Big Bang file pg1 [pg2] [Directory]
The something that was nothingness read more

The big bang tango-script for Ciara Byrne
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The big bang
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The hop, skip, and jump of the cosmos
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The silly putty universe-where constants like the sp
eed of light can change
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The music of the universe
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Interfaces which shouldn't be
A proton has 1,842 times the mass of an electron. In rough terms, if the proton were the size of the Empire State Building, the electron would be the size of a basketball. Yet the negative charge of the electron fits the positive charge of the proton so precisely that the two embrace and thus create an atom. This is a fit which shouldn't be, unless the two are products of a common seed--corollaries sprung from the same small set of axioms.

Information
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The something that was nothingness
_________
The idea of a potentia from which universes spring is fascinating. But why, when it gives birth to a new universe, should the potentia's number of possibilities diminish?

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:


Subj: Re: [issues] Stochastic Realism and Foundations of quantumtheory
Date: 6/20/2003 9:10:52 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: werbos
To:

Hi, James!

>But I am interested in voicing another
>topic intimate with this and your isss post
>of 17 June "Foundations of quantum theory"
>where you wax on a notion of "entropy
>matrix". I'm guessing that you came to the
>same conclusion I did that the density
>matricies are correlates of if not
>dual with intrinsic gradients within
>the structure of spacetime itself.
>
>Would that be correct? I hope so, because that
>leads directly to a topology which unifies
>QM and continuum. And, one which places
>the gradients of the so-called 'fundamental'
>forces as -secondary- products of these
>gradiented spaces.

In quant-ph 008036, Luda and I defined a mathematical
object called an "entropy matrix" which does have
some interesting relations with density matrices.

But that paper did not really address metric effects as such.

I do believe that topology and topological solitons are
an essential part of the "next generation" of physics --
but topology is COMPLEMENTARY to the mathematics
of the entropy matrix as we defined it.

Lots more yet to be done here!


>It is when these aspects are correlated with
>process .. as is natural .. that things get
>-really interesting-, because there are
>several stochastic domains present (ala
>your stochastic realism) and the processing
>of time co-induces two simultaneous -but
>opposite- stochastic product domains(at least).
>
>One has connection with the many-worlds
>theories, while another generates
>negentropic complexity imperatives. (!)
>
>
>This was how I enunciated the logics
>of the relations:
>
> Consider that the Potentia
>of existence (per Linde) included all
>future possibles of all possible values
>of the 'constants' .. some combinants which
>will produce viable universes and some not.
>
>As a universe becomes enacted, through whatever
>mechanisms accomplish that, the new 'possibles'
>is a smaller set than before (though still
>inordinately large). Allowing that the existential
>domain of 'possibles' remains constant (as you
>descibe it: "a finite number of spatial arguments"), the
>change is an effective reduction of 'content', diminished
>density, which matches standard thermodynamic entropicy.
>
>In opposition, if the original maximum
>potentia of possibles is, via some mechanism,
>summarily reduced, then the remainder information
>set is more defined and specific than the
>prior maximum-generalization (chaos).
>
>It is more negentropic and ordered than prior.
>By default, it is becoming more complex;
>knowability is improving.
>
>In second counter-opposition, any given
>set of states during time progression,
>every node, generally has improved access
>to new panoramas of potentia.
>
>Every moment provides an opportunity-added
>set of behavior actions that wasn't present
>just before, whether taken advantage of or not.
>
>The opportunity space is entropically increasing
>and this is where thermodynamic gradients were
>first identified.
>
>In second re-counteropposition, systems endure,
>survive, and stochasticly improve their
>survivability when their competence for coping
>improves, and as and when there are congenial
>conditions entered into, and performance
>capacities under alternative conditions
>expands and or becomes more reliable.
>
>Information/energy access improvement -
>in the immediate and for the future;
>which includes both control and resilience.
>
>As the possibilities increase, improved
>order within those expanded spaces does
>as well.
>
>And this doesn't even include the
>direct causality-impacts that
>nested tiers of organization have
>on one another .. where I've identified
>that entropic distributions in one
>tier act as contraints in nested
>spaces, and produce negentropic complexity
>in the next tier of organization.
>
>They share mechanisms but the mechanisms
>often have inverse changes on
>order-chaos.
>
>We live in a universe with simultaneous
>drivers: diminution of imbalance~variance,
>and, localization. Smoothing and clumping.
>
>Information/communication symbiosis,
>starting in the topology of timespace itself.
>
>Best,
>
> Jamie
>
>
>"Werbos, Dr. Paul J." wrote:
>>
>>Hi, James!
>>
>>I certainly do not claim any kind of authorship of the word
>>"stochastic," or the general idea that stochastic effects
>>(like "God rolling dice") might have some relation to physics.
>>
>>I am proposing the specific term "stochastic realism" for the
>>specific class of physical theories, PR({phi(x)}), discussed
>>in the email. This is narrower than what you had in mind, and
>>it could be seen as a special case
>>of hundreds of more general ideas centuries old, but it is a concept
>>in itself worthy of explicit consideration and of having a name.
>>
>>But... to be careful... let me add a caveat ... I
>>would want the term "stochastic realism" to
>>apply to the obvious natural extensions where
>>"PHI" may be made up bosonic fields, fermionic fields,
>>and "pointer fields" like {PHI(x,y)} over a finite number
>>of spatial arguments.
>>
>>I actually have used the term a few times before,
>>but only today (after my Japanese friend's comments)
>>does it really come together.
>>
>>By the way, I doubt that it is the ultimate theory
>>of everything. I can see a step or two beyond. But
>>it is exciting as a more near-term option for
>>returning to reality.
>>
>>Best,
>>
>> Paul
>>
_________
Subj: Re[2]: [issues] Stochastic Realism and Foundations of quantumtheory Date: 6/26/2003 2:04:35 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: kurakin To: [email protected] Sent from the Internet (Details) Hac> I suspect that time is like RNA. DNA can do nothing until it's Hac> visited by RNA. The potentia, I suspect, lays there fallow, a non-potentia, Hac> until a tweak from time yanks it into opening its inherent possibilities. Pk: Wow! Great. I like such an approach. It is very much like what Roger Zelazny introdoced in "Chrono-master". And it is what my "inner time means". Inner time may tick, signals may move back and forth, but physical time stands, untill the ultimate confirmation signal comes to winner detector. -- "Our line is right. The victory will be ours". (c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin mailto:kurakin
_________
This is a fascinating idea. It implies that between ticks of Plank time the cosmos returns to where it began--the potentia. Just as man has not thrown out the hammer, nature hasn't tossed out anything either, not even the nothing from which all things sprang. Howard

 

The big bang tango-script for Ciara Byrne
________
Why We Make War
The Lucifer Principle
By
Howard Bloom

Episode One:
Mother Nature's Dirty Little Secret
The Days of the Great Gravity Crusades


Sit back and relax. Get ready for a tale of sex and violence-for the story of why and how you came to be. I'm going to tell you just the smallest tale, the tiniest tale of all, the story of the universe and of your place in it, a fourteen-billion-year-old story of violence and creation, a story that is your biography. I'm going to pin you to the wall and splay you. I'm going to show you how wars between galaxies and how the deaths of stars have made you. I'm going to show you how wrecks in the depths of space coughed out the raw stuff pulsing right now in your heart and arms and brain. I'm going to take you walking through the viciousness that Mother Nature used to fuse the atoms in your fingertips, and even the atoms in the mind with which you're checking me out now. I'm going to take you flying through the twist of old disasters-disasters that were woven into brand new things-woven in the microscopic strings and ropes that make you lust to touch the skin of fresh young women or of powerful young men, the strings within that fill your brain with torture when you think of all the small mistakes, the tiny social missteps that undo you almost every day. I'm going to take you from crusades of space wisps-from the first real star wars--to the torture chambers in your brain.

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."

The next 300,000 years of our cosmic foremother's time was spent stirring up soup and brewing raw aggression. Every particle was hyperactive. Every particle smashed against its playmates at devastating speed, then ricocheted and hit another sister or a brother, and rocketed off again. This sandbox clash of particles is what scientists call a plasma. You can see the micro-version at the heart of the sun today. [show the leaping, throbbing sun spitting out huge arcs of itself and sucking them back in, pulsing like a wildly beating heart]

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.

 

The big bang

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John--This is extremely helpful. Yes, if a fast moving stream shoots into or against something standing stock still, it's easy to imagine why the jet would sheer off, veer, bend, and loop around the edges, causing whorls and spirals. And it's easy to imagine why a high-pressure jet would crack more adamantine stuff into which it blasts, thus making fractal networks of cracks. But why the "inevitablity" of formfulness? Why its continual increase? In the beginning, there was a singularity, a point so infinitesimal that it would have made a pinprick seem vaster than a universe. From this twist of nothing gushed a space-time manifold, expanding at speeds beyond belief. We call the speed of this eruption, of this inflation, energy. But why did this spreading fabric, this self-ejecting cosmic sheet, *inevitably* knot itself in quarks and protons? Inevitability there does seem to be, or the quarks and protons would not precipitate from space-time's speed in such numbers and with such perfect uniformity. But what is the expanding cosmos rubbing against? What's it pushing into? Where's the friction, what the catalyst, that causes quark precipitation? Smoot says there were quantum wrinkles in the tip of nothingness from which this universe emerged. Hence, as the sheet of time and space shot from the size of a handkerchief to that of the drape of space, the quantum creases and their intersections grew, collecting the precipitated quark/baryon/lepton particles into galactic-cluster heaps. But what, again, accounts for the twist of speed into the stuff of light and matter--electrons, neutrons, protons, photons? And why the cosmos' unbelievable fracticality? Why did the same rules of precipitation spit out identical particles everywhere? Why the great commandment to repeat, repeat, repeat? A proton is a proton is a proton, whether born in a space-time crease or on the smoothness of a broad stretch of the space-time sheet. Where's the famous randomness of quantumness when everything's so very close to being all the same? The same question applies at each level of emergent property. Why should things move upward in complexity? The second law of thermodynamics says the very opposite. Why is it wrong? Because of open systems, yes. But that's a negative. What positive goads a constantly evolving cosmos into mounting ever further on the ladder of new form? What is that ladder, if it is at all? And if it's not, what other metaphor captures the obsession with form-generation that holds this cosmos in its thrall?

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

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Subj: Re: the corollary generator Date: 99?10?02 11:58:44 EDT From: (Dr. John R. Skoyles) Sender: [email protected] To: paleopsych

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.

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John?? By suggesting the manner in which similar patterns appear in levels from that of cell biology to that of channel hopping, you've done an excellent job of presenting an interesting facet of corollary generator theory. The theory says that the universe began with a handful of axioms, equivalent to the two or three algorithms with which one starts an artificial life program such as Tierra. Through iteration after iteration of the initial algorithm/axioms, a self?organizing system evolves which jumps from one level of complexity to another, doing so in time frames which, in the case of Tierra's designer Thomas Ray, astonished even their creator. (See Steven Levy. _Artificial Life_. New York: Vintage Books, 1992: 219?230). Because the process was iterative, it was fractal. In other words, the initial axioms showed up in new forms on each level of complexity??on each phase transitioned jump to a new landscape of emergent properties.

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
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v412/n6848/full/412689a0_fs.html&filetype=&_UserReference=C0A804EF465034328FFA092AB64D3B834BAE, downloaded 8/22/01 16 August 2001 Nature 412, 689 - 690 (2001) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Quantum physics: Cooperation includes all atoms JUHA JAVANAINEN Juha Javanainen is in the Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3046, USA. Atom statistics is a fundamental property of all particles that dictates how they behave in certain situations. But behaviour previously attributed to atom statistics is equally likely to arise from cooperative effects. All microscopic particles can be classified either as bosons (particles such as photons that obey Bose-Einstein statistics) or fermions (particles such as electrons that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics). Although it often takes an elaborate low-temperature experiment to see the difference between bosons and fermions in an atomic system, the distinction is woven into the fabric of the Universe. If electrons were bosons instead of fermions, matter would be different in unimaginable ways, and we would probably not be around to contemplate the issue. For example, the fermionic nature of electrons is responsible for the chemistry of the periodic table. Nonetheless, as two groups from Arizona1 and MIT2 argue in Physical Review Letters, behaviour that physicists have attributed to atoms being bosons may actually arise from cooperative dynamics between the atoms, and therefore would be equally valid for fermionic atoms. The case in point is four-wave mixing, a standard tool of nonlinear optics in which two light waves interfere to form a periodic pattern. A third wave diffracted from this pattern generates a fourth wave at a particular frequency. The 1995 achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation - a form of matter in which all the atoms are in the same quantum state - has allowed the development of analogous experiments with atoms3. In this case, there are two beams of atoms running at each other. By virtue of quantum mechanics, there is a wave associated with the moving atoms. So the two atomic waves interfere and make a standing-wave pattern - a grating of atoms. A 'probe' atom coming along will act as a wave in its own right and diffract off the grating, resulting in a fourth atomic wave travelling in a particular direction. The results of experiments on four-wave mixing are usually interpreted as a consequence of boson statistics, specifically the enhancement or amplification of the bosonic atoms or photons. Such behaviour is forbidden by fermion statistics, so other bosonic processes, such as amplification of light or matter waves, would also appear to be ruled out for fermions. But the Arizona1 and MIT2 groups show that these processes can indeed occur with fermions. Happily, no violations of atom statistics are required, simply a more mature understanding of how quantum mechanics works. Consider a more quantitative picture of four-wave mixing with atoms, in which the first two beams, 1 and 2, each have N bosonic atoms with momenta k1 and k2. Atom-atom interactions cause an atom to transfer from beam 1 to beam 2, and the conservation of momentum means that the probe atom has to deflect in a new direction, generating the fourth wave. The probability that this process occurs is proportional to the number of atoms, N, available to scatter in beam 1. But Bose-Einstein statistics says that bosons prefer to join already existing bosons, so the probability is also proportional to the number of atoms, N, in beam 2 that receives the probe atom. The resulting N2 dependence of the probability for the probe atom to scatter in a certain direction can therefore be attributed to bosonic enhancement. This, though, is not the only conceivable description of four-wave mixing1, 2. According to quantum mechanics, to find a probability for a transition between two states of a system one first finds a transition amplitude, f, and then takes the square of it. In four-wave mixing there are N transition amplitudes for the scattering of the probe atom from the initial state to the final state, one for each atom that could transfer between the two beams. Another intriguing provision of quantum mechanics states that if in a given experiment it is impossible, even in principle, to distinguish between the paths that lead from the same initial state to the same final state, then the transition amplitudes have to be added. If this holds, then the probability amplitude for four-wave mixing becomes Nf and the probability again scales as N2. This time, though, the reason is not bosonic enhancement, but another common cause for N2 dependence in physics: cooperation. Although only one atom was transferred between beams 1 and 2, all the atoms acted in concert to boost the transition amplitude. The role of atom statistics is therefore only secondary. To date, all the experiments on four-wave mixing3 and analogous amplification of matter waves4, 5 have been done with bosons because they conveniently provide atom waves that have sharply defined wavelengths. But one might imagine doing the same thing with fermionic atoms. In a Bose-Einstein condensate there is no way to distinguish between the atoms, and cooperation is assured. The defining property of fermions is that only one fermion can occupy one quantum state, so N fermionic atoms cannot be prepared with the same momentum, k1 or k2. Still, it is feasible to have atoms with momenta in a narrow enough range around k1 and k2 so that the spread cannot be resolved experimentally. Then it is not possible to distinguish between the transition paths, cooperation holds, and the N2 dependence on the number of atoms emerges. This time, though, the atoms are fermions, and bosonic enhancement is not a viable explanation. As a classic example of cooperation, imagine a system of N excited atoms. An atom is coupled to the ever-present electromagnetic fields, so an excited atom will spontaneously emit a photon. But if the N atoms reside at equivalent positions relative to the field, they all couple to the electromagnetic fields in the same way and cannot be distinguished by the way they interact with the field. Spontaneous emission from the atoms is then cooperative6: the N excited atoms return to their ground state by spontaneously emitting a flash of light whose peak intensity scales as N2. This dramatic process is called superradiance, but it is a subtle matter of interpretation whether it has been seen experimentally. Superradiance as described by Dicke6 is one of the key paradigms in optical physics, but an unequivocal demonstration would need the atoms to be placed in a region smaller than the wavelength of the light to fulfill the requirement for 'equivalent field positions'. Even if this were practicable, the interactions between the atoms would spoil cooperation anyway. The moral of this story is that experimental realities tend to obstruct cooperative behaviour. In my opinion, the main contribution of the Arizona1 and MIT2 work is that it demonstrates the fragility of the distinction between atom statistics and cooperative behaviour. Physicists now know that cooperative behaviour may mock Bose-Einstein statistics. Perhaps the converse is true: can Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics be harnessed to assist in cooperative phenomena, such as superradiance? References 1. Moore, M. G. & Meystre, P. Phys. Rev. Lett . 86, 4199-4202 (2001). | Article | PubMed | 2. Ketterle, W. & Inouye, S. Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 4203-4206 (2001). | Article | PubMed | 3. Deng, L. et al. Nature 398, 218-220 (1999). | Article | 4. Inouye, S. et al. Nature 402, 641-644 (1999). | Article | 5. Kozuma, M. et al. Science 286, 2309-2312 (1999). | Article | PubMed | 6. Dicke, R. H. Phys. Rev. 93, 99-110 (1954). Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2001 Registered No. 785998 England.
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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.

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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.


Networking, often called synergy, has been a key to evolution since
the universe's first second of existence. Roughly twelve to twenty
billion years ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose
in the nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human
comprehension, doubling every 10?34 seconds. As it whooshed from
insignificance to enormity, it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos,
photons, electrons, then the quark?triumvirates known as protons
and neutrons to precipitate from its energy. A neutron is a
particle filled with need. It is unable to sustain itself for
longer than ten minutes. To survive, it must find at least one
mate, then form a family. The initial three minutes of existence
were spent in cosmological courting, as protons paired off with
neutrons, then rapidly attracted another couple to wed within their
embrace, forming the two?proton, two?neutron quartet of a helium
nucleus. Those neutrons which managed this match gained relative
immortality. Those which stayed single ceased to be. (Roughly
twelve billion years later, the universe remains 25% helium.)
Protons, on the other hand, seemed able to survive alone. But even
they were endowed with inanimate longing. Flitting electrons were
overwhelmed by an electrical charge they needed to share. Protons
found these elemental sprites irresistible, and more marriages were
made. From the mutual needs of electrons and protons came atoms.
Atoms with unfinished outer shells bounced around in need of
consorts, and found them in equally bereft counterparts whose
electron protrusions fit their empty slots (and vice versa).
Through these connective compulsions, to paraphrase Yeats, "a
terrible beauty was born."

And so it continued. A physical analogue of unrequited desire
was stirred by allures ranging from the strong nuclear force to
gravity. These drew molecules into dust, dust into celestial
shards, and knitted together asteroids, stars, solar systems,
galaxies, and even the mega?matrixes of multi?galactic whorls.
Theories like those of Claude Shannon imply that the intertwined
elements were bundles of information??skeins of data whose
proliferation of plugs and sockets disgorged newnesses at every
turn.

One of the products of this inorganic copulation was life.
The latest findings suggest that shortly after the molten earth
began to harden its shell and massive rains of planetesimals ceased
smacking this sphere like a boxer pummeling the face of his
opponent, RNA paved the path for DNA. Massive minuets of
deoxyribonucleic acid generated the first primitive cells??the
prokaryotes??by 3.85 billion b.c. And 350,000 years later,
unmistakable signs of complex social life??the multi?million?
inhabitant bacterial megalopoli called stromatolites??appeared.
Then paleontological dogma has it that virtually nothing of
significance occurred until the Cambrian explosion roughly 535
million years ago. One popular science writer, summing up the
opinion of the experts, calls this interim "three billion years of
non?events" (Karen Wright, "When Life Was Odd," Discover Magazine,
March 1997, p. 53). Oh, there was the occasional burp, say the
yawning authorities. But such moments of evolutionary indigestion
are hardly worth mentioning.

The hints are many that there was little to yawn about. Since
software innovations??new forms of behavior and interaction??leave
few fossil records, and since paleontologists have been virtually
blind to proterozoic social activity, the record seems barren. But
evidence indicates that intimate forms of organization were
undergoing long and ever more intricate trial periods.

Futurists and computer scientists predict that a global brain will
not arise until this orb's computers have been further interlaced
and programs such as intelligent agents have been sent to scour the
cyberworld on our behalf. Boston computer scientist Alexander
Chislenko feels the breakthrough will come when these agents are
endowed with evolutionary algorithms, allowed to haggle with each
other, and to serve us new conceptual cocktails of their own.
Exciting as these concepts are, they need a bit of tempering.

The first step in the creation of a large?scale learning machine
began with sociality??that force which draws individuals together
in a net whose properties are far more potent than those of its
component parts. Strange as it seems, this daisy?chaining of plug?
ins into mass assemblies started during the first 10(?32) second of
the Big Bang, as quarks were born in up and down form. The up
quarks craved completeness in a mating with the down. Each next
step, from the nuptials of these needy quarks as protons and
neutrons to the crowds of space debris which flamed as stars,
created novel minuets of modules, ranging from molecules to spiral
nebullae. Each of these dancing macramés foreshadowed what a
global web would later be.

The first planetary intelligence??immensely sprier than the
Worldwide Web which spans the earth today??sprang into existence
roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Its "transistors" were bacteria.
Its microprocessors were multi?million?member colonies of
constantly communicating beasts. Its biochemical and other
intranets made each community an innovative intelligence, a
creative web. Its internet was a flow of plasmids and genetic
fragments which carried new designs as far as currents of wind and
water could fling them.

Microbes reigned for 2.5 billion years until a new form of
mainframe came along??the creature gifted with multicellularity.
The old connective devices of social need pulled these together
too, yet their immense genetic memories were now locked inside a
walled?off nucleus, preventing the data cascades which empowered
their bacterial ancestors. One solution was the merger of genetic
libraries which we call sexuality. But the sporadic nature of this
process severely cut down information flow.

A more advanced interconnect emerged roughly 220 million years ago
when imitative learning allowed the continuous transmission of
behavioral memes??emotional predispositions and concrete ways of
doing things. A new migration path could whip from one beast to
its neighbors and so on through a spiny lobster pack. Between two
million and 35,000 years ago, man added language and multiplexed
the imitative data stream. Behavioral and explicit memes gushed in
tandem through the channels of the human interlink, bridging gaps
far faster than the odysseys of sperm and egg. Man marched across
the old world carrying his memes. In forms like instructions for
fashioning an Acheulian hand axe, ideas and techniques spanned
continents. Yet they trudged at the sluggish rhythm of a walking
pace.

Fission worked with fusion to disperse the seed of man, varying his
cultures, providing new mutations from which fresh innovations
would emerge. Man embodied a universal irony: the fruitful force
of welded opposites. The need to separate teamed with the desire to
unite. Variation and imitation stoked the emerging trans?human
brain, just as the escape of object from object in the Big Bang's
initial flash had coupled with allures like electro?magnetism and
gravity to create a perpetually evolving universe. The conformity
enforcers and diversity generators which power our learning machine
were bequeathed us by the cosmic genesis.

As consciousness elevated the vistas of humanity, repulsors like
our quibble over trivialities twined with attractors like our fear
of eccentricity to keep our species teetering creatively, prodding
us from rest to restlessness, blessing us with conflict,
competition, aggregation and exchange. Through this generative
tension we were propelled to higher and higher velocities of
cultural evolution, attaining the speed which multicellular
sluggishness had throttled for nearly a billion years. Yet we had
still not gone global. And our shuttling of packets nowhere near
approached the rapidity still quickening the inventions which
poured from bacteria's planet?straddling system of research and
development.

We'd take further steps to close this gap after the ice sheets
cleared ten thousand years ago and opened the way to our next giant
leaps. Yet, ironically, it will be many generations before we
catch up with the broadband interlace our mono?cellular cousins
still revel in today.

Networking is not a product of the 20th century's end. It is our
fifteen?billion?year?old legacy. Neither we nor any other element
in this whorl of atoms, galaxies, and living beings has been
isolated by the overweening self?interest Thomas Hobbes envisioned
when he said that life before the social contract was nasty,
brutish and violent. This planet's genes and organisms have never
been pitted in the total war of each against all portrayed by
modern evolutionists. Nature has far more than its share of
brutality. But even the sparks of the Big Bang's fireball were
birthed with a need for company. Despite our fractiousness, that
longing is built into you and me, cabling us into a collective
learning machine of ever increasing size. At the ripe young age of
more than three billion years, the global brain is using our
ambitions and technologies to ready the next in a long string of
complexity upgrades. Futuristic as the unrevealed enhancements may
yet be, their gifts will flow from an ancient source??the instant
when this cosmos first revealed its ache for sociality. (final paragraphs of Bollmann.bk)
------------------------------
Empedocles felt love bound together the elements of which matter was made. In a strange, but very real, sense, Empedocles may have been right.
_______________________________
Communication has been a key to evolution since the universe's
first second of existence. Roughly twelve to twenty billion years
ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose in the
nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human comprehension,
doubling every 10?34 seconds. As it whooshed from insignificance
to enormity, it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos, photons,
electrons, then the quark?triumvirates known as protons and
neutrons to precipitate from its energy. A neutron is a particle
filled with need. It is unable to sustain itself for longer than
ten minutes. To survive, it must find at least one mate, then form
a family. The initial three minutes of existence were spent in
cosmological courting, as protons paired off with neutrons, then
rapidly attracted another couple to wed within their embrace,
forming the two? proton, two?neutron quartet of a helium nucleus.
Those neutrons which managed this match gained relative
immortality. Those which stayed single ceased to be. (Roughly
twelve billion years later, the universe remains 25% helium.)
Protons, on the other hand, seemed able to survive alone. But even
they were endowed with inanimate longing. Flitting electrons were
overwhelmed by an electrical charge they needed to share. Protons
found these elemental sprites irresistible, and more marriages were
made. From the mutual needs of electrons and protons came atoms.
Atoms with unfinished outer shells bounced around in need of
consorts, and found them in equally bereft counterparts whose
electron protrusions fit their empty slots (and vice versa).
Through these connective compulsions, to paraphrase Yeats, "a
terrible beauty was born." And so it continued. A physical
analogue of unrequited desire was stirred by allures ranging from
the strong nuclear force to gravity. These drew molecules into
dust, dust into celestial shards, and knitted together asteroids,
stars, solar systems, galaxies, and even the mega? matrixes of
multi?galactic whorls. Theories like those of Claude Shannon imply
that the intertwined elements were bundles of information??skeins
of data whose proliferation of plugs and sockets disgorged
newnesses at every turn. One of the products of this inorganic
copulation was life.

Scott Beach 5/31/98
Howard:

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.

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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

_______________________________
By David Pratt. Last updated 13 April 1998. Original articles published in Sunrise, Jun/Jul & Aug/Sep 1993.
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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
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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

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New information from the study of supernovas has physicists reevaluating their theories of the universe in a frenzied fashion. The supernovas are supposed to be slowing down in the wake of the initial big bang. Instead, the further they get from the center of the Bang's beginning, the faster they seem to go. This defies the predictions of prevailing theories in a most unsettling way.

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.
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The following piece comes from the last part of 'Rules of engagement' by Ian Stewart, New Scientist, 29 August 1998, 36-40.

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
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"Matter is condensed energy" says Michio Kaku interpreting Einstein for the masses in his book _Hyperspace_ (p. 88). This means that after the Big Bang's pure energy flash mere explosive force began a process of compaction into a radically different form from the pyrotechnic blast with which it began.. Actually, the number of initial forms into which it squeezed itself were few--photons, leptons, bosons, mesons, and a handfull of others. This swarm of identical repackaged energy may have taken on few shapes, but it went on to combine in forms beyond imagining--stars and planet, galaxies and multi-galactic clusters, bacteria, slime mold, insects, you and me.

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

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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


The hop, skip, and jump of the cosmos
_________
What follows is another testament to the lurch, jump, and saltation of a hopping, skipping cosmos. The first stars appeared in a sudden whomp that continued at high levels from a billion years after the big bang to seven billion ABB. Then the star formation process crashed as suddenly as it had begun.

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 disagree with the math underlying these .gif's, but they are still wonderful visualizations of self-organizing processes, of a cosmos lifting its head from the muck of the nothingness and emerging like a stallion to challenge all that's barren, empty, formless, and dark. Howard
Hb to Pavel Kurakin 6/25/2003 Your tip on Linde has landed us in a goldmine. Linde's webpage is filled with .gifs that illustrate the sort of cosmos I imagine Paul Werbos is describing when he speaks of Lagrangian models.

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> cosmoses. It works like this. Cosmoses bubble forth in great abundance from an
Hac> unknown source. Each begins with a different set of parameters. The cosmoses
Hac> with the "right" parameters produce many galaxies and many black holes. From
Hac> black holes, new cosmoses come bubbling.

Hac> Those cosmoses that produce the most progeny--the most new universes spawned
Hac> from black holes, take over the space of the nothing that universes sprang
Hac> from. Those cosmoses that don't evolve galaxies and black holes or some other
Hac> form of reproductive mechanism remain in small numbers, they are a small
Hac> minority, they fail to spread their seed. That's all Smolins, not me. But it's an
Hac> intriguing idea.

pk: ;) Please note, that Andrei Linde, former theroretist from Lebedev
Physical Institute (now with Stanford - ?) develops the same. Search by
"Andrei Linde" or "inflationary cosmology"


--
"Our line is right. The victory will be ours". (c) I. V. Stalin, 1941.

kurakin mailto:kurakin
________
Retrieved from the World Wide WebJune 24, 2003 http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/ Stanford University Department of Physics Andrei Linde Professor of Physics Contact Information * office: Department of Physics Varian blg. 344 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 * phone: (650) 723 2687 * FAX: (650) 725 6544 * email: linde Research Interests I am one of the authors of the inflationary cosmology and of the theory of the cosmological phase transitions. These two topics remain the main subject of my work. Current research also involves investigation of the global structure of the universe, cosmological constraints on the properties of elementary particles, and quantum cosmology. Career History * B.S., Moscow State University * Ph.D., 1975, Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow * Professor, Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, 1985-89 * Staff Member of CERN, Switzerland, 1989-90 * Professor of Physics, Stanford University, 1990-present * Lomonosov Award of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1978 * Oskar Klein medal in physics, 2001 Curriculum Vitae The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe Inflationary theory describes the very early stages of the evolution of the Universe, and its structure at extremely large distances from us. For many years, cosmologists believed that the Universe from the very beginning looked like an expanding ball of fire. This explosive beginning of the Universe was called the big bang. In the end of the 70's a different scenario of the evolution of the Universe was proposed. According to this scenario, the early universe came through the stage of inflation, exponentially rapid expansion in a kind of unstable vacuum-like state (a state with large energy density, but without elementary particles). Vacuum-like state in inflationary theory usually is associated with a scalar field, which is often called ``the inflaton field.'' The stage of inflation can be very short, but the universe within this time becomes exponentially large. Initially, inflation was considered as an intermediate stage of the evolution of the universe, which was necessary to solve many cosmological problems. At the end of inflation the scalar field decayed, the universe became hot, and its subsequent evolution could be described by the standard big bang theory. Thus, inflation was a part of the big bang theory. Gradually, however, the big bang theory became a part of inflationary cosmology. Recent versions of inflationary theory assert that instead of being a single, expanding ball of fire described by the big bang theory, the universe looks like a huge growing fractal. It consists of many inflating balls that produce new balls, which in turn produce more new balls, ad infinitum. Therefore the evolution of the universe has no end and may have no beginning. After inflation the universe becomes divided into different exponentially large domains inside which properties of elementary particles and even dimension of space-time may be different. Thus, the new cosmological theory leads to a considerable modification of the standard point of view on the structure and evolution of the universe and on our own place in the world. A description of the new cosmological theory can be found, in particular, in my article The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe published in Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 5, pages 48-55, November 1994. Recently its shorter version was reprinted in a special issue of Scientific American ``Magnificent Cosmos.'' A nice introduction to inflation was written by the journalist and science writer John Gribbin Cosmology for Beginners There were many attempts to replace inflation by other theories, but at present, inflation remains the only robust mechanism that produces density perturbations with a flat spectrum and simultaneously solves all major cosmological problems. As an example explaining why it is so difficult to construct a consistent non-inflationary cosmology, one may look at our recent discussion of the so-called ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario . Movies 1. Self-Reproduction of the Universe Inflationary cosmology is different in many respects from the standard big bang cosmology. Domains of the inflationary universe with sufficiently large energy density permanently produce new inflationary domains due to stochastic processes of generation of the long-wave perturbations of the scalar field. Therefore the evolution of the universe in the inflationary scenario has no end and may have no beginning. Here we present the results of computer simulations of generation of quantum fluctuations in the inflationary universe. These processes should occur in the very early universe, at the densities just below the Planck density. 1) Series of figures in gold show generation of fluctuations of the scalar field $\varphi$ during inflation. Classically, the value of this field should decrease, but quantum perturbations lead to formation of exponentially large domains containing the scalar field which is much bigger than its initial value. In particular, calculation of the volume of the parts of the universe corresponding to the peaks of the ``mountains'' shows that it is much bigger than the volume of the parts where the scalar field rolled to the minimum of its energy density. * Fluctuating inflaton field can be viewed in gif format (0.5 Mb). * The same results can be seen at a greater resolution in gif format (9.6 Mb). 2) Series of figures in red, blue and green show evolution of another scalar field, which has three different minima of its potential energy density. In the regions when the inflaton field is large (it is represented by the hight of the mountains), the second field strongly fluctuates. In the domains where the inflaton field is small, the second field relaxes near one of the three minima of its potential energy density, shown by red, blue and green correspondingly. Each such domain is exponentially large. If the second field is responsible for symmetry breaking in the theory, then the laws of low-energy physics inside domains of different colors are different. The universe globally looks not like an expanding ball, but like a huge fractal consisting of exponentially large domains permanently produced during inflation. * Fluctuations of the inflaton field (shown as the hight of the mountains) and of the second field (shown by dirrerent colors, depending on its value) in gif format. * The same results can be seen at a much greater resolution in gif format (1.6 Mb). 3) The third movie shows only the evolution of the second field, determining the choice of the symmetry breaking (shown by dirrerent colors), so the images are two-dimensional. This made it possible to perform simulations on a much greater scale and with a much better resolution. We called this series of images ``Kandinsky universe,'' after the famous Russian abstractionist.

 

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
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In a message dated 6/26/2003 1:56:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin writes: Hac> Your tip on Linde has landed us in a goldmine. Linde's webpage is filled Hac> with .gifs that illustrate the sort of cosmos I imagine Paul Werbos is describing Hac> when he speaks of Lagrangian models. Hac> I love the graphics but feel that the concept is wrong. All these equations Hac> are based on smooth transitions, smooth gradients, and the history of the Hac> cosmos, as I've been pointing out, is NOT SMOOTH. It is jumpy. It takes big, Hac> sudden, shocking leaps. Yes. But, You see, Linde (on my opinion) belongs to a class of theoreticians who are trained in differential equations school and hardly understands other languages. What can we do with that... Hb: use Linde's modeling in a slightly different way than Linde has. Imagine that each peak is the base of the next plateau--the next plane. Then the peaks in Linde's model may have some validity as a descriptions of the new emergent properties the cosmos produces on each plateau--sixteen peaks for sixteen different forms of particles, for example. Those particles are the first things, the first objects-- they maximize and minimize their forms and forces in the aggregations of protons and neutrons pulled together by the strong force, in the beta decay of neutrons that fail to aggregate, in the decay inflicted by the action of the weak force, in the turbulent properties of plasma flows and pressure waves, in collisions, and in temperature gradients. Then comes a new plateau--a new plane that begins above the peaks of scalding particle-soup and provides the base for the progression from plasma to atoms. The cosmos spreads out, slows down, and a new force appears--electromagnetic attraction and repulsion (forget the mathematical formulae in which this force preexists; they don't manifest themselves in a meaningful way until the universe has traveled to a point 300,000 to 380,000 years after the big bang). Three new optimization peaks in electromagnetic attraction appear as atoms (hydrogen, helium, and lithium). Once atoms emerge the cosmos reaches another plateau--the base or plane--of gravity. From that plane come many other peaks--whisps of gas, clouds of dust, galaxies, and finally stars. The metabolism of stars lays another base, another plane, from which emerge the optimization peaks and valleys of star deaths and of the compression of 89 new forms of atomic nuclei. This, in turn, lays a base whose optimization peaks include many a new form of molecule--and all the strange things those molecules get together and do, like make cells, live, and breathe. At 7 billion to eleven billion years after the big bang yet another new force appears--dark energy. We have yet to see what troughs and valleys this new plane produces, what new surprises lurk above us on the cosmic staircase or will soon be twisted in the cosmic weave. There you have your jumping cosmos--one that's quantal on the tiny level of Planck units and is quantal in a more wobbly way on the very large-scale of cosmic evolution and its hops upward from the emergence of one level of new forms and forces to another. Meanwhile, the model should be symmetrical--it should have one cosmos peaking and valleying above the surface of the plane and another below. One is the cosmos of ordinary matter. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Time runs forward on the ordinary matter upside and backward on the anti-matter downside. Then loop the far right hand edge of your graph paper around in a tube so it meets the far left hand edge of the graph paper. The cosmic graph moves in a circle. The end of the ordinary matter cosmos is the beginning of the anti-matter cosmos and vice versa. Or try Rob Kritkausky's suggestion. Join the right hand edge of the graph to the left hand edge of the graph, but first put in a twist, so the form is not that of a tube, it's the form of a Moebius strip. I haven't been able to visualize what this would do, but it's worth a bit of exploration. What does this all translate to mathematically? To what extent does it explain empirical reality? It should explain empirical fact pretty well--especially if you put it together toroidally. The toroid's hump takes care of dark energy. And the rest is based on the data astrophysics has been reeling in during the 50 years since Hoyle and Gamow postulated their steady state and big bang model. It also accounts for many of the new things we've seen in the decades since Guth first went to work on his magnetic monopoles (which seem to me like Ptolemaic epicycles--a false way to escape symmetry) and came up with inflationary theory. pk: (Saying "it is not smooth" or "it is not to be described through smooth gradients" is the same as saying to You "USA begin to introduce totalitar practices" - he will not discuss, he simply won't understand this meaningless (for him) set of words. - let me teaser a little ;) It's the whole another culture). hb: yes, I suspect it is. Or maybe it isn't. Optimization peaks can be useful in explaining why there are only sixteen (or 76, depending on how you're counting) different forms of elementary particles, 92 different forms of naturally occurring atoms, and can imply that there may be many new surprises ahead of us now that we have dark energy--if you turn the peaks into spikes on the plateaus of the stairway-to-heaven model I've sketched above. This is a stair-climbing cosmos. To me, the stairs are more important than the spikes along the way. Hac> I suspect that at the Planck scale the universe is gritty--or, more Hac> accurately, griddy. And I suspect it moves ahead one lurch at a time, working out the Hac> possibilities implicit in its initial rules. In that sense, I think Wolfram Hac> is right. Hac> Which means that Wolfram's tens of thousands of cellular automata toy Hac> universes, as limited as they may be, are more accurate representations of the Hac> fundamentals underlying cosmic evolution than are the ever-so-wonderful Hac> illustrations of scalar peaks in Linde's material. Yes, yes, yes! My 5. Hac> Now let me disagree with myself for a moment. Wow. Hac> The peaks presented in Linde's Hac> models can represent the big leaps-the saltations, the lurches from plasma to Hac> atoms, from atoms to galaxies, from gravitational galactic aggregations to a Hac> new metabolic crunch--the ignition of stars, from three forms of Hac> neutron-proton teams (hydrogen, helium and lithium) to 92, from atoms to complex, Hac> carbon-centered molecules, from molecules of roughly six or seven atoms to Hac> macromolecules-megacities of atoms-and from atom teams to molecular teams, the teams of Hac> cells, then from cells in colonies to trillions of cells in single Hac> mega-organisms, organisms like sponges, trilobytes, you and me. Then the leap to Hac> consciousness, imagination, passion, prophecy, poetry, science, and dreams. Linde's Hac> patterns can represent these saltations if we move across the emerging Hac> landscape, and if each peak leads to a plateau whose long plane of stability leads to Hac> the base of another peak. That is not what Linde's models represent. But they Hac> may be a stretch in that direction. So, You accept that the languages may differ. All ways lead to Allah. hb: yup. Almost all the tools we've ever devised, from the Stone Axe to the Aristotelian system have come in handy for something. Copernicus took Aristotle's perfect circles and rearranged them. Then Kepler stretched them out a bit and got rid of their perfection. But the dominance of circles in this cosmos still remains. Without Aristotle's circles, William Harvey would never have come up with the concept of blood circulation (see Carl Zimmer's upcoming book for his extraordinary analysis of this transition). Without Aristotle's taxononomy, Linaaeus would never have been able to devise his system. Without Linneaus, we'd never have had Erasmus Darwin, the Sunday botanist prowling for plants he could name as he wanted according to the Linnaean binomial nomenclature. Without Erasmus and the resurrection of Virgil's epic poetry, we'd never have had that great leap forward in evolutionary theory, Erasmus Darwin's rhyming epic of nature's course Zoonomia. And without Erasmus Darwin and his evolutionary and Linnaean obsessions, we'd have never had his grandson Charles' natural selection. So much as we think we've abandoned Aristotle, we still find his toolkit hidden in our scientific storage bin. And Virgil and Homer are in our scientific storage clutter with him. We still use hammers over two million years after their first invention, but today we make them of iron or steel. And we mount them on wooden handles. But the change is less than at first it seems. There's no use tossing out smooth systems like those of Linde and LaPlace. They just have to be taught not to tyrranize and monopolize. We need some choppy, jumpy, scalar systems, too. pk: Hac> I've downloaded the text describing Linde's theories--including his Hac> extraordinarily clear description of his work on his webpage Hac> (http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/) and his Scientific American article. I am now trying to download Hac> and insert the graphics. The graphics are the pictures of math I've been Hac> asking Paul for. But the files are huge and I'm not sure the digest on Linde I'm Hac> preparing for you will got through my email portal or yours. In fact, it just Hac> broke down my computer. pk: Please, stop! I can download them by myself now. Hac> Meanwhile, if you go to Linde's website, look at his model of symmetry Hac> breaking in the Higgs Model Hac> (http://physics.stanford.edu/linde/reheating/realbigandfast.gif). Imagine what you're seeing stretching in two directions from the Hac> flat plane-a caldera, a deeply-cratered peak--rising above the plane and another Hac> exactly the same bulging from the plane's underside. You'll see the beginning Hac> of a big bagel. Ok. Howard

 

The silly putty universe-where constants like the speed of light can change
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The following article on electrical signals moving four times the speed of light must mean something in an Einsteinian world, but what? Here's one tiny bit of interpretion that may aid in answering the question. In water-for example in the Atlantic Ocean--a wave travels hundreds of miles. But no individual water molecule takes that lengthy trip. An atom of water is caught up in a circular flow that recruits it to move with a herd of molecules mushing along in the same direction. That crowd rises, makes a temporary bump in the water's surface, then makes a temporary trough as the herd of water molecules circles back down to its starting point. An individual water molecule and its herd-mates may glide in a vertical circle that carries them a mere three feet or a mighty 80 feet-but this motion is nothing compared to the emergent property the contagion of this crowd phenomenon produces. As the circular motion is passed along from one molecular herd to another, this no-thing called a wave, this motion water-herds make, moves from somewhere in the mid-Atlantic to a beach in Virginia, Maine, or Carolina. The story below explains how Jeremy Munday and Bill Robertson at Middle Tennessee State University have persuaded a crowd of electrons to convey a message four times faster than the speed of light by using a similar system. They created a bunch of superimposed waves in a flow of electrons. No electron traveled faster than light speed. But the electron crowds were choreographed to pulse-to expand and shrink-much like the molecules of water in the sea. In the ocean, no water molecule moves more than 80 feet or so to make the longest-distance wave. In Munday and Robertson's coaxial cable, no electron traveled at more than its normal speed (about two-thirds the speed of light). But the long-distance wave motion that the short-distance herd motions of electrons produced was an emergent property that moved four times faster than the cosmos' fastest thing--a photon. Moral number one of this story--some emergent properties can break Einstein's cosmic speed limit. Some products of crowd-power can make the old laws of nature obsolete. But we are all the product of crowd power. Every entity in this universe is an emergent property. A proton is an emergent property produced by the aggregation of quarks and gluons. An atom is an emergent property produced by the marriage of protons, neutrons, and electrons. A galaxy is an emergent property produced by the mass attraction and perpetual gavotte of atoms. And you and I, with our brains that think, sense, and emote, are among the strangest emergent properties in the universe, emergent properties heaped upon each other like blankets in a warehouse…seething blankets, blankets of social activity. We are heaps of mated quarks, massed atoms, herds of molecules, flocks of dna and protein strings, not to mention the perpetual intermeshing between the 100 trillion cells that produce what we call we. The universe is constantly churning out new forms of herds, flocks, and highly organized mobs-new emergent properties. Munday and Robertson have now shown that crowd power can outpace a speed that nothing (in theory) can outrace. What strange law-breakers will reveal themselves when the next new products of crowd-power come along? Howard Retrieved September 17, 2002, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992796 Speed of light broken with basic lab kit 10:03 16 September 02 Charles Choi Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department. Scientists have sent light signals at faster-than-light speeds over the distances of a few metres for the last two decades - but only with the aid of complicated, expensive equipment. Now physicists at Middle Tennessee State University have broken that speed limit over distances of nearly 120 metres, using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $500. Jeremy Munday and Bill Robertson made a 120-metre-long cable by alternating six- to eight-metre-long lengths of two different kinds of coaxial cable, each with a different electrical resistance. They hooked this hybrid cable up to two signal generators, one of which broadcast a fast wave, the other a slow one. The waves interfere with each other to produce electric pulses, which can be watched using an oscilloscope. Any pulse, whether electrical, light or sound, can be imagined as a group of tiny intermingled waves. The energy of this "group pulse" rises and falls over space, with a peak in the middle. The different electrical resistances in the hybrid cable cause the waves in the pulse's rear to reflect off each other, accelerating the pulse's peak forward. Four billion km/h By using the oscilloscope to trace the pulse's strength and speed, the researchers confirmed they sent the signal's peak tunnelling through the cable at more than four billion kilometres per hour. "It really is basement science," Robertson said. The apparatus is so simple that Robertson once assembled the setup from scratch in 40 minutes. While the peak moves faster than light speed, the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein's relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon. Signals also get weaker and more distorted the faster they go, so in theory no useful information can get transmitted at faster-than-light speeds, though Robertson hopes his students and others can now rigorously and cheaply test those ideas. Physicist Alain Hache at the University of Moncton in Canada adds that it may be possible to use this reflection technique to boost electrical signal speeds in computers and telecommunications grids by more than 50 per cent. Electrons usually travel at about two-thirds of light speed in wires, slowed down as they bump into atoms. Hache says it may be possible to send usable electrical signals to near light speed. 10:03 16 September 02 Return to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
Everything you see or touch is an ephiphenomenon. At atom is an epiphenomenon of particles. A molecule is an epiphenomemon of atoms. You are an almost infinite series of epiphenomenon piled on top of each other, working inside of each other, ep-ing and phenomening for all they're worth. Would you cut off your finger for the crime of being merely an epiphenomenon of cells? If not, why cut off your mind? That's what we materialists do when we go whole-hog Skinnerian and deny the mind's existence or its reality. Howard >
In a message dated 9/18/2002 7:53:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time, jscottlewis writes: This is all quite interesting, but one might imply from the statement that we are an emergent property that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon. While some might be quite comfortable with that, most would find it rather disturbing. Where does the meaning of the individual (or the micro-social) psyche fit into the analogy? Just wondering aloud.
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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.)
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The music of the universe
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In a message dated 8/13/01 2:42:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time, emmanuel lusinchi writes: I have been pondering your question over the week-end and I have to admit I have no rock-solid answers but only a few more clues and tentative conclusions. The first clue is that the surface of a metal can be described as a plasma: a sea of electrons moving on top/in a flatbed of immobile ions. hb: this is amazing. but it still leaves the question in the air--as you've said. do the electrons float on a loose tether, still tied to the nuclei of their home atoms, but able to wobble? And do they feel the bump of an electron in a neighboring atom, then sling with the motion over to the neighbor on the other side and bump her in turn, thus propagating the motion, energy, and wave form of a current? Gilbert Ling's work on polarized water atoms seem to indicate that this is a distinct possibility. el: The second clue is that the speed of an electron in a metal is rather slow: only a couple of meters per second… You could actually outrace one! But we use electric lines to propagate signals at very high speed (as in phone-lines). So, what travel around at about the speed of light must be waves in the electron medium, not the electrons themselves. hb: aha! my guess as well. el: On a telegraph cable, we do not have to wait for an electron excited at one end to travel to the other side of the cable to deliver its signal… we just need to jiggle it and watch the wiggle propagates from one end to the other at much higher speed than the local motion of an electron. hb: sounds good to me. el: (Here are some analogies for Walter, on how something can travel by using slow or even immobile things: Think of a crowded room with people packed shoulders to shoulders: If you push someone next to you (which is a lot of fun), he won't move much -since the room is crowded- but will fall against someone next to him, etc... hb: we are thinking in parallel--our thoughts are propagating in a wave form very much like the electron bobbling (more properly, an electron oscillation propagated through a crowd--a ripple on the surface of the electron mob, like the waving of placards in unison in a football stadium, many small wobbles doth a big joggle make--a current is an emergent property--it's mass behavior big-time, but ironically on a micro-scale.) But I digress. Back to your superb analogies. el: until the 'push' is transmitted like a wave. The speed of the wave is not related to the speed of motion of the people in the room (or electron in the plasma) but to the speed at which an interaction can be propagated from one person/electron to the next… hb: but wouldn't that depend on the speed of an electron's movement as it humps from one side of it's shell to another? And it does lump and hump--or at least that's the implication of Gilbert Ling's theories. Gilbert, by the way, is the only scientist I've ever met who is a master of physics, biochemistry, and cell biology. It's a potent combination. And it's led to a potent product--the whole body NMR scanner--which is based on Gilbert's theories. So though Gilbert is considered a scientific heretic who officially disappeared from respectability in the late '60s or so, I suspect he knows a good deal more than the politically motivated theorists who elbowed him out of the limelight. Knowledge propagates in generation-waves. What has been suppressed often surfaces then climbs the heights again. It rises once the age-cohort that submerged it has disappeared. Gilbert's time is coming once again--hopefully while he's alive to enjoy the triumph. el: Another good analogy is falling dominoes hb: yes, wonderful. el: like we see at these dominoes competition… Each domino in the long sequence hardly moves more than a few millimeters as it falls against its neighbors but the wave of falling dominoes races at great speed across the room. There is also the 'wave' people do in stadium. Each spectator stays in his own sit, but the wave itself races around the stadium. The speed of the wave is related to how fast each person transmits it (getting up from his sit, raising his hands above his head and sitting back) not to the speed of people in the stadium (since everyone is actually staying at the same place). hb: we are waving in synchrony, Emmanuel. el: Now, this does not means that our electrons are sitting still. Indeed, we measure what we call the electric current, which is by definition the motion of charge (electron) per time unit. hb: yes, yes, very good. el: So, two aspects are relevant: the propagation of waves in the sea of electrons and the motion of the electron themselves. Exactly like a sea of water molecules, with traveling waves and currents. But, and this is the third clue, we use strange currents indeed. Currents that flow in one way, change direction and change again, 60 times per second (we call this Alternative Currents, or AC). hb: yes, so theoretically AC must take advantage of the pendulous swing of the electron. every action has an equal and opposite reaction. once it's rubber-banded its shell and stretched it outward the electron must snap back again. presumably dc current goes against this boinging sway. this may be why Edison's DC could only travel short distances and would have demanded a power plant every few city blocks or so. DC only took advantage of the electron's bounce in one direction, then went against the grain of the counter-bounce. DC swung but didn't sway. Meanwhile Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse's AC current could be transmitted hundreds of miles. AC, I'd guess, takes advantage of the slinging back and forth of an electron's mass within the cloudy sphere of its shell. When in pendulum-land, pendulate. In this cosmos, most things round discover they must oscillate. This oscillation of what's round, the gathering in that makes a circle, then the pushing out that makes it bud, the switch from attraction toward a center to a push to escape the boundaries then cling, is what we see at work in a Mandelbrot set when it's portrayed visually. It also appears in galaxies, stars, and living cells when they divide. The swing and sway of circular stuff, its urge to gather and to escape, its attraction and repulsion are nearly everywhere we gape. If you want to see a visual treatment of this theme, tracing the swing and sway, the urge to merge then separate, from the Big Bang to the romantic glow and insecurity of human beings, go to http://www.howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion/. The key refrain in this mini-opus of science dance, science song, and science poetry goes like this: Love and the birth of a universe, What are they all about? Attraction and repulsion. The gathering in. The pushing to get out. The binding of atoms. The breaking of hearts. The needs that bring us together, The needs that tear us apart. A former member of our group, Timothy Perper, once warned me not to "do science with poetry." Having observed the rhythms of this universe, poetry now seems to me a very good way to do science indeed. The universe began, I believe, with attraction and repulsion, opposites wedded as if in a rubber band. Begin with a circle, then break out, then condense in a circle again. It started with oscillation, alternation, with a wave. Yes, the early universe, like electrons, sung, danced, iterated, rhymed, it swung, and swayed. The Big Bang--in its plasma form-- literally rang like a bell, resounding with the sound of pressure waves. Music rocked the baby cosmos in its tides. el: Why we uses AC currents rather than DC currents (Direct Current: current flowing only in one way) has to do with safety reasons, efficiency and a bit of history and politic, but that's another story! With AC currents, electrons do not get much chance to travel far: it's all: rush this way then rush back the other way and every 1/60 second, it more or less comes back where it was before. Maybe the electron sometimes takes some rest and merges back with an ion on the sea floor… but it would then be on the top orbit of the atom and would probably eventually get back into the sea, to resume its back and forth travel. hb: wonderful observation. el: Also, fourth clue, we use transformers to convert very high voltage electricity into the low (110V) voltage we use for household appliances. In a transformer, two sets of loop influence each other without touching. This is the phenomenon of induction, of course. Howard described the experience with one set of metal loops and a moving magnet. Moving the magnet will create electricity in the loop. Also, having an electric current in the loop will move the magnet. But if we now have two sets of loops, physically unconnected, instead of a loop and a magnet, circulating current in one will create a current in the other. By having different number of loops in each set, we can manipulate the properties of the current: hb: amazing. you've just made clear a mystery. el: for example having high voltage current in one set of loop induces a lower voltage current into the other. An electron from one circuit will not travel to the other. Our low voltage electron stays around in the local electric grid. This further restricts the traveling of our electrons! It seems to me that the best travel opportunity for an electron is to either go back inside the Earth, where it can get redistributed in many ways, or to jump and merge with something going places (a car, a plane, people) On an old TV set, static electricity builds up on the screen. These TVs work with electron-guns, shouting electrons at the screen. hb: superb verb, Emmanuel--shouting. el: Some of these electrons just stay around, refusing to let go of the screen surface. If I move my hand close to the screen, the fine hair of my hand and arm stand-up. If I touch the monitor, I can feel a small shock as these stray electrons jump from the screen to me, and race to the ground through my body. hb: but do they race, or do they simply set a wave flowing through the loosely tethered electrons of your body? Do they merely bob the mob a bit? el: If there was too many of these electrons, they would create permanent -even lethal- damage on their way… but with only the few stray electrons on the TV screen, it's just a mild shock. Most of the electrons escape right into the Earth, but some must also become part of myself, following me in my trips around the world. Now, to raise a little caution flag on the answers above, I do not know if we would use AC or DC currents in a superconductor-based electric grid. Also, I have some doubts on the high voltage electric lines that crisscross the country... Are those AC or DC or triphase or some other mode yet? All these factors would change the travel potential of our electrons... hb: I am quite certain the long-distance currents are all AC. That was Westinghouse and Tesla's gift to modernity. (Among many--they were a creative team, the creativity flowing between them like electrons bouncing in their shell and causing a close companion to bounce as well. This form of creativity is one we all feel when in the presence of a colleague who vibrates to our frequency.) As for the flow of electrons in superconductors, if they are sent down a DC straightaway they can't handle the linear motion and literally begin to stray. They swirl to the left and swirl to the right, setting up whirls of turbulence on either side of what the researchers would prefer to straighten. They insist on oscillation. They insist on circularity. Take a look at a Mandelbrot set some time. One in motion, not one standing still. You'll see what I believe is a fundamental rule of this universe at work: "gather in a circle around a central point (attraction), then bud but don't quite separate (repulsion), then gather in your newness once again." Circle/oscillate. This pattern produces what look like straight lines, but on close inspection aren't. They wriggle back and forth, oscillating on a straight path like a snake. The last time I looked, researchers in superconductivity were trying to beat or cheat this pattern by making electrons zip the quickest way between two points--to travel in straight lines, to listen up, race quickly, and obey. Electrons, damn their little souls, circled back, they strayed. Perhaps like Westinghouse, the researchers should go with nature, let electrons be themselves, take advantage of the circling and be satisfied with waves. Howard ps Emmanuel has had an excellent idea. He's tried to visualize his concepts so clearly that Walter The Wonder, a ten-year-old marvel, can understand them. One of the goals of the International Paleopsychology Project has been to help brilliant thinkers-multi-disciplinary discoverers-express themselves so clearly that their ideas can penetrate the public consciousness and alter in some small way the manner in which our culture perceives. Addressing material to Walter is an excellent way to proceed. Pps In the process of pursuing the goal of writing new ideas in clear and sparkling prose, we've produced two books-Bill Benzon's upcoming Beethoven's Anvil (on the evolutionary and neurobiological roots of ecstatic musical experience-Basic Books is the publisher); and John Skoyles' and Dorion Sagan's Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence (McGraw Hill). We will produce more as we proceed. -------- a bit of backup material-- | | electricity Direct electric current Basic phenomena and principles Many electric phenomena occur under what is termed steady-state conditions. This means that such electric quantities as current, voltage, and charge distributions are not affected by the passage of time. For instance, because the current through a filament inside a car headlight does not change with time, the brightness of the headlight remains constant. An example of a nonsteady-state situation is the flow of charge between two conductors that are connected by a thin conducting wire and that initially have an equal but opposite charge. As current flows from the positively charged conductor to the negatively charged one, the charges on both conductors decrease with time, as does the potential difference between the conductors. The current therefore also decreases with time and eventually ceases when the conductors are discharged. In an electric circuit under steady-state conditions, the flow of charge does not change with time and the charge distribution stays the same. Since charge flows from one location to another, there must be some mechanism to keep the charge distribution constant. In turn, the values of the electric potentials remain unaltered with time. Any device capable of keeping the potentials of electrodes unchanged as charge flows from one electrode to another is called a source of electromotive force, or simply an emf. Figure 12 shows a wire made of a conducting material such as copper. By some external means, an electric field is established inside the wire in a direction along its length. The electrons that are free to move will gain some speed. Since they have a negative charge, they move in the direction opposite that of the electric field. The current i is defined to have a positive value in the direction of flow of positive charges. If the moving charges that constitute the current i in a wire are electrons, the current is a positive number when it is in a direction opposite to the motion of the negatively charged electrons. (If the direction of motion of the electrons were also chosen to be the direction of a current, the current would have a negative value.) The current is the amount of charge crossing a plane transverse to the wire per unit time--i.e., in a period of one second. If there are n free particles of charge q per unit volume with average velocity v and the cross-sectional area of the wire is A, the current i, in elementary calculus notation, is where dQ is the amount of charge that crosses the plane in a time interval dt. The unit of current is the ampere (A); one ampere equals one coulomb per second. A useful quantity related to the flow of charge is current density, the flow of current per unit area. Symbolized by J, it has a magnitude of i/A and is measured in amperes per square metre. Wires of different materials have different current densities for a given value of the electric field E; for many materials, the current density is directly proportional to the electric field. This behaviour is represented by Ohm's law: The proportionality constant J is the conductivity of the material. In a metallic conductor, the charge carriers are electrons and, under the influence of an external electric field, they acquire some average drift velocity in the direction opposite the field. In conductors of this variety, the drift velocity is limited by collisions, which heat the conductor. If the wire in Figure 12 has a length l and area A and if an electric potential difference of V is maintained between the ends of the wire, a current i will flow in the wire. The electric field E in the wire has a magnitude V/l. The equation for the current, using Ohm's law, is or The quantity l/JA, which depends on both the shape and material of the wire, is called the resistance R of the wire. Resistance is measured in ohms (). The equation for resistance, is often written as where is the resistivity of the material and is simply 1/J. The geometric aspects of resistance in equation (20) are easy to appreciate: the longer the wire, the greater the resistance to the flow of charge. A greater cross-sectional area results in a smaller resistance to the flow. The resistive strain gauge is an important application of equation (20). Strain, l/l, is the fractional change in the length of a body under stress, where l is the change of length and l is the length. The strain gauge consists of a thin wire or narrow strip of a metallic conductor such as constantan, an alloy of nickel and copper. A strain changes the resistance because the length, area, and resistivity of the conductor change. In constantan, the fractional change in resistance R/R is directly proportional to the strain with a proportionality constant of approximately 2. A common form of Ohm's law is where V is the potential difference in volts between the two ends of an element with an electric resistance of R ohms and where i is the current through that element. Table 2 lists the resistivities of certain materials at room temperature. These values depend to some extent on temperature; therefore, in applications where the temperature is very different from room temperature, the proper values of resistivities must be used to calculate the resistance. As an example, equation (20) shows that a copper wire 59 metres long and with a cross-sectional area of one square millimetre has an electric resistance of one ohm at room temperature. | | To cite this page: "electricity" Encyclopædia Britannica Online. <http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?eu=108498&sctn=1&pm=1> [Accessed 15 August 2001]. Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Steve Goldberg refers to a New York Times article on string theory and asks, "doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc? "

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:


The NY Times Tuesday Science Section had a lead article on string theory
(which now introduces "branes" to overcome problems of mathematics and
explanatory power).

I'm sorry T can't provide the article; I don't have a scanner (keep meaning
to get one). However, it was no doubt reprinted in other papers and is, I
imagine, available on the Times web site.

Question: I don't doubt that the theory is mathematically beautiful, even if,
to this point, entirely untested and, possibly, intestable in practice.

But doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?

Best,

Steve Goldberg
>>
New York Times April 4, 2000, Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring Theory By GEORGE JOHNSON For a quarter of a century, superstring theory has promised that the universe could be understood more deeply than ever before, with all the forces unified into one, if it were seen in a startling new light -- 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. But despite heroic efforts to keep this strange vision alive, with one mathematical embellishment after another, a seemingly fatal credibility problem has remained: no one has been able to figure out how to test the idea with experiments. To give the strings enough wiggle room to carry out their virtuoso performance, theorists have had to supplement the familiar three dimensions of space with six more -- curled up so tiny that they would be explorable only with absurdly high-powered particle accelerators the size of an entire galaxy. It's a fact of life on the subatomic realm that smaller and smaller distances take higher and higher energies to probe. In the last few months, however, new ideas emerging from the theoretical workshops offer some hope of connecting the airy speculations to reality. Physicists are proposing a revised view in which at least one of the extra dimensions is vastly larger -- large enough perhaps to be indirectly detected with existing accelerators. "This is a field day for the experimenters," said Dr. Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. "Now there are all these things they can look for." In fact, he ventured, it is conceivable that experimenters have already found subtle hints of other dimensions. They just have had no way of appreciating what they were seeing. Though human brains are not wired to picture a world beyond the familiar three dimensions of space, one can begin to overcome this myopia by pretending to be antlike creatures in a two-dimensional fantasy world like the one in Edwin A. Abbott's story "Flatland." Confined to the surface of a plane, the Flatlanders can move left and right or forward or backward, but the idea of up and down is inconceivable to them. Now suppose this two-dimensional world were rolled into a long tube. The Flatlanders could still move in only two directions -- along or around the outside surface of their soda straw universe. But if the diameter of the straw were made extremely tiny, this second, curled-up dimension would essentially disappear. It has long been assumed that if, as required by superstring theory, our own world is accompanied by additional dimensions, they too would have to be extremely tiny, curled up smaller than what physicists call the Planck length, which is a hundred million trillion times smaller than the width of a proton. To every point in space would be attached a vanishingly tiny six-dimensional ball. But the price for curling up the extra dimensions and tucking them out of sight has been rendering superstring theory untestable. The subatomic realm is explored by smashing together particles with powerful accelerators and then studying the debris. Peeking below the Planck scale would require collisions of unimaginable energies. "For the first 25 years, the thinking has been that superstring theory is so difficult to see experimentally that you have to figure it out by its own mathematical consistency and beauty," Dr. Lykken said. "Now that's completely changed. If this new picture is true, it makes everything we've been talking about testable." But the result is a picture of reality that is no less weird than before. Imagine again the two-dimensional realm of Flatland. Suppose now that it is surrounded by an infinitely large, three-dimensional "hyperspace." And maybe there are also other Flatlands floating around inside the third dimension -- parallel universes separated by what to these two-dimensional denizens would be an uncrossable void. Take this vision and move up an extra dimension and you arrive at the theory that is currently causing all the intellectual commotion. Dr. Lisa Randall of Princeton University and Dr. Raman Sundrum of Stanford University suggest that what we think of as The Universe may be just one of many islands -- three-dimensional versions of Flatland -- floating inside a surrounding megaverse with four spatial dimensions. Each ruled by different laws of physics, the various island universes would be inaccessible to one another. But the tantalizing prospect exists that each would be able to barely sense the other's presence through the weak tug of its gravitational pull. The idea may be easy to dismiss as absurd. But in return for a suspension of disbelief, the new theories suggest answers to some of the biggest riddles of physics. Cosmologists have inferred that as much as 90 percent of the universe must be made from invisible matter that emits or absorbs no light, that is evident only through its gravity. But what is the source of this mysterious dark matter? Maybe it is just ordinary matter trapped on another island universe, with its gravity but not its light able to cross the fourth-dimensional divide. Most significant of all, the new theory could be a step toward the goal of embracing all of physics with one grand picture -- a vision that unites the reigning theory of gravity, Einstein's general relativity, with the Standard Model, which describes electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Theorists have discovered that it is possible to bring about this merger -- on paper, anyway -- if each kind of particle making up the universe is described as a different note produced by tiny superstrings vibrating in nine-dimensional space. This picture includes matter-making particles like the proton and neutron (components of the cores of atoms) and force-carrying particles like the photon (the conveyor of light) and the graviton (the conveyor of gravity). As the unification quest has forged ahead, physicists have found it necessary to expand superstring theory to include vibrating membranes -- called branes for short. These are not just two-dimensional surfaces, like the skin of a drum or the world of the Flatlanders. Hard as it may be to picture, there can be branes with three, four, five or more dimensions. These "surfaces" can be tiny like the strings but they can also span across light-years. What this additional filigree offers is a novel way to hide extra dimensions without making them extremely small. Suppose that our entire universe is a three-dimensional brane (think of it as a bubble) floating inside the four-dimensional megaverse. The reason we cannot explore the surroundings of hyperspace or even sense its existence is that the strings that make up everything in our own world are stuck solidly to the surface of the gargantuan home brane, like ants on a sheet of paper confined to move in only a limited number of directions. We cannot peer into the extra dimension because photons, the carriers of light, are also anchored solidly to our home brane. Several people had toyed with this idea, but they kept running into an obstacle: there did not appear to be any way to get gravitons to stick to the brane. That would create a big problem: It can be shown mathematically that if gravity were allowed to roam throughout all four dimensions, it would be much stronger than the gravity experienced in this three-dimensional realm. "This would clash with everything we've observed, from the motion of the planets to that of climbers falling off cliffs," said Dr. Steve Giddings, a theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum's theoretical coup was to show that if the hyperspace was curved in just the right manner, the gravitons could be kept from escaping and becoming unreasonably strong. With that hole plugged, the possibility arises that there are other brane worlds floating out there too, neighboring islands separated by this higher dimensional void. And that suggests how dark matter could simply be regular matter waving to us from another brane. While its photons could move only along the surface of the foreign brane, the gravitons would not be so tightly confined. They could seep across the fourth-dimensional divide. Thus we could dimly feel the matter's gravity without being able to see its light. The theory also suggests why dark matter tends to be found in the halos around galaxies. Because of gravitational attraction, large masses on the other brane would tend to line up with large masses on our home brane. Sitting behind a galaxy in this universe, separated by the void of hyperspace, would be a dark galaxy in the other brane world. Because most of it would be occluded, its gravity would be apparent only around the edges. Conversely, luminous matter on this brane would be dark to observers in the other universe. "We'd look mutually dark to each other," Dr. Sundrum said. "We could only talk through the gravitational force." That would require signaling somehow with gravity waves. Unlike many of physics' far-out theories, the idea of a large extra dimension may be possible to test indirectly. Since gravitons are not so tightly confined as the other particles, sometimes they will stray into the surrounding hyperspace, becoming heavier than the ordinary variety. According to the theorists' calculations, it just may be possible to create momentarily these denizens of the fourth dimension using the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, where protons are slammed into antiprotons to produce energies measured in trillions of electron-volts. Physicists would not be able to detect heavy gravitons directly -- they would immediately fly off into the higher dimension -- but their existence might be inferred. Energy going into a particle collision must equal the energy coming out. If some is missing and all other possibilities are accounted for, physicists could surmise that the energy was spirited away by the heavy gravitons, carried off into hyperspace. In fact, it might be possible to concentrate so many heavy gravitons into a tiny volume of space that they would collapse in on themselves and create miniature black holes, those cosmic sinkholes from which nothing can escape. Experiments like this will be on the agenda when the Large Hadron Collider begins operation in five or six years at the CERN accelerator center in Geneva. "These black holes should be quite safe," Dr. Giddings said, for they would rapidly evaporate. The intellectual fun may be only beginning. Combining the Randall and Sundrum theory with a conjecture made a couple of years ago by a young Argentinian physicist, Dr. Juan Maldacena, yields the latest big idea: the physics governing the particles stuck to this brane might be a kind of shadow of a more fundamental physics prevailing in the surrounding megaverse. In laser holography, a three-dimensional image is encoded onto a two-dimensional surface. Viewed at the proper angle, the third dimension seems magically to pop out. So think of each separate brane world as a hologram carrying a flattened version of the Truly Universal Laws. Each would capture the view from a slightly different perspective, resulting in different universes ruled by different laws of physics. What denizens of this universe call the Standard Model would not be standard at all, but more like a book of local traffic laws. Viewed from the fourth dimension, however, universality would prevail. If they were clever enough, scientists on each brane world could deduce the same overarching law of gravity, the lingua franca of the megaverse. As they await the data that will provide a reality check, the physicists on this brane are enjoying their new intellectual toy. "We can look at any question we were previously mystified by and get a new handle on it," Dr. Lykken said. "That doesn't mean this is right, but it makes theorists very happy." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

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the sun. Then MAP will settle down to capturing microwave photons that have been traveling for about 13 billion years, almost since the beginning of time. For its first 300,000 years, the universe was a hot cauldron ofprotons, electrons, and other charged particles. Light coul&t travel far in this boiling subatomic stew before it bounced off some electron, just as light inside a cloud scatters off droplets of water. The early universe would have looked rather like a thick fog bank-opaque. But after 300,000 years, it cooled off enough to undergo a profound change: Electrons settled down and combined with protons to form hydrogen, which is transparent. Once the fog dispersed, photons traveled freely throughout the universe. Those photons -light from the dawn of creation-bathe us here on Earth; about 400 of them fill every cubic centimeter. If you use an antenna for television reception instead of cable, photons from the cosmic microwave background cause some of the snow on your television screen. Lyman Page likes to call that radiation "the universe's baby picture." m" will study that image in unprecedented detail. For its Survey, COBF divided the sky into about 6,ooo patches, each about as large as 400 fiffl moons. mAp will look at more than 3 million patches, each less than a quarter the size of moon. If coBE glimpsed God, mAp will see the deity's fmg!e@- prints. Cosmologists expect many of their answers to come from an echo frozen in the microwave background. As strange as it may seem, cosmologists believe that before the primbr- dial fog cleared, before light could travel unhindered throli& space, sound waves reverberated freely throughout the universe. The sound waves may have originated in the first instant of the universe's life, when the cosmos underwent an extra- ordinary expansion. In fact, some astronomers would rather call the Big Bang the "Big Stretch." Within a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, a region of space smaller than a proton is thought to have ballooned to the size of Earth. Cosmologists refer to this extraordinary growth as inflation. No one really knows what drove it, but by stretch- ing the very fabric of space, it magnified a weird subatomic phenomenon that is today detectable only in the careful ex- periments of particle physicists: the spontaneous material- ization of particles from a complete vacuum. Vacuum-spawned particles are constantly flickering in and out of existence around us, arising from and sinking back into the void. During inflation, this process, Uc everything else in the universe, was magnified mmendously.'Me rapidly expanding early universe imparted enough energy to these particle wannabes that instead of quickly subsiding into the vacuum, they remained in the real world. The sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like a stone thrown into the dense particle pond of the early universe, sending out ripples -pressure waves. And pressure waves through a gas are nothing more than sound waves. The en- Ltire universe rang like a bell. THOSE REVERBERATIONS WERE ABRUPTLY SILENCED 13 billion years ago, when the universe became transpar- ent. Once photons were traveling freely through space, there was no longer enough pressure to support the sound waves. But before fading forever, those echoes of creation had left their mark on the cosmic microwave background. When sound waves were still spreading through the uni- verse, they compressed the particle soup in some regions of the cosmos and rarefied it in others. Pressure changes cause temperature changes -increase the pressure in a gas and the temperature increases. Microwave photons com- ing from these various regions have slightly different tem- peratures. By looking at temperature patterns in the microwave background, MAP Will give researchers the in- formation needed to reconstruct the precise size and shape of the primordial sound waves. The temperature patterns show the universe just as it was when the particle fog- and the sound waves -vanished. "It's almost like you had waves propagating in a pond, and all of a sudden the pond froze and the pattern ofwaves stayed there says Hinshaw. "We're capturing that-' a snapshot of the time when the universe became transparent." The single most important thing the sound waves will re- veal is the amount of matter present in the universe. If there is a Holy Grail for cosmologists, this is it. Whether the uni- verse will expand forever, or collapse back onto itself in a fiery "Big Crunch," depends on how much matter it holds. With sufficient matter, gravity could slow down or even re- verse the expansion. With too little matter, and thus too lit- tle gravity, the expansion will never end; galaxies will gradually sputter out until the entire universe darkens. Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice." mAp could settle the issue. Cosmologists have struggled for decades to measure the matter in the universe. They've tried to infer it by carefully studying the motions of galaxies and calculating how much matter and gravity would be necessary to produce the ob- served movements. Their calculations show that visible mat- ter- stars and galaxies - accounts for less than zo percent of the required gravity. The rest is attributed to an unknown entity that cosmologists call dark matter. MAP will discover not only the total amount of matter but how much of it is in the form of dark matter. One of the paradoxes of the early universe,*that it is so easy to describe, says Charles Bennett. Si@@ the physics of sound waves are very well understood, cosmologists don't need much more than freshman phocs to model the phe- nomena mAp will be studying.just as a wave traveling through viscous oil will have a different size and shape than one mov- ing through water, so will the composition of the early uni- verse strictly define the size and shape of the sound waves measured by mAp. Bylooking at the shape of the waves, cos- mologists will know how much matter the universe contains, and thus its fate -fire or ice. mAp should also give cosmologists their best v@lues for a number of other quantities, including the Ifubble constant, which indicates how fast the universe is expanding. An accu- rate fix on the expansion rate will make it possible to gauge how long it took the universe to reach its present size. Know- ing the expansion rate and matter density will allow them to establish the age of the universe. Of course, there's always the possibility that mAp won@t find the evidence they expect to find of sound waves, meaning the theory cosmologists have relied on for the past few decades to explain the universe- inflation- is somehow wrong. "It may be that the universe will have the last laugh and that none of the models will come close to fitting the MAP data," says Neil Cornish, a 32-year-old cosmologist at Mon- tana State University in Bozeman. 'Then we'll be back to the drawing board." The odds, however, are better than even that mAp will detect the sound waves. In fact, Page and his colleague Aluk Devlin reported last fall that they had already found some tantalizing traces in ground-based observations. The string of MAPs potential discoveries will satisfy most cosmologists, but not a team of three astrophysicists and one mathematician. The four men, only one of whom is of- ficiaffy on the mAp team, have devised a scheme to use MAPs data to work out the overall geometric shape of the universe. ON THE DOOR OF DAVID SPERGEUS OFFICE AT PRINCETON, a cartoon clipped from The New Yorker shows a close-up of a city sidewalk, with a fire hydrant and sewer grating. The caption reads: "The MilkyWay (Detail)." Spergel, who has just returned from dropping his son off at school, is ex- plaining why he has problems with an infinite universe. "In an infinite volume, eventually I can find a patch in which the atoms are arranged just the way we see them here in my office. We could be having this conversation an infuiite num- ber of times. So a truly infinite universe is strange." The alternative is no less strange. "In a finite universe," article on Big Bang and new space probe designed to explore it DISCOVER MAY 2000 49

 

Information
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An information theory of the universe--sounds intriguing. Can you sum it up--or send me a few paragraphs via email from your manuscripts that give the gist? Problem is, the standard interpretation of information theory has to do with order, entropy, signal-to-noise ratio, and the wiggle room in a flow of whatever is flowing. To me information is social connection...it's a signal sent by a sender that a receiver can understand. The interaction between an electron and a proton is social, by this definition, and the electrical fields that attract the two are information--stimulus that leads to a response. This cosmos is pulsing with flows of all kinds--from floods of photons to floods of particles and flows of larger forces like gravity and magnetism. Many of these flows can be interpreted by receivers--particles trapped in a gravity flow for example. Then there's the human aspect of things. As we evolve culturally, we intepret more and more tides adrift in the cosmos as meaningful--from the days when men made up myths about the origins of the constellations to today's interpretations of the background radiation and the particle emissions from novas. So is there more information in the universe when more things and beings involve who can interpret what was once chaff, flack, and cosmic garbage? Howard In a message dated 3/11/2003 7:51:14 PM Eastern Standard Time, grbear writes: Its from Bits is the name John A. Wheeler has given to this fledgling information theory approach to physics.I created my own take on this for MOVING MARS, ANVIL OF STARS, and HEADS. Paul may know more about it than I do, on a formal basis; the only text I know of has since apparently been superseded, and that is INFORMATION MECHANICS by Frederick Kantor. Ed Fredkin and David Deutsch are other pioneers, I believe.
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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
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In a message dated 99?07?24 06:44:58 EDT, benJacob writes:

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
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Paul werbos 6/13/2003 "I have argued that causation is information transmission. Actually, I am glad that you brought its importance to my attention."
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In a message dated 99?07?24 15:18:07 EDT, steen writes:

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
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Subj: Re: Information,Knowladge and meaning Date: 99?07?24 22:55:07 EDT From: (Stephen Springette) Sender: owner?paleopsych To: (Francis F. Steen) CC: paleopsych

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

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Newton's Laws of Emotion: http://opera.iinet.net.au/~tramont/biosem.html There can be no complexity without simplicity

Stephen Springette ______________________________________________
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In a message dated 99?07?25 00:55:20 EDT, dberreby writes:

<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
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Here are a few more musings on Eshel's information question. If information is in the eye of the beholders and if those bits of evolutionary fluff called human beings are constantly learning to interpret as information that twhich to them was formerly incomprehensible, this would mean the amount of information in the universe is constantly increasing. Even if there were no humans, this would be true. Carbon is a relative latecomer in the universe's history. Before carbon, many molecules hung out on cosmic street corners wondering what the heck to do with themselves. Once carbon came into being, lots of those lazing molecules were able to see the information in carbon and act on it enthusiastically, attaching themselves in such a plethora of ways that we humans are still discovering new combinations and permutations which are carbon?based (bucky?ball tubules to choose a recent example). Which leaves us with a question??how is it that the universe manages to continually cough out fresh sources of information, that is, fresh material for new interpretations? How is it that the amount of information in the universe is always on the increase? And how does this relate to yet another mystery??the universe's constant generation of new forms and higher complexities? How does the universe make something from nothing, thus denying the rules of physics in several fundamental ways?If this happens through loops and kinks in the gradient of entropy, as Dorion Sagan has said, this would imply, as Dorion's last posting did, that we started off in the Big Bang with enough energy from which to create an ever unfolding universe. But how and why does the energy get snagged in its downslide from its first Grand Flash? Saying that such dissipative structures as grass and goldfish handle the problem is cheating. How is it that these particular forms of snarls in the descending energy gradient came to be? Why have any dissipative kinks at all? And what has determined the form these snags should take?Which leads us back to the question of what form and complexity are once we leave the observer out of the equation. Sally Goerner once tried to define form and complexity, if memory serves correctly, in terms of the intricacy with which information is harvested and processed. But there's a trick to intricacy. In engineering and mathematics there's the principle of elegance. The more elegant a solution, the more it is able to explain with the smallest number of statements. That is, elegance is the solution of the knottiest problems in the simplest terms.In terms of information, this would mean that the more elements of potential information a system translates with the most efficiency the more elegant that system would be. But doesn't this mean that elegance expands the scope of what it can interpret while decreasing the information it extracts? This would be true if information were defined as the number of actions an interpreter extracts from a unit of data. Sum up a great deal in a simple equation, like E=mc(2), and you can make just a handful of gestures with chalk and blackboard in response to a vast variety of inputs. Perhaps, then, information can sometimes be measured as the greatest number of actions produced by the fewest inputs. And sometimes it can be measured in the opposite manner entirely??the fewest number of actions needed to interpret the greatest number of inputs.A conversation with Eshel this afternoon convinced me that in these questions may lie the base of a new physics, one which is naturally wedded to biology in a manner previously impossible. In short, the answers to questions like these may finally allow us to comprehend scientifically why this is an ascending universe rather than one descending to entropy.The real glitch is that in the formulations we've discussed so far, even the reaction of two quarks has been reduced to epistemology. To put it differently, interpretation and information start with the first 10(?32) of the universe. Or did meaning enter enter in the time before the Big Bang when Guth's vacuum seethed with instantly dissolving entities? Howard


Val--if you combine what's below with your observation in Life Strategies that all signalling systems in mammals come down to either a come-hither or a go-away, more intriguing material emerges. Signalling is another early cosmic mechanism. It showed up when an up and down quarks met during the first second after the Big Bang and, via the strong nuclear force, called to each other and understood each others' beckonings, or when two up quarks flashed each other messages which sent them scurrying apart. Protons and neutrons sent similar attraction and repulsion signals to each other 3.5 minutes later, thus using the simple language of the strong force to group as separate nuclei. (Had they all given recruitment whistles and no repulsion cues, the cosmos might have ended up as one big blob of adhering particles, thus annihilating itself in the sucking soundlessness of a Black Hole.) A million years later, when the tumult died down, electrons would be lured by the siren calls of proton/neutron groups, and through these songs the dance of atoms would begin. Then in the bellies of dying suns nuclei would be compressed into yet larger clusters. Yet the chorus of attraction and repulsion would allow only 109 minisymphonies--and would rule out the myriad of other possibilities. The weave would leave a mere 109 forms of atom (we call them elements) in a universe whose possible nucleic combinations could, without the music of attraction and repulsion, have approached infinity. Underneath it all would be the sultry whisperings of galaxies, stars, planets, and moons, speaking the seductive pull of gravity. Meanwhile the croons and hisses of electrons would coax atoms into molecules, then complicate things with romance and betrayal, the attraction and repulsion known as chemistry. Comfily paired hydrogen atoms would abandon their partners when lured by the lusty syllables of iron-atom gangs. Group signaling would grow so strong that they'd result in kidnappings. Fifteen CO2 atoms would cluster around a bromine molecule (Br2), but the bromine would not hear the call of the carbon dioxide as a welcome. The cage of carboniferous collaborators would continue the capture until a particle of light dislodged one of the bromine atom's molecules, thus setting off a chain of new couplings which would lead to the bromine's getaway.

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
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Alan H. Guth. The Inflationary Universe:the quest for a new theory of cosmic origins. Reading, MA: Perseus Books: 95-98.
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