| Big Bang file pg1 [pg2] [Directory] |
| The
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 observe today. The microwave background radiation is supposed to be the afterglow of the big bang. However, all the hypothetical steps leading from this radiation to the development of normal, full?sized galaxies are currently missing from the observations. The big bang theory predicts that all galaxies formed within a relatively short period, and should all be between 10 and 15 billion years old, but surveys have found evidence of much younger galaxies. The most distant galaxies ought to consist solely of very young stars, but their spectra provide no evidence for this. Furthermore, extremely distant galaxies have been discovered that apparently formed long before the big bang universe could have cooled sufficiently. Each time astronomers acquire more powerful telescopes allowing them to see deeper into space, they discover new scales of structure: first it was galaxies, then clusters of galaxies, then superclusters of galaxies, then in 1986 came the discovery of supercluster complexes ?? huge sheets of galaxies stretching over a billion light?years of space, separated by enormous voids. The largest of these megagalactic structures stretch for nearly half the radius of the visible universe, and their discovery has filled big bangers with dismay, for no version of the big bang had predicted the existence of such colossal structures. By measuring the speeds at which galaxies move today and the distance they would have travelled to form such structures, it has been estimated that it would have taken at least 100 billion years to build these complexes ?? 7 to 10 times the age assigned to the universe by the big bang theory. It is possible that matter moved much faster in the past and later slowed down, but this deceleration would have distorted the spectrum of the microwave background to a degree that has not been observed [1]. In their efforts to explain the large?scale structure of the universe, big bang cosmologists invoke gravity in conjunction with their latest fad: dark matter. Most dark matter is believed to consist of as yet undiscovered physical particles (WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles) and hypothetical flaws in the fabric of spacetime (such as one?dimensional cosmic strings) left over from the big bang. Dark matter is thought to be concentrated around galaxies in vast halos, with just the right amounts in just the right places. It has been known for some time that cold dark matter models are unable to accurately simulate the structure of the universe on both galactic and multigalactic scales simultaneously. Many cosmologists believe that 'One way to fix the models is to mix in a smidgen of hot dark matter with the cold dark matter' [2]. Hot dark matter would consist of fast?moving particles, and the most likely candidate is the neutrino. However, the latest calculations show that the neutrino does not have a sufficient mass to play a significant role in the formation of galaxies [3]. According to the current 'inflationary' model of the big bang, the universe underwent a very brief period of accelerated expansion (many times faster than light) in the first split second after the big bang. This ad?hoc model was first proposed in 1980 to explain the smoothness of the microwave background radiation and to solve a number of other problems. The model dictates that the matter in the universe must have a certain critical density, and since the density of visible matter is only a fraction of this value, big bang cosmologists conclude that dark matter makes up 99% of the mass of the universe. There is no observational evidence for such a huge quantity of dark matter. It is theorized that this large mass density should cause space to curve back on itself so that the universe is closed and finite, but no real evidence for the slightest curvature of space has ever been found [4]. Observational evidence leads most astronomers to conclude that up to 90% of the mass of the universe consists of dark matter, though some scientists have interpreted the evidence in other ways that do not require the existence of any new, exotic forms of physical matter. In our solar system, the orbital speed of planets declines with increasing distance from the sun, so that the solar system has a falling 'rotation curve'. However, many galaxies have flat rotation curves, and the anomalously high speeds are attributed to the gravitational effect of large quantities of unseen matter. It is important to note that galaxy rotation curves are not obtained by measuring the actual motion of individual stars, as this is impossible to detect even for the nearest galaxies; the curves are derived from the motion of interstellar gas. Furthermore, not all galaxies show flat rotation curves; nearly every curve has a different shape. An extended spherical halo of exotic dark matter would therefore be hard to fit to each curve. The uniqueness of each rotation curve also rules out an explanation by any modification of the inverse?square law of gravity. Another proposal is that localized extended magnetic fields may play a role, but evidence for this is lacking. Pari Spolter suggests that the observations can be explained by two factors: 1. the high?speed stream of charged particles ('stellar wind') emitted by stars imparts a high velocity to interstellar gas; our own sun, for example, orbits the centre of the galaxy at a velocity of about 200 km/s, whereas the solar wind has a velocity of about 400 km/s locally; 2. the dense environment near the centre of galaxies retards the motion of stars [5]. Observations of the speed with which galaxies move in groups and clusters are also interpreted as evidence of dark matter. However, M. Valtonen and G. Byrd have drawn attention to two errors in the interpretation of observations ?? the inclusion of galaxies that have been flung away from a cluster and of 'interlopers' not really belonging to the cluster. If these errors are taken into consideration, there is no 'missing mass' to account for [6]. Virtually all the work on the 'missing mass' problem is based on the fundamental assumption that the gravitational force is proportional to the inert mass of a celestial body. However, Pari Spolter has clearly demonstrated that there is no empirical basis for this assumption [7]. Redshift quantization indicates that the assumed rapid motions of galaxies are wrong, and provides further evidence that new physics and a new understanding of gravity are required. Alternative cosmologies 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. The steady state theory was first put forward in 1948, and once enjoyed equal status with the big bang. Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Jayant Narlikar have recently developed a detailed 'quasi?steady state' model of the universe. As in the original model, they propose that the universe has always existed, but they abandon the idea of the continuous creation of matter, suggesting instead that a series of large creation events, or little big bangs, occurred 10 to 15 billion years ago, which caused our part of the universe to expand. Since then smaller creation events have continued to occur, producing energetic objects such as quasars and radio galaxies. However, in the future the expansion of our part of the universe will weaken, allowing the formation of new creation centres and another episode of large creation events. Hoyle and his colleagues say that the new model 'is not intended to give a finished view of cosmology [but] to open the door to a new view which at present is blocked by a fixation with big bang cosmology' [2]. Another alternative to the big bang which is slowly gaining ground is plasma cosmology, a theory pioneered by the Swedish astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Hannes Alfv*n beginning in the 1950s. Like the steady state theory, it proposes that the universe is infinite in space and time and is continuously evolving. Alfv*n, too, interprets the redshift as a sign that the galaxies are flying apart, but believes that this may apply only to our own part of the universe, having been produced by a series of matter?antimatter explosions billions of years ago. However, Eric J. Lerner [3], another supporter of the 'plasma universe', believes that far more work needs to be done to test the different interpretations of the redshift. Plasma ?? also called the fourth state of matter ?? is an electrically conducting gas consisting of a high density of electrons and ions. Over 99% of the ordinary matter in the universe is believed to exist in the plasma state, including stars, the outer atmospheres of planets, and interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic media. Largely thanks to Alfv*n's pioneering work, the importance of plasmas, electric currents, and magnetic fields in the formation and evolution of the solar system is now well established. However, most cosmologists still believe that electrical and magnetic forces are of minor significance in explaining the formation and evolution of galaxies and multigalactic structures. Indeed, the big bang theory predicts that galactic magnetic fields should be weaker the more distant the galaxy and the younger it is in relation to the big bang, but observational evidence contradicts this prediction [4]. Plasma cosmologists envision a universe crisscrossed by vast electrical currents and powerful magnetic fields, ordered and controlled by electromagnetism as well as gravity. The inhomogeneous and filamentary structure of the universe is no surprise, for almost any plasma generates inhomogeneities naturally, pinching itself together into dense, swirling filaments, and these have been observed in the laboratory, in the sun, in nebulas, and at the heart of our galaxy. Tiny plasmas fired at high speed towards each other in the laboratory pinch and twist themselves into the graceful shapes of spiral galaxies, suggesting that galaxies themselves might have been created by vortex filaments on a much larger scale. The meta model developed by astronomer Tom Van Flandern [5] proposes that the universe is not only infinite in space and time, but comprises objects and entities spanning an infinite range of sizes. There is nothing unique about our own scale of things; the universe should look essentially the same on all scales. Flandern proposes that there is a light?carrying medium and a gravity medium, which play an important role on our own scale, but that there are infinite numbers of other media composed of particles of every conceivable size; even what to us are galaxies may be particles in a medium on a super?cosmic scale. He argues that the redshift is caused by light losing energy as it travels through space and that our own part of the universe is not expanding. The subquantum kinetics cosmology developed by Paul LaViolette [6] proposes that physical matter emerges from a preexisting ether. LaViolette, too, believes that the redshift arises because photons lose energy while travelling through intergalactic space, and that the universe is not expanding. His theory also predicts that photons gain energy in certain regions of space, such as within galaxies. This 'genic energy' is produced in the interior of all celestial bodies, and may shed light on the origin of solar energy and the energy that powers supernova and galactic core explosions. Evolution and involution Hindu mythology speaks of the inbreathing and outbreathing of Brahmë, the cosmic divinity, when worlds are evolved forth from, and later withdrawn into, the bosom of Brahmë. Some people have drawn parallels between this idea and that of an oscillating universe which alternately expands and contracts. But there is another interpretation. In The Secret Doctrine, when discussing the origin of worlds, H.P. Blavatsky quotes the following from the Stanzas of Dzyan: 'The mother [Space] swells, expanding from within without like the bud of the lotus' (Stanza III.1). She adds the following explanation: The expansion 'from within without' of the Mother, called elsewhere the 'Waters of Space,' 'Universal Matrix,' etc., does not allude to an expansion from a small centre or focus, but, without reference to size or limitation or area, means the development of limitless subjectivity into as limitless objectivity. . . . It implies that this expansion, not being an increase in size ?? for infinite extension admits of no enlargement ?? was a change of condition. [1] In other words, expansion can refer to the emanation or unfolding of steadily denser planes or spheres from the spiritual summit of a hierarchy, until the lowest and most material world is reached. At the midpoint of the evolutionary cycle, the reverse process begins: the lower worlds gradually dematerialize or etherealize and are infolded or indrawn into the higher worlds; the heavens are 'rolled together as a scroll' (Isaiah 34:4). Thus, outbreathing and inbreathing can refer to the expansion of the One into the many, and the subsequent reabsorption of the many into the One. The evolution and involution of worlds does not mean that space itself pops into existence out of nothingness, expands like elastic, and later contracts and vanishes into nothingness. It is the worlds within space ?? planets, stars, etc. ?? that materialize and etherealize. Our physical senses allow us to perceive only physical?plane objects composed of the same type of matter as ourselves. But if the matter of the physical universe makes up only one tiny range in an infinite continuum of possible grades of matter, there must be countless interpenetrating worlds and planes, both grosser and more ethereal than our own, that are beyond our range of perception. The infinite totality of worlds and planes not only infill space but are space. In theosophy, no thing or entity ?? whether atom, human, planet, star, galaxy, or universe ?? appears randomly out of nowhere. A physical entity is born because an inner entity or soul is returning to embodiment, and each new embodiment is the karmic result of the preceding one. There is no absolute beginning or end to evolution, only relative starting places and stopping (or resting) places. During the lifetime of a solar system, planets are said to reembody many times on many different planes, making arcs of descent into material realms, followed by arcs of ascent into spiritual realms. By analogy, stars reembody many times during the lifetime of a galaxy. The observable universe contains about l00 billion galaxies. This immense collection of galaxies may form a relatively independent whole, which is just one of an infinite number of such 'universes'. And these universes may, in turn, be collected into 'superuniverses', and so on, ad infinitum. A popular theory nowadays is that when stars above a certain size die, they collapse under their own weight to an infinitesimal point, forming a hypothetical 'black hole'. Likewise, big bangers believe that in the far distant future space might start to shrink, so that all the matter and energy in the universe is compressed into a single point in a 'big squeeze'. In contrast to these wild theories, theosophy says that on the upward arc of evolution cohesive forces begin to relax and matter becomes increasingly ethereal, and that when planets and suns die their constituents are dispersed and enter a dormant, relatively homogeneous condition [2]. At the dawn of the next cycle of universal manifestation, life impulses from inner realms will quicken sleeping matter into renewed activity in certain 'fertile' regions of space, following which this primal physical substance will begin to differentiate and condense into galaxies, stars, and planets. Once the various worlds or globes have been formed by the most spiritual kingdoms working with the elemental and mineral kingdoms, the other kingdoms of nature ?? plant, animal, human, and superhuman ?? can gradually make their appearance, as their sleeping prototypes on the astral plane reawaken, and physicalize, becoming once more the dwellings of evolving souls. According to the big bang theory, the universe was created about 10 to 15 billion years ago. Plasma cosmologist Eric Lerner, on the other hand, has suggested that the observable universe may actually be trillions of years old. He describes a scenario in which the current cycle of evolution began over 3 trillion years ago with the stirring into life of a primordial homogeneous hydrogen plasma, which then differentiated and agglomerated into astronomical structures [3]. The figure of trillions of years begins to approach the vast time periods suggested in theosophy, according to which the current major cycle of evolution ?? of which our own solar system forms part ?? has been in progress for over 155 trillion years. During this period there have been many planetary and solar reembodiments.[4] In the middle of the seventeenth century Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland made the startling revelation that God created Heaven and Earth on 22 October 4004 BC, at 8 o'clock in the evening! This was later 'corrected' by the English biblical scholar Dr John Lightfoot, who gave the date for the creation of Adam as 23 October 4004 BC, at 9 o'clock in the morning! Our understanding of the physical world has increased immeasurably since then, thanks mainly to advances in the physical sciences. However, tremendous gaps in scientific knowledge remain, and physical science can shed little light on the nonphysical factors which in occult philosophy are said to play a crucial role in shaping and organizing the physical world. Many big bang theorists may believe that they know what was happening during the first trillionths of a second after the moment of creation of the entire universe, but as one scientist remarked, 'Every generation thinks it has the answers, and every generation is humbled by nature' [5]. References: A modern creation myth [1] P. Davies & J. Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1992, pp. 162?73. [2] Ibid., p. 122. [3] New Scientist, 21/28 December 1991, p. 3. The non?expanding universe [1] Halton Arp, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, Interstellar Media, 1987. [2] Eric J. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened, Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 428?9; Paul LaViolette, Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient myth and the science of continuous creation, Park Street Press, 1995, pp. 260?3; Tom Van Flandern, Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets, North Atlantic Books, 1993, pp. 91?4; Richard L. Thompson, Vedic Astronomy and Cosmography, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1990, pp. 145?54; William R. Corliss (comp.), Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos, Sourcebook Project, 1987, pp. 148?50. [3] Beyond the Big Bang, pp. 268?73; Tom Van Flandern, 'Did the Universe Have a Beginning?', Meta Research Bulletin, 3:3, 1994, www.metaresearch.org. [4] Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos, pp. 195?8; Vedic Astronomy and Cosmography, pp. 155?60. [5] G. de Purucker, The Esoteric Tradition, TUP, 2nd ed., 1940, pp. 435?8fn. [6] G. de Purucker, Fountain?Source of Occultism, TUP, 1974, pp. 80?1; G. de Purucker, Esoteric Teachings, PLP, 1987, 3:29. [7] Beyond the Big Bang, p. 317. The microwave background [1] Scientific American, July 1992, p. 9. [2] The Big Bang Never Happened, pp. 50?1, 268?78. [3] Ibid., pp. xviii?xx. Large?scale structure [1] The Big Bang Never Happened, p. 31. [2] Scientific American, January 1993, p. 14. [3] New Scientist, 12 June 1993, p. 18. [4] Pari Spolter, Gravitational Force of the Sun, Orb Publishing Co., 1993, pp. 34, 58, 60, 82?3. [5] Pers. com., 22 Dec. 1996. [6] The Big Bang Never Happened, pp. 36?9. [7] See Gravitational Force of the Sun. Alternative cosmologies [1] Scientific American, February 1992, p. 96. [2] New Scientist, 27 February 1993, p. 14; New Scientist, 19 June 1993, pp. 27?31. [3] See The Big Bang Never Happened. [4] New Scientist, 28 March 1992, p. 24. [5] Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets, pp. 79?116. [6] Beyond the Big Bang, part 3. Evolution and involution [1] The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 1:62?3. [2] Ibid., 1:4, 11?12, 41; The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, TUP, 2nd ed., 1926, pp. 97?8 / TPH, chron. ed., 1993, pp. 187?8; Fountain?Source of Occultism, pp. 122?3. [3] The Big Bang Never Happened, pp. 295?301. [4] See G. de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy, TUP, 1945, pp. 357?60; G. de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, TUP, 2nd ed., 1979, pp. 184, 468. [5] Scientific American, July 1992, p. 12. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? In a message dated 4/23/00 4:56:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time, benJacob writes: I was enjoyed reading these new ideas. Have many comments but need more time to think about it again. The main comment is that there are two main types of vortices. Those like hurricanes which result from attraction in the center (low pressure in the hurricane case black hole in galaxies (not the usual explanantion)) and vortices like in the bacteria or schools of fish etc that also have attraction but it is among the elements and each element has its own popeltion force. hb: Eshel, this is an extremely interesting way of looking at it. Where do vortices which result from collisions of high and low pressure areas fit in? In electromagnetic waves, in the strong force, in the weak force, and in gravity, what constitutes an equivalent to the meeting of high and low pressures? Where do the forces of attraction and repulsion fit in? Attraction is a quality belonging to the central focus of a vortex. Repulsion keeps one vortex separated from others and thus guards the permanence of a vortex:s identity. But how do attraction and repulsion contribute to the constant motion of a swirl? For that matter, what energy or force keeps an electron moving around a nucleus? The textbooks say that particles have momentum, but is an electron's momentum sufficient to account for its activity? Doesn't the attraction of a proton create an equivalent of friction or viscosity? Does an electron have sufficient mass to generate centripetal force? And why, some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, at that instant when atoms were first born, did yet another mystery reveal its being--the quantum steps between electron shells? If this is a universe unfolding from initial axioms (or principles, or algorithms), what do the quantum shells of atoms indicate about what their starting axioms might be? I've been thinking recently of the gravitational force in a galactic cluster as having an equivalent of viscosity. Gravity on this huge scale seems to be the equivalent of a liquid in which the dust clouds, stars, and other detritus of a galaxy whirl. In colonies of bacteria there is a direct equivalent to the meeting of high and low pressures in a hurricane. The agar or other medium in which the bacterial colony grows has a level of resistance. The colony's expansion gives the bacterial community a collective pressure, an expansive outward force. Your studies have shown that when the resistance of the medium through which the colony is spreading changes, the shape of the vortex (or concentric rings) alters as well. This is very much like the mechanism of a hurricane, whose strength depends on the battle between hot and cold fronts, the clash of high and low pressure zones. A colony also, as you say, has its center, its parent cells and their huddled progeny. Those centers send out attraction and repulsion cues which orient the spiraling of rings...rings of generations whose lineages long ago (in bacterial time) left their ancestral homeland far behind. But here's the real paradox. What sort of difference in pressure or in attraction to a center would cause a particle like a quark or an electron to precipitate from the inconceivably fast expansion of inflating space-time? One physics book after another proposes some terribly counterintuitive notion like that of the Higgs particle, then announces that our next clue to the puzzle awaits the arrival of a larger atom smasher, a bigger hammer with which to disintegrate the particles we already know. Frankly, we've had accelerators of this sort since the 1940s. Smashing things is becoming a bit old. Now the challenge is to do the opposite, not to shatter but create. If we're to understand the evolution of matter and its motions in this universe, we need to apply our minds to the invention of gadgetry able to make particles out of energy. This will teach us how the things which are have self-constructed rather than the ways in which what is can be destroyed. ebj: In the case of the hurricane the central attraction also provides the force to move. hb: intriguing. what is the nature of this center of attraction in a hurricane or a tornado? Is this center self-constructed by the forces of the hurricane itself? Is it, like a center of gravity, a mathematical abstraction which the hurricane, in its own crude way, computes? One of a weather vortex's mysteries that it is constantly on the move. It exists and yet it's nowhere. It is, as Ulysses might have said, "no thing." Instead it is an action, a movement made a being. "I am because I am," said the Lord of Hosts, speaking from the center of a vortex made of wind. ebs: So they are very different both mathematically and in nature. There are additional comment but this is the main one to distinguish between vortices of self moving elements and vortices of driven elements. hb: food for thought. Many thanks, chaver. Lehit--Howard _______________________________ In a message dated 99?10?01 04:40:17 EDT, benJacob writes: You are right a static force cant have "ripples" the pattern if formed as you shake the paper and it is complicated combination of friction with the paper the action of the magnetic force and the interaction between the particles which are magnetized by the external field and tend to aggragate. >> Which would mean, if I have this straight, that shaking the paper provides the kinetic energy necessary to move the filings. Aggregation begets aggregation. So the larger a pile of manetized shavings becomes, the larger its cumulative magnetic powers of seduction. Those spaces in which there are few shavings lose their influence as they are emptied of filings which have gone along with the crowd and joined the bunches in their vicinity. This is a pattern followed by animals and humans as well??attraction begets more attraction, and the desolate are shunned. "To he who hath it shall be given and from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away." This is also a basic rule of a complex adaptive system, a communal intelligence or learning machine. But I have a further
question. Don't the aggregations of filings appeal along the "lines
of force" of the magnetic field itself? In other words, isn't it
true that the lines of force are concentrated in loops, ellipses, and
similar patterns, but that it takes kinetic energy to send objects (say
the photons of a solar wind crossing the outer fringes of the earth's
magnetic field and atmosophere) within "grabbing" distance
of the lines of force? Or, to put it differently, are the lines of force
in a magnetic field structural properties, shapes, of the magnetic force
itself. And, if they are indeed lines of concentration of the magnetic
field, why is the fieild concentrated along lines and more dilute in
the spaces between the lines? Howard it took 300,000??? years before the first atoms formed--see articles in Scientific American, January 1999 on origins of universe. A million, says Lee Smolin in The Life of the Universe ------------------------------ One solution has been to resurrect Einstein's Cosmological Constant. As I understand the idea, the universe is pulled together by gravity. But it also has an as-yet-undetected energy that pushes it apart--an impulsive force driving it from condensation, cohesion, collapse, and uniformity. A second solution has been to imagine that the universe and what proceeded it is on a grand roller coaster ride, rolling into minimums, then riding up to crest again. Under both these theories lie impulse, restlessness, motion, and change. Another twist from the physics of the last 100 years--the old assumption was that time was reversible. A series of studies since roughly 1960 have found that the alleged reversibility of things physical was false. One couldn't arbitrarily flip symmetries--the universe had direction, it had, if you want to call it that, a predilection. It tilted toward one side. New 1988 experiments at CERN and Fermilab have shown that time is not reversible either. It too tilts, and its tilt is forward. Both the supernova-inspired reevaluations of cosmology and the studies of reversibility hint at the same thing. In essence, this is a motivated universe. Its impulse is to move, to never rest, to thrust itself forward and outward. If the roller coaster theory is true, that movement is exploratory, oscillatory, shifting, and twisting through regular but expanding patterns. In fact, that twitch of restlessness which those of us who study life see in the outreach for novelty, digestion of the new, internal growth, and then outreach again, is reflected at the most fundamental level of quantum mechanics, in which, according to physicists Martin A Bucher and David N. Segal, fluctuation is inherent. Even at the most basic level, the universe has an unstoppable twitch. And with the asymmetry of time, that twitch is can only move things in one direction--on to new horizons. All of this implies that the notion of mere randomness in other quarters, too, has got to go eventually. First, it is likely to wash away the idea of entropy--the notion that we are on our way to an inevitable randomness, and that our existence is a bubble in a backward flow. Second, it is likely to effect the concept that evolutionary variation springs entirely from the random effects of mutation. The universe has been evolving in complexity since its inception. Life is a new manifestation of that evolution--one of many, since evolution itself has been evolving over time. The evolution of quarks occurred in one manner, that of atoms in another, that of the first cells in one vastly different yet very much the same, and now, with culture, we are playing yet a new variation on the cosmic evolutionary game. That evolution may not be an accident. Just as the universe shows tilts to one side, to motion forward, and to an impulse that hastens the outward rush of supernovas, there may well be an inherent push toward complexity. There is no hard and solid evidence except the vast evidence of a universe which has, in fact, consistently complexified. Yet physics seems ever closer to exposing the forces which in Bloomian theory underlie the coupling of forces for conformity and diversity. The cosmological constant is a diversity generator par excellence. It also seems an ancestor of the propulsive force which causes the marriages and wars of opposites to continually create. Here's a sample of the new theoretical musings with which physicists are feeding this thought process: "If the inflation field had a different potential energy function, inflation would have bent space in a precise and predictable way, leaving the universe slightly curved rather than exactly flat. In particular, suppose the potential energy function had two values: false local minimum as well as a true global minimum. As the inflation field rode down the universe expanded and became uniform, but then the field got stuck in the false minimum. Physicists call this state the false vacuum. Any matter and radiation in the cosmos was almost entirely replaced by the energy of the inflation field. The fluctuation inherent in quantum mechanics caused the inflation field to jitter and ultimately enabled it to escape from the false minimum just as shaking a pinball machine can free a trapped ball. The escape, called false vacuum decay, didn't occur everywhere at the same space and time, rather it took place at some random location, then spread. The process was analogous to bringing water to a boil. Water heated to its boiling point does not instantaneously turn into steam everywhere. First, because of the random motion of atoms, scattered bubbles nucleate throughout the liquid rather like the burbling of a pot of soup. Bubbles smaller than a certain minimum size collapse because of surface tension, but in larger bubbles the energy difference between the steam and the superheated water overcomes surface tension. The bubbles expand at the speed of sound in water. In false vacuum decay, quantum fluctuation played the role of the random atomic motion, causing bubbles of true vacuum to nucleate. Surface tension destroyed most of the bubbles, but a few managed to grow so large that quantum effects became unimportant. With nothing to oppose them, the radius continued to increase at the speed of light. As the outside wall of a bubble passed through a point in space, the inflation field at the point was jolted out of the false minimum and resumed its downward descent. Thereafter the space inside the bubble inflated much as in standard inflationary theory. The interior of the bubble corresponds to our universe. The moment that the inflation field broke out of its false minimum corresponds to the Big Bang in older theories." (Martin A Bucher and David N. Segal. "Inflation In a Low Density Universe." Scientific American. January 1999: 65-66.) see also: P. Weiss.
"Time proves not reversible at deepest level." Science News,
October 31, 1998: 277; R. Cowen. "Studies support an accelerating
universe." Science News, October 31, 1998: 277; Craig J. Hogan,
Robert P. Kirshner and Nicholas B. Suntzef. "Surveying Space-time
with Supernovae." Scientific American, January 1999; Lawrence M.
Krauss. "Cosmological Antigravity." Scientific American, January
1999. John ... It was last year, while studying emergence, that James Hanson and James Crutchfield of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico discovered something astonishing. They were playing with a simple cellular automaton called Rule 54, This is made op of a single row of squares and requires only two colours, black and white. The "update rules" are: a white cell flanked by two white cells stays white; a black cell flanked by two blacks, or one black and one white, turns white; all other cells turn black. From a random configuration, the automaton generates row after tow of successive states. Though the resulting pattern looks random, it contains some distinctive features; sequences of the fores OOO1OIIlO111 ... in one row, followed by lIlOIIl0llO . . . in the next, and so on. The pattern repeats in space every four cells, and in time every four steps. The overall picture can be split up into a number of "domains" in which this pattern is perfectly reproduced, separated by "defects" where it breaks down. Hanson and Crutchfield became particularly interested in the behaviour of the defects. They worked out a way to 'filter out" the regular domain patterns and leave only the defects behind. What they saw came as a shock. There were many different kinds of defects, moving around the pattern at each new step. Some of them seemed "heavy". They tended to stay in one place or move only very slowly. Others were "lighter". They zipped around, occasion- ally colliding with the heavier ones. When they collided, the lighter ones sometimes bounced off and were sometimes swallowed by the heavier ones. In the latter case, a new light defect was sometimes spat back out. It all appeared very familiar. Hanson and Crutchfield realised that their defects were acting in much the same way that fundamental particles do. They behaved as if they had mass, they interacted with one another and they could even engage in collisions that generated new particles. What's more, in addition to the simple domain pattern at the lowest level, and the more complex dynamic particle-like pattern at the next, the researchers found new ingredients at higher levels. The researchers began to wonder if their discovery was telling us something profound and important about the nature of reality. Could the same kind of hierarchical structure organise the emergent properties of more complex systems of rules, such as those governing the Universe? If this is right, fundamental particles might not be fundamental at all; they might be defects in something else, some- thing that the ordinary material world "filters out". We defect-constructed creatures may be sensitive only to defects, and what we think is a Theory of Everything might actually be several steps up the hierarchy from the ultimate reductionist rules-a Theory of Everydefectrelatedthing. For now, this is a fascinating but speculative question. Yet Hanson and Crutchfield's approach to cellular automata may give us some clues about how to test to see if such a hierarchy exists. Back in what we think as of the real world, cellular automata have come full circle and given us a new perspective on the origins of life. Von Neumann's self-replicating automaton is enormously special, carefully tailored to make copies of one highly complex initial configuration. Is this typical of self-replicating automata, or can we get replication without starting from a very special configuration? Last year Hui-Hsien Chou from the Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, and James Reggia of the University of Maryland developed a cellular automaton with 29 states for which a randomly chosen initial state, or "primordial soup", leads to self-replicating structures more than 98 per cent of the time. In this automaton, self-replicating entities are a virtual certainty. The same may well be true of our Universe, with its far more complex range of molecular states. What remains to be understood is what kinds of rule lead to the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating configurations-in short, what kind of physical laws make this first crucial step towards life inevitable. Cellular automata may not have given us the answer to that one yet, but we're on our way. Computational mechanics of cellular automat: an example by James Hanson and James Crutchfield, Physica D, 103. p169- 1997. Modelling and characterization of cloud dynamics by Tatsuo Yanagita and Kunihiko Kaneko, Physical REview Letters 78 p4287 (1997). These papers may be available [I have not checked out] at the Los Alamos Eprint Archive Physics and Associated Disciplines: http://xxx.lanl.gov There are many interactive
cellular automata on the web try http://www.student.nada.kth.se How in the world did the initial forms evolve? What path could have generated these few patterns and impelled energy to assume them? What impulsive force lives alongside the arrow of time, urging the inchoate and uncontrollable to compact itself into intricate outlines and become *things* of great complexity? What is the push impelling energy to undergo imprisonment in envelopes exuding entirely new properties? What is the form generator in this universe, the form compeller? I propose we add another sub-discipline to paleopsychology--the study of form dynamics, form generation. It is essential to our understanding of inanimate and animate evolution. It's integral to the comprehension of the manner in which boundaries spring up out of nowhere. Boundaries between quark and empty space. Boundaries between us and them. Boundaries which rope off the circle of awareness we call self from our myriad of other internal entities. For mind, too is energy compacted into the form of phantasmagoria--the phantasmagoria of self and unconcscious, the phantasmagoria which each culture calls a reality, the phantasmogoria of dreams and of imaginings which, pushed by the phantasmagoria called will, make things that never were and fashion what will be. For we are form generators par excellence. Yet we are a part of some greater dynamic, something primal pushing from the beginning to carve the outlines of complexity. Howard ------------------------------ might the rules for selection themselves reside in previously selected physical properties? Most of them do. In other words, the environment is the selective obstacle course any newly generated what's?is has to run. However there's a bit more to it than meets the eye. What environmental selection sieves were present in the amorphous energy of the Big Bang? How did they select the four forces??the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity? If there were selective sieves, then the initial energy was anything but amorphous. It was very morphous indeed. And if randomness produced those four forces, how many others did it produce? How did it do it so fast? Why did randomness produce forces and not, say, glozbiggles? How did it manage to produce a quartet of forces which just happened to dovetail so nicely? Why did randomness produce anything at all. What is randomness that it has the power to precipitate forces out of energy, thus producing not mere variation but entirely new categories of being. Forces are by definition: a : an agency or influence that if applied to a free body results chiefly in an acceleration of the body and sometimes in elastic deformation and other effects b : any of the natural influences (as electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force) that exist especially between particles and determine the structure of the universe. (WWWebster Dictionary, copyright 1999 by Merriam?Webster, Inc.) So how can there be forces without particles and bodies? Which brings us to the first particles. How could randomness have produced them and how were THEY selected? A traditional Darwinist might hit me with the following argument: "Look here, Bloom, your confusion stems from the fact that you've tried persistently over the last few years to apply the principles of evolution to inanimate matter. Evolutionary law posits only that natural selection operates on random novelty to zero in on the most fit among *living beings*. No matter how many times we've told you that, you've insisted on going off the track." This argument would imply that some special variety of form?generation exists in the world of the inanimate. What is it? And if it indeed is, what role does it play in the evolution of animate beings? We're back to the
problem of who moved the first mover, the primum mobile. But in a different
guise. The universe DOES spit out fresh forms in highly structured ways.
As scientists it's up to us to figure out the how and why. It's easy
to select just the right gift once you've entered a mall teaming with
goods. But let's figure out how the goods which natural selection chooses
got there to begin with. Howard Galaxies appeared with equal suddenness…and equal supersimultaneity and supersimilarity, though the following article doesn't say exactly when. If you and I had been sitting around at a café table on the edge of the cosmos way back then, we'd have sipped our latté for a billion years ago assuming that the grand cosmic evolver had pulled all the rabbits from her hat-particles, atoms, galaxies, and stars--and had departed the stage. We'd have been wrong. At the two billion year ABB mark the next big shock arrived, the next great leap in form, process, and emergent wonder-black holes. Among the galaxies whose centers had bunched into the sucking frenzy of black-holeness was a species that, like most others in this cosmos, showed the usual supersimultaneity and supersimilarity-quasars…black holes that use their surrounding galaxy the way a guitar uses a sounding board, to amplify its output of energy. Ordering a pastry and continuing to watch the passing scenery of the cosmos from our outdoor café we'd have assumed that these quasars-the most potent light producers, the strongest of the gravitationally strong-would last forever. As usual, we'd have been in for a solid mind-blow. Four billion years ABB, the production of quasars came to nearly a dead stop. So we'd have concluded that moderation was the key to success in this cosmos. And, once again, we'd have been wrong. Why? The cosmos doesn't sit still. She shifts her rules and tosses forth new creations in fits, starts, and bursts. The mid-sized black holes that had reigned over galaxies from 2 billion ABB peaked at ten billion ABB. But something even more surprising happened at just about the point when mid-sized black holes began their slump, their slow decline. It was something the cosmologists quoted below fail to note-the evolution of that complex molecular social prance we know of as organism and life. So much for our coffee and pastries. I suspect we'd still be suffering from the shock of that little magic trick…and its consequences in the 3.85 billion years that have come since. Howard Subj: NYT: Spacecraft
Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of Galaxies Date: 6/20/2003 10:12:38
AM Eastern Daylight Time From: sheergeniussoftware.com Sent from the
Internet (Details) Spacecraft Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of
Galaxies NYT June 20, 2003 By DENNIS OVERBYE Astronomers unveiled the
first results yesterday from what they said was the most searching look
yet into the origin of galaxies and how they grew. Staring at two patches
of sky, one in the north and one in the south, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
and Chandra X-ray Observatory assembled a snapshot of cosmic history,
the astronomers said, that reaches back to less than a billion years
after the Big Bang in which the universe was born. A billion years corresponds
to about 8 percent of the age of the universe, said Dr. Mauro Giavalisco,
an astronomer at the space telescope who was a leader of the survey
known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or Goods. That,
Dr. Giavalisco said, is "the period when galaxies and humans evolved
the quickest." [hb: Eras of Evolutionarily Adaptiveness--EEAs]
Dr. Niel Brandt, an X-ray astronomer at Pennsylvania State University,
said, "We are seeing galaxy children." Augmented by ground-based
observatories and the soon-to-be launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility,
which will perform its own sweep of the same patches of sky, Goods is
a successor to earlier surveys in which the Hubble stared at a pair
of tiny patches of sky, recording galaxies far back in time. The new
survey is wider, encompassing an area of sky equal to about half of
a full moon - an area 33 times as large as that covered by the earlier
"deep field" effort - and containing some 50,000 galaxies.
Moreover, because the Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys has a
greater sensitivity in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum,
it can see deeper into time. (Galaxies far, far away and thus back in
time have their light shifted to longer infrared wavelengths.) Among
the surprises, Dr. Giavalisco said, is that the universe was copiously
producing stars as early as a billion years of age. Some earlier surveys
had suggested that star formation had started out slowly and then peaked
until the universe was three billion to six billion years old. According
to the Goods results, however, star formation started out at a high
rate and stayed that way until about seven billion years ago. Then the
rate fell precipitously, perhaps because all the primordial hydrogen,
the gas of which stars are made, had been used up or heated up too far
to condense. In the dark realm of black holes, meanwhile, evolution
was following a different course. Dr. Brandt described the X-ray half
of the survey as "a black hole core sample" of the universe.
The goal, he said, was to study the evolution of black holes - millions
or billions times the mass of the Sun - thought to lurk in the centers
of most galaxies belching X-rays as they swallow stray gas and stars.
"The Chandra data are very cool," said Dr. Michael Turner,
a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, "because essentially
every image you see is a supermassive black hole. Where else are black
holes so easy to see?" Out of the 540 black hole candidates that
Chandra counted, however, only a handful seem to date from the first
billion years, even though galaxies were already numerous then, Dr.
Brandt said. Black holes do not seem to "turn on" until a
billion years later. The data could resolve a chicken-and-egg question
about which come first, galaxies or the black holes inside them. "Our
data suggest that the galaxies come first and then supermassive black
holes grow inside them," Dr. Brandt said. What happens next, he
said, depends on the mass of the black hole, with more massive ones
growing and becoming active more quickly and generally lodging in more
luminous galaxies or quasars. The "heyday" of the quasars,
home of super-mighty black holes, happened when the universe was two
billion to four billion years old, Dr. Brandt said, but the numbers
of more moderate mass black holes, as registered by their X-ray activity,
peaked when the universe was about 10 billion years old. About seven
of the black holes in the new survey have no optical counterparts, Dr.
Brandt said. They could be in galaxies even more distant in time, in
the so-called ages when the universe was only half a billion years old
and still swaddled in gas that blocked all light, or they could be closer
but swaddled in thick dust. "They are very exciting, no matter
what they are," Dr. Brandt said. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/science/20GALA.html
I love the graphics but feel that the concept is wrong. All these equations are based on smooth transitions, smooth gradients, and the history of the cosmos, as I've been pointing out, is NOT SMOOTH. It is jumpy. It takes big, sudden, shocking leaps. I suspect that at the Planck scale the universe is gritty--or, more accurately, griddy. And I suspect it moves ahead one lurch at a time, working out the possibilities implicit in its initial rules. In that sense, I think Wolfram is right. Which means that Wolfram's tens of thousands of cellular automata toy universes, as limited as they may be, are more accurate representations of the fundamentals underlying cosmic evolution than are the ever-so-wonderful illustrations of scalar peaks in Linde's material. Now let me disagree with myself for a moment. The peaks presented in Linde's models can represent the big leaps-the saltations, the lurches from plasma to atoms, from atoms to galaxies, from gravitational galactic aggregations to a new metabolic crunch--the ignition of stars, from three forms of neutron-proton teams (hydrogen, helium and lithium) to 92, from atoms to complex, carbon-centered molecules, from molecules of roughly six or seven atoms to macromolecules-megacities of atoms-and from atom teams to molecular teams, the teams of cells, then from cells in colonies to trillions of cells in single mega-organisms, organisms like sponges, trilobytes, you and me. Then the leap to consciousness, imagination, passion, prophecy, poetry, science, and dreams. Linde's patterns can represent these saltations if we move across the emerging landscape, and if each peak leads to a plateau whose long plane of stability leads to the base of another peak. That is not what Linde's models represent. But they may be a stretch in that direction. I've downloaded the text describing Linde's theories--including his extraordinarily clear description of his work on his webpage (http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/) and his Scientific American article. I am now trying to download and insert the graphics. The graphics are the pictures of math I've been asking Paul for. But the files are huge and I'm not sure the digest on Linde I'm preparing for you will got through my email portal or yours. In fact, it just broke down my computer. Meanwhile, if you go to Linde's website, look at his model of symmetry breaking in the Higgs Model (http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/reheating/realbigandfast.gif). Imagine what you're seeing stretching in two directions from the flat plane-a caldera, a deeply-cratered peak--rising above the plane and another exactly the same bulging from the plane's underside. You'll see the beginning of a big bagel. In a message dated 6/24/2003 9:45:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin writes: Hac> hb: Lee
Smolin originated the concept of a Darwinian competition between Hac> Those cosmoses
that produce the most progeny--the most new universes spawned pk: ;) Please note,
that Andrei Linde, former theroretist from Lebedev
kurakin mailto:kurakin
1.gif The process of symmetry breaking in the Higgs model . This movie shows the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the Higgs model. Naively, one could expect that the distribution of the Higgs field falling from the top of the effective potential will oscillate for a long time near the minimum of the effective potential. However, we see that the whole process endes within a single oscillation. This is one of the most surprising results on the theory of tachyonic preheating. (If one has slow connection, we recommend to download the file and then play it again, using, e.g., the refresh button). 2 String formation and its continuation 3 The process of symmetry breaking in the theory with cubic potential 4 As we see, if the maximum of the effective potential is flat (cubic instead of quadratic with respect to the scalar field), the process of symmetry breaking occurs due to bubble formation and bubble wall collision. * Symmetry breaking after hybrid inflation 5 In this scenario, just as in the Higgs model, the field distribution experiences only one oscillation. The energy of the oscillating field is rapidly transfered to classical waves of the scalar field in the process of tachyonic preheating A UNIVERSAL VIEW
THE SELF-REPRODUCING INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE Contents Questioning Standard
Theory Scalar Fields An Inflationary Universe Testing Inflationary Theory
A New Cosmology Recent versions of the inflationary scenario describe
the universe as a self-generating fractal that sprouts other inflationary
universes If my colleagues and I are right, we may soon be saying good-bye
to the idea that our universe was a single fireball created in the big
bang. We are exploring a new theory based on a 15-year-old notion that
the universe went through a stage of inflation. During that time, the
theory holds, the cosmos became exponentially large within an infinitesimal
fraction of a second. At the end of this period, the universe continued
its evolution according to the big bang model. As workers refined this
inflationary scenario, they uncovered some surprising consequences.
One of them constitutes a fundamental change in how the cosmos is seen.
Recent versions of inflationary theory assert that instead of being
an expanding ball of fire the universe is a huge, growing fractal. It
consists of many inflating balls that produce new balls, which in turn
produce more balls, ad infinitum. Cosmologists did not arbitrarily invent
this rather peculiar vision of the universe. Several workers, first
in Russia and later in the U.S., proposed the inflationary hypothesis
that is the basis of its foundation. We did so to solve some of the
complications left by the old big bang idea. In its standard form, the
big bang theory maintains that the universe was born about 15 billion
years ago from a cosmological singularity--a state in which the temperature
and density are infinitely high. Of course, one cannot really speak
in physical terms about these quantities as being infinite. One usually
assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply then. They took
hold only after the density of the universe dropped below the so-called
Planck density, which equals about 10(sup 94) grams per cubic centimeter.
As the universe expanded, it gradually cooled. Remnants of the primordial
cosmic fire still surround us in the form of the microwave background
radiation. This radiation indicates that the temperature of the universe
has dropped to 2.7 kelvins. The 1965 discovery of this background radiation
by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories proved
to be the crucial evidence in establishing the big bang theory as the
preeminent theory of cosmology. The big bang theory also explained the
abundances of hydrogen, helium and other elements in the universe. As
investigators developed the theory, they uncovered complicated problems.
For example, the standard big bang theory, coupled with the modern theory
of elementary particles, predicts the existence of many superheavy particles
carrying magnetic charge--that is, objects that have only one magnetic
pole. These magnetic monopoles would have a typical mass 10(sup 16)
times that of the proton, or about 0.00001 milligram. According to the
standard big bang theory, monopoles should have emerged very early in
the evolution of the universe and should now be as abundant as protons.
In that case, the mean density of matter in the universe would be about
15 orders of magnitude greater than its present value, which is about
10(sup -29) gram per cubic centimeter. Questioning Standard Theory This
and other puzzles forced physicists to look more attentively at the
basic assumptions underlying the standard cosmological theory. And we
found many to be highly suspicious. I will review six of the most difficult.
The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang.
One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then,
how could everything appear from nothing? What arose first: the universe
or the laws determining its evolution? Explaining this initial singularity--where
and when it all began--still remains the most intractable problem of
modern cosmology. A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General
relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius
on the order of the Planck length, or 10(sup -33) centimeter. We see,
however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10(sup 28)
centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This
result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more
than 60 orders of magnitude. A similar discrepancy between theory and
observations concerns the size of the universe, a third problem. Cosmological
examinations show that our part of the universe contains at least 10(sup
88) elementary particles. But why is the universe so big? If one takes
a universe of a typical initial size given by the Planck length and
a typical initial density equal to the Planck density, then, using the
standard big bang theory, one can calculate how many elementary particles
such a universe might encompass. The answer is rather unexpected: the
entire universe should only be large enough to accommodate just one
elementary particle--or at most 10 of them. It would be unable to house
even a single reader of Scientific American, who consists of about 10(sup
29) elementary particles. Obviously, something is wrong with this theory.
The fourth problem deals with the timing of the expansion. In its standard
form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began
expanding simultaneously. But how could all the different parts of the
universe synchronize the beginning of their expansion? Who gave the
command? Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter
in the universe. On the very large scale, matter has spread out with
remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its
distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part
in 10,000. For a long time, nobody had any idea why the universe was
so homogeneous. But those who do not have ideas sometimes have principles.
One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the "cosmological
principle," which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous.
This assumption, however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates
important deviations from homogeneity, namely, stars, galaxies and other
agglomerations of matter. Hence, we must explain why the universe is
so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism
that produces galaxies. Finally, there is what I call the uniqueness
problem. Albert Einstein captured its essence when he said, "What
really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of
the world." Indeed, slight changes in the physical constants of
nature could have made the universe unfold in a completely different
manner. For example, many popular theories of elementary particles assume
that space-time originally had considerably more than four dimensions
(three spatial and one temporal). In order to square theoretical calculations
with the physical world in which we live, these models state that the
extra dimensions have been "compactified," or shrunk to a
small size and tucked away. But one may wonder why compactification
stopped with four dimensions, not two or five. Moreover, the manner
in which the other dimensions become rolled up is significant, for it
determines the values of the constants of nature and the masses of particles.
In some theories, compactification can occur in billions of different
ways. A few years ago it would have seemed rather meaningless to ask
why space-time has four dimensions, why the gravitational constant is
so small or why the proton is almost 2,000 times heavier than the electron.
Now developments in elementary particle physics make answering these
questions crucial to understanding the construction of our world. All
these problems (and others I have not mentioned) are extremely perplexing.
That is why it is encouraging that many of these puzzles can be resolved
in the context of the theory of the self-reproducing, inflationary universe.
The basic features of the inflationary scenario are rooted in the physics
of elementary particles. So I would like to take you on a brief excursion
into this realm--in particular, to the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic
interactions. Both these forces exert themselves through particles.
Photons mediate the electromagnetic force; the W and Z particles are
responsible for the weak force. But whereas photons are massless, the
W and Z particles are extremely heavy. To unify the weak and electromagnetic
interactions despite the obvious differences between photons and the
W and Z particles, physicists introduced what are called scalar fields.
Although scalar fields are not the stuff of everyday life, a familiar
analogue exists. That is the electrostatic potential--the voltage in
a circuit is an example. Electrical fields appear only if this potential
is uneven, as it is between the poles of a battery or if the potential
changes in time. If the entire universe had the same electrostatic potential
say, 110 volts--then nobody would notice it; the potential would seem
to be just another vacuum state. Similarly, a constant scalar field
looks like a vacuum: we do not see it even if we are surrounded by it.
These scalar fields fill the universe and mark their presence by affecting
properties of elementary particles. If a scalar field interacts with
the W and Z particles, they become heavy. Particles that do not interact
with the scalar field, such as photons, remain light. To describe elementary
particle physics, therefore, physicists begin with a theory in which
all particles initially are light and in which no fundamental difference
between weak and electromagnetic interactions exists. This difference
arises only later, when the universe expands and becomes filled by various
scalar fields. The process by which the fundamental forces separate
is called symmetry breaking. The particular value of the scalar field
that appears in the universe is determined by the position of the minimum
of its potential energy. Scalar Fields Scalar fields play a crucial
role in cosmology as well as in particle physics. They provide the mechanism
that generates the rapid inflation of the universe. Indeed, according
to general relativity, the universe expands at a rate (approximately)
proportional to the square root of its density. If the universe were
filled by ordinary matter, then the density would rapidly decrease as
the universe expanded. Thus, the expansion of the universe would rapidly
slow down as density decreased. But because of the equivalence of mass
and energy established by Einstein, the potential energy of the scalar
field also contributes to the expansion. In certain cases, this energy
decreases much more slowly than does the density of ordinary matter.
The persistence of this energy may lead to a stage of extremely rapid
expansion, or inflation, of the universe. This possibility emerges even
if one considers the very simplest version of the theory of a scalar
field. In this version the potential energy reaches a minimum at the
point where the scalar field vanishes. In this case, the larger the
scalar field, the greater the potential energy. According to Einstein's
theory of gravity, the energy of the scalar field must have caused the
universe to expand very rapidly. The expansion slowed down when the
scalar field reached the minimum of its potential energy. One way to
imagine the situation is to picture a ball rolling down the side of
a large bowl. The bottom of the bowl represents the energy minimum.
The position of the ball corresponds to the value of the scalar field.
Of course, the equations describing the motion of the scalar field in
an expanding universe are somewhat more complicated than the equations
for the ball in an empty bowl. They contain an extra term corresponding
to friction, or viscosity. This friction is akin to having molasses
in the bowl. The viscosity of this liquid depends on the energy of the
field: the higher the ball in the bowl is, the thicker the liquid will
be. Therefore, if the field initially was very large, the energy dropped
extremely slowly. The sluggishness of the energy drop in the scalar
field has a crucial implication in the expansion rate. The decline was
so gradual that the potential energy of the scalar field remained almost
constant as the universe expanded. This behavior contrasts sharply with
that of ordinary matter, whose density rapidly decreases in an expanding
universe. Thanks to the large energy of the scalar field, the universe
continued to expand at a speed much greater than that predicted by preinflation
cosmological theories. The size of the universe in this regime grew
exponentially. This stage of self-sustained, exponentially rapid inflation
did not last long. Its duration could have been as short as 10(sup -35)
second. Once the energy of the field declined, the viscosity nearly
disappeared, and inflation ended. Like the ball as it reaches the bottom
of the bowl, the scalar field began to oscillate near the minimum of
its potential energy. As the scalar field oscillated, it lost energy,
giving it up in the form of elementary particles. These particles interacted
with one another and eventually settled down to some equilibrium temperature.
From this time on, the standard big bang theory can describe the evolution
of the universe. The main difference between inflationary theory and
the old cosmology becomes clear when one calculates the size of the
universe at the end of inflation. Even if the universe at the beginning
of inflation was as small as 10(sup -33) centimeter, after 10 (sup -35)
second of inflation this domain acquires an unbelievable size. According
to some inflationary models, this size in centimeters can equal 10(sup
10 sup 12)-- that is, a 1 followed by a trillion zeros. These numbers
depend on the models used, but in most versions, this size is many orders
of magnitude greater than the size of the observable universe, or 10(sup
28) centimeters. This tremendous spurt immediately solves most of the
problems of the old cosmoiogical theory. Our universe appears smooth
and uniform because all inhomogeneities were stretched 10(sup 10 sup
12) times. The density of primordial monopoles and other undesirable
"defects" becomes exponentially diluted. (Recently we have
found that monopoles may inflate themselves and thus effectively push
themselves out of the observable universe.) The universe has become
so large that we can now see just a tiny fraction of it. That is why,
just like a small area on a surface of a huge inflated balloon, our
part looks flat. That is why we do not need to insist that all parts
of the universe began expanding simultaneously. One domain of a smallest
possible size of 10 (sup -33) centimeter is more than enough to produce
everything we see now. An Inflationary Universe Inflationary theory
did not always look so conceptually simple. Attempts to obtain the stage
of exponential expansion of the universe have a long history. Unfortunately,
because of political barriers, this history is only partially known
to American readers. The first realistic version of the inflationary
theory came in 1979 from Alexei A. Starobinsky of the L. D. Landau Institute
of Theoretical Physics in Moscow. The Starobinsky model created a sensation
among Russian astrophysicists, and for two years it remained the main
topic of discussion at all conferences on cosmology in the Soviet Union.
His model, however, was rather complicated (it was based on the theory
of anomalies in quantum gravity) and did not say much about how inflation
could actually start. In 1981 Alan H. Guth of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology suggested that the hot universe at some intermediate stage
could expand exponentially. His model derived from a theory that interpreted
the development of the early universe as a series of phase transitions.
This theory was proposed in 1972 by David A. Kirzhnits and me at the
P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow. According to this idea, as
the universe expanded and cooled, it condensed into different forms.
Water vapor undergoes such phase transitions. As it becomes cooler,
the vapor condenses into water, which, if cooling continues, becomes
ice. Guth's idea called for inflation to occur when the universe was
in an unstable, supercooled state. Supercooling is common during phase
transitions; for example, water under the right circumstances remains
liquid below zero degrees Celsius. Of course, supercooled water eventually
freezes. That event would correspond to the end of the inflationary
period. The idea to use supercooling for solving many problems of the
big bang theory was very attractive. Unfortunately, as Guth himself
pointed out, the postinflation universe of his scenario becomes extremely
inhomogeneous. After investigating his model for a year, he finally
renounced it in a paper he co-authored with Erick J. Weinberg of Columbia
University. In 1982 I introduced the so-called new inflationary universe
scenario, which Andreas Albrecht and Paul J. Steinhardt of the University
of Pennsylvania also later discovered [see "The Inflationary Universe,"
by Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, May 1984].
This scenario shrugged off the main problems of Guth's model. But it
was still rather complicated and not very realistic. Only a year later
did I realize that inflation is a naturally emerging feature in many
theories of elementary particles, including the simplest model of the
scalar field discussed earlier. There is no need for quantum gravity
effects, phase transitions, supercooling or even the standard assumption
that the universe originally was hot. One just considers all possible
kinds and values of scalar fields in the early universe and then checks
to see if any of them leads to inflation. Those places where inflation
does not occur remain small. Those domains where inflation takes place
become exponentially large and dominate the total volume of the universe.
Because the scalar fields can take arbitrary values in the early universe,
I called this scenario chaotic inflation. In many ways, chaotic inflation
is so simple that it is hard to understand why the idea was not discovered
sooner. I think the reason was purely psychological. The glorious successes
of the big bang theory hypnotized cosmologists. We assumed that the
entire universe was created at the same moment, that initially it was
hot and that the scalar field from the beginning resided close to the
minimum of its potential energy. Once we began relaxing these assumptions,
we immediately found that inflation is not an exotic phenomenon invoked
by theorists for solving their problems. It is a general regime that
occurs in a wide class of theories of elementary particles. That a rapid
stretching of the universe can simultaneously resolve many difficult
cosmological problems may seem too good to be true. Indeed, if all inhomogeneities
were stretched away, how did galaxies form? The answer is that while
removing previously existing inhomogeneities, inflation at the same
time made new ones. These inhomogeneities arise from quantum effects.
According to quantum mechanics, empty space is not entirely empty. The
vacuum is filled with small quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations
can be regarded as waves, or undulations in physical fields. The waves
have all possible wavelengths and move in all directions. We cannot
detect these waves, because they live only briefly and are microscopic.
In the inflationary universe the vacuum structure becomes even more
complicated. Inflation rapidly stretches the waves. Once their wavelengths
become sufficiently large, the undulations begin to "feel"
the curvature of the universe. At this moment, they stop moving because
of the viscosity of the scalar field (recall that the equations describing
the field contain a friction term). The first fluctuations to freeze
are those that have large wavelengths. As the universe continues to
expand, new fluctuations become stretched and freeze on top of other
frozen waves. At this stage one cannot call these waves quantum fluctuations
anymore. Most of them have extremely large wavelengths. Because these
waves do not move and do not disappear, they enhance the value of the
scalar field in some areas and depress it in others, thus creating inhomogeneities.
These disturbances in the scalar field cause the density perturbations
in the universe that are crucial for the subsequent formation of galaxies.
Testing Inflationary Theory In addition to explaining many features
of our world, inflationary theory makes several important and testable
predictions. First, density perturbations produced during inflation
affect the distribution of matter in the universe. They may also accompany
gravitational waves. Both density perturbations and gravitational waves
make their imprint on the microwave background radiation. They render
the temperature of this radiation slightly different in various places
in the sky. This nonuniformity was found in 1992 by the Cosmic Background
Explorer (COBE) satellite, a finding later confirmed by several other
experiments. Although the COBE results agree with the predictions of
inflation, it would be premature to claim that COBE has confirmed inflationary
theory. But it is certainly true that the results obtained by the satellite
at their current level of precision could have definitively disproved
most inflationary models, and it did not happen. At present, no other
theory can simultaneously explain why the universe is so homogeneous
and still predict the "ripples in space" discovered by COBE.
Inflation also predicts that the universe should be nearly flat. Flatness
of the universe can be experimentally verified because the density of
a flat universe is related in a simple way to the speed of its expansion.
So far observational data are consistent with this prediction. A few
years ago it seemed that if someone were to show that the universe is
open rather than flat, then inflationary theory would fall apart. Recently,
however, several models of an open inflationary universe have been found.
The only consistent description of a large homogeneous open universe
that we currently know is based on inflationary theory. Thus, even if
the universe is open, inflation is still the best theory to describe
it. One may argue that the only way to disprove the theory of inflation
is to propose a better theory. One should remember that inflationary
models are based on the theory of elementary particles, and this theory
is not completely established. Some versions (most notably, superstring
theory) do not automatically lead to inflation. Pulling inflation out
of the superstring model may require radically new ideas. We should
certainly continue the search for alternative cosmological theories.
Many cosmologists, however, believe inflation, or something very similar
to it, is absolutely essential for constructing a consistent cosmological
theory. The inflationary theory itself changes as particle physics theory
rapidly evolves. The list of new modems includes extended inflation,
natural inflation, hybrid inflation and many others. Each model has
unique features that can be tested through observation or experiment.
Most, however, are based on the idea of chaotic inflation. Here we come
to the most interesting part of our story, to the theory of an eternally
existing, self-reproducing inflationary universe. This theory is rather
general, but it looks especially promising and leads to the most dramatic
consequences in the context of the chaotic inflation scenario. As I
already mentioned, one can visualize quantum fluctuations of the scalar
field in an inflationary universe as waves. They first moved in all
possible directions and then froze on top of one another. Each frozen
wave slightly increased the scalar field in some parts of the universe
and decreased it in others. Now consider those places of the universe
where these newly frozen waves persistently increased the scalar field.
Such regions are extremely rare, but still they do exist. And they can
be extremely important. Those rare domains of the universe where the
field jumps high enough begin exponentially expanding with ever increasing
speed. The higher the scalar field jumps, the faster the universe expands.
Very soon those rare domains will acquire a much greater volume than
other domains. From this theory it follows that if the universe contains
at least one inflationary domain of a sufficiently large size, it begins
unceasingly producing new inflationary domains. Inflation in each particular
point may end quickly, but many other places will continue to expand.
The total volume of all these domains will grow without end. In essence,
one inflationary universe sprouts other inflationary bubbles, which
in turn produce other inflationary bubbles. This process, which I have
called eternal inflation, keeps going as a chain reaction, producing
a fractallike pattern of universes. In this scenario the universe as
a whole is immortal. Each particular part of the universe may stem from
a singularity somewhere in the past, and it may end up in a singularity
somewhere in the future. There is, however, no end for the evolution
of the entire universe. The situation with the very beginning is less
certain. There is a chance that all parts of the universe were created
simultaneously in an initial big bang singularity. The necessity of
this assumption, however, is no longer obvious. Furthermore, the total
number of inflationary bubbles on our "cosmic tree" grows
exponentially in time. Therefore, most bubbles (including our own part
of the universe) grow indefinitely far away from the trunk of this tree.
Although this scenario makes the existence of the initial big bang almost
irrelevant, for all practical purposes, one can consider the moment
of formation of each inflationary bubble as a new "big bang."
From this perspective, inflation is not a part of the big bang theory,
as we thought 15 years ago. On the contrary, the big bang is a part
of the inflationary model. In thinking about the process of self-reproduction
of the universe, one cannot avoid drawing analogies, however superficial
they may be. One may wonder, Is not this process similar to what happens
with all of us? Some time ago we were born. Eventually we will die,
and the entire world of our thoughts, feelings and memories will disappear.
But there were those who lived before us, there will be those who will
live after, and humanity as a whole, if it is clever enough, may live
for a long time. Inflationary theory suggests that a similar process
may occur with the universe. One can draw some optimism from knowing
that even if our civilization dies, there will be other places in the
universe where life will emerge again and again, in all its possible
forms. A New Cosmology Could matters become even more curious? The answer
is yes. Until now, we have considered the simplest inflationary model
with only one scalar field, which has only one minimum of its potential
energy. Meanwhile realistic models of elementary particles propound
many kinds of scalar fields. For example, in the unified theories of
weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions, at least two other scalar
fields exist. The potential energy of these scalar fields may have several
different minima. This condition means that the same theory may have
different "vacuum states," corresponding to different types
of symmetry breaking between fundamental interactions and, as a result,
to different laws of low-energy physics. (Interactions of particles
at extremely large energies do not depend on symmetry breaking.) Such
complexities in the scalar field mean that after inflation the universe
may become divided into exponentially large domains that have different
laws of low-energy physics. Note that this division occurs even if the
entire universe originally began in the same state, corresponding to
one particular minimum of potential energy. Indeed, large quantum fluctuations
can cause scalar fields to jump out of their minima. That is, they jiggle
some of the balls out of their bowls and into other ones. Each bowl
corresponds to alternative laws of particle interactions. In some inflationary
models, quantum fluctuations are so strong that even the number of dimensions
of space and time can change. If this model is correct, then physics
alone cannot provide a complete explanation for all properties of our
allotment of the universe. The same physical theory may yield large
parts of the universe that have diverse properties. According to this
scenario, we find ourselves inside a four-dimensional domain with our
kind of physical laws, not because domains with different dimensionality
and with alternative properties are impossible or improbable but simply
because our kind of life cannot exist in other domains. Does this mean
that understanding all the properties of our region of the universe
will require, besides a knowledge of physics, a deep investigation of
our own nature, perhaps even including the nature of our consciousness?
This conclusion would certainly be one of the most unexpected that one
could draw from the recent developments in inflationary cosmology. The
evolution of inflationary theory has given rise to a completely new
cosmological paradigm, which differs considerably from the old big bang
theory and even from the first versions of the inflationary scenario.
In it the universe appears to be both chaotic and homogeneous, expanding
and stationary. Our cosmic home grows, fluctuates and eternally reproduces
itself in all possible forms, as if adjusting itself for all possible
types of life. Some parts of the new theory, we hope, will stay with
us for years to come. Many others will have to be considerably modified
to fit with new observational data and with the ever changing theory
of elementary particles. It seems, however, that the past 15 years of
development of cosmology have irreversibly changed our understanding
of the structure and fate of our universe and of our own place in it.
PHOTO (COLOR): SELF-REPRODUCING UNIVERSE in a computer simulation consists
of exponentially large domains, each of which has different laws of
physics (represented by colors). Sharp peaks are new "big bangs";
their heights correspond to the energy density of the universe there.
At the top of the peaks, the colors rapidly fluctuate, indicating that
the laws of physics there are not yet settled. They become fixed only
in the valleys, one of which corresponds to the kind of universe we
live in now. PHOTO (COLOR): EVOLUTION OF A SCALAR FIELD leads to many
inflationary domains. In most parts of the universe, the scalar field
decreases (represented as depressions and valleys). In other places,
quantum fluctuations cause the scalar field to grow. PHOTO (COLOR):
UNIVERSE EXPANDS RAPIDLY in places-- represented in the above model
as peaks--where quantum fluctuations cause the scalar field to grow.
Such expansion creates inflationary regions. In this model, we would
exist in a valley, where space is no longer inflating. PHOTO (COLOR):
KANDINSKY UNIVERSE, named after the Russian abstractionist painter,
is depicted here as a swirling pattern that represents an energy distribution
in the theory of axions, a kind of scalar field. PHOTO (COLOR): SELF-REPRODUCING
COSMOS appears as an extended branching of inflationary bubbles. Changes
in color represent "mutations" in the laws of physics from
parent universes. The properties of space in each bubble do not depend
on the time when the bubble formed. In this sense, the universe as a
whole may be stationary, even though the interior of each bubble can
be described by the big bang theory. ~~~~~~~~ By Andrei Linde The Author:
ANDREI LINDE is one of the originators of inflationary theory. After
graduating from Moscow University, he received his Ph.D. at the P. N.
Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, where he began probing the connections
between particle physics and cosmology. He became a professor of physics
at Stanford University in 1990. He lives in California with his wife,
Renata Kallosh (also a professor of physics at Stanford), and his sons,
Dmitri and Alex. A detailed description of inflationary theory is given
in his book Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1990). This article updates a version that appeared in Scientific
American in November 1994. Copyright of Scientific American is the property
of Scientific American Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed
to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use. Source: Scientific American, Spring98 Special
Edition Cosmos, Vol. 9 Issue 1, p98, 6p Item: 658717 Top of Page Formats:
CitationCitation HTML Full TextHTML Full Text No previous pages 1 of
2 Next Result List | Refine Search PrintPrint E-mailE-mail SaveSave
Items added to the folder may be printed, e-mailed or saved from the
View Folder screen.Folder has 0 items. © 2003 EBSCO Publishing.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
Frank--This is exciting stuff. It indicates we may have a silly putty universe whose constants alter as it expands. There's a fine mesh of space and time, a gridwork or pixel-like structure, created by the relationship between the speed of light, electric charge, and Planck's constant. But a grid drawn in silly putty alters as the putty is splayed and flattened into new form. It's said below that Einstein's theories would be overthrown if time and electric charge turned out to have changed in the 13 billion years since the big bang. But Einstein used Riemann's geometry of curved-that is distorted-space. Distortion takes in more than just in the three dimensions of space, It also takes place in the fourth dimension, time. No time span, no distortion. Without time, things stay the same. It's been decades since I've read Einstein on relativity, but I have the impression that Einstein implied deformations. And, in fact, any cosmos that goes from micro pinprick to megasize has to undergo distortion as part of its evolution. So while the grid of light speed, electricity, and Planck's stubborn little quantums remains a grid, it's shape and size would change. Eshel, Michael Burns, and Cynthia Hertzl, have I got this right? Howard Retrieved September
9, 2001, from the World Wide Web http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=212820
Friday, 17 August 2001 19:07 (ET) That light speed varies long suspected
TORONTO, August 17 (UPI) -- Recent observations of metallic atoms in
gas clouds 12 billion light years from Earth may help confirm a controversial
theory proposed nearly a decade ago - that the speed of light, a cherished
fundamental constant of nature, might not be constant after all. Using
the world's largest telescope, the 30-foot-wide Keck Telescope in Hawaii,
a team of experimentalists led by John Webb of the University of New
South Wales in Sydney, Australia, observed patterns of light absorption
in the gas clouds that could not be explained without assuming a change
in a basic constant of nature called the fine structure constant. The
fine structure constant is a combination of three other universal constants:
electric charge, light speed, and Planck's constant, named for the German
physicist Max Planck. Planck's constant is important in the study of
atoms and subatomic particles. Because the speed of light is an integral
part of the fine structure constant, the research of John Moffat, plus
that of John Barrow, Andreas Albrecht, and Joao Magueijo, has become
the theoretical centerpiece of what could be one of the most stunning
and revolutionary scientific discoveries ever -- that light did not
always travel at a constant speed. Moffat, a physicist at the University
of Toronto, first proposed a variable speed of light as a way to explain
certain cosmological puzzles, such as why the universe has uniform temperatures
and densities. Known as the "horizon problem," this universal
uniformity is hard to explain if light has forever traveled at the same
constant speed. Light carries the energy that would smooth out the many
density and temperature variations that must have arisen after the Big
Bang. The universe is simply too big for constant-speed light signals
to have had time to travel throughout, smoothing out all the lumps --
that is, unless light traveled much faster in the early universe than
it does today. "It is immediately obvious that if the speed of
light were larger in the past one could resolve the horizon problem
of the universe," Demos Kazanas, a physicist with the Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told United Press International. Moffat
published his ideas on light speed in the International Journal of Physics
and Foundations of Physics in 1993. In a 1998 paper entitled "A
Time Varying Speed of Light as a Solution to Cosmological Puzzles,"
Albrecht and Magueijo, of London's Imperial College, proposed ideas
that were independent of, but strikingly similar to, Moffat's. They
concluded that the speed of light "suddenly fell" to nearly
its current value shortly after the Big Bang, a change that would account
for several cosmological puzzles. A brief but striking controversy later
ensued between Moffat, Albrecht and Magueijo, which resulted in Moffat
receiving credit for the original "variable light speed hypothesis."
Magueijo gave him that credit in a subsequent paper on the same topic
published in the prestigious journal Physical Review D. The speed of
light is not the only component of the fine structure constant that
may vary -- it contains elements of another universal constant -- electric
charge -- as well. The latest theoretical work published in July of
this year by Magueijo and John Barrow of the Astronomy Center at the
University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, suggests allowing electric charge
to vary. This newest "changing constant" theory better satisfies
certain well-accepted scientific principles, the authors claim, and
may therefore be preferable to theories in which light speed changes
over time. "This is the only theory that I know that supports all
the experimental evidence," Barrow told United Press International.
Allowing the electric charge to change over time might be more radical
than allowing the speed of light to change, John Moffat told UPI from
Toronto. "You get into some serious issues with basic scientific
principles such as the conservation of charge and mass when you allow
charge to be non-constant," Moffat said. Theories that require
a non-constant speed of light are also controversial because they overthrow
a well-accepted notion of space and time called "Lorentz invariance,"
that observations of physical phenomena by observers in constant motion
relative to one another will be equivalent. Einstein's famous theory
of relativity is based on Lorentz invariance, and falls apart without
it. "Lorentz invariance has been -- and still is -- one of the
most cherished principles of modern physics," said Demos Kazanas.
"Abandoning such a principle without much agonizing as to what
becomes of the entire edifice of physics does not appear to me the 'natural'
way of resolving cosmological puzzles." "It should be emphasized
that varying speed of light is only one possible interpretation of John
Webb's results," said physicist Gordon Kane of the University of
Michigan in An Arbor. "What is measured in the fine structure constant
is a ratio of the electric charge of an electron to the speed of light
and to Planck's universal constant. Any of the three constants might
vary, not just the speed of light." Regardless of the final outcome
of this scientific furor, National Science Foundation senior advisor
Morris Aizenman urges caution and re-examination. "Dr. Webb's results
will have to be duplicated by other researchers working under other
conditions before they are widely accepted," Aizenman, a physicist,
told UPI from Washington. "I think the idea that nature's fundamental
constants may not be so fundamentally constant is an exciting one, however
-- one that if proven would herald a whole new era in physics."
(Reported by UPI Science Correspondent Mike Martin in Washington.)
Steve--I've enclosed the article you mentioned below. Why does string theory sound ad hoc? Yes, it does sound like it may be a mathematical widget of the type used by Copernicans to shore up their shredding theory of the universe back in 1500 or so. But on another level, like all mathematical systems, it's its own self-consistent universe. It may or may not resemble reality, but it has a sort of Platonic reality all its own. Or, to put it differently, it is a rigorous fantasy guided by rules based on axiomatic premises which are possible in this world of conceivable multiverses, but which may never sneak from possibility into solidity. So, yes, it does have the feel of a quick-fix patch on a leaking inner tube. When one looks at the history of physics, one realizes how leaky that inner tube might be. It is still trying to incorporate laws derived early in the 19th century. Even the Theory of Relativity was an attempt to get these antique concepts to segue smoothly with the new observations which had accumulated since the days of Maxwell and Faraday. In this sense, all the current efforts to find a GUT, a grand unified theory of physics, seem a bit creaky. All incorporate approaches which may have outlived their time. Physics seems to ache for a new paradigm which will remove the mess of patchwork complexities added to keep the rickety old machine operating--a paradigm which will satisfy the demands of Occam's razor and dazzle us all with its simplicity. One thing that strikes me is the manner in which string theory and many of the other approaches of modern physics are consistently described as musical. George Johnson, in the piece below, says the string theory he describes would unify "all the forces ...into one.. -- as a kind of mathematical music played by an orchestra of tiny vibrating strings. Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent one of the many different kinds of particles that make up matter and energy." Schrodinger's equations for quantum wave mechanics were based on mathematical descriptions of the vibration patterns of stringed instruments and drums. (Sternglass: 28-29.) This isn't surprising when one considers that sound is a pattern of waves, and music a subset of this form of oscillation. The music of the universe--an old Pythagorean concept--comes up in astrophysics as well. One of its latest manifestations is the notion that for its first 300,000 years of existence, the universe rang like a huge gong. The plasma of proton-neutron clusters colliding at superspeed with was more like a thick, hyperactive soup than like the gaping black space with which we're familiar. Dip a spoon in a soup and you get ripples--pressure waves--yet another equivalent of the pressure waves in air which our ears decipher as sound. Making things all the more Pythagorean is the fact that according to former head of the Apollo Lunar Station Program at Westinghouse Research Laboratories, Ernest J. Sternglass, Einstein was insistent on taming the wildly abstract quantum mechanics of his day and turning it into a visualizable, geometric system with its probabilistic uncertainties resolved into hard and fast predictabilities. Sternglass had the privilege of a bit of time with Einstein, so may know whereof he speaks. Once you reduce the universe to music, you reduce it to oscillations and begin moving in the direction of some very strange things indeed. We can see the fractal repetition of oscillating patterns all over the place. Aside from the aforementioned first 300,000 years, when the universe chimed like a bell, the sun has a beat, a rhythmic pulse, that in many ways is like the pulse of the human heart. Then there are human things like romance, which pulse back and forth like the sun or like the masses of matter which collect in galactic whorls. Humans fall in love with someone distant whom they'd love to get close to. Once they gotten close, they panic and run. Commitment phobia hits women as well as men. So in a romance, men and women move together, then apart as regularly as the beat of the heart The music of the spheres is alive in the way we love each other. Then there are our intellectual cycles, wavering back and forth between holism and reductionism but raising the same questions in 2000 as were raised in 1830 by the holists Goethe inspired or in 1848 by the reductionists who were rebelling against Goethe's influence. Just as the ringing of the early universe helped move it forward in degrees of complexity, our oscillations from left-brain micro-slicing to right brain piecing together of big pictures and back again produces continuous movement upward. The old questions take on new dimensions when they're asked in a medium thick with new and as-yet-incompletely digested ideas and discoveries. So we thinkers, too, oscillate like a plasma ringing with pressure waves. It would seem that our curiosities, our passions, our music, the sun, and the Big Bang are all linked. This makes sense if one believes in a fractally unfolding universe. Fractal unfoldings oscillate back and forth between fresh wonders of intricacy and the reemergence of the old patterns on which they were initially based. We may be mere manifestations of an ancient algorithm, a basic cosmic rule. infinitely superimposed and retraced. Howard In a message dated 4/8/00 1:04:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, sgxxx writes: **
Eshel??Try this definition of information. Information is anything at all which can be decoded by a receiver. I've deliberately left out an intentionality on the part of the sender, since gravity is information which is read and translated into action by any receiving body which falls under its spell. So is the sunlight which falls upon a rock and to which that rock responds by producing heat. I've left out strings, forms, and the many other shapes information can take because any such definition will be too narrow. Virtually anything in this universe can become information if the receiver decodes it and changes actions accordingly. Hence the more we human beings find meaning in the inanimate universe, the more information it conveys to us. Information is in the eye of the beholder. The more that pools of aggregating molecules on an early earth found others which would respond and rearrange themselves according to the seduction of a comely shape, the more information was present. Meaning information is not a noun, it is a verb. It is an action or a transaction. When the first up quarks decoded the emanations of the first down quarks and interpreted them as a call to move together and unite, that process of decoding translated the qualities of up and down quarks into information. Molecules of RNA and DNA carry information only in so far as other molecules are able to pick up their message and translate it into action. In this sense, there will be natural selection for those molecules whose influence is picked up and acted upon by the greatest number of randomly available bits and pieces. Acted upon to replicate the original molecular strand, that is. Molecules which cause other random bits and strands to take the original molecule apart??that is to eat it or dissolve it??will also convey information. But they will be selected against. I have no idea of
how one would quantify this, but this definition, which i've been using
implicitly in my own work since you encouraged me to think in terms
of information eighteen months ago, has come in very handy. Howard I am interested in the ability of the DNA to compute new strands of DNA. >> This leads me to assume that you're looking for a definition of information which helps account for the manner in which a strand of DNA can compute a strand with properties which the original does not have. Let's start with a basic. This has been a universe of information from its first instant of being. The four forces are said to have precipitated first from the amorphousness of the Big Bang. Those forces are informational. They are forces only insomuch as they enable one entity to send a message clearly interpreted by another entity. Ever since the Bang, the universe has been steadily increasing its informational density. Needless to say this does not fit with any definition of information based on entropy. Entropy will never explain a universe whose direction is toward increasing levels of complexity. One job physics dodges steadily is that of replacing thermodynamics with a new concept in which upward movement in information content and complexity is the default mode and not an aberration. Eshel, I feel strongly that your expression of the fact that entropy works only within closed systems, that there are no closed systems in this universe, and that hence entropy is a mathematical toy with no application to the cosmos in which we live??the only cosmos which, in fact, we know??is a strong step toward the necessary replacement of the entropic concept. We have a universe of constant interaction. No entity in this cosmos is immune to the influence of gravity or of electromagnetic radiation. No entity we know is beyond the reach of starlight. Even black holes presumably suck the stuff up, while they, in turn, churn out gravity. A universe in which
interaction is a given is one in which information is perpetual, since
information and interaction are two different names for the same thing.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, and a universe whose elements
do not interrelate and communicate can not exist. Now how do we turn
these propositions into equations. Or need we take that step at all?
Howard In the humanities, a major critique of the code?based notion of communication has been formulated by Sperber and Wilson (_Relevance_ 2nd ed 1995). They point out that in human communication, much of what goes on cannot be understood in terms of a model where thought is encoded as speech (modulated air waves, say) and then decoded by the listener. In practice, almost none of the information is transmitted that way. Instead, people rely on already existing shared meaning to provide cues from which the intended message can be inferred. The cues are assumed to conform to the principle of relevance. >> Francis??What a wonderful concept with which to help physics along. What you've pointed out can be translated into cosmological terms in the following manner. The only nothing we know is a vacuum. A vacuum these days is defined in physics as not a nothing, but very much a something. It is a something in which particles slip into and out of existence in micro?nano?instants of time, disappearing before they can possibly be perceived. This means that implicit in the very weave of nothingness is a limited number of somethings, a lexicon of electrons, positrons, quarks, and lord knows what all else. Nothingness has a vocabulary, a predetermined set of building blocks, very much the kind of thing we find in language. Language is like the decoration on a sweater. That sweater is a culture, a finite mesh of conceptual interconnects. When we pinch a small portion of that garment with a sentence, we twist the fabric far beyond the point we touch explicitly. So, I suspect, it
goes with the universe. Each small pinch pulls with it an entire skein
of four implicit forces and probably less than a hundred forms of basic
particles, now arranged in galaxies, human beings, and other explicit
whallops, whomps, and whorls. Howard Francis, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the more recent, more general extension of semiotics, called "biosemiotics", address the sorts of questions you raise. The following web sites provide good, comprehensive outlines: Biosemiotics home page (by Alexei Sharov): http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/ Jesper Hoffmeyer's home page: http://www.molbio.ku.dk/MolBioPages/abk/PersonalPages/Jesper/Hoffmeyer.html At 12:17 PM 24/07/1999 ?0700, Francis F. Steen wrote: > >Eshel Ben?Jacob raises a central issue and I look forward to a good >discussion on it. First of all, Shannon's notion of information clearly >misses major features of biological (or human) sense of meaning or >information. In Shannon's scheme, a random signal would carry the most >information, which doesn't get us any closer to understanding biological >information. > >In the humanities, a major critique of the code?based notion of >communication has been formulated by Sperber and Wilson (_Relevance_ 2nd >ed 1995). They point out that in human communication, much of >what goes on cannot be understood in terms of a model where thought is >encoded as speech (modulated air waves, say) and then decoded by the >listener. In practice, almost none of the information is transmitted that >way. Instead, people rely on already existing shared meaning to provide >cues from which the intended message can be inferred. The cues are assumed >to conform to the principle of relevance. > >Can this model be extended to biological systems in general, and to DNA in >particular? On the very simplest level, what it offers is the idea that >biological communication is highly dependent on tacit assumptions of >shared meaning. Signals take place between complex systems in such a way >that most of the information "conveyed" is in fact already within the >recipient; it is *activated* rather than *acquired*. To make this work, >the recipient of the signal must make assumptions about the relevance of >the signal to its own processes. > >I'm way out of my depth here, but consider the example of allergies. >The immune system responds to a signal from the environment, but the >problem is not the signal, the problem is that the immune system >mistakenly assumes it is relevant. Once it has made that faulty >assumption, its machinery responds in a massive way with information that >was not acquired but activated. > >I would enjoy hearing what people think of the possibility of extending >relevance theory to biological systems. In this view, signals don't >contain all that much information; almost everything is already in place >in the recipient. After making a judgment concerning relevance, >information within the recipient is then activated (or not) in response to >the signal. The question of the *amount of information* the signal >contains is thus not a factor of how many bits it contains but how >relevant it is. A zero?bit signal in the relevant context (an awkward >silence) can contain vast amounts of information for the recipient. > >I'm unaware of whether Sperber has considered extending relevance theory >in this way; at a quick glance, it provides a dramatically different view >of information from Shannon's. In Sperber's view, there is still place for >Shannon's model, but it describes only a very small part of the whole >process of communication ? a part relating to the mechanics of >transferring the signal. What Sperber's view would suggest is that >Shannon's notion of information is *entirely irrelevant as a measure of >the amount of information communicated* ? a rather counterintuitive >perspective within the current theory. > >Francis Steen >UCSB >http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu ______________________________________________ Newton's Laws of Emotion: http://opera.iinet.net.au/~tramont/biosem.html There can be no complexity without simplicity Stephen Springette
______________________________________________ <The immune system responds to a signal from the environment, but the >problem is not the signal, the problem is that the immune system >mistakenly assumes it is relevant. Once it has made that faulty >assumption, its machinery responds in a massive way with information that >was not acquired but activated.>> This sounds like it has at least a family resemblance to Gazzaniga's proposal (Nature's Mind, Basic Books, 1992) that biological systems don't really operate by learning, but rather by selecting from a population of available options. The immune system is one of his examples. It doesn't learn to fight an invader so much as make available for selection its population of available antigens. That, Gazzaniga argues, is the basic paradigm of living things: Novelty prompts selection, not ``learning.'' Perhaps Sperber and Gazzaniga are tugging on the same buried thread in thought about what information is? >> Picking from an
available repertoire of responses is one mode of handling incoming data,
and perhaps the most common one. However another is invention. Invention
has increased the repertoire of responses available at any given time??for
example by generating the immune system and its many antigens way back
in evolutionary time. One of the major challenges in scientifically
understanding an evolving universe is to comrehend how the creative
webs Eshel describes manage their creativity. If there is more involved
than selection working on random accident, then what is that additional
element? How and why does being so often evidence a teleonomic tendency?
Why do quarks emerge from a maelstrom of four forces and from formless
energy? Why do protons and neutrons self?assemble from quarks? Why do
the many forms of teleonomy??of goal direction??cited in biosemiotics
exist? How did they come to be? If randomness is the diversity generating
source of novelty, as the classical theory of mutation proposes, what
is responsible for the rules built into the selection mechanisms? Raw
randomness would produce more chaos than order, and over time would
wipe all order away. But in the cosmos we know, randomness is harnessed
and constrained. There is a ratchet which makes even a backlide of destruction
like the explosion of a star a step to the next constructive level up.
To get at the constraints which keep chaos at bay and produce identical
replications of elements like protons in numbers unimaginable to us,
I'd propose that we examine the first 10(?32) of the Big Bang, when
many of the guiderails of form first showed themselves, then worry about
biology after we've solved the problem of cosmological teleology. Howard
The weave of attraction and repulsion signals would result in a form of inanimate natural selection--the hallmark of Darwinian processing. When George Gamow and his collaborators were first puzzling out the mysteries of the Big Bang n the 1940s and early 1950s, their reasoning told them that at first there must have been twosomes of one proton and one electron pulled together by forcefield harmonies. And indeed it seemed there were, for of such coos deuterium nuclei were made. Then, thought Gamow and his cronies, there must have been partnerships of three. And so there were, for these were the nuclei of tritium and of helium-3. Then came foursomes, Gamow thought, and the calls and outcries of subatomic particles harmonized with his reasoning, making the barbershop quartets of helium nuclei. However the early Big Bang reasoners soon hit a sour note with their reasoning. For their theory called for a next step up the atomic table, one which required particle quintets--groups of five. But the songs of every fivesome mounted to a shriek, a discord of repulsion signaling. How, without a fivesome, Gamow wondered, had the Big Bang managed to create the remaining hundred and some atoms of which this universe was made? The answer was the Big Bang hadn't--it had taken the brute force of novas to finish the work. Only such enormous crushes could overcome the subatomic protests of particle-signalling. "Think of information,"
Eshel said a year ago. But you'd written the ultimate informational
equation back in the 1970s. Attraction and repulsion cues are the coos
and outcries of this cosmos' murmurings. Howard |
