UNION and an INTERSECTION not a SEPARATION OF VARIABLES..."• "LOVE = [PERSON1 (union) PERSON2] && PERSON1 (intersection) PERSON2]...“• "I wish you were sine squared theta and I was cosine squared theta so together we could be one..."

http://www.nikko-jp.org/english/toshogu/youmeimon.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/firrs/2673338601/

“The Universe in a Glass of Wine”• A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will

probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

We are part of this global enterprise

• Baldomero Olivera• Ben de Lumen• Leon Chua• Gregory Tangonan• Dado Banatao• Sam Bernal

Conotoxin

Lunasin (from the Pilipino word lunas for cure) is a novel cancer preventive soy peptide with a unique epigenetic mechanism discovered in our lab in 1999. It has now been found in other seeds as well.

Drug delivery, fighting cancer, optical communications, nanotechnology, graphics chips, biomolecular engineering

HP’s Memristor

Readings from our text

• F. T. Limpoco, “A brief history of science”• J. Garcia, “Science and the scientific method”