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something that was nothingness read
more The big bang tango-script for Ciara Byrne read more The big bang read more The hop, skip, and jump of the cosmos read more The silly putty universe-where constants like the speed of light can change read more The music of the universe read more Interfaces
which shouldn't be
My guess a few days ago was that the rules governing the potentia are very restrictive. When the handful of rules with which this cosmos began were still very close to their base, their source, their instantiation or substantiation as space-time, the room for variety was miminal. So this new cosmos spat out roughly 10(90) particles, all a member of just sixteen or 76 species (depending on how you count). All were precisely identical to all others in their species. Their only differences were in location, direction of movement, and, perhaps, velocity. Even the lumps and crinkles in the fabric of time/space (see Smoot's work) were so similar that way, way down the road they would generate highly similar galaxies. If the cosmos springs from a potentia, and the cosmos is extraordinarily constrained, able to do just a tiny variety of things but capable of doing them in such multitudes of spontaneous and simultaneous clones that it defies belief, why should the potentia be any different? Wouldn't the potentia be even more restrained? Which means that in the same way that we had a blizzard of identical photons, the potentia would produce a blizzard of identical universes. Here's another twist. If the potentia produces different universes over time, it means that time is one of the potentia's characteristics. Why take this for granted? Supersimultaneity--the instant, simultaneous generation of precise duplicates--seems to be one of the qualities of this cosmos. Wouldn't simultaneity--no march of time, but instead one single decisive kick--be more likely? And, again, if we can judge the parent--the potentia--by its progeny--our cosmos--wouldn't the potentia INCREASE the number of its possibilities over time--assuming the potentia has time at all? Wouldn't the potentia, like its cosmic children, evolve? I think not. I suspect that time is like RNA. DNA can do nothing until it's visited by RNA. The potentia, I suspect, lays there fallow, a non-potentia, until a tweak from time yanks it into opening its inherent possibilities. Here's another twist. If we want to go totally semiotic and informational, time would be the reader of the potentia's implications, the translater of the potentia's inherent code. The act of cosmos-gestation would be one of turning no-sense into information. It would be what I've been calling the first form of information--interpretation. Here's the breakdown of communication and information as I see it this week. 1) Interpretation is the most primitive form of information--a reader reads a message in what formerly had no meaning. It's a one-way process. An astronomer reads the photons coming from a star and concludes that the star has a certain size and makeup. The star does not read the astronomer. 2) communication--both participants in the exchange read each other. A proton reads the come hither signal of an electron and moves toward it. The electron also reads the come-hither signal of the proton and moves toward it, too. Or, to put it differently, a proton reads the gradient in an electron's electromagnetic field and moves toward it. Mind you, this isn't as easy as we think. It didn't happen between protons and electrons until the cosmos was approximately 380,000 years old. 3) Conversation--Sorry, protons and electrons can't do this. It takes a receiver able to read a message from a source. The receiver then has to formulate a new message based on its interpretation of the message it received. The receiver next sends its response, its new message back to the sender. And the sender does the same--it reads the new message, formulates a response, and sends back a new message. We know that conversation occurs among bacteria--our formothers who first began talking to each other chemically 3.5 billion years ago. I suspect that conversation also occurs among smart molecules, macromolecules. A cell is the result of macromolecular conversation on a truly massive scale. Now back to potentia. Let's imagine that time is a reader of what's implicit, that time is an implication extractor. Time reads the first set of implications it "perceives" in the basal strata of potentia. Then it reads the implications of the first implications it's interpreted. This leads to interpretation number two. Then it reads the implications of the second set of implications. This leads to the tapestry of implications number three. And so on. Time is an interpreter. It's the interpreter whose particular reading of the potentia is shaped by its own narrow rules, its own initial abilities and limitations. Now, does the potentia evolve over time? Is it influenced by the experience of its progeny? Is this a potentia producing an infinite progression of funhouse mirrors in which to see and elaborate itself? And does time evolve over time? Does its ability to interpret grow as the richness of interpretations extracted in one vast, simultaneous pass after another pile upon themselves? Does time change? Does space change (we know the answer to that one is yes)? Do constants like the speed of light change (there are recent experiments implying that, yes, it may)? And, as some very far-out but respectable physicists propose, do the rules of nature change? Does the sudden burp of radical new forces and properties--like the appearance of gravity at 380,000 years after the big bang and the appearance of anti-gravity--dark energy--7 billion to 11 billion years after the big bang--change the rules of nature? Does the appearance of a grand surprise like the first atom, the first galaxy, the first star, the first carbon, and the first life change the rules of nature? If all change is implicit from the git-go (as I believe) why do we have degrees of freedom? And how did we get this awesome process of turning the implicit into reification, a cosmic process that recalls a religious term--transubstantation? Howard ps I disavow any affiliation with the God industry. I am a solid atheist. In a message dated 6/20/2003 9:10:52 AM Eastern Daylight Time, werbos writes:
Hi, James! >But I am interested
in voicing another In quant-ph 008036,
Luda and I defined a mathematical But that paper did not really address metric effects as such. I do believe that
topology and topological solitons are Lots more yet to be done here!
Episode One:
The 20th century was the Century of Genocides-Armenians, Jews, Slavs, Russians, Chinese, Ugandans, and Rwandans-all were killed off by the millions. Over 100 million were slaughtered by mass murder and by war. But why? Where did this scourge of killing come from? Did we create it with our autos and our factories, with our greed for the fast buck or the cheap gallon of gasoline? Did we generate it with our gadget lust, our auto-hunger, and with our drive to buy more and more trinkets at our local Tescos or at glitzy electronic stores? Does violence come from hunger and injustice, as we're so often told? Or does it come from wealth and from an exuberant bloodlust, a need for the thrills of pillage and conquest…a periodic thirst for war? How did bloodlust and the itch-to-kill end up flashing daily on our TV screens? Is it here to stay? Is there more carnage coming in our future-new shocks and new atrocities? Could these upheavals of mass killing reach you and me? Where will the new mass killers come from? How do we stop them? How do we stop war? How do we stop the killing in our streets? Could it be that these geysers of spilt blood secretly thrill something very deep inside of you and me? The tale I'm going to tell you in three quick episodes is the story of why we make war-but it's a story told from a point of view you've never heard before. These are the untold tales of your personal history. These are the hidden sagas of your family tree. These are the stories of the quarks and atoms that you're made of. These are the tales of the feelings that ripple and grow jagged in your brain. These are the stories of the hidden engines of the cosmos and of life. They're a plot based on the very latest science. They're three chapters of a thriller filled with bonding and with battles, with love and with destruction. But most of all these are the secret stories of who you are and why. You and I have been told that poverty and oppression are the generators of violence. Nature is gentle and kind. Only modern humans like you and me-with our industrialism, our consumerism, and our greed-only we revel in slaughter. Only we exult in genocide. Not true. Not true at all. Mother Nature is the violence-shaker. Mother Nature is the cataclysm-maker. And here's the real irony. Nature uses violence to create. To see how nature sculpts with violence let's dig back to the beginning of your story and of mine. First, a simple fact of life. You're much, much older than you think you are. You're far more ancient than you ever imagined you could be. Feel your right hand. [zoom in fast, step by step] It's made of roughly 280 billion cells. [Zoom in again.] Each cell is made of millions of molecules. [Zoom in again.] Each molecule is a mob of atoms. [Zoom in again.] And at the heart of every atom is a solitary proton or a proton gang. [Zoom in again.] The protons in your hand are great survivors. [Zoom out, but now we're in space-quick-flick through visuals.] They've been through blasts, they've been through crunches, and they've gone through cold beyond belief. They've made it through heat that can evaporate the hardest steel. But they've hung in through ordeal after ordeal after ordeal. They've been around since the first second of the Universe-fourteen billion years ago. Space dust, galaxies, stars, plants, animals, human beings, your furniture, the clothes you're wearing, and your TV, we're all made of protons like the protons in your right hand and mine. Supernovas, quasars, stones, earthworms, bones, and you and me, we're all cousins in a proton family tree. The saga of the protons that you call you and that I call me is hidden in something scientists have been toiling for centuries to read. It's Mother Nature's secret diary. Mother Nature isn't nice. In fact, she's bloody as can be. Mother Nature has a talent though. She builds things from disaster. She builds things from catastrophe. This cosmos started with disaster. First there was a nothing. Then came a detonation bigger than a planet-sized stockpile of atomic weaponry. It was an explosion faster and more massive than anything you and I will ever see. It isn't called the Big Bang because it was loving, sweet, and kind. Let's face it. Nature wasn't gentle. She birthed us with a blast of violence. She formed us with a blast that ripped the heavens into opening wide. Mother nature shatters and she gathers. She weaves upheaval into brand new things. And she does it with profusion, she does it by mass-copying. Call it spontaneous generation. Call it obsessive duplication. Call it supersimultaneity. I call it manic-mass-production. But from the first moment of calamity, nature made new wonders. And she manically-mass-produced them flagrantly. She squeezed a zillion protons into existence in less than a sliver of a second. She made a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion protons from nothing but space wrinkles and raw energy. [Flash the figure 100,000,000,000,000,000.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in front of particles gushing toward the screen from the black of space.] Fourteen billion years ago Mother Nature manically mass-produced the protons that sit and think today in you and me. Despite her manic-mass-production,
precision was another of Mother Nature's keys. No matter where a proton
sprang from the expanding sheet of space and energy, it was identical
to every other proton that had just popped into being. It was identical
with a precision no human tool could ever achieve. From the rage of
raw disaster Nature had yanked a breakthrough. In fashioning masses
of protons she had created the very first "things." Then came the first miracle of another basic talent nature leans on-mating, recruiting, team-making, matching, networking, and gathering. Particles spread out, cooled down, and slowed. The protons that would eventually be you and me discovered that in some strange way they didn't want to be alone. Every proton felt a need welling from its emptiness, welling from its hunger for a charge. Every proton was incomplete, driven by electromagnetic hankerings. Flicks of flutter called electrons also felt an overflow, a need to share their fullness with a mate. Protons and electrons got together and they stayed. These mini-teams of particles, these micro-families, were the very first atoms-the foremothers of the atoms in your hands, your eyes, your shins, and brain. When Mother Nature first introduced a proton and electron for a date, she wasn't content with just one happy couple. She manically-mass-produced zillions of proton-electron-atoms all over the spreading universe's face. The first atoms came in only three models, only three basic forms. Some were hydrogen, some were helium, and the rest were lithium. But like Henry Ford's Model T's there were gazillions of identical copies of each. Now here's a little irony: from togetherness and coziness came the first primitive forms of war. Atoms made a shocking discovery. In a cosmos thrust by push and shove and the rush to get away, there was more than the mere whisper of electromagnetism seducing atoms into mating. There was a grander and a stranger force, one that had never shown its tug in this universe before. It was a pull called gravity. Atoms that clustered in gravity's sway battled other bunches in the making. So the protons that make you and me were drawn into the era of Great Gravity Crusades. If your loosely flowing flock of hydrogen or helium atoms had more mass than that of a neighboring gas, you could capture the smaller wisp whole. You could add the little loser to your catch of atom slaves. If the multitude of atoms in your dust speck outnumbered the host in a rival fleck of dust, you could haul in the less-populated squad with a gravity traction beam. Then you could pack it in, swallow it, and wolf it down entirely. The larger you got, the more neighbors you could seduce, recruit, or kidnap into your pack. When the big felt the attraction of the small, the large swept in the tiny and took all. Long trails of queer, phantasm-stuff-long wisps of the first matter-- threaded through the swelling blackness. Where they crossed they battled to survive each others' tug. Some hung together through sheer compromise. They swung in circles and spirals around fattening hubs of gravity-stuff. They discovered one of Mother Nature's prime survival tactics-when you can't win, give in. That's the pattern of kings and courtiers, of superstars and groupies, of central-sun and orbiting, of looping and obedience, bowing to the power of a bundle with more force and mass, circling it endlessly-a strategy whose curls speckled the expanding cosmic map. From these loops and ringlets came the galaxies. Once again Mother Nature manically-mass-produced, cranking out vast numbers of whirling duplicates, of tornado-shaped copy-cats, of ever-so-similar masterpieces of twirl. Galaxies pulled themselves together by the billions. Huge blobs and whorls clustered all over the stretching, growing plain of space. With billions of galaxies on hand, nature could afford a bit of waste. Like their ancestors, the pirate flits of space-dust, galaxies were greedy raiders, sumo wrestling-style crusaders duking it out for territory and for new matter that would bulk them up. When a big galaxy met a midget, it would swallow the smaller galaxy whole. Astronomers call this cannibalism. The grand empires of the space crusades were built by mother nature's rule of neighbor-eat-your-neighbor. What did nature use this conflict for? She used it for construction, for the building of bigger galaxies, galaxies with whole new properties. Rule one of Mother Nature is manic mass production. Rule two is growing teams through mass destruction. The first of the new galaxies were shaped like giant potatoes. After a few million years of feasting on their neighbors, the later galaxies acquired swirling arms and elegance. But to lesser galaxies the big were still a menace, still hungry to snag and swallow, to digest and conquer, then to grow bigger still. Galaxies continue Mother Nature's violence and greed--the cannibalistic habit of attract, snatch, and swallow--to this day. Above our heads the Gravity Wars, the Great Gravity Crusades still rage. Nature used violence to produce the bang that started everything. Now she was ready to use destruction more and more to create…to generate an irony. Mother Nature used ransack-and-plunder, war and bullying, to craft new fleets of allies, whole new kinds of megateams. And, following ancient pattern, she mass-produced these brand new flying wedges, precision squads, and phalanxes maniacally. Rule one of Mother Nature is manic mass production. Rule two is growing teams through mass destruction. Deep inside the galaxies, dust balls of greedy matter hauled in lesser clumps and swallowed them whole-or forced them into circling obediently. The fatter the gluttonous dust balls grew, the more pressure they placed on the atoms they'd enslaved. A million years into this cosmos' birth, some of those balls were grossly overweight. The pressure in their bellies grew so great that the atoms crushed inside of them could no longer hold their shape. Atoms were mashed together like rioting crowds at the foot of a stage. It was the end for many--they were forced to let go of their electrons and to shed chunks of their energy. The mega-globs that smashed and chomped the atoms at their center flamed with the rage of this vast-atom-genocide. Thus did the first stars ignite. In the heart of each new sun, crushed atoms screamed out heat and photons. From this torture nature squeezed a wonder--light. Stars were born by the billions of billions. Born from one end to another across the cosmos' face. Born so similar to each other that there was just a squinch of difference. Mother Nature revels in manic-mass-production. She revels in immense coincidence. What were the rules that Nature had revealed in her acts of fresh creation…in her generation of starry flames that sprinkled the black with lamps and beacons? Mother Nature spits forth competition, greed, and consumerist accumulation, accumulation beyond need. Mother Nature shoves her children into battling and eating their own kind. Mother Nature rips apart what she's manically-mass-produced. Mother Nature sacrifices victims to create. She sacrificed a new creation, atoms, to the Gravity Wars-atoms made of protons and their electron mates. There were atoms in vast multitudes-more than we have numbers for. Thanks to Mother Nature's manic mass production she could easily afford to crunch and crack a trillion atoms every second, chewing them like candy and popcorn. Nature revealed another of her rules in the first 200 million years of Her creation. You can research and develop, freshen, upgrade, and create, as long as you've manically-mass-produced enough copies of each thing that you can afford to lose a trillion or two in a cosmic manufacturing fling. You can afford it even if there's pain and suffering. But so far the cosmos was lucky. Brutalized atoms felt no pain. Or at least that's what we think today. Who knows what tomorrow's knowledge will bring. Thanks to building teams through acts of mass destruction, the stars that you and I view by night winked into life. So did the sun we see by day. Protons remained eternal. They're in your wrists and cheeks and mine. But many an atom died so we could see. Another hundred thousand years later Nature produced yet another form of mass disaster, yet another waste of billions of her new creations, yet another act of violence and destruction that manically-mass-produced a whole new kind of teamwork-a new breakthrough, a radical upgrade. Had you and I been there-sitting at an outdoor café table at the center of the universe--neither of us would have believed the next act of teamwork-built-through-mass-destruction that Mother Nature had up her sleeve. Stars spun through a morphing act. They went from eager youth to vigorous maturity, and, finally, to tired-out old age. The atom-mash that powered aging stars ran out of energy. The liquid-like inferno at many an elder star's heart was squeezed. The core of the stars shrunk down, grew cold, and balled up in despair like fists. Atomic nuclei at the heart lost the energy to keep their distance, to stay apart. Gravity compacted them as if they were stellar trash, mashing them in the dying star's heart. In the world of Mother Nature, catastrophe is opportunity. Destruction spreads the seeds of something new. And that something new is usually a whole new kind of team. Before the first stars died there had only been three kinds of atoms-hydrogen, helium, and lithium-only three forms of particle teams. All star-power, no matter where, had come from chewing hydrogen and helium. The stellar death-squeeze forced these ancient proton families to accept new social norms, to reluctantly ally in 89 new tribal forms. Four protons forced together would be beryllium. Five protons tortured to unite would be boron. Six would be the wizardly chain-maker that pulls together the proteins of which your body and mine is made-carbon. Seven would be carbon's eventual sidekick in your amino acids, nitrogen. Fifteen would be your energy-carrier, phosphorus. And twenty-six would be the stuff that gives your blood its redness-iron. Yes, the death of the first stars gave you the raw materials for life. When the death-grip of stars grew too tight, their balled-up matter blew like dynamite. The 89 new atoms they'd just made spattered into clouds and gas, the space-dust of a cosmic grave. To Mother Nature, catastrophe is opportunity. Violence is a building scheme. Nightmare is the stuff of creativity. Collapse, crash, slash, and burning are the makings of new teamwork, of new mass dances of intricacy. In the dark boneyards of star-death-scatter, gravity clotted lumps of matter. Then gravity set the biggest six or seven of these swelling seeds racing to outdo each others' greed. Each contestant wolfed down gases, space dust, and debris, outeating and out-conquering its sisters frantically. Those that won caught fire and ignited: new stars chewing up new atoms, flicking 89 new colors, 89 new stripes of flame. Those that lost the gravity battles were left to ember on in shame-brown dwarves only half-alight, barely worthy of their name. Around the nugget suns circled a dark parade of prisoners, playing a bush-league version of their masters' gravity game. The captives gobbled stones the size of mountains, yanked in asteroids, swallowed comets, sucked in gases, slurped up ices, and pot-luck suppered on space gravel. They smashed their prizes, squunched them, packed them, and if they grabbed enough to plump them, they grew round and comfortably obese. These rock-balls we call the planets. Someday human beings would think them peaceful…while living off the plunder of the planets' violent gains. Clouds of cosmic garbage floated in between the dying and the newly-borning suns and planets. In those clouds the jumbles of the 89 new atoms flirted, mixed, and mated, feeling out their talents and their tastes in partners, feeling out their eagerness for teams. In the freeze of clouds grown frigid, in the boil of clouds that sizzled, fresh-squeezed atoms--oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen-grabbed on to each other and commandeered a cosmic oldster, hydrogen, making a whole new sort of team, one that was radically new. This team was the pre-life bio-molecule. Your armbones, shins, and belly carry those ancient biomolecules at this second. The spawn of interstellar clouds is basic to the flesh you are today. Throughout the cosmos nucleic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ammonia, and sugars crystallized on slivers of ice. Or they clumped in slush-and-dust-ball comets. Or they discovered they were meant for each other while mingling in the stuff of meteorites. Nature was up to her old tricks, manically-mass-producing wonders, churning out trillions of copies of each new biomolecular masterpiece. Nature was creating teams through mass destruction. Oh, how Nature can afford to gamble when everything precious comes so cheap. If a tribe of bio-mated atoms found a planet or a moon with liquid water they could do a dance and gather in a bubble, in an empty pocket that invited filling...in the first beginning of a cell membrane. Meanwhile knotted ropes of other bio-atoms stitched themselves together, seducing and recruiting outriders to join on their periphery. Atoms by the millions wove themselves in cables and sheltered in the floating bio bubbles to make it through a rain of insults-heat and iceballs, ultraviolet rays, the shock of planetesimals splattering the globe on which they rode, and high-speed particles slammed down from space. In the flick of less than 750 million years, these new strings, new tangles, ropes, knots, rings, and triangles of atoms in their bubble-housings uncovered a bizarre new opportunity--the ability to fuse and flicker in the huge self-copying armies of atom-scavengers called DNA. But Mother Nature's triumph would eventually be the many ways in which she planted her itch to gamble and create-with-battle into you and me. Sigmund Freud saw one of Nature's manic-mass-producers-and-upgraders driving nearly everything we do. It's our sexuality. Sex is the itch of molecules to manically-mass-produce. Sex is the itch of molecules to duplicate. That itch comes from a whole new form of Mother Nature's mass-producers, replicators-self-copying molecules, miniature assembly-machines. We know the manic mass producers better by another name. We call them strings of genes. You and I are those genes' armored troop carriers. But no human is an island. Just as she gathers galaxies, Nature pulls us humans together in teams. War and mass killing happen when the social teams that you and I belong to duke it out for overlordship, for the right to swallow, to enslave, or to subjugate our neighbor. War comes when we battle for new spreads of teamwork…when through mass-destruction we create new forms of megateams, new alliances and aggregations based on our supremacy. War can force big breakthroughs. But in the process it can lose you and me our homes, our lives, and our families. To Mother Nature, your life and mine come very cheap. We're manically-mass-produced and disposable experiments in her research and development schemes. Life is only precious to you and me. But we are heaps of atoms with brand new things-- consciousness, will, and morality. We have a right to look Mother Nature in the face and say, "no more." We have a right to upgrade the creativity of competition, but to find a way to race each other and team up without the blood of war. Every living creature, from bacteria to salamander and to you and me are children of a blast that tortured space and time and gave birth to matter. We are children the first explosion, children of a violent cosmic history. We are the offspring of this self-destroying, self-creating, war-and-violence-generating mother of a nature. We are children of explosion and combustion, of nightmare and catastrophe. We are the offspring of the mother of disasters, the Big Bang. We are children of in-gathering, teamwork-making, caressing, and embracing, cannibalistic atom strings. We are children of a mother ready to be bloody once she fashioned her first creatures and sent them off to slaughter in her research and development schemes. There's another Natural torment whose reason for being is harder to see. We'll peel back the wrappings of your emotions in our next episode to show how Nature has planted her violent twists in the very hot seat of your brain…in self-destruct feelings you can barely contain, in feelings of guilt, self-doubt, and unworthiness that hit you nearly every day. And we'll see why these inner torture chambers are piston-tubes of Mother Nature's engines, engines of her creativity. I promised you sex
and violence…two drive-trains of this universe and life. In this
episode, I've hammered home the violence. In our next episode, we'll
start with sex.
_______________________________ Subj: Re: Schneider, thermodynamics and complexity Date: 5/10/01 1:55:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: (John McCrone) Sender: [Howard Bloom] > But why cycles? Why turbulence? Why > not the simplest form of energy dissipation--a straight line? [Dorion Sagan] > Yes, we show how in Into the Cool: as dissipative structures > complexify, cyclical biochemistry gives way to replication, to (to > quote Wicken) "stable vehicles of degradation"; matter (gradient > breakdown) leads to mind (gradient perception). > The real fourth law of > thermodynamics is not Kauffman's but Morowitz's cycling theorem, in > which the flow of energy from a source to a sink will cause at least one > cycle to appear in the system. Hurricanes dissipate barometric pressure > gradients; they are cyclical but I am not sure they are "fractal." [John McCrone] Fractal - imagine directing a jet of something at a viscous vat of some substance. The stuff has to force its way through the medium. Depending on viscosity, you get a fine finger branching (like a water drainage pattern or other forms of fractal branching) or you might get a turbulent pattern of big whorls and little whorls. The energy of the jet is being dissipated in fractal manner in both cases. To answer Howard's point, if its a very fluid medium, you first get a simple linear dissipation - squirt ink into water gently and the stream is fat and even. But at a certain point, it goes non-linear and the stream breaks up into fractal turbulence. From these intuitive examples, you can see why fractal structure is efficient for dissipating the influx of energy (or an energetic flow of material). Whether you see whorls of turbulence or branching structure depends on the kinds of substances pushing into each other. So hurricanes are certainly fractal - turbulence occurs in the weather system on all scales and hurricanes are one of those scales. It would be a nice story if the analogy extends to life and mind. The Universe is a blast of energy. As it pushes out hard, it has to break up into fractal knots of matter simply because this is the most efficient way of dissipating its energy. hb: dissipate simply means transform speed into patterned movement or the knot of process we call hardened form. but, again, the question is why--why must a cosmic bang dissipate into a slowdown of speed and an increase of intricacy? jm: So you get the clumpiness of atoms and stars automatically. Then when the knots get especially intense (as on planet earth), you get an eruption to yet further levels of inevitable order. So push past the fractal distribution of matter and you must get the evolution of life and mind. This is a vision that many are pursuing. And I agree that there is something essentially correct about it. But my point to Dorion was that information (or computation, or semiotics) is difficult to fit into this ontological scheme. It obviously must fit somehow. hb: perhaps the scheme--while probing in the right direction--is missing an elephant in the room. perhaps it's helpful and tentative, but as-yet incomplete. jm: Again speaking rather metaphorically, information - in its strictly defined mathematical sense, as information cannot actually exist as such - seems to be the buffers that the Universe eventually hits as it dissipates its energy. Push hard enough (as must happen somewhere in a Universe that has grown big enough to be boiling with planet size knots of ordered matter) and the Universe pushes up against the shape of information. Information (in the form of DNA and words, and also in more intermediate forms such as neural networks) begins to shape matter into particular complex and adaptive knots. In this way, information is almost like a platonic mould waiting to impress itself on a dissipating Universe once it had thrown up enough dynamic, fractal, complication of its own. hb: these metaphors may seem vague, but they're extremely useful. we're trying to grasp something very difficult here. Let's call it The Creator Priniciple. What I've called a ladder of complexity you've called an underlying set of shapes, of molds, into which the universe spreads. What is this underlying grid of pattern? Where does it come from? How much has been here since the beginning? Both of us are implying something metaphysical--that there is an invisible stairway of shape implicit in this universe and that its form becomes visible only when the rush of time-space reaches it and covers it. Such rococo invisibilities exist in mathematics. They are the propositions implicit in the axioms from which a mathematical system is derived. But why are such enormous whorls of the exotic and the practical implicit in mathematical systems? Why is it that an immanence of structured possibility is hidden in a basic principle that states two lines running in parallel will never meet? In this and a handful of other constraints the entire system of Euclidean geometry is contained. [Dorion Sagan] > Schneider is not talking about models. Before getting lost in > mathematical abstractions one needs to see the real data on ecosystems > and how they behave. Neodarwinism is fine for academics but Darwin > shows us the big generalizations from the data. I think Schneider is > onto something similar. [John McCrone] Perhaps my concerns are different because I'm working on different problems. My primary area is the problem of consciousness. The difficulty for theories of consciousness lie not with a lack of real data - we are drowning in data. Instead, it is a lack of a causal mathematics to breathe conceptual life into this data. The question is why does the brain have a mind? What is it about neurons and processing that could cause subjective states? To answer this question it seems obvious that you need to rethink the causal models that you believe animate material reality. The existing model - rooted in the reductionist, linear, causation of computation and physics - clearly does not work (they do not even work within physics as quantum mechanics shows). But within theoretical biology, there are some very good thinkers on the issue of causation in living systems (people like Pattee, Rosen, Salthe, Maynard Smith) whose insights carry over to the understanding of mind as well. hb: it sounds like you are working in a very positive direction, John, one that may yet reveal a bit more of whatever it is we sense is there but have'nt yet learned to see. Howard ------------------------------ Recently I have had that experience already familiar to most of you from childhood ?? channel hopping [the reasons for my virginity are that I do not have a TV, my parents refuse to have cable and no one until recently has been paying me to stay in hotels with TV]. In channel hopping you switch from one Television studio to another or some film or news desk. But after ten minutes you realize nothing much changes: the same requirements of story telling are needed whether it is selling quack slimming aids, the latest events in East Timor, or some soap opera drama. It strikes me that this experience is very similar to my reading of the science literature of late. I am no cell biologist but I am a fan of all those molecules that make cells work ?? the DNA, the receptors, the chemokines, the G proteins, the organalles that create them and in turn are made of them, the viruses and mutations that subvert the whole process, the P53 protein circuits that spot and check such processes within the cell and without (the immune system). But I have a problem ?? I think it is an important problem for cell biology science ?? there is the giddiness of channel hopping (while I stress the cell biology level, it becomes even more giddy as one opens ones eyes to all the phenomena beyond it such as physiology, living organisms, ecology, psychology, civilization and history). One moment one is at the nanosecond level of thinking about how proteins turn off and on DNA replication, the next thinking about mitochrondra and the production of oxygen radicals, then the next how transmitters lock into receptors and change their shape or let them channel in ions, how neurons interact as networks, brains as societies and so on. One is constantly looking at images of dynamic processes of vary different kinds and at vary different scales both of time and size. There is a great similarity between pressing the remote control on the TV and flicking the pages on science journals. One's mind buzzes with the variety: once scientists had it easy: subject areas were linked in a nice hierarchical way: the physics of atoms provided the ground upon which chemistry was based, and this in turn cell biology which in turn did this for physiology. Now in the cell we see dozens of these levels within one area alone of science. There is a fundament need to find order within this apparent multiple of processes. Well, when we channel hop after a few minutes we notice that the various channels are not all that different: there are media rules of thumb about how to keep viewer's interest whether its is informing us about the weather, presenting a sell's pitch or a daily soap opera yarn. (Such as tell a story, balance good things with bad, keep it personal, keep the viewer in suspense for more after the commercial). Now what we need to understand the diversity within the cell [and beyond it] is a set of principles to understand mechanisms and how they create the richness of phenomena at different levels even though their component parts might be very different: molecules, whole organelles, cells, individuals or societies. That is what I see as the role of the corollary generator. It is a top down rather than a bottom up axiomatic approach to understanding the mechanism of things. The usual approach is to start with the axioms provided by maths and its corollaries deduced from them about fields, geometries etc and use these to understand phenomena. Here instead phenomena are examined across various areas and axioms that produce corollaries in the form of processes which underlie their mechanisms, phenomena and entities are hunted out. At bottom it relies on the insight that systems with lots of properties such as DNA regulation, cell development, ecologies, civilizations will owe their capacity for for phenomena richness to many shared abstract processes. Thus, if we look at one system and understand how it generates its wealth of phenomena, processes and entities, we can understand broad principles upon how another system generates its phenomena, processes, and entities ?? even if their components are very different and at different scales of size or temporal duration. ------------------------------ My current suspicion is that the intial axiom/algorithms were a trinity: attraction, repulsion, and time. The big bang as it's currently described commenced with a whoosh of energy and with four naked forces??the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. Each of these forces bore the seeds of attraction and/or repulsion. As for energy, it was also naked. That is, the forces and energy had no substance or particles to work upon. Forces are defined by their power to cause bodies to aggregate or separate. Energy is defined as the ability to do work. And heat, one of the forms of energy present at the Big Bang, is defined by the hyperactivity of atoms bouncing within a boundaried confine. Or, to put it differently, heat is a measure of the speed with which atoms zig and zag across space time. Space time, I suspect, was implicit in energy, since movement is a time?dependent thing. So, for that matter, are attraction and repulsion, which depend on movement to do their thing. Time is a one way process of unfolding. And unfolding the corollaries of the three initial axioms is apparently what the universe did. The birth of all we know in a threesome of axioms has resulted in a repetition of those axioms from the level of quarks and leptons to the quark?trios we know as protons and electrons, to the extraoardinarily rapid movement of the quark trios and speeding leptons outward from the pinprick of their generation, then, a million years later, to the marriage of protons, neutrons, and electrons (electrons are leptons) which generated atoms. Atoms cleared the peasoup ?fog of leptons which had kept the cosmos in a dense, dark shroud, thus making space transparent so that photons could finally zoom in the glorious freedom of straight lines. Eventually this rain of light revealed ever?growing larger aggregations of molecules, stars, planets, dna, and life, each of which depended on the trinity of time, attraction and repulsion mightily. At some point along the line two other basic principles appeared, those I've called inner judges and resource shifters. These are delineated in the quintet of essentials for a learning machine given in the now?completed manuscript of _Global Brain_ (to be published by John Wiley & Sons). The whole quintet is as follows: Conformity Enforcers (these equate with attraction) Diversity Generators (these equate with repulsion) Inner?Judges (built?in self?destruct or self?reward devices) Resource Shifters (to he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away) and Intergroup Tournaments. Conformity Enforcers showed up very early in the evolution of the universe. Though quarks come in up, down, and strange forms and in three colors, this limited number of forms was reproduced with enormous precision more times that we have numbers to count them. In other words, all quarks conformed to one of nine different patterns. The uniformity of quarks was so great that their match to each other was absolutely perfect. This suited matters just fine, since quarks were enormously gregarious. Says the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Quarks always seem to occur in combination with other quarks or antiquarks, never alone." How peculiar. For all the emphasis in evolutionary psychology on selfish genes and individuals who calculate their own self interest and that of their genetic heritage like greedy merchants in a counting house, the universe was a hotbed of congeniality, a place of mating and of fellowship from its inception. In other words, from the beginning, the four forces of attraction imposed a pattern we call sociality. The conformity enforcement of the early universe defies all rules of chance and randomness. Trios of quarks formed formed protons and electrons. These basic particles were identical, despite their formation in enormous heat and their rapid separation by the speed of the universe's outward rush. Wherever protons and electrons were generated and no matter how many zillions or googol and googol?plexes of them there were, they showed no aberrations, not even variations on a common theme. Diversity generation worked its wonders from the earliest instants of the universe as well. Some quark threesomes where protons, some neutrons. Then there were the flitting leptons. The number of forms into which the initial Bang had settled were small, but varied. Then there was the fearsome speed with which these particles battered their time?space manifold from nothingness to enormity. That, too, was apparently a diversity generator. Judging from the large?scale soap?suds patterns in which bubbles of galaxies are currently arrayed, their must have been turbulence at work in the primordial Big Bang's stew. Turbulence does strange and wonderful things, creating patterns which always resemble each other in their swirls of circularity, but each of which is different, with its own peculiarities. Resource shifters
went to work ten billion years before life began. To the largest clot
of dust went yet more dust, dragged, in some cases, from those which
had little. The larger you were, the more attractive you were, thanks
to gravity. The smaller you were, the more you were at larger bodies'
beck and call. Jesus' cruel rule was already working its mischief in
the cosmos, "to he who hath it shall be given." From this
unjust dictum came stars, galaxies, intergalactic clusters, cluster?strands,
and on a smaller level, planets in thrall to stars and moons held in
the planets' demanding embrace. Attraction drew inanimate things together.
The repulsive force which expanded the universe tore things apart. The
physicist Lee Smolin has a good handle on these matters in his book
_The Life of the Cosmos_ (Oxford University Press, 1997). He says that
the universe is a nested hierarchy of self?organizing systems. More
on that tonight, if I can find the time to do a posting on it. Howard One aspect of corollary generator theory (which is supposed to be presented formally for the first time in my next book) In a message dated 99?10?02 11:58:44 EDT, skoyles writes: That is what I see as the role of the corollary generator. It is a top down rather than a bottom up axiomatic approach to understanding the mechanism of things. The usual approach is to start with the axioms provided by maths and its corollaries deduced from them about fields, geometries etc and use these to understand phenomena. Here instead phenomena are examined across various areas and axioms that produce corollaries in the form of processes which underlie their mechanisms, phenomena and entities are hunted out. At bottom it relies on the insight that systems with lots of properties such as DNA regulation, cell development, ecologies, civilizations will owe their capacity for for phenomena richness to many shared abstract processes. Thus, if we look at one system and understand how it generates its wealth of phenomena, processes and entities, we can understand broad principles upon how another system generates its phenomena, processes, and entities ?? even if their components are very different and at different scales of size or temporal duration. ------------------------------ The Big Bang's first instant produced a universe which was not made of autonomous billiard balls or the closed systems of thermodynamics, but was social and interactive from the very git-go.
And so it continued.
A physical analogue of unrequited desire One of the products
of this inorganic copulation was life. The hints are many
that there was little to yawn about. Since Futurists and computer
scientists predict that a global brain will The first step in
the creation of a large?scale learning machine The first planetary
intelligence??immensely sprier than the Microbes reigned
for 2.5 billion years until a new form of A more advanced
interconnect emerged roughly 220 million years ago Fission worked with
fusion to disperse the seed of man, varying his As consciousness
elevated the vistas of humanity, repulsors like We'd take further
steps to close this gap after the ice sheets Networking is not
a product of the 20th century's end. It is our Scott Beach 5/31/98 The International Paleopsychology Project mission statement describes the IPP as "a scientific team dedicated to mapping out the evolution of sociality, perception, mentation, emotion, and collective intelligence from the first 10(?32) second of the Big Bang to the present." I recommend that the reference to the Big Bang be deleted because the Big Bang theory has become an orthodoxy that stifles scientific research. In _Cosmology and the Big Bang_ David Pratt wrote: "The big bang hypothesis is not just unproven but unprovable, and it is therefore important for all the alternatives to be considered with an open mind. Unfortunately the big bang seems to have become an article of faith for a great many scientists; in 1951 it even received the blessing of Pope Pius XII! Geoffrey Burbidge points out that astronomical textbooks no longer treat cosmology as an open subject, and that cosmologists are often intolerant of departures from the big bang faith [1]. Researchers who question the prevailing orthodoxy tend to find it more difficult to obtain access to funding and equipment and to get their articles published. Some years ago, Halton Arp was denied telescope time at Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories because he had found evidence that was very embarrassing to the big bang establishment; he was told that his observing programme was 'worthless'. "There are several rival cosmological theories, though they tend to receive little publicity. The alternative models mentioned below all propose that space is infinite and eternal." I recommend that the IPP mission statement be revised to read, "We are a scientific team dedicated to mapping out the evolution of sociality, perception, mentation, emotion, and collective intelligence from the beginning of life on Earth to the present." See the heading "Alternatives Cosmologies", below. Scott __________________________________ Cosmology and the Big Bang * A modern creation myth * The non?expanding universe * The microwave background * Large?scale structure * Alternative cosmologies * Evolution and involution * References A modern creation myth Most cosmologists today believe that the universe we inhabit exploded into being some 15 billion years ago in a titanic fireball called the big bang. The modern big bang theory does not state that a concentrated lump of matter located at a particular point in space suddenly exploded, sending fragments rushing away at high speed, but that space itself came into being at the moment of the big bang. The birth of the universe is said to have happened in the following manner [1]. In the beginning, a tiny bubble of spacetime, a billion?trillion?trillionth of a centimetre across (10^?33 cm), popped spontaneously into existence out of nothing as the result of a random quantum fluctuation. It was seized by an intense anti?gravitational force which caused it to expand with explosive rapidity. In scarcely more than a billion?trillion?trillionth of a second the universe swelled to about 10 cm, the size of a grapefruit. The anti?gravitational force then disappeared, and the inflationary phase of accelerating expansion came to an abrupt halt amid a burst of heat. The heat energy and gravitational energy of expanding space then produced matter and, as the universe cooled, more and more structure began to 'freeze out' ?? first nuclei, then atoms, and finally galaxies, stars, and planets. Paul Davies and John Gribbin write: 'the big bang was the abrupt creation of the Universe from literally nothing: no space, no time, no matter. This is a quite extraordinary conclusion to arrive at ?? a picture of the entire physical Universe simply popping into existence from nothing' [2]. This theory is not just 'extraordinary' ?? it is utterly absurd! If there was no space, matter, or energy before the hypothetical big bang, then there was obviously nothing to undergo a random fluctuation and nowhere for it to occur! To avoid the illogical idea that the universe emerged from an infinitesimal point, or 'singularity', of infinite density and temperature, big bang cosmologists have invented the equally far?fetched notion of a 'smeared?out singularity'. They claim that prior to 10^?43 seconds after the big bang, when the universe measured 10^?33 cm across, the distinction between space and time becomes blurred (!) as a result of 'quantum fluctuations', so that an infinitesimal point can never form and the origin of the universe cannot be said to occur at a precise moment but is smeared out. Big bangers also theorize that if the universe contains sufficient matter, space should curve round onto itself so that the universe is 'closed' and finite but has no boundaries or edges. However, to get three?dimensional space to perform this remarkable contortion, advanced mathematical acrobatics are required! If the amount of matter in the universe is below the critical value, the universe is said to be 'open'; according to this scenario, although space popped into being a finite period ago and expands at a finite pace, it somehow, and probably instantly, became infinite ?? and yet even though it is infinite it still manages to keep on expanding! We are told that a closed universe will eventually stop expanding and start to contract, culminating in a 'big crunch' in which it annihilates itself, leaving behind nothing ?? no space and no matter. If, however, the universe is open, it will expand forever; eventually stars will burn out, matter will become utterly cold, all forces will fade out, and the universe will suffer a 'heat death'. Such are some of the claims made by the standard creation myth of modern science. The big bang theory is based on three main pieces of observational evidence. Firstly, in the early decades of the century it was discovered that the light from distant galaxies is 'redshifted', i.e. shifted towards the red or long?wavelength end of the spectrum. This indicates that light is losing energy for some reason, and one possible explanation is that the galaxies are rushing apart at great speed and that the universe is expanding; from this it was inferred that the universe originated in a huge explosion. Secondly, the universe is filled with a uniform microwave radiation, which is claimed to be the faint echo of the big bang. Thirdly, the big bang theory is believed to explain the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and other light elements in the universe. Commenting on the evidence for the big bang, an editorial in the New Scientist stated: 'Never has such a mighty edifice been built on such insubstantial foundations' [3]. The non?expanding universe The spectral lines in the light from stars in our galaxy are redshifted if the stars are moving away from us and blueshifted if they are moving towards us, resulting from the stretching and compressing of light waves respectively. Since the light from all the galaxies, except for a few nearby ones, is redshifted, this could mean that the universe is expanding. The redshift of the light from distant galaxies increases with distance, and this is interpreted to mean that galaxies are moving apart at a velocity which also increases with distance, with the velocity of the furthest galaxies approaching closer and closer to the speed of light. In actual fact, the standard big bang theory does not say that galaxies are moving apart from one another through space, but that space itself is expanding, so that the gaps between the galaxies are stretching like a rubber sheet. Cosmologists frequently cite the analogy of a balloon with spots spread evenly over its surface; as the balloon expands, the spots 'move' further apart. The spots act like clusters of galaxies and the balloon like the structure of spacetime. The reason the big bang is said to have been an explosion of space rather than an explosion in space is because an explosion of matter in preexisting space would have had a definite, measurable location. Since the redshift is interpreted to mean that everything is moving away from us and that the velocities of expansion are the same in all directions, this would mean that we would have to be situated at or close to the centre of the explosion. To avoid the conclusion that we are located in a special place in the universe, it is therefore claimed that space itself popped into being with the big bang and has expanded ever since, carrying the galaxies with it. The conventional 'cosmological' interpretation of the redshift faces several problems. Although it is well established that the redshift of ordinary galaxies is closely correlated with their distance, this is not the case with radio galaxies, Seyfert galaxies, 'active galactic nuclei', and quasars. Astronomer Halton Arp and others have found many cases where galaxies and quasars that are close together and appear to be physically connected or interacting have very different redshifts, showing that at least some component of quasars' high redshift is due to factors other than velocity [1]. As no expansion of space is observable within our solar system or galaxy, big bangers believe that the stretching of space must be taking place between galaxy clusters and superclusters ?? where it is safely beyond observational investigation. Since there is no conclusive evidence that redshifts are due to recession velocities, and since we know that at least some redshifts are certainly not due exclusively to velocity, how can we be sure than any of them are? The main alternative explanation of the redshift is the 'tired light' hypothesis, according to which the redshift is produced by light losing energy as it travels through space. One possibility is that light loses energy when it collides with dust particles in the intergalactic medium. However, to account for the whole of the observed redshifts, the intergalactic medium would have to be 100,000 times denser than has been observed locally. Another possibility is that light loses energy as it passes through the ether, a subtle medium pervading all space and forming the substratum of all physical matter. Scientists used to believe that lightwaves propagated through an etheric medium, but the ether was abolished by mainstream science earlier this century in favour of the fiction of 'empty space'. The tired?light hypothesis has been proposed by several scientists, beginning in 1921 [2]. It is ironic that the supposed expansion rate of the universe ?? the 'Hubble constant' ?? is named after Edwin Hubble, the discoverer of the redshift?distance relation, for he had serious doubts about the expanding?universe hypothesis and came to favour the tired?light model. Paul LaViolette and Tom Van Flandern have reviewed several observational tests of the different interpretations of the redshift, and show that the non?expanding?universe interpretation explains the data much better than the expanding?universe hypothesis [3]. To bring the big bang model into line with observations, an increasing variety of ad?hoc assumptions and 'free parameters' (fudge factors) have to be introduced. Moreover, the adjustments made to enable the big bang theory to fit one set of data often undermine its fit on other kinds of cosmological tests, throwing the theory as a whole into confusion. Van Flandern concludes: 'despite the widespread popularity of the big bang model, even its most basic premise, the expansion of the universe, is of dubious validity, both observationally and theoretically.' Further evidence for a non?expanding universe comes from a phenomenon known as 'redshift quantization' [4]. This refers to the fact that instead of being just any numbers, redshifts tend to be multiples of a certain basic unit of about 72 km/s. This discovery has tremendous implications, and has met with intense resistance from orthodox cosmologists. It appears that light does not lose energy continuously but in an incremental fashion ?? discrete energy transitions being a common feature of quantum level phenomena. However, if galaxies were orbiting one another at the rapid speeds expected on the basis of Newton's or Einstein's theories of gravity, this should destroy quantization and produce a continuous range of redshifts. But this is not what we observe: the redshifts deviate from exact multiples of the basic unit of redshift by only a few km/s. This implies that the individual members of galaxy groups and clusters are barely moving at all in relation to one another, and that the visible universe is far more static than is generally believed. The tired?light interpretation of the redshift was supported by G. de Purucker: he suggested that the redshift may be caused by light undergoing some form of retardation as it passes through the ether of space before reaching earth [5]. He rejected the theory proposed in 1927 by the Belgian priest and cosmologist, Georges Lemaötre ?? the father of the big bang ?? who argued that the observable universe had expanded to its present size from a 'primeval atom'. The theory of an expanding universe, says Purucker, is 'purely imaginary', 'a scientific fairly?tale', and 'all wrong'. He wrote: Occultism affirms that in all things both great and small, whether a universe, a sun, a human being, or any other entity, there is a constant secular cyclical diastole and systole, similar to that of the human heart. [This cosmic heartbeat] is nothing at all like the expanding universe. The framework or corpus of the universe, whether we mean by this term the galaxy or an aggregate of galaxies, is stable both in relative structure and form for the period of its manvantara [active lifetime] ?? precisely as the human heart is, once it has attained its full growth and function. [6] As LaViolette says, with the abandonment of the myth of the expanding universe, we can look out on a new cosmic landscape: 'Galaxies no longer rush away from us at incredible speeds, but instead float gently in the waters of the cosmos, like so many glittering lilies on a vast lake' [7]. The microwave background The microwave background radiation, which was discovered in 1964, has a temperature of 2.73 degrees kelvin. Big bang theorists had earlier predicted a microwave temperature of 28 degrees kelvin left over from the big bang. This represents a ten?thousand?fold error in estimating the energy density of this background radiation, which varies as the fourth power of temperature. The big bang theory predicts that there should also be a cosmic background radiation at infrared wavelengths, but no signs of its existence have been found. According to the big bang model, the extreme uniformity of the microwave background radiation indicates that matter in the early universe was distributed extremely smoothly ?? which makes it extremely difficult to explain how the universe ended up being so clumpy. In April 1992 it was announced that NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite had found tiny fluctuations or 'ripples' in the background radiation. However, these temperature variations are much too vast in extent to be the ancestors of the galaxies and clusters observed today, and are less than a hundred?thousandth of a degree ?? far too minuscule to act as the seeds for structures to form from. So although COBE's findings were welcomed by big bang theorists, they 'simultaneously relegated most of cosmologists' specific models for the formation of the universe to the trash bin' [1]. There are other possible explanations for the microwave background besides the big bang. If all the observed helium were produced in stars, the energy released would be just the right amount to generate the microwave background. To smooth out large variations and leave only the tiny fluctuations seen by COBE, the radiation would have to be scattered by a process of absorption and reemission. One suggestion is that this could be done by high?energy electrons spiralling around magnetic field lines in intergalactic space. The existence of such a plasma filament fog between the galaxies is backed up by other observational evidence. If it does exist, it would rule out a big bang origin for the microwave background since it would produce distortions in the black?body spectrum of a microwave background resulting from a big bang, but no such distortions have been observed [2]. The radiation map produced by COBE clearly showed our own galaxy and a trace of the large Magellanic Cloud (our nearest neighbouring galaxy) but did not show any outlines of distant large?scale structures such as clusters, superclusters, walls, and voids ?? which strongly suggests that the microwave background is produced in 'local' intergalactic space. Another claim made for the big bang is that it can account for the origin and abundances of certain light elements. However, observations show that there is less helium and far less deuterium and lithium in the universe than the theory predicts. By altering the assumed value for the density of matter in the universe, the amount of helium or deuterium or lithium can be accounted for ?? but never all three at the same time. [3] Large?scale structure While big bang cosmologists are extremely good at concocting highly speculative and untestable mathematical theories about what was happening during the first few microseconds after the big bang, they have been spectacularly less successful in explaining the large?scale structure of the universe that we |
