Jacob's Liberal Classic Page

Ah, enjoy the refreshing taste of liberal classic. This is the old site for the KSU Libertarian club. Come and see the new website at www.ksulibertarians.com !
Here is the old KSU College Libertarians Page: KSU College Libertarians Club

Now the site is just a place for Jacob to deposit notes. Send him mail to jacob@liberalclassic.info.

Pertaining to Classic Liberalism and Libertarianism

Pending...

Alternative Formulations of Quantum Mechanics

Jacob was always surprised that Quantum Mechanics courses tend to skip over topics like Bohm's Interpretation.
The interpretation preserves realism, though unfortunately at the expense of allowing time travel.
Against Realism is a good paper to read about these sorts of issues.
Jacob has the feeling that there is a lot yet to be done in interpreting the quantum state reduction process that occurs during a "quantum measurement". Reduction certainly is a physical process. It can be empirically demonstrated to involve more than conditioning probabilities to include revealed information. The Relational Interpretation has an interesting approach to the whole issue.

Calculus without Limits

Several classic thinkers like Newton, Euler, and Liebniz, used the concept of infinitesimal numbers without rigorous justification. This conception of the infinitely small led to so many criticisms and contradictions by the likes of George Berkeley that Calculus was rigorized by Cauchy and others with the concept of limits. However, Calculus can be formulated in a logically consistent way with infinitesimal numbers. This senior thesis explores a method due to Edwin Hewitt of generating the hyperreal field of infinitesimal numbers using algebraic equivalence classes of continuous functions over unbounded domains.

Financial Cryptography

There are methods for creating anonymous claims systems for fungible assets suggested by David Chaum in the 80's. These would allow people to transfer ownership of fungible assets while making it impossible to reveal the identity of buyers and sellers.
This technique has ethical implications. Is it morally defensible to run a bank like this? However, it is morally no worse than issuing paper money or bearer bonds. Money laundry is a big problem with or without cryptography.
There are similar techniques that allow anonymous elections to be verified as well.
These schemes all depend on blind digital signatures, which are signing functions that commute with other encryption functions.
A good set of references is available in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography.

Accounting from Axioms

Axiomatic Method and Accounting Science, Milton H. Spencer, The Accounting Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Apr., 1963), pp. 310-316, http://www.jstor.org/pss/242921

Alternative Formulation of Thermodynamics

A physicist named Jaynes came up with an interesting perspective on Thermodynamics. He suggested that entropy is an extension of an information theoretic concept also called entropy. Entropy gives a sort of distance between the exact and unchanging Hamiltonian model of a system and the more imprecise thermodynamic model of the system. In this way, the second law can be proven as a consequence of a system having a model that relaxes, i.e. a model which goes thermostatic after a certain period of time.