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more ============================================================================ Darwinian competition among Big Bangs In a message dated 99?08?08 00:32:32 EDT, Val Geist writes: Subj: Re: address Date: 99?08?08 00:32:32 EDT To: HBloomDear Howard,Thank you very much for sending me kent's e?mail address. The paper on urban wildlife is on its way to him. Yes, physisists are stirring up interesting "matter"! I am certain your trip into black hole territory was fun and insightful. hb: the most interesting
thing about it is that once you realize a galaxy has a nucleus, and
often a highly active one at that, its resemblance to dynamic structures
we know in biology begins to pop out at you. By the way, though evolutionary
theorists feel that the use of the word evolution in conjunction with
non?living matter is absurdly wrong?headed, astrophysicists use the
term constantly in referring to the life, death, and new birth from
the ashes of stars. The physicist Lee Smolin has even come up with a
Darwinian notion of cosmology. His concept is that universes of a type
able to pop from false vacuums into being and to hang in there for a
good, long time manage to "outbreed" species of universes
which are less prolific and less able to sustain themselves. Actually,
now that you have me thinking on the topic, this fits into the Bloom
view of inorganic evolution too, even though I think the idea of multiple
universes is still extraordinarily speculative. However a universe consistent
with the environment of a false vacuum is most likely to make it from
instantiation to birth. (This is very much like fertilized ova. Those
which make it to the uterine lining within that lining's brief time
frame of receptivity have a good chance of survival. Those which arrive
too late generally do not. Those ova which fit the temporal environment
of the womb thus get to fructify. [John Travis. "The Early Fetus
Gets The Womb." Science News, July 31, 1999:78]). Since that universe
presumably continues to mainntain its fit to the false vacuum around
it or within it in order to survive, all the more reason that a universe
is a working out of initial corollaries. Those corollaries are in the
false vacuum itself, a false vacuum which presumably continues to be
that universe's environment. Howard Roukema has
analyzed the patterns made by quasars on different parts of the sky--the
quasar equivalent of constellations. He has found two pairs of constellations
where the patterns in different directions look like distorted images
of each other (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol
283, p 1147). Roukema admits that with such a small sample, the effect
could be due to chance. But if he is right, the implication is that
our Universe is not only toroidal, but twisted. A strange twist in the
tale of the Universe THE IDEA that the Universe may be shaped like a
torus--rather like a bicycle inner tube--has long fascinated cosmologists.
But a theorist in Japan is now arguing that the inner tube may also
be twisted in a fourth dimension. His claim is based on studies of the
patterns made by quasars in different parts of the sky, which he says
look like images of each other reflected in a distorted way, as if in
a fairground mirror. Imagine that the Universe is a flat strip of paper.
Now put a single twist into the strip and join its ends together. This
makes a continuous surface in which the inside of the loop becomes the
outside. An ant could crawl around and arrive back at its starting place
after travelling twice round the loop. This is the classic Mobius strip.
Now imagine that the strip is a cylinder joined at both ends to form
a circle--a torus, or inner tube. The tricky bit is to imagine twisting
the inner tube in a fourth dimension to create a toroidal Universe in
which the inner and outer surfaces become continuous, as in a Mobius
strip. But it's worth the effort, because according to Boud Roukema,
a theorist at the National Observatory of Japan, that may be the shape
of the Universe. The way to tell if the Universe is "multiply connected"
like this is to look in different directions on the sky at objects hundreds
of millions of light years away. Quasars are about the only things bright
enough and distant enough to fit the bill. If you see the same geometrical
pattern in different directions (not necessarily in opposite directions,
because the Universe may be crumpled as well as toroidal), you will
know that it is indeed multiply connected. Should the idea be taken
seriously? Malcolm MacCallum of Queen Mary and Westfield College in
London says that the mathematics is sound, and "the general idea
is not very surprising"--at least, not to a mathematician. It is
worth pursuing the possibility, researchers believe, because if Roukema
is correct, cosmologists will be able to see the same quasars by light
which has taken different times to reach us around the twisted Universe--in
other words, to see them at different stages of their evolution. John
Gribbin From New Scientist, 4 Jan 97 I just had my first decent lecture on String Theory or as the Germans coin it "Weltformel" hb: a splendid term. ? a much more dignified term. Oh yes, I got it out of Der Spiegel, which covered the recent conference on that matter held in Potsdamm. Der Spiegel made it cover story news hb: fantastic. I was just on Der Spiegel's website today, however my inability to make out more than a tad of German had me at a distinct disadvantage. and gave a most informative account of the quest for the "Everything formula". After what physics presented us with half a century ago, it is gratifying to see an enthusiastic quest for something without application ? or so some claim. I can embrace science as Art, but the do?gooder attitude and promises of benefits to come, a common approach to greater funding, scare me. hb: me too. It kills the curiosity and the joy of doing it for its own sake which produces, ironically, the most fundamental insights, and hence the insights with the most practical applications in the long run.We have had busy, happy days, but there were tears today. During a little hike into the woods my oldest granddaughter stepped on a wasp nest....She got stung four times, her dad three times, her uncle twice and one of the dogs at least once. hb: yoiks. This just happened to a close friend of mine yesterday. Renate had not stepped on the log within which the nest was hidden and escaped being stung ? a blessing in her condition. After a lot of hugging and some medication ? her dad is a medical physiologist and physicean ? there are smiles again. I have just sent off the last corrections on the proofs of my moose book which is due out in November. I teamed up with Michael Francis a very fine photographer on this one. It is more than a book about moose based on front edge research, as it also deals with human matters, in particular with moose in captivity. These huge deer do not act at all like deer when raised by humans, but more like very loyal, intelligent, mischevious dogs six to seven feet at the shoulders. hb: amazing. I've told you about my friend the bison. How I'd love to befriend a moose! I like moose very much, but not only for reasons implied in the above. Moose have excellent meat, and I lived on it for long stretches of time in my career in the wilderness. When working on snow shoes at 30 or 40 below, one craves fat, and nothing ? but nothing ? is as good then as the roasted yellow fat on the rim of a moose steak. Mere words cannot describe it, and the Gods are wellcome to their ambrosia as long as I can have fat moose meat. As to paeleo matters: that type of food sustained us during our last formative period which was not on the plains of Africa, but the glacial Mediterranean (North Africa, Western Europe) which shaped those characteristics we share with other large Ice Age mammals. Even nutrition al fashions now favour the view that fats and proteins might be better for us than endless carbohydrates (and old age diabetes, as a consequence). hb: strange. several weeks ago I read a scientific ariticle whose author seemed to assume that we are capable of living easily with no meat, and that, as a consequence, the work done back in Paleolithic days by men was completely expendable. It's true that there's fat in nuts and other plant offerings, but one of the best tales in the anthropological lore is that told by ethnologist Richard Borshay Lee who attempted to buy the tribe he'd been studying a present, and purchased a nicely marbled cow. The results were not only hilarious, but showed how starved for fat his hunter?gatherers were. (Lee's essay is entitled "Eating Christmas In the Kalahari.") Best regards,Val From: <HBloom>
To: geist Date: August 7, 1999 7:17 PM you write: > > > I did
not save Kent Bailey's e?mail address. Would you be please so kind and
> send it to me. I want to send him the article on urban landscapes
and > wildlife I now completed, as I have cited his 1987 book there
in. > > Hope you are doing well! >> > >>I'm in
good spirits today. Learned a whole lot today about views of the >nature
of galaxies which have just gained credence in the last three years.>It
seems galaxies are now thought to contain black holes at their center,
and >many of those black holes are very active places indeed. However
despite >going through over 20 articles, I haven't yet get a handle
on how the huge >flares of energy these "Active Galactc Nuclei"
produce is generated. Still, >it was a fascinating voyage. Be well??Howard
Once an up quark had paired with a down quark the pair could attract either another up or down quark to complete the threesome and form a nucleon. If the wiggle room of the early cosmos was so small that the forms it precipitated rained down with almost absolute uniformity, what does that tell us about the substrate from which universes come? What does it tell us about the nature of the extra-cosmic nothing? That it presumably is even more constrained than are the cosmoses this nothing generates. Which implies that the principles of manic mass production and supersimultaneity that cranked out huge numbers of identical atoms in just three forms 380,000 years down the line of this cosmos--when the wiggle room was comparitively huge--probably works for the production of cosmoses as well. With no wiggle room, how many differences in cosmoses can there be? Are universes produced in massive numbers almost identically? Are they produced in massive flurries simultaneously? That's what the way this cosmos works seems to imply. But are there different species of cosmoses--just as there are nine basic forms of quarks in mega quantities at this cosmos' start? I'd normally regard all of what I've said above as meaningless speculation. We have no evidence of other cosmoses that I know of, none at all. But these days the existence of many universes is taken for granted. Smolins and Guth both tout the view as if it were self-evident. If they are right, I suspect that when they DO find evidence supporting their many-universe point of view, they'll discover a lockstep march from the nothing into somethingness--manic mass production supersimilarity and supersimultaneity. pw: But I had a few thoughts in my chapter in Pribram's edited paperback book, Origins, from Erlbaum. I like to believe that the whole book is worth looking at. _________ Howard In a message dated 6/11/2003 3:28:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, werbos writes: At 10:34 AM 06/11/2003 -0700, James N Rose wrote: >1) A question about tensors and metrics, in relation >to the current topics. > >Physics designates speeds of transference of information >in spacetime. > >Mathematics .. presumes instantaneous distribution of >information in metric equations. > >This seems to be a problem disparity. Comments? Mathematics allows for many different types of possible systems with different properties. For quasilinear partial differential equations, solved in a time-forwards progression, it is well known that information cannot really propagate faster than the speed of light. That's rigorous mathematics. With nonquasilinear systems, like general relativity or Wheeler's "already unified" field theory (of electromagnetism and general relativity), people usually assume that information propagation is limited to the LOCAL speed of light, IN the tensor mathematics. But I haven't tracked the exact theorems. I assume this IS a theorem for small perturbations. But they tell me there is an Alcubierre solution and the like, which might allow faster speeds for some macroscopic situations. And the issue really gets clouded when time symmetry is assumed, and life gets truly complex; the whole notion of time-forwards progression can itself become fuzzy. >===== > >2) A proposition regarding dissipative fields. > >Could dissipation (re-distribution) be considered >a smoothing / normalization process? It certain is not renormalization of the kind we talk about in QFT. But the word renormalization has been used for many things... I think of dissipation as a kind of nonergodicity, or the consideration of dynamical systems which are initially allowed to be outside of their "ergodic core(s)" It is common, for example, to have causal symmetry WITHIN the ergodic core, but not when we allow the following boundary conditions: off-core states allowed at a finite initial time, but not at infinity. That's just a choice of boundary cnditions. >And if so, what aggregation of factors could >account for (initial) disproportioning states? > >And, could there be an a priori primitive-condition >which starts things in that disproportionate >condition to begin with? Again, boundary conditions. Also, what are boundary conditions to an open subsystem may be ergodic conditions for the more complete system description. >====== > >Jamie
It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr. Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter. The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer roughly the same estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark matter to dark energy domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion years ago. Dr. Perlmutter said that much more research would be necessary to determine whether the changing density of the expanding universe was the only reason dark energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have the physical properties of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr. Perlmutter said that in the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the true nature of dark energy "would be No. 1 on my list of things to figure out." The research teams are planning new observations of more distant supernovas to determine when cosmic acceleration began and to gather clues about the properties of dark energy. Some observations will be conducted with ground-based telescopes, others with the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's group has proposed putting a spacecraft in orbit with telescopes especially designed for supernova hunting and pinning down the nature of dark energy. In "The Extravagant Universe," published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote: "We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe rubs it in." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html
Ultimately, our ideas will be a matter for astronomical observatories to prove." One concept included in his mathematical theory is that we all could be living inside of a huge gravistar called "the universe," something that might explain the dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the universe, he said. But to understand that, one first must understand what a black hole is. Traditionally, a black hole is believed to be created after an extremely large star explodes and collapses. After it collapses, more and more material gathers on it until it condenses into a single point of infinite energy and mass. At a certain distance from this point, light can't even escape, and it gets sucked back toward that point, which astronphysicists call a singularity. Einstein said in a 1939 paper that he just wasn't comfortable with the concept, and in 1962 another famous scientist, P.A.M. Dirac, raised similar doubts. Mottola postulates that inside a gravistar is a different type of universe. In a small gravistar, say the size of a traditional black hole and its radius, atoms get packed together so tightly that they start acting as if they were a single atom bound with the force of dark energy. That mass would push out against a boundary area, where it intersects with normal space. This area is the spot where, in conventional theory, light cannot escape. "In black hole theory there's nothing there - there's nothing at that boundary and nothing in the black hole until you get to the center," Mottola said. "In our theory, it's a real physical boundary." As a gravistar is created, the phase shift would discharge energy in the form of big quantities of gamma rays, which would explain the phenomenon of gamma ray bursts, something astrophysicists haven't been able to explain with the standard models. "One very speculative idea is that maybe a gravistar could be a much more efficient central engine driving the effects we see in the universe," Mottola said. "In the classical model, once matter falls in, it's gone. In our model, matter hitting a gravistar would have a physical effect. It should make the boundary vibrate; it should have a spectrum that we can see." Maybe we don't entirely understand the idea because we're living inside it, he said. "Another speculation about this is, rather than thinking about a gravistar from the outside in, think about it from the inside out - we might well be on the inside of one of those bubbles," Mottola said. "Obviously we don't live in a universe that is all dark energy, but 70 percent of our universe is. It's real, and it's been calculated. If you make the mass of this thing, a gravistar, equal to the size of the universe, it actually works out. The Big Bang, in fact, could be the formation of this bubble." Mottola has been developing his theory for the past 10 years and started working on it full time through a grant for Los Alamos last year. Reactions to his concept have been mixed in the scientific community, something that frustrates Mottola at times. "I've been giving a lot of talks, and people are very polite and they listen," he said. "Some get very excited, and the people that are used to the black hole theory look at me strangely and say, `Bah.' I think that's healthy skepticism, and the burden of proof is on us." Still, he said, "I didn't just wake up one morning with this loony idea in my head and decide to become an outcast in my field," he said. "I think we've done our homework. I don't come to this point lightly. There are several people that think this is a really neat idea, and they're not stupid people - one's a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford University." Whatever the resistance or the challenge, Mottola said he's dedicated to working on the task. "Nature can do what it wants - it doesn't depend on any of these theories," he said. "Ultimately we just want to understand what it's doing."
Subj: NYT: From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe' Date: 6/3/2003 4:19:58 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: checker From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe' New York Times, 3.6.3 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NASHVILLE, May 30 - New observations of exploding stars far deeper in space, astronomers say, have produced strong evidence that the proportions of the mysterious forces dominating the universe have undergone radical change over cosmic history. The findings, reported here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which ended Thursday, supported the idea that once the universe was expanding at a decelerating rate but then began accelerating within the last seven billion years, scientists concluded. "We are now seeing hints that way back then the universe was slowing down," said Dr. John Tonry, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who is a member of one team studying exploding stars, or supernovas, for signs of cosmic expansion rates. The new research by Dr. Tonry's group and another, led by Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, confirmed the earlier surprising discovery that the universe is indeed expanding at an accelerating rate and has been for at least the last 1.2 billion years. But four supernovas, almost 7 billion light-years away, appeared to exist at a time the universe was slowing down, Dr. Tonry said. "A stop-and-go universe" is the way Dr. Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics characterized the phenomenon. Well, the expansion never really stopped, he conceded, but it has certainly revved up. "Right now, the universe is speeding up, with galaxies zooming away from each other like Indy 500 racers hitting the gas when the green flag drops," said Dr. Kirshner, a member of the Tonry team. "But we suspect that it wasn't always this way." The changing pace of cosmic expansion, combined with recently announced measurements of the cosmic microwave background, revealing conditions soon after the Big Bang, encourages theorists in thinking that a tug-of-war has been going on between dark forces of matter and energy no one yet understands. The combined gravitational pull from all matter in the universe, most of which is beyond detection, has acted as a brake on cosmic expansion. The so-called dark matter apparently had the advantage when the universe was younger, smaller and denser. Now the ever-increasing pace of expansion suggests that something else even more mysterious is at work. Theorists are not sure what the antigravity force is, but they call it dark energy. It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr. Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter. The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer
roughly the same estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark
matter to dark energy domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion
years ago. Dr. Perlmutter said that much more research would be necessary
to determine whether the changing density of the expanding universe
was the only reason dark energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have
the physical properties of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr.
Perlmutter said that in the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical
astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the
true nature of dark energy "would be No. 1 on my list of things
to figure out." The research teams are planning new observations
of more distant supernovas to determine when cosmic acceleration began
and to gather clues about the properties of dark energy. Some observations
will be conducted with ground-based telescopes, others with the Hubble
Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's group has proposed putting a spacecraft
in orbit with telescopes especially designed for supernova hunting and
pinning down the nature of dark energy. In "The Extravagant Universe,"
published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote:
"We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of
the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly
the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus
taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present
picture of the universe rubs it in." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html
_____ Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition
Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind
From The Big Bang to the 21st Century www.howardbloom.net Visiting Scholar--Graduate
Psychology Department, New York University Founder: International Paleopsychology
Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding
council member, The Darwin Project; Founder, Big Bang Tango Media Lab;
member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement
of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science,
Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society of Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor
-- New Paradigm book series. For two chapters from The Lucifer Principle:
A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the
Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net For Reinventing
Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine, see: http://howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism
or http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf Bear with me while I fanatasize about Pavel's find, which appears below. The research reported in this article says that the speed of light is frequency dependent. Long wavelength light travels faster than short wavelength light. Light is both a wave and a particle. A paradox, right? Maybe it's less of a paradox than it seems. Let's go back to the Big Bagel Theory-The Toroidal Theory of the Universe. And let's violate a nice Jewish boy's sense of what a bagel should be. Let's imagine that instead of being plump, the bagel is as thin as a membrane. Let's imagine that light is a discrete bundle of energy-a quantal energy lump-a bit of plasticine or clay one-quantum in mass no matter how it's distended or clumped. Let's imagine that it oscillates back and forth between the ordinary matter side of the bagel/membrane and the anti-matter side of the bagel/membrane. When this quantum-sized ball of clay squeezes fully into the anti-matter plane, it disappears from the plane of ordinary matter entirely. In the ordinary matter world, this appears as a zero-point. Then the quantum ball of clay begI have another of my mathematically ignorant questions. I can understand why Pi shows up on numerous equations describing the physics of this cosmos. Pi is a property of circles, and circles show up at every level from the atom to stars and galaxies. The circle is one of the many iterative patterns of this universe that shows up on level after level of emergence. To what pattern in this cosmos does the square root of minus one pertain? Let me try to guess. The square root of plus one is plus one. The square root of minus one is NOT minus one. Why? Minus one times minus one=plus one. In this universe--the universe we see, the square root of minus one doesn't exist. But if my toroidal theory--or perhaps some other toroidal theories--of the cosmos is true, there is a universe in which the square root of minus one DOES exist. It's the anti-matter universe on the underside of the torus. If any positive number in the anti-matter universe is negative in ours, then in that universe the square root of minus one is minus one. Why? Because in that anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says.ins to oscillate back across the membrane from the anti-matter world to the matter world. The more of it appears in the matter world, the more it expands toward the peak point of its amplitude. And the more it declines toward it's zero-point in the anti-matter world. This quantal blob goes forward-in-time in the ordinary matter world. But it swishes backward-in-time in the anit-matter world. It works like a molecular module in a wave of water. That is, the clay quantal ball squeezes back and forth from our world to the anti-matter world, but never actually moves more than the distance of its wavelength. However, like the water molecules in a ripple or the molecules of water in a wave crossing an ocean, the local motion of the quantal ball passes its energy on. The molecules of water don't really travel more than the length of the wave they're momentarily participating in. A molecule of water in the Atlantic Ocean wave passes its energy on, but merely moves in a small circle, a circle twice the size of the wave's amplitude. The energy travels, but the molecules expressing that energy oscillate around a center…they never leave that local center's domain. The quantal ball never leaves its space on the Planck-length checkerboard of time-space either. It simply loops out a full wavelength into the matter cosmos, hits the limits of its amplitude, then bloops back across the membrane into the anti-matter world. There it circles back in time and ends where it began, waiting for another perturbation in the membrane-another traveling wave--to loop it forward in the matter universe and backward in the anti-matter universe again. The backward-time move of a photon on the anti-matter side of things is very reminiscent of Paul Werbos' backward-propagation, and of the back-and-forth consultations between Planck units of future and past called for in Pavel Kurakin's toy photon model. Time space is a rubbery membrane in this vision of things. A membrane with two opposite sides that begin their journey at a common point. Both sides start with the big bang (which just happens to be not only in the center of this torus but also at its periphery). They spread apart then go over a hump. Their energy no longer holds them apart. Slowly they fall under the influence of each others' gravity. This results in what we call quintessence, anti-gravity, and dark energy. Finally the two universes meet at the bagel's edge and annihilate. That annihilation is the bagel's center. It's a big bang that starts two cosmoses again- An anti-matter cosmos
on the underside. The universe blips locally-it oscillates-just like the waves of photons to which it gives birth. If this were a comic book, we'd round things off with this. A cosmos is a blip in yet a bigger universe. It's an oscillating Planck-style unit in a cosmos of nearly infinite other universes, each passing along information when it's called upon. Passing the message on by oscillating-by participating in a larger wave. We're a photon in some giant's bigger time and space. Now for the frequency dependency of the speed of light. Not to mention a photon's energy. The shorter the wavelength, the tighter the squeeze of a quantal ball. The greater the squeeze, the more energy per unit of time-and-space. The longer the wavelength, the more the quantal ball is spread out. The less energy it has per unit of time-and-space. So a photon is a traveling wave made up of standing waves roughly akin to Paul Werbos' soliton. That soliton is our quantal ball of space time that's malleable as clay and can either rest peacefully or wobble back and forth across the membrane that separates the ordinary matter cosmos from the anti-matter cosmos. The greater the wavelength, the more space each quantal ball of energy traverses. Yes, it loses energy. But it makes up for that loss with its gain in speed. The shorter the wavelength, the more energy, but the shorter the strides each quantal ball of energy traverses. The more little steps, the slower the speed. But by this reasoning the difference in speed between high frequency photons and low frequency photons should be huge. Would knowing more about Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions help me out here? Also by this reasoning a photon is not at all what it seems. It's both a wave and a particle-but it does not move more than a tiny bit-1,000 meters if it's a radio wave…and 1/1,000,000,000,000 meter if it's a gamma ray. What moves is its motion, its energy. What medium does the energy move in? The membrane between the matter world and the anti-matter world. That membrane is what Eshel Ben-Jacob referred to in a conversation several days ago as a firmament. A giant caveat-this does NOT mean that Eshel endorses any of my oddball Big Bagel views. The bottom line is this. When a photon is absorbed by an electron it's a local event. Yes, the movement, the wobble in the membrane, has traveled a great distance-perhaps from as far as the galaxy Markarian 501. But the photon is a local manifestation, a quantum blip in the membrane, a distortion in time and space, a twist in the fabric of the cosmos, a temporary blister in the stretched drumhead of time-space. The electron doesn't care whether the photon is a long-distance traveler or a local wobbler. It gobbles up the packet of motion in that quantal oscillation blob and uses it to jump a quantum length outward from its atomic shell. There's a flaw in this reasoning. If an electron from the positive universe swallows the quantal glob, the bit of blooping quantal clay, and imprisons it on this side of the cosmos, it should disappear from the anti-matter side of the cosmos. And vice versa. Do we actually see such disappearances in our cosmos? In a sense, yes. For the first 100,000-380,000 years of the cosmos (depending on whose figures you're using) there were no free-ranging photons, no photons traveling in straight lines, no light. Then came the first photon blast-the background radiation. There were no visible photons until roughly one million years later, when the first stars ignited. What does this have to do with photons disappearing? The further this cosmos has evolved, the more light it has produced. The further we go down the The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen molecule, the first potassium molecule, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos says, "Hey, nut case, it went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accelerate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But the Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Gravity tells space how to bend. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Bohr's complimentarity). Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of toward it. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos too. The two are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. I'm trying to show that the square root of minus one may not as imaginary as we think. Minus one is a real number in the anti-universe. So is its square root.cosmos' evolutionary timeline, the more stars, quasars, and supernovas appear. Even black holes evolve in the hearts of galaxies and, as they grind matter up and carry it away, they blast their surroundings with particle geysers thousands of light years in size. Many of those particles are photons. New photons appear in this cosmos. And in black holes photons do disappear. But do they disappear in the manner I've described-seemingly randomly, swallowed up by positrons going backward in time on the bagel/membrane's underside? Sorry, I have no answers. Can anyone help me out? Which leads to a question-how does a cosmos with black holes follow the laws of the conservation of energy? Meanwhile, there's no need to worry that we've lost our bagel when spreading it out to the thinness of a membrane, far thinner than the stingiest smear of cream cheese. Topology says that if a continuous surface has an upside, a downside, and a hole in its center, it is still a torus. Its surface still maintains toroidal-that's Big Bagel-properties. Yes, I realize all of this is speculative insanity. But who knows? With a little lox I may be right. Howard Retrieved from the
World Wide Web May 31, 2003 The hypotheses put
forward by Nanopoulos and his collaborators has been under experimental
scrutiny, and the results obtained during the last few months are encouraging.
"One way to experimentally test our hypothesis is to consider galaxies
or other objects in the sky that are very far from us," says Nanopoulos.
"Then we collect the photons (particles of light) simultaneously
emitted by these sources, and we look at differences of arrival times
in a detector on earth between photons of different frequencies. The
photons of higher frequencies should come later." The frequency-dependent
expression of the speed of light depends on the gravitational constant,
a quantity that is known since Newton established his law of gravitation.
By using the differences in photon arrival times of six astronomical
sources, Nanopoulos and his collaborators estimated an upper bound of
the value of the gravitational constant from the data, and compared
their results with the expected value. "We were amazed to see that
if we use all these astronomical data, we find very reasonable values
for the gravitational constant," says Nanopoulos. "That was
our first surprise: the fact that, put together, a bunch of data that
had nothing to do with the gravitational constant, gave us values so
close to what we would expect to find." A second experimental encouraging
result about the frequency-dependence of the speed of light was provided
by the HEGRA (High Energy Gamma Ray Astronomy) experiment, which is
detecting photons from outer space, and is situated in La Palma, Canary
Islands, * high-energy physics Dimitri Nanopoulos is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and holder of the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics at Texas A&M University, head of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) Astroparticle Physics Group, and fellow and chair of Theoretical Physics, Academy of Athens in Greece. Professor Nanopoulos received his B.S. in 1971 from the University of Athens and his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of Sussex, England. He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology. He works in string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and quantum-inspired models of brain function. Nanopoulos is fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Curie Fellow at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique de l'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1975-76), Research Fellow Harvard University (1977-79); CERN staff member (1979-86), Professor of Physics, University of Wisconsin (1986-88) and joined Texas A&M University in 1989. He is author of more than 515 refereed articles, with an excess of 25,500 citations, placing him as the fourth most cited High Energy Physicist of all time according to the 2001 census. He has given more than 250 invited presentations at international conferences.
Because in that
anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus
one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may
be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside
of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe
and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal
model says.ave similar spiral patterns. We start a universe with simple
rules and those rules show up fractally on level after level--explaining
why metaphors work, why a water wave behaves a bit like light, and why
artists are the antennae of society. Artists sense the elements of what's
been formed so far, elements that seem to flee each other in opposition,
and sense the attraction inherent in these disparate, emergent processes
and forms. Artists sense the new ways old patterns seek re-formation.
Like the cosmos itself, artists are corollary splicers, working out
the latest implications of the ancient rules with which the cosmos started.
So are all creative culture-makers, be they scientists, priests, or
politicians. I hope that these amateurish ramblings are not wasting
your time. But I've been working on them for a long, long time. Paul,
I'd love to get your alternative take on this--the steady state as opposed
to the big bang perspective. Greg, your musing about the role of math
in a cosmos capable of producing biology--a cosmos capable of producing
forms of complexity no math has ever been able to grapple with--is extraordinary
and is also part of the Bloomian grand unified theory of everything
in the universe including the human soul. (There'll be no room for it,
alas, in The Big Bang Tango.) You've just said it better than I could.
The Bloom Big Bagel Theory of the Cosmos keeps getting more support
every day (the NY Times reported on another toroidal theory of the cosmos
several days ago--the second toroidal theory I've heard about this year).
It's based on topology. The cosmos pulses like a photon, too. It goes
from attraction to repulsion--from the outward rush of the Big Bang
to a consolidation when the anti-universe and the positive universe
join at the Bagel's edge and become a bagel's center, a big bang, again. Howard In a message dated 3/16/2003 5:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time, grbear writes: Subj: RE: its from bits paper Date: 3/16/2003 5:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time From: grbear To: werbos HowlBloom, Sent from the Internet Very stimulating thinking here. I must admit, mathematical ignoramus that I am, that my thinking emerges from other areas--a kind of instinctive approach that asks the same questions in physics I might ask when cobbling together any other complicated system. To that end, like Paul, I have no objection to extra dimensions--but am deeply worried by making assumptions of infinity just to get the math to fit with the logic. Geological/topological solutions could be much more elegant--but (and pardon my naivete here, already admitted) are we still just begging the question? (Perhaps to justify my own ignorance!) I wonder if mathematics per se can create a theory of physics. It produces beautiful but somehow unsatisfying models. What if the universe is as complicated as, say, a living organism? Then we must use other intellectual means to create theories and describe them, and bring in math later to help us figure out parameters and implications. Math as tool, and not master. Most physicists do this anyway, but are sometime reluctant to admit it! I doubt we'll ever have a final theory of physics. There's wonder in taking that as a prime assumption--what if the universe, as it is observed, subtly and locally alters ground rules to evade final detection and description? What if a final theory kills a universe? How would we describe a universe that can smoothly transition from one locally applicable theory (an ecological adaptation to large populations of thinking and reality-pinning beings) to another, with its own infestation of differently theorizing beings? A trickster? Or a mother? Talk about endless and full employment for theorists! But again this has little to do with what I try for in MOVING MARS. In that book, I use a computational approach, not a biologically perverse approach! The weakness in applying information theory to physics is that Shannon describes transmission of data, but barely begins to describe what happens when users receive the data. The former is mathematically tractable, the latter is not. If particles are users, and photons, bosons, etc., are among the means of transmission of data... Well, I just get lost trying to figure that out. My instinct tells me, however, that if a "computational" universe needs some finite length of time to "update" or "refresh" its various constituents, we could derive gravity as a vector change created by the increased time(?) it will take larger masses to compute their situations and update/refresh. The longer the refresh "time", the stronger the gravity. Some connection between a spacial component and a true time component of the total particle bit description could also produce special and general relativistic effects. Sorry to be obscure here! Greg Bear Greg ----- Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 7:24 AM To: HBloom. Lissa Werbos Subject: its from bits paper Hi, folks! Thanks much for passing on the its from bits paper by Wilczek in Nature. I regret that I took a few days before getting to it -- but the bits are a bit out of control these days in my life. (Friday last, a colleague said: here is a list of over 1000 proposals for about $3 million each up on the computer. Come back and evaluate the nature and degree of real engineering content in each of them, and report back immediately... Just one of many little things.. Still, I did learn a few things in reading through them...) My impressions: It often happens that some folks try to apply A to B, while others do B on A, and others do more complex connections. Wilczek's vision of its from bits is very different from what I saw in Moving Mars, and different in spirit from other things I have seen. One version of "its from bits" is... basically trying to model the universe as a kind of computer or as a kind of intelligent system. That's like what I saw in Moving Mars. Wolfram's notion of modeling the universe as a cellular automaton (an approach Kurakin also likes) is maybe a step in that direction. (P.S. A Fruedian slip: as I was typing, I typed "autonomaton" at first...) But Wilczek uses the title "its from bits" to address a totally different idea, which he describes much more precisely in the text: the "Pythagoras-Planck program." I have seen shadows of that approach before, and I suspect a very long history -- but Wilczek's account is far more coherent than what I have seen before. Certainly Wilczek has shown important, unique insights in other areas. (There may be another aspect to the "Pythagoras-Planck" approach emanatng from some speculations of Dirac, which I have not trcaked down either.) ========================== But your real question may be: OK, what do you make of it? Is it real, and where does it go? I am intrigued by the TRUE its from bits (as in Moving Mars) as a kind of possible "generation after next" of physics model. But when I get time to do my own work in this area, I try to focus just on the next generation, something more in front of us here and now. That is already radical enough for today's physics. Wilczek's paper is also pointing towards the next generation. (After all, he is prominent member of the PRESENT generation!) He sees some important points, but also misses a few, in my view. (Or maybe he just doesn't choose to talk about some important points which might be over people's heads.) In my view, everything he talks about here relates to the traditional Einstein view of the universe, where everything is a matter of continuous force fields fluctuating over space-time in a local, continuous way. He argues that natural quantities in physics, like the mass of a proton, ought to be near one, if the laws of physics were expressed "in pure natural form," in dimensionless units. That's an important observation. But where do masses come from? How do we explain them anyway? There are three alternative answers to this question, in different streams of modern physics. The oldest answer would be "they come from renormalization." In other words, out of thin air. In the original formulation of quantum field theory (QFT), due to Heisenberg, Dyson, Schwinger and Feynmann (and Tomonaga?)... particles like electrons or quarks would be seen as perfect point particles. It was just like the very old, pre-Einstein stuff of Lorentz, where "particles" and "forces" were considered to be two kinds of things in nature. "Particles" were idealized objects more perfect than the ancient Greek "atom." When they used QFT to calculate the mass-energy of these particles... there was a problem. When a charge is concentrated at a point, the energy of self-repulsion is infinite. So people added an assumption into the laws of physics, to deal with this. They assumed that nature somehow added a counterbalancing negative infinity to the mass, a negative infinity of just the right size to make the total mass come out to be whatever is observed. And this was done for every type of particles. This was a very big assumption in the physics, but most people made it sound as if it was just a kind of calculating procedure... (I am oversimplifying the sociology here. Most physicists would just shrug their shoulders -- a behavior they have had to repeat over and over again -- and say "I don't really believe nature is like this, but this is a placeholder for an unknown truth that people will discover someday..". And a lot of work was done to further that kind of interpretation. But it still leaves open the question: what is that underlying truth?) Wilczek's paper focuses almost entirely on the Standard Model and such. The Standard Model of physics is generally regarded as the far frontier of what has actually been proven out empirically -- "Beyond this point lies speculation." It includes QCD (discussed at length in this paper) and electroweak theory ("the modern extension of Maxwell's Laws"). The Standard Model is built entirely on renormalization. And so... it would appear, on the surface, that Wilczek is talking about the problem of how to explain particle masses... without bothering to mention that they are actually TOTALLY unexplained and unexplainable within the framework of traditional QFT which he invokes!!! ----- But... I know a bit about Wilczek, and I know it is not so simple. There is a SECOND approach (historically the third) to trying to explain particle masses -- superstring theory, including the modern n-brane versions. And many people believe that that is the "underlying truth." In superstring theory, the electron is NOT a perfect point particle, but a kind of extended body whose radius is about the size of the Planck length. Even though there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for superstring theory, physicists are excited by the fact that it provides a way to explain things WITHOUT renormalization. No more magic hand coming out of the sky to tweak all the masses!!! Wilczek's paper
could be interpreted as... a stream of argument which points very strongly
and suggestively towards superstring theory "or something like
it" as the natural way to explain everything we see in nature.
Particles should have radii about like the Planck length. If we accept
the superstring interpretation, this is not all pointing towards "Moving
Mars" exactly. It points towards whatever superstring theory offers.
Which is not entirely obvious to ANYONE... =============================
OK, superstring theory is coherent, relatively speaking, though I do
not know whether it could ever be converted into a truly axiomatic theory....
-- But personally, I do not believe it. All those extra dimensions coming
out of thin air. If the extra dimensions were motivated by something
empirical, that would be one thing. Extra dimensions are a very plausible
idea to me, in principle... but when the origin is just a lack of ability
to close the math, I am very, very skeptical about these particular
proposed extra dimensions. Who knows? But there are grounds to try to
find alternative hypotheses.... I tend to believe that the next generation
of physics (if we ever get there, if we survive the events of the coming
week...) will involve a third explanation for particle masses, also
part of the mainstream, but not so prominent. And I myself go a bit
beyond or outside the mainstream in how far I would take it. For the
next generation of physics... I think particle masses would emerge as
the mass-energy of TOPOLOGICAL SOLITONS. They, like the superstring
objects, have finite radius -- and Wilczek's article suggests that they
ought to be about as big as the Planck radius. HOWEVER: (1) they do
not require that we assume the existence of additional dimensions in
nature; (2) it looks to me as if they can explain the mass (and existence!)
of the electron, without renormalization, simply by adding a few terms
to the "Higgs field" (a part of the standard model which we
HAVEN'T been able to get good data on yet); (3) they even allow the
more radical plossibility of "returning to reality," returning
to Einstein's kind of field theory. That last bit is very far from mainstream.
But the logic holds up. And I had a couple of papers last year backing
it up. However -- there is a huge amount of work required to really
push through any basic paradigm shift requiring difficult mathematics,
and I may or may not have the time or ability to pass this off to the
more full-time physicists who would have to carry it ahead. It
may be that the sheer social/cultural entropy pulling physics into something
more and more like medieval theology is too much to hold back... I worry
whether this time the epicycles may win, in part because of iron triangle
effects. For what it's worth... most people who talk about topological
solitons haven't got the foggiest idea of what they are. The clearest
explanation I have seen was in a book by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk...
a really neat book, in some ways... but it is not the kind of book you
can learn from by just reading in the usual way... I am tempted to say
"it is definitive but it is no BIble.." but then again, is
the real Bible a bible? Best, Paul Here's a simpleton's suggestion. The motive power is...gravity. Take the bagel model I keep tossing around (or loxing up). If both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. When the gravity-dimples around matter-suns and anti-matter-suns meet, they may well produce a mini-bagel hole-a black hole. Talk about tautological, I've got gravity working because of….gravity. But my blithering doesn't remove the fact that it seems to me there's more than mathematical description needed to explain attraction at a distance. Math can map the manner in which gravity works. But does it tell us why force at a distance applies? If it takes objects to generate a field, and it takes an intersect of fields to generate an object, ummm, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what is a photon-a rippled intersect of electrical and magnetic fields? My ignorance is showing all over the place, but sometimes it's worth asking naïve questions. Occasionally we become so used to using words like "force" that we don't recognize our ignorance anymore.I have another of my mathematically ignorant questions. I can understand why Pi shows up on numerous equations describing the physics of this cosmos. Pi is a property of circles, and circles show up at every level from the atom to stars and galaxies. The circle is one of the many iterative patterns of this universe that shows up on level after level of emergence. To what pattern in this cosmos does the square root of minus one pertain? Let me try to guess. The square root of plus one is plus one. The square root of minus one is NOT minus one. Why? Minus one times minus one=plus one. In this universe--the universe we see, the square root of minus one doesn't exist. But if my toroidal theory--or perhaps some other toroidal theories--of the cosmos is true, there is a universe in which the square root of minus one DOES exist. It's the anti-matter universe on the underside of the torus. If any positive number in the anti-matter universe is negative in ours, then in that universe the square root of minus one is minus one. Why? Because in that anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says. It's like the doctor
who feels he's explained your stomach cramp when he tells you that you've
got gastritis. Sorry, you knew that before you walked in to his examining
room. Gastritis is Latin for irritation of the stomach. In other words,
all your doctor has done is parrot your question back at you in another
tongue. You asked why does my stomach ache and the doc has said because
you have an ache of the stomach. Hb 3/25/2003 Oscar Wilde once said: "to be understood is to be found out." It's a risky business, explaining yourself clearly. Many of those who publish peer-reviewed articles in abstruse journals would discover that stripped of their jargon and their acronyms, they have nothing to say at all. But, as I mentioned in an earlier email, Einstein saw clear explanation AS A SCIENTIFIC IMPERATIVE. And Einstein was the ultimate scientist--an outsider, an oddball, a man who'd been written off as having a shabby and substandard mind, but a man with vision...a vision that stabbed through what Herman Melville calls "the pasteboard mask" on the surface of things and found a deeper reality. Unlike many of our colleagues, you, Paul, have a great deal to say. You have a unique form of vision. You can see math as clearly as others see their fingernails and their toes. You've been able to do this since you were a child. It's as if the rest of us only saw visible light, and you saw, with no difficulty whatsoever, infrared and ultraviolet light. Your vision would be dazzling. You could see at night. You could see the strange ultraviolet visions of a flowers signals, its critical information, that bees see. But you'd have to tell us blind folks what was clear to you, or you'd miss out on vision's reason to be. You'd fail to be what you can be--an antenna of human culture, a brilliant seer of new visions that add to the collective enterprise we call culture. Yes, you can choose to leave behind traces that only a few can read. But a mind like yours should never be lost that way. Never, Paul. Never. Your contribution would be enormous if you wrote in Discover Magazine vocabulary...in the vocabulary of the best science magazines of our era, Science 86 (from the AAAS) and The Sciences (from the New York Academy of Sciences). All of the following statements make my mouth water. But all call for clear explanation: pw: One does not need to introduce fermions-ex-deus-ex-machina at a higher level of organization in order to have the emergent behavior. That being said -- it HAS been tremendously convenient (both in Lagrangian systems and in network automata ala Wolfram) to have one specific higher-level concept -- topological charge -- embedded in the system dynamics, to make particle-like stuff emerge hb: now this, the following, is vivid English. Are you saying that a symmetry break--one in which two things are separated by a membrane, a firmament, a clear dividing line--is not the way this cosmos works? Are you saying that time exists precisely because of assymetry? That this cosmos has a tilt that runs from the past toward the future, with a little backward leakage? If you are, you are inadvertently supporting the elephant in the room, the theory everyone has been kind enough not to comment on because of its obvious amateur stupidity--The Toroidal Model of the cosmos, The Big Bagel. The Big Bagel calls for a kick that sends one universe spinning assymetrically in one direction, and another spinning assymetrically in the other. Together these two cock-eyed, assymetric planes of being make what I mentioned last night, a shape like a wok with its lid on. More accurately, they make a doughnut, a torus, a bagel. The angry kick of god is the big bang--a non-Hoylesian way of starting things. For those who don't know, Paul and I both grew up eating and breathing cosmology. The brilliant explainer who made things clear to Paul was Sir Fred Hoyle, a man so good at making the most complex things clear to untutored minds that he had his own TV and radio shows in Britain. Hoyle was a terrific self-promoter--a very necessary thing if you feel you have ideas of importance to convey. But, most important, Hoyle was the creator and champion of the steady state model of the cosmos--a model in which matter is continually erupting from I'm-not-sure-where. I grew up fascinated by another great explainer--George Gamow, a creator andchampion of Big Bang theory. So Paul and I see the cosmos differently. We FEEL it differently. Why? Because of passion points, imprinting moments, glomming with all our energy onto role models who shape our very core and soul. This is transgenerational communication. I suspect that Hoyle, like Gamow, opened a cornucopia of thoughts of previous theorists and explainers and made them glisten for the two of us. Through these minds who were eager to bend and entertain us with their insights, we were given the works of Pythagoras, Euclid, Arc |
