Heinz Dieterich  14/08/17  1. El American Dream de Maduro Finalmente, las plegarias del madurismo para evocar una amenaza de guerra imperialista, se cumplieron. “Tenemos muchas opciones para Venezuela, incluida una posible opción militar si es necesario”, dijo Trump, proporcionándole a Maduro el salvavidas ideológico que su desastrosa gobernanza anhelaba. Desde hace cuatro años, Cabello y Maduro manipulan al […]

Si algo podría claramente definir la brecha científica y tecnológica entre los países industrializados y los países de América Latina es la falta de “visión nacionalista” de estos últimos a la hora de abordar los asuntos de la ciencia. Nacionalismo este que no debe entenderse como la pura actuación del Estado por defender su soberanía o su derecho a la autodeterminación. Se trata, más bien, de un nacionalismo que se corresponde con la facultad de un país de poder pensar y avizorar inteligentemente la innovación. Y si algo caracteriza a los países latinoamericanos es su “enamoramiento” por los países industrializados y por el éxito alcanzado por ellos en el campo de la ciencia y la tecnología. No tan bueno resulta su convencimiento de poder transplantar al interno enfoques de innovación exitosos.

We search an autocatalytic structure in networks of technological fields and evaluate its significance for technological change. To this aim we define a technology network based on the International Patents Classification, and we study if autocatalytic structures in the network foster innovation as measured by the rate of production of patents. The network is identified through patenting activity of geographical regions in different technology fields. Through our analysis we show how the technological landscape of the patents database evolves as a self-organising autocatalytic structure that grows in size, and arrives to cover the most part of the technology network. Technology classes in the core of the autocatalytic structure perform better in terms of their innovativeness, as measured by the rate of growth of the number of patents. Finally, the links between classes that define the autocatalytic structure of the technology network break the hierarchical structure of the database, and indicate that recombinant innovation and its autocatalytic patterns are an important stylised fact of technological change.

A phase plot of the oil economy is built using the literature data of world oil production, price, and EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). An analogy between the oil economy and the Benard convection is proposed; some methods of interpretation and forecast of the system behavior are also shown based on “phase portrait” using as main variables the price, production and EROEI values. A scenery is proposed on this basis.

The heaviest of the transuranic elements known as superheavy elements (SHE) are produced in nuclear reactions in a few specialized laboratories located in Germany, the U.S., Russia, and Japan. The history of this branch of physical science provides several case studies of interest to the philosophy and sociology of modern science. The story of SHE illuminates the crucial notion of what constitutes a chemical element, what the criteria are for discovering a new element, and how an element is assigned a name. The story also cast light on the sometimes uneasy relationship between physics and chemistry. It is far from obvious that elements with Z > 110 exist in the same sense as oxygen or sodium exists. The answers are not given by nature but by international commissions responsible for the criteria and evaluation of discovery claims. The works of these commissions and of SHE research in general have often been controversial.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”1 Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.

Recently we proposed “quantum language”, which was not only characterized as the metaphysical and linguistic turn of quantum mechanics but also the linguistic turn of Descartes = Kant epistemology. And further we believe that quantum language is the only scientifically successful theory in dualistic idealism. If this turn is regarded as progress in the history of western philosophy (i.e., if “philosophical progress” is defined by “approaching to quantum language”), we should study the linguistic mind-body problem more than the epistemological mind-body problem. In this paper, we show that to solve the mind-body problem and to propose “measurement axiom” in quantum language are equivalent. Since our approach is always within dualistic idealism, we believe that our linguistic answer is the only true solution to the mind-body problema.

This article deals with the first detection of gravitational waves by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors on 14 September 2015, where the signal was generated by two stellar mass black holes with masses 36 M ⊙ and 29 M ⊙ that merged to form a 62 M ⊙ black hole, releasing 3 M ⊙ energy in gravitational waves, almost 1.3 billion years ago. We begin by providing a brief overview of gravitational waves, their sources and the gravitational wave detectors. We then describe in detail the first detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger. We then comment on the electromagnetic follow up of the detection event with various telescopes. Finally, we conclude with the discussion on the tests of gravity and fundamental physics with the first gravitational wave detection event.

Mereology is the theory of wholes and parts. The first formal mereology was developed by Husserl in his third Logical Investigation at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1916 Stanisław Lesnie ´ wski gave the first axiomatization of a classical extensional formal mereology. That same year, Alfred North Whitehead also gave a sketch of a mereology in “La théorie relationniste de l’espace”. It was developed in the perspective of a theory of space in which the concept of point is no longer considered as primitive, but is built in terms of the relations between objects. This project was then taken up and amplified in the wider perspective of the method of extensive abstraction presented in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature. Afterwards, Whitehead added to what was first a theory of the part-whole relation some definitions of topological notions such as junction.

Recently we uploaded to the arxiv a paper entitled: Improving the Economic Complexity Index. There, we compared three metrics of the knowledge intensity of an economy, the original metric we published in 2009 (the Economic Complexity Index or ECI), a variation of the metric proposed in 2012, and a variation we called ECI+. It was brought to our attention that the definition of ECI+ was equivalent to the variation of the metric proposed in 2012. We have verified this claim, and found that while the equations are not exactly the same, they are similar enough to be our own oversight. More importantly, we now ask: how many variations of the original ECI work? In this paper we provide a simple unifying framework to explore multiple variations of ECI, including both the original 2009 ECI and the 2012 variation. We found that a large fraction of variations have a similar predictive power, indicating that the chance of finding a variation of ECI that works, after the seminal 2009 measure, are surprisingly high.