SCIENCE AND SANITY – ALFRED KORZYBSKI

The fantastic science fiction adventures described in "The World of Null-A" and "The Pawns of Null-A" made me wonder if there really was any such thing as "General semantics". Was this "science" just a product of A. E. van Vogt's vivid imagination. Some of the chapters started with anonymous quotes from purported authorities, such as "B. R", "A. K.", "C. J. K.". Had they all been made up? Could "B. R." be Bertrand Russell? And what about the "Semantic Institute" at "Korzybski Square"?

Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)

  


In the      mid-1950s it was not as easy to dig out obscure information as it is today, with the omnipresent Web and its search engines. I went to the central public library in Stockholm, but as far as I can recall, there was nothing to be found under the heading of "General semantics". But there was an index card system where authors were listed alphabetically. I looked up "Korzybski", and - lo and behold! - there was an author of that name. He had written a book called "Science and Sanity". I could not find it on the shelves, however, so I asked a librarian to make a reservation for me when it was returned. It turned out that nobody had borrowed the book. Instead it was kept along with other obscure books in a storage compartment behind the area that was accessible to the public. The librarian took me there and dug out the book, a hefty tome of some 800 pages. I felt pretty foolish as the librarian gave me a quizzical look. What could an adolescent schoolboy possibly want from this dusty volume?
By the way, a few years earlier during a visit to the local public library, I was indignant to find a Swedish science fiction book written by Vladimir Semitjov: "430 million km in outer space" ("43,000,000 mil i världsrymden") on a shelf behind the librarian's desk under the heading of "Crazies" ("Galningar"). As the space age dawned and interplanetary probes became a reality, I often recalled that incident. - Many years later, an aunt of mine, who was a librarian, laughed heartily when I told her the story. She told me that the term "Galningar" was used for books that had been misplaced on the shelves. It had nothing to do with their content.
The book turned out to be a heavy read, due to its high level of abstraction and unusual terminology, in addition to my own limitations with regard to the English language. But at the same time I found it quite fascinating, with its abundance of ideas. (Unexpectedly - at least to me - the complete book is now available on the web.)
The central themes of the book are the enormous influence that language itself has on our thinking, the dangers that are inherent in the process of abstraction that underlies language, and the need to be fully aware of them: "The map is not the territory." The book makes a distinction between the "Non-Aristotelian" discipline of "General Semantics" and the two-valued logic of Aristotle with its insistence that statements are either true or false. In particular, it warns us from using the little word "is" of identification without realising how it can constrain our view of the world. Many times when we say "is", we should really think "has" (the property of, or the attribute, at this point in time), or "exhibits some of the characteristics of", and add "etc." in order to remind ourselves that the statement is not exhaustive, and may not even be valid tomorrow.
The term "General Semantics" is used to widen the scope of semantics so that it does not just deal with the lexical meaning of words and symbols, but also with our reactions to them. - A man unexpectedly brings flowers to his wife, as a symbol of his love. But she may be wondering if instead it is a sign of his bad conscience. Not only her interpretation, but also the emotions it evokes, are seen as legitimate subjects for study under the heading of "General Semantics".
"Science and Sanity" has been acclaimed by many intelligent readers, but it has also been denounced as a mish-mash of unoriginal observations presented as science. To my mind, it does not matter very much whether Korzybski's work is based on original research or is just a compilation of previous contributions. I believe that his world view, despite some exaggerations and a tendency to self-aggrandizement, is basically sound, has turned out to be influential, and is largely compatible with modern scientific thought.
By all accounts Korzybski had a strong and colorful personality. He was a Polish count, born in 1879. He received an engineering education in Warsaw, fought with the Russian army in WW I, was injured and sent to North America in late 1915 to co-ordinate the shipment of war supplies to Russia. After the war he decided to stay in the United States. He wrote several books. "Science and Sanity" was published in 1933. He founded the Institute of General Semantics in 1938 and directed it until his death in 1950. - See also this biography.

Anatol Rapoport

At the Institute he gathered a group of disciples, some of whom turned out to be very talented. Shortly after I read "Science and Sanity", I enjoyed two rather more accessible books. One was by Samuel Hayakawa: "Language in Thought and Action". The other was by Anatol Rapoport: "Science and the Goals of Man". Both men had distinguished careers. Hayakawa became a U. S. Senator for California, and Rapoport a pioneering professor of mathematics, applying it to biology and to the theory of social conflicts. Their books in turn encouraged me to take an interest in the philosophical foundations of science: some of the works of Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and in logical positivism and empiricism in general.

Samuel Hayakawa

Hayakawa's recollections in interview form ("oral history") of his time with Korzybski are illuminating and amusing. Apparently, Korzybski and Hayakawa had a good relationship, but Hayakawa characterised himself as a "disobedient son", adding that Korzybski wanted "faithful, nonargumentative, pious disciples, spreading the word of Korzybski".
Today the teachings of "Science and Sanity" seem as relevant as when they were written, especially in the light of our present tendency to attach labels to persons, and groups of persons, whom we like or dislike, and to see the world in terms of black and white: "Terrorist", "Unbeliever", etc. The map is not the territory!
Further reading

1. Reader reviews of "Science and Sanity" at Amazon. (Scroll down to "Spotlight Reviews").
2. The home page of the Institute of General Semantics.
3. "Dare to Inquire: Demarginalizing General Semantics" by Bruce Kodish. An article written in 2003. It examines Martin Gardner's attacks on "General Semantics" and finds them unjustified.

http://www.zenker.se/Books/korzybski.shtml

A JEWEL AT THE HEART OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

Illustration by Andy Gilmore

Artist’s rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated — the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions.

By: Natalie Wolchover September 17, 2013

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.
The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.
“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”
The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.
“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”
Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.
In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.
“It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.
The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to change over time.
Because “we know that ultimately, we need to find a theory that doesn’t have” unitarity and locality, Bourjaily said, “it’s a starting point to ultimately describing a quantum theory of gravity.”
Clunky Machinery
The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

United States Postal Service

The iconic 20th century physicist Richard Feynman invented a method for calculating probabilities of particle interactions using depictions of all the different ways an interaction could occur. Examples of “Feynman diagrams” were included on a 2005 postage stamp honoring Feynman.

The 60-year-old method for calculating scattering amplitudes — a major innovation at the time — was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He sketched line drawings of all the ways a scattering process could occur and then summed the likelihoods of the different drawings. The simplest Feynman diagrams look like trees: The particles involved in a collision come together like roots, and the particles that result shoot out like branches. More complicated diagrams have loops, where colliding particles turn into unobservable “virtual particles” that interact with each other before branching out as real final products. There are diagrams with one loop, two loops, three loops and so on — increasingly baroque iterations of the scattering process that contribute progressively less to its total amplitude. Virtual particles are never observed in nature, but they were considered mathematically necessary for unitarity — the requirement that probabilities sum to one.
“The number of Feynman diagrams is so explosively large that even computations of really simple processes weren’t done until the age of computers,” Bourjaily said. A seemingly simple event, such as two subatomic particles called gluons colliding to produce four less energetic gluons (which happens billions of times a second during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider), involves 220 diagrams, which collectively contribute thousands of terms to the calculation of the scattering amplitude.
In 1986, it became apparent that Feynman’s apparatus was a Rube Goldberg machine.
To prepare for the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas (a project that was later canceled), theorists wanted to calculate the scattering amplitudes of known particle interactions to establish a background against which interesting or exotic signals would stand out. But even 2-gluon to 4-gluon processes were so complex, a group of physicists had written two years earlier, “that they may not be evaluated in the foreseeable future.”
Stephen Parke and Tommy Taylor, theorists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, took that statement as a challenge. Using a few mathematical tricks, they managed to simplify the 2-gluon to 4-gluon amplitude calculation from several billion terms to a 9-page-long formula, which a 1980s supercomputer could handle. Then, based on a pattern they observed in the scattering amplitudes of other gluon interactions, Parke and Taylor guessed a simple one-term expression for the amplitude. It was, the computer verified, equivalent to the 9-page formula. In other words, the traditional machinery of quantum field theory, involving hundreds of Feynman diagrams worth thousands of mathematical terms, was obfuscating something much simpler. As Bourjaily put it: “Why are you summing up millions of things when the answer is just one function?”
“We knew at the time that we had an important result,” Parke said. “We knew it instantly. But what to do with it?”
The Amplituhedron
The message of Parke and Taylor’s single-term result took decades to interpret. “That one-term, beautiful little function was like a beacon for the next 30 years,” Bourjaily said. It “really started this revolution.”

Arkani-Hamed et al.

Twistor diagrams depicting an interaction between six gluons, in the cases where two (left) and four (right) of the particles have negative helicity, a property similar to spin. The diagrams can be used to derive a simple formula for the 6-gluon scattering amplitude.

In the mid-2000s, more patterns emerged in the scattering amplitudes of particle interactions, repeatedly hinting at an underlying, coherent mathematical structure behind quantum field theory. Most important was a set of formulas called the BCFW recursion relations, named for Ruth Britto, Freddy Cachazo, Bo Feng and Edward Witten. Instead of describing scattering processes in terms of familiar variables like position and time and depicting them in thousands of Feynman diagrams, the BCFW relations are best couched in terms of strange variables called “twistors,” and particle interactions can be captured in a handful of associated twistor diagrams. The relations gained rapid adoption as tools for computing scattering amplitudes relevant to experiments, such as collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. But their simplicity was mysterious.
“The terms in these BCFW relations were coming from a different world, and we wanted to understand what that world was,” Arkani-Hamed said. “That’s what drew me into the subject five years ago.”
With the help of leading mathematicians such as Pierre Deligne, Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators discovered that the recursion relations and associated twistor diagrams corresponded to a well-known geometric object. In fact, as detailed in a paper posted to arXiv.org in December by Arkani-Hamed, Bourjaily, Cachazo, Alexander Goncharov, Alexander Postnikov and Jaroslav Trnka, the twistor diagrams gave instructions for calculating the volume of pieces of this object, called the positive Grassmannian.
Named for Hermann Grassmann, a 19th-century German linguist and mathematician who studied its properties, “the positive Grassmannian is the slightly more grown-up cousin of the inside of a triangle,” Arkani-Hamed explained. Just as the inside of a triangle is a region in a two-dimensional space bounded by intersecting lines, the simplest case of the positive Grassmannian is a region in an N-dimensional space bounded by intersecting planes. (N is the number of particles involved in a scattering process.)
It was a geometric representation of real particle data, such as the likelihood that two colliding gluons will turn into four gluons. But something was still missing.
The physicists hoped that the amplitude of a scattering process would emerge purely and inevitably from geometry, but locality and unitarity were dictating which pieces of the positive Grassmannian to add together to get it. They wondered whether the amplitude was “the answer to some particular mathematical question,” said Trnka, a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “And it is,” he said.

Nima Arkani-Hamed

A sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle interaction. Using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra.

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka discovered that the scattering amplitude equals the volume of a brand-new mathematical object — the amplituhedron. The details of a particular scattering process dictate the dimensionality and facets of the corresponding amplituhedron. The pieces of the positive Grassmannian that were being calculated with twistor diagrams and then added together by hand were building blocks that fit together inside this jewel, just as triangles fit together to form a polygon.
Like the twistor diagrams, the Feynman diagrams are another way of computing the volume of the amplituhedron piece by piece, but they are much less efficient. “They are local and unitary in space-time, but they are not necessarily very convenient or well-adapted to the shape of this jewel itself,” Skinner said. “Using Feynman diagrams is like taking a Ming vase and smashing it on the floor.”
Arkani-Hamed and Trnka have been able to calculate the volume of the amplituhedron directly in some cases, without using twistor diagrams to compute the volumes of its pieces. They have also found a “master amplituhedron” with an infinite number of facets, analogous to a circle in 2-D, which has an infinite number of sides. Its volume represents, in theory, the total amplitude of all physical processes. Lower-dimensional amplituhedra, which correspond to interactions between finite numbers of particles, live on the faces of this master structure.
“They are very powerful calculational techniques, but they are also incredibly suggestive,” Skinner said. “They suggest that thinking in terms of space-time was not the right way of going about this.”
Quest for Quantum Gravity
The seemingly irreconcilable conflict between gravity and quantum field theory enters crisis mode in black holes. Black holes pack a huge amount of mass into an extremely small space, making gravity a major player at the quantum scale, where it can usually be ignored. Inevitably, either locality or unitarity is the source of the conflict.

Puzzling Thoughts
Locality and unitarity are the central pillars of quantum field theory, but as the following thought experiments show, both break down in certain situations involving gravity. This suggests physics should be formulated without either principle.
Locality says that particles interact at points in space-time. But suppose you want to inspect space-time very closely. Probing smaller and smaller distance scales requires ever higher energies, but at a certain scale, called the Planck length, the picture gets blurry: So much energy must be concentrated into such a small region that the energy collapses the region into a black hole, making it impossible to inspect. “There’s no way of measuring space and time separations once they are smaller than the Planck length,” said Arkani-Hamed. “So we imagine space-time is a continuous thing, but because it’s impossible to talk sharply about that thing, then that suggests it must not be fundamental — it must be emergent.”
Unitarity says the quantum mechanical probabilities of all possible outcomes of a particle interaction must sum to one. To prove it, one would have to observe the same interaction over and over and count the frequencies of the different outcomes. Doing this to perfect accuracy would require an infinite number of observations using an infinitely large measuring apparatus, but the latter would again cause gravitational collapse into a black hole. In finite regions of the universe, unitarity can therefore only be approximately known.

“We have indications that both ideas have got to go,” Arkani-Hamed said. “They can’t be fundamental features of the next description,” such as a theory of quantum gravity.
String theory, a framework that treats particles as invisibly small, vibrating strings, is one candidate for a theory of quantum gravity that seems to hold up in black hole situations, but its relationship to reality is unproven — or at least confusing. Recently, a strange duality has been found between string theory and quantum field theory, indicating that the former (which includes gravity) is mathematically equivalent to the latter (which does not) when the two theories describe the same event as if it is taking place in different numbers of dimensions. No one knows quite what to make of this discovery. But the new amplituhedron research suggests space-time, and therefore dimensions, may be illusory anyway.
“We can’t rely on the usual familiar quantum mechanical space-time pictures of describing physics,” Arkani-Hamed said. “We have to learn new ways of talking about it. This work is a baby step in that direction.”
Even without unitarity and locality, the amplituhedron formulation of quantum field theory does not yet incorporate gravity. But researchers are working on it. They say scattering processes that include gravity particles may be possible to describe with the amplituhedron, or with a similar geometric object. “It might be closely related but slightly different and harder to find,” Skinner said.

Courtesy of Jaroslav Trnka

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his former student and co-author Jaroslav Trnka, who finished his Ph.D. at Princeton University in July and is now a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

Physicists must also prove that the new geometric formulation applies to the exact particles that are known to exist in the universe, rather than to the idealized quantum field theory they used to develop it, called maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This model, which includes a “superpartner” particle for every known particle and treats space-time as flat, “just happens to be the simplest test case for these new tools,” Bourjaily said. “The way to generalize these new tools to [other] theories is understood.”
Beyond making calculations easier or possibly leading the way to quantum gravity, the discovery of the amplituhedron could cause an even more profound shift, Arkani-Hamed said. That is, giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry.
“In a sense, we would see that change arises from the structure of the object,” he said. “But it’s not from the object changing. The object is basically timeless.”
While more work is needed, many theoretical physicists are paying close attention to the new ideas.
The work is “very unexpected from several points of view,” said Witten, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. “The field is still developing very fast, and it is difficult to guess what will happen or what the lessons will turn out to be.”
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/

PERMANENT MAGNETIC MOTOR FROM ARGENTINA. A SELF RUNNING, FREE ENERGY GENERATOR!

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom^[1]

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review.^[2] Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow used the terms Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Self-Actualization and Self-Transcendence needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.
Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."^[3] Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.^[4]
Maslow's theory was fully expressed in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.^[5] While the hierarchy remains a very popular framework in sociology research, management training^[6] and secondary and higher psychology instruction, it has largely been supplanted by attachment theory in graduate and clinical psychology and psychiatry.^[7][8]

Contents

• 1 Hierarchy
  • 1.1 Physiological needs
  • 1.2 Safety needs
  • 1.3 Love and belonging
  • 1.4 Esteem
  • 1.5 Self-actualization
• 2 Research
• 3 Criticism
• 4 Changes to the hierarchy by circumstance
• 5 See also
• 6 Further reading
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Hierarchy

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid with the largest, most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom and the need for self-actualization at the top.^[1][9] While the pyramid has become the de facto way to represent the hierarchy, Maslow himself never used a pyramid to describe these levels in any of his writings on the subject.
The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called "deficiency needs" or "d-needs": esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these "deficiency needs" are not met – with the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) need – there may not be a physical indication, but the individual will feel anxious and tense. Maslow's theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs. Maslow also coined the term Metamotivation to describe the motivation of people who go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment.^[10]
The human mind and brain are complex and have parallel processes running at the same time, thus many different motivations from various levels of Maslow's hierarchy can occur at the same time. Maslow spoke clearly about these levels and their satisfaction in terms such as "relative," "general," and "primarily." Instead of stating that the individual focuses on a certain need at any given time, Maslow stated that a certain need "dominates" the human organism.^[11] Thus Maslow acknowledged the likelihood that the different levels of motivation could occur at any time in the human mind, but he focused on identifying the basic types of motivation and the order in which they should be met.

Physiological needs

Physiological needs are the physical requirements for human survival. If these requirements are not met, the human body cannot function properly, and will ultimately fail. Physiological needs are thought to be the most important; they should be met first.
Air, water, and food are metabolic requirements for survival in all animals, including humans. Clothing and shelter provide necessary protection from the elements. While maintaining an adequate birth rate shapes the intensity of the human sexual instinct, sexual competition may also shape said instinct.^[2]

Safety needs

With their physical needs relatively satisfied, the individual's safety needs take precedence and dominate behavior. In the absence of physical safety – due to war, natural disaster, family violence, childhood abuse, etc. – people may (re-)experience post-traumatic stress disorder or transgenerational trauma. In the absence of economic safety – due to economic crisis and lack of work opportunities – these safety needs manifest themselves in ways such as a preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, savings accounts, insurance policies, reasonable disability accommodations, etc. This level is more likely to be found in children because they generally have a greater need to feel safe.
Safety and Security needs include:

• Personal security
• Financial security
• Health and well-being
• Safety net against accidents/illness and their adverse impacts

Love and belonging

After physiological and safety needs are fulfilled, the third level of human needs is interpersonal and involves feelings of belongingness. This need is especially strong in childhood and can override the need for safety as witnessed in children who cling to abusive parents. Deficiencies within this level of Maslow's hierarchy – due to hospitalism, neglect, shunning, ostracism, etc. – can impact the individual's ability to form and maintain emotionally significant relationships in general, such as:

• Friendship
• Intimacy
• Family

According to Maslow, humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance among their social groups, regardless if these groups are large or small. For example, some large social groups may include clubs, co-workers, religious groups, professional organizations, sports teams, and gangs. Some examples of small social connections include family members, intimate partners, mentors, colleagues, and confidants. Humans need to love and be loved – both sexually and non-sexually – by others.^[2] Many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and clinical depression in the absence of this love or belonging element. This need for belonging may overcome the physiological and security needs, depending on the strength of the peer pressure.

Esteem

All humans have a need to feel respected; this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect. Esteem presents the typical human desire to be accepted and valued by others. People often engage in a profession or hobby to gain recognition. These activities give the person a sense of contribution or value. Low self-esteem or an inferiority complex may result from imbalances during this level in the hierarchy. People with low self-esteem often need respect from others; they may feel the need to seek fame or glory. However, fame or glory will not help the person to build their self-esteem until they accept who they are internally. Psychological imbalances such as depression can hinder the person from obtaining a higher level of self-esteem or self-respect.
Most people have a need for stable self-respect and self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs: a "lower" version and a "higher" version. The "lower" version of esteem is the need for respect from others. This may include a need for status, recognition, fame, prestige, and attention. The "higher" version manifests itself as the need for self-respect. For example, the person may have a need for strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence, and freedom. This "higher" version takes precedence over the "lower" version because it relies on an inner competence established through experience. Deprivation of these needs may lead to an inferiority complex, weakness, and helplessness.
Maslow states that while he originally thought the needs of humans had strict guidelines, the "hierarchies are interrelated rather than sharply separated".^[5] This means that esteem and the subsequent levels are not strictly separated; instead, the levels are closely related.

Self-actualization

Main article: Self-actualization

"What a man can be, he must be."^[12] This quotation forms the basis of the perceived need for self-actualization. This level of need refers to what a person's full potential is and the realization of that potential. Maslow describes this level as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.^[13] Individuals may perceive or focus on this need very specifically. For example, one individual may have the strong desire to become an ideal parent. In another, the desire may be expressed athletically. For others, it may be expressed in paintings, pictures, or inventions.^[14] As previously mentioned, Maslow believed that to understand this level of need, the person must not only achieve the previous needs, but master them.

Research

Recent research appears to validate the existence of universal human needs, although the hierarchy proposed by Maslow is called into question.^[15][16] Other research indicates that Maslow's explanations of the hierarchy of human motivation reflect a binary pattern of growth as seen in math. The individual's awareness of first, second, and third person perspectives, and of each one's input needs and output needs, moves through a general pattern that is basically the same as Maslow's.^[17]
Following World War II, the unmet needs of homeless and orphaned children presented difficulties that were often addressed with the help of attachment theory, which was initially based on Maslow and others' developmental psychology work by John Bowlby.^[18] Originally dealing primarily with maternal deprivation and concordant losses of essential and primal needs, attachment theory has since been extended to provide explanations of nearly all the human needs in Maslow's hierarchy, from sustenance and mating to group membership and justice.^[8] While Maslow's hierarchy remains a very popular framework in sociology research and secondary and postsecondary psychology instruction, it has largely been supplanted by attachment theory in graduate and clinical psychology and psychiatry.^[7]

Criticism

In their extensive review of research based on Maslow's theory, Wahba and Bridwell found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all.^[19]
The order in which the hierarchy is arranged (with self-actualization described as the highest need) has been criticized as being ethnocentric by Geert Hofstede.^[20] Maslow's hierarchy of needs fails to illustrate and expand upon the difference between the social and intellectual needs of those raised in individualistic societies and those raised in collectivist societies. The needs and drives of those in individualistic societies tend to be more self-centered than those in collectivist societies, focusing on improvement of the self, with self-actualization being the apex of self-improvement. In collectivist societies, the needs of acceptance and community will outweigh the needs for freedom and individuality.^[21] The term "Self-actualization" may not universally convey Maslow's observations; this motivation refers to focusing on becoming the best person that one can possibly strive for in the service of both the self and others.^[11] Maslow's term of self-actualization might not properly portray the full extent of this level; quite often, when a person is at the level of self-actualization, much of what they accomplish in general may benefit others or, "the greater self".
The position and value of sex on the pyramid has also been a source of criticism regarding Maslow's hierarchy. Maslow's hierarchy places sex in the physiological needs category along with food and breathing; it lists sex solely from an individualistic perspective. For example, sex is placed with other physiological needs which must be satisfied before a person considers "higher" levels of motivation. Some critics feel this placement of sex neglects the emotional, familial, and evolutionary implications of sex within the community, although others point out that this is true of all of the basic needs.^[22][23]

Changes to the hierarchy by circumstance

The higher-order (self-esteem and self-actualization) and lower-order (physiological, safety, and love) needs classification of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not universal and may vary across cultures due to individual differences and availability of resources in the region or geopolitical entity/country.
In one study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of a thirteen item scale showed there were two particularly important levels of needs in the US during the peacetime of 1993 to 1994: survival (physiological and safety) and psychological (love, self-esteem, and self-actualization). In 1991, a retrospective peacetime measure was established and collected during the Persian Gulf War and US citizens were asked to recall the importance of needs from the previous year. Once again, only two levels of needs were identified; therefore, people have the ability and competence to recall and estimate the importance of needs. For citizens in the Middle East (Egypt and Saudi Arabia), three levels of needs regarding importance and satisfaction surfaced during the 1990 retrospective peacetime. These three levels were completely different from those of the US citizens.
Changes regarding the importance and satisfaction of needs from the retrospective peacetime to the wartime due to stress varied significantly across cultures (the US vs. the Middle East). For the US citizens, there was only one level of needs since all needs were considered equally important. With regards to satisfaction of needs during the war, in the US there were three levels: physiological needs, safety needs, and psychological needs (social, self-esteem, and self-actualization). During the war, the satisfaction of physiological needs and safety needs were separated into two independent needs while during peacetime, they were combined as one. For the people of the Middle East, the satisfaction of needs changed from three levels to two during wartime.^[24][25][26]
A 1981 study looked at how Maslow's hierarchy might vary across age groups.^[27] A survey asked participants of varying ages to rate a set number of statements from most important to least important. The researchers found that children had higher physical need scores than the other groups, the love need emerged from childhood to young adulthood, the esteem need was highest among the adolescent group, young adults had the highest self-actualization level, and while old age had the highest level of security, it was needed across all levels comparably. The authors argued that this suggested Maslow's hierarchy may be limited as a theory for developmental sequence since the sequence of the love need and the self-esteem need should be reversed according to age.

See also

• ERG theory, which further expands and explains Maslow's theory
• Fundamental human needs, Manfred Max-Neef's model
• John Curtis Gowan
• Metamotivation
• Murray's psychogenic needs
• Juan Antonio Pérez López, spontaneous and rational motivation
• Energy hierarchy
• Engel's law, an economic model for how well basic needs are met 　

Further reading

• Heylighen, Francis (1992). "A cognitive-systemic reconstruction of maslow's theory of self-actualization". Behavioral Science 37 (1): 39–58. doi:10.1002/bs.3830370105.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
2. ^ ^{a b c} Maslow, A.H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–96. Retrieved from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
3. ^ Maslow, A (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. p. 236. ISBN 0-06-041987-3.
4. ^ Mittelman, W. (1991). Maslow's study of self-actualization: A reinterpretation. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 31(1), 114–135. doi: 10.1177/0022167891311010
5. ^ ^{a b} Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper.
6. ^ Kremer, William Kremer; Hammond, Claudia (31 August 2013). "Abraham Maslow and the pyramid that beguiled business". BBC news magazine. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
7. ^ ^{a b} van IJzendoorn MH, Sagi-Schwartz A (2008). "Cross-Cultural Patterns of Attachment; Universal and Contextual Dimensions". In Cassidy J, Shaver PR. Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Applications. New York and London: Guilford Press. pp. 880–905. ISBN 9781593858742.
8. ^ ^{a b} Bugental DB (2000). "Acquisition of the Algorithms of Social Life: A Domain-Based Approach". Psychological Bulletin 126 (2): 178–219. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.126.2.187. PMID 10748640.
9. ^ Steere, B. F. (1988). Becoming an effective classroom manager: A resource for teachers.. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 0-88706-620-8, 9780887066207 Check |isbn= value (help).
10. ^ Goble, F. (1970). The third force: The psychology of Abraham Maslow. Richmond, CA: Maurice Bassett Publishing. pp. 62.
11. ^ ^{a b} Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper
12. ^ Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. pp. 91.
13. ^ Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. pp. 92.
14. ^ Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. pp. 93.
15. ^ Villarica, H. (2011, Aug 17). Maslow 2.0: A new and improved recipe for happiness. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/08/maslow-20-a-new-and-improved-recipe-for-happiness/243486/#.TkvKIRv8USE.facebook
16. ^ Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 354–365. doi: 10.1037/a0023779
17. ^ Cronburg, T. (2010). Maslow 2.0 human hierarchy of needs [Image]. Retrieved from [1]
18. ^ Bretherton, I. (1992). "The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth". Developmental Psychology 28 (5): 759–775. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.28.5.759.
19. ^ Wahba, M. A., & Bridwell, L. G. (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15(2), 212–240. doi: 10.1016/0030-5073(76)90038-6
20. ^ Hofstede, G. (1984). The cultural relativity of the quality of life concept. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 389–398. Retrieved from http://www.nyegaards.com/yansafiles/Geert%20Hofstede%20cultural%20attitudes.pdf
21. ^ Cianci, R., & Gambrel, P. A. (2003). Maslow's hierarchy of needs: Does it apply in a collectivist culture. Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship, 8(2), 143–161.
22. ^ Kenrick, D. (2010, May 19). Rebuilding Maslow's pyramid on an evolutionary foundation. Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/201005/rebuilding-maslow-s-pyramid-evolutionary-foundation
23. ^ Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 292. doi: 10.1177/1745691610369469
24. ^ Tang, T. L., & West, W. B. (1997). The importance of human needs during peacetime, retrospective peacetime, and the Persian Gulf War. International Journal of Stress Management, 4(1), 47–62.
25. ^ Tang, T. L., & Ibrahim, A. H. (1998). Importance of human needs during retrospective peacetime and the Persian Gulf War: Mid-eastern employees. International Journal of Stress Management, 5(1), 25–37. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/content/h1q9vg84760uhh5u/
26. ^ Tang, T. L., Ibrahim, A. H., & West, W. B. (2002). Effects of war-related stress on the satisfaction of human needs: The United States and the Middle East. International Journal of Management Theory and Practices, 3(1), 35–53.
27. ^ Goebel, B. L., & Brown, D. R. (1981). Age differences in motivation related to Maslow's need hierarchy. Developmental Psychology, 17, 809–815. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.17.6.809

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Maslow's hierarchy of needs

• A Theory of Human Motivation, original 1943 article by Maslow.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Teacher's Toolbox. A video overview of Maslow's work by Geoff Petty.
• A Theory of Human Motivation: Annotated.
• Theory and biography including detailed description and examples of self-actualizers.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Valdosta.
• Abraham Maslow by C George Boheree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

THEY TRIED TO MAKE THE WORLD FORGET HIS NAME , NIKOLA TESLA THE GREATEST INVENTOR OF ALL TIME

Envylife904· Published on 8 Dec 2012
Nikola Tesla symbolizes a unifying force and inspiration for all nations in the name of peace and science. He was a true visionary far ahead of his contemporaries in the field of scientific development. New York State and many other states in the USA proclaimed July 10, Tesla's birthday- Nikola Tesla Day... :
Electromechanical devices and principles that Nikola Tesla worked on during his career: rotating magnetic fields
Induction motor
"high" frequency alternator
Tesla coil
magnifying transmitter
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Electric power transmission
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electronic logic gate[citation needed]
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Polyphase system for distributing alternating-current electrical power. For more on Tesla check

http://www.teslasociety.com/biography...

 

QUANTUM COMMUNICATION CONTROLLED BY RESONANCE IN 'ARTIFICIAL ATOMS'

06 August 2013

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues in the US and Australia, have developed a method to control a quantum bit for electronic quantum communication in a series of quantum dots, which behave like artificial atoms in the solid state. The results have been published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

The experiments are carried out at ultra low temperatures close to absolute zero, which is minus 273 degrees C.

In a conventional computer, information is made up of bits, comprised of 0’s and 1’s. In a quantum computer the 0 and 1 states can simultaneously exist, allowing a kind of parallel computation in which a large number of computational states are acted upon by the machine at the same time. This can make a quantum computer exponentially faster than a conventional computer. The problem with the quantum world, however, is that you cannot allow these states to be measured, or all of the quantum magic disappears.
“We have developed a new way of controlling the electrons so that the quantum state can be controlled without measurement, using resonances familiar in atomic physics, now applied to these artificial atoms,” explains Professor Charles Marcus, director of the Center for Quantum Devices at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
He explains that they are combining classical solid-state physics on a nanometer scale with resonance techniques of atomic physics. In a semiconducting material (GaAs) there are free electrons that move within the material structure. The information is stored in the spin of the electrons which can turn up or down. But the electrons and their spin must be controlled.

Schematic illustration of the actual ‘box’ with a triple quantum dot, where there is one single electron in each dot.

Captures electrons and controls them

“We capture the electrons in ‘boxes’. Each box consist of a quantum dot, which is an artificial atom. The quantum dots are embedded in the semiconductor and each quantum dot can capture one electron. There needs to be three quantum dots next to each other using nanometer-scale electrostatic metal gates. When we open contact between the ‘boxes’ the electrons can sense each others’ presence. The three spins must coordinate their orientations because it cost extra energy to put electrons with the same spin into the same box. To lower their energy, they not only spread out among the three boxes, but they orient their spins to further lower their energy. The three boxes together form a single entity – a qubit or quantum bit,” explains Charles Marcus.
An electrical signal is now sent from outside and by rapidly opening the boxes the system begins to swing in dynamic vibrations. The researchers can use this to change the quantum state of the electrons.
“By combining three electrons in a triple quantum dot and oscillating an applied electric field at the frequency that separates adjacent energy levels, we can thus control the spins of the electrons without measuring them,” explains Charles Marcus.

Quantum computers for extreme applications

First, the technique itself was discovered. The next step is not just a single sequence with three quantum dots, but several sequences. Each sequence forms one qubit and now a series of qubits need to talk to each other. This could be realised by a quantum computer with more bits.
“The potential of a quantum computer is that it will be able to perform multiple calculations at once. In that way it will be much faster than conventional computers and will be able to solve tasks that cannot currently be solved, because it simply takes too long,” says Charles Marcus.
Quantum computers are not expected to be something everyone will own, but rather an advanced set of tools for researchers who need to make extreme calculations.
http://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news13/quantum-communication-controlled-by-resonance-in-artificial-atoms/
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