Good article in "American Scientist" on cosmology and cosmic background variations

From: Tim May <tcmay.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 09:33:16 -0700

I took a quick look at a newstand copy of "American Scientist," the
current issue. A good article on variations in the cosmic background
and how this might be able to give some indications about very early
"forks" taken in the evolution of the universe we are in.

In other news, am reading Graham Priest's "An Introduction to
Non-Classical Logic," 2001. A good survey of various kinds of modal
logic, multi-valued logic, intuitionistic logic, etc.

I also found an interesting book by Robert Goldblatt, "Mathematics of
Modality," 1993, which contains a paper "Diodorean Modality in
Minkowski Spacetime." He points out that Arthur Prior, in books from
the late 60s, early 70s, demonstrated that the lattice of
partially-ordered events in Minkowski spacetime corresponds to a modal
logic system called "S4.2."

(Sidenote: Bruno uses these names for axiom systems more comfortably
than I can at this point. Just citing a name for some system is not
very convincing to me, without having the background to know what the
names imply.)

The point is that apparently my hunch about time being viewed as a
poset, which I wrote about several weeks ago, is already known to
people like Goldblatt and Prior.

This remains my focus.


--Tim is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" --Unknown
Usenet Poster
Received on Tue Sep 17 2002 - 09:43:45 PDT