Frederick Parker-Rhodes

Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes (21 November 1914 – 2 March 1987) was an English linguist, plant pathologist, computer scientist, mathematician, mystic, and mycologist, who also introduced original theories in physics.

Frederick Parker-Rhodes
Born(1914-11-21)21 November 1914
Newington, Yorkshire
Died2 March 1987(1987-03-02) (aged 72)
NationalityBritish
Known forContributions to computational linguistics, combinatorial physics, bit-string physics, plant pathology, and mycology
Scientific career
FieldsMycology, Plant Pathology, Mathematics, Linguistics, Computer Science
Author abbrev. (botany)Park.-Rhodes

Background & education

Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes was born in Newington, Yorkshire on 21 November 1914. He was educated at Marlborough College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1934 and subsequently received his PhD. Being of independent means, he was able to pursue a variety of interests.[1][2] He married author and political activist Damaris Parker-Rhodes and the couple earned a reputation as "bohemians" and eccentrics.[3] They were both members of the Communist Party (Klaus Fuchs stayed with them in Cambridge, Alan Nunn May was a local friend),[3] they became disillusioned with communism and in 1948 [4] [5] joined the Society of Friends. They had three boys (one of whom died aged 12) and a daughter, Oriole.[6]

Plant pathology and mycology

During the Second World War, Parker-Rhodes worked as a plant pathologist at Long Ashton Research Station from where he published a series of research papers on the mechanism of fungicidal actions. His personal interest, however, was in the larger fungi, particularly agarics (mushrooms and toadstools), and he was a familiar figure at forays of the British Mycological Society in the 1940s and 1950s. He even published a statistical survey of these forays. For nearly 30 years Parker-Rhodes tutored a course on fungi at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre in Suffolk and, in 1950, published a popular book, Fungi, friends and foes.[7] Subsequently, he produced papers studying the kinetics of fairy rings and a series surveying the larger fungi of Skokholm, an island off the western coast of Wales.[2] He described several taxa new to science, including the species now known as Trechispora clanculare (Park.-Rhodes) K.H. Larss. which he found in a puffin burrow.

Mathematical linguistics and computer science

Parker-Rhodes was an accomplished linguist and was able to read at least 23 languages, claiming that they became "easier after the first half-dozen".[8] He was introduced to Chinese and formal linguistic syntax by Michael Halliday at Cambridge.[8] Parker-Rhodes was also a mathematician, with a particular interest in statistics and applications of lattice theory. Both these areas of expertise were of use to him when he joined the Cambridge Language Research Unit, an independent research centre established in 1955 by Margaret Masterman. The unit was said to house "an extraordinary collection of eccentrics" engaged in research on language and computing, including information retrieval.[8] Parker-Rhodes' colleagues at CLRU included Roger Needham, Karen Spärck Jones, Ted Bastin, Stuart Linney, and Yorick Wilks.

Parker-Rhodes was "an original thinker in information retrieval, quantum mechanics and computational linguistics."[8] He wrote A Sequential Logic for Information Structuring in "Mathematics of a Hierarchy of Brouwerian Operations" with Yorick Wilks (Fort Belvoir Defense Technical Information Center 01 MAY 1965).

Parker-Rhodes also co-authored papers with Needham on the "theory of clumps" in relation to information retrieval and computational linguistics.[9]

He wrote a book on language structure and the logic of descriptions, Inferential Semantics, published in 1978.[10] The work analyzes sentences and longer passages into mathematical lattices (the kind in Lattice Theory, not crystal lattices) which are semantic networks. These are inferred not only from sentence syntax but also from grammatical focus and sometimes prosody. Each node the network is a concept in one or more structured conceptual dimensions (called base domains, which are also lattice structures); this places a description into a resulting abstract lattice of possible descriptions, ordered from general to specific. This structure can be used for automated inference in artificial intelligence and machine translation. He factors some of the dimensions (base domains, like a quantifier lattice, a (deep) case lattice, et al.) into sublattice-factors. Division of the lattice of possible descriptions into factors acts to divide-and-conquer the abstract lattice of all possible descriptions into simpler, independent semantic "factors" or "dimensions".

Physics

In physics, he is remembered partly for his founding contribution to combinatorial physics, based on his elucidation of "combinatorial hierarchy", a mathematical structure of bit-strings generated by an algorithm based on discrimination (exclusive-or between bits).[1]

He published some of his ideas in fundamental physics (based on a logical "level below physics") in the book The Theory of Indistinguishables (1981).[11] It identifies a logic based on adding to equality and inequality a third fundamental relationship which is neither one: indistinguishability-in-principle. For example, even with infinite knowledge, the three dimensions of a completely empty space are totally indistinguishable from one another, but they are still three, not one (contradicting Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles). It applies to cases of total symmetry. This logic is used to develop particle physics (see indistinguishability) and explain quantum phenomena.

At the time of his death, Parker-Rhodes was completing his last book, The Inevitable Universe, which combines elements of metaphysics with mathematics, resulting in actual physics.[12] It claims that one can infer various facts of modern physics solely by using logic and mathematics with very few assumptions. Most simply, Statement 1. "Something exists.", and Statement 2. "Statement 1. conveys no information." lead to the rest. The universe and much of its fundamental physics are inevitable (they are derivable a priori ), not contingent, empirical or a happenstance. He says that this theory is inconsistent with, among other things, the anthropic principle. The manuscript has been exchanged for years among interested physicists and others, and cited, but as of 2017 it remained unedited and unpublished.

He was a member of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, a group of physicists and mathematicians who met up in Cambridge in the 1960s and created a semi-formal association in 1979. Other key members included H. Pierre Noyes, Ted Bastin, Clive W. Kilmister, and John Amson.[13] The association sponsored an annual series of Parker-Rhodes memorial lectures, the first being given by John Amson in 1987.[8][12]

His Times obituarist, Ted Bastin, says of Parker-Rhodes' personality and scientific contribution: "One must say, in sum, that Parker-Rhodes leaves us with an enigma – a situation to which he brought his characteristic gentle and slightly amused acquiescence.".[1]

Spiritual and other writings

Parker-Rhodes had published a pamphlet, Wholesight: The Spirit Quest (1978), that explored mythical tales and parables in an attempt to bring science and religion together.[4] He also produced a long poem, The Myth of the Rock, of a spiritual nature.[14] His daughter, Oriole Parker-Rhodes, has electronically published some of the stories he told to his children, entitled Tales from the Sink.[15] That and the Myth of the Rock are available free online at Archive.org. The library of the Society of Friends in London holds a typescript of: The Wheel of Creation : An essay in Wholesight, towards a coherent model of the place of mankind in the cosmos" [16] He wrote a Key to the British Bacidiomytes which is held by the library at Kew Gardens.

Selected scientific publications
gollark: I mean, not too much *new* krist.
gollark: I don't think there's a problem with too much krist.
gollark: Krist is in a weird position of being vaguely cryptocurrency-ish in that it uses anonymous-ish addresses and uses proof of work, but being completely centralized and not really having a use for the b l o c k c h a i n feature.
gollark: I probably could, on my desktop's somewhat dead GTX 1050, but meh.
gollark: It's a fiftieth of the daily mining rate, and who knows where that goes.

References
  1. Bastin, E. (1987). "Obituary of Dr Frederick Parker-Rhodes". The Times (11 March 1987).
  2. Ainsworth, GC. (1996). Brief Biographies of British mycologists. Stourbridge, UK: British Mycological Society. p. 132.
  3. D. Gale, Eruptives III http://www.strengthweekly.com/essays/eruptives-iii/ (accessed 20 January 2011)
  4. Parker-Rhodes, F. (1978). Wholesight: The Spirit Quest (PDF). Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill Publications. Retrieved 21 January 2011.
  5. Damaris Parker-Rhodes (1977). Truth: A path and not a possession (Swarthmore Lecture). Friends Home Service Committee. p. 13.
  6. Damaris Parker-Rhodes (1977). Truth: A path and not a possession (Swarthmore Lecture). Friends Home Service Committee.
  7. Fungi, friends and foes Paul Elek (1950)
  8. Y. Wilks, Arthur Frederick Parker-Rhodes: a memoir Downloadable from http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/Y.Wilks/papers.html)
  9. Needham R, Parker-Rhodes AF. (1960). "The theory of clumps". Cambridge Language Research Unit, Report (126).
  10. Inferential Semantics, Humanities Press (1978) ISBN 0-391-00764-5
  11. The Theory of Indistinguishables: A Search for Explanatory Principles below the level of Physics, Springer (1981) ISBN 90-277-1214-X
  12. H. Pierre Noyes, The Inevitable Universe – Parker-Rhodes’ peculiar mixture of ontology and physics http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-5161.pdf (accessed 21 January 2011)
  13. Manthey M. (1993). "ANPA – The Alternative Natural Philosophy Association". Cybernetics and Human Knowing. 2 (2). http://www.imprint.co.uk/C&HK/vol2/v2-2mm.htm Archived 15 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  14. A.F. Parker-Rhodes, The Myth of the Rock https://archive.org/details/TheMythOfTheRock_70 (accessed 21 January 2011)
  15. A.F. Parker-Rhodes, Children's Stories http://frederickp-r.blogspot.com/ (accessed 21 January 2011)
  16. "The wheel of Creation" – found in Catalogue of the Library of the Society of Friends. The catalogue also lists a number of contributions by Frederick Parker-Rhodes to The Friends Quarterly.
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