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more ============================================================================ Darwinian competition among Big Bangs In a message dated 99?08?08 00:32:32 EDT, Val Geist writes: Subj: Re: address Date: 99?08?08 00:32:32 EDT To: HBloomDear Howard,Thank you very much for sending me kent's e?mail address. The paper on urban wildlife is on its way to him. Yes, physisists are stirring up interesting "matter"! I am certain your trip into black hole territory was fun and insightful. hb: the most interesting
thing about it is that once you realize a galaxy has a nucleus, and
often a highly active one at that, its resemblance to dynamic structures
we know in biology begins to pop out at you. By the way, though evolutionary
theorists feel that the use of the word evolution in conjunction with
non?living matter is absurdly wrong?headed, astrophysicists use the
term constantly in referring to the life, death, and new birth from
the ashes of stars. The physicist Lee Smolin has even come up with a
Darwinian notion of cosmology. His concept is that universes of a type
able to pop from false vacuums into being and to hang in there for a
good, long time manage to "outbreed" species of universes
which are less prolific and less able to sustain themselves. Actually,
now that you have me thinking on the topic, this fits into the Bloom
view of inorganic evolution too, even though I think the idea of multiple
universes is still extraordinarily speculative. However a universe consistent
with the environment of a false vacuum is most likely to make it from
instantiation to birth. (This is very much like fertilized ova. Those
which make it to the uterine lining within that lining's brief time
frame of receptivity have a good chance of survival. Those which arrive
too late generally do not. Those ova which fit the temporal environment
of the womb thus get to fructify. [John Travis. "The Early Fetus
Gets The Womb." Science News, July 31, 1999:78]). Since that universe
presumably continues to mainntain its fit to the false vacuum around
it or within it in order to survive, all the more reason that a universe
is a working out of initial corollaries. Those corollaries are in the
false vacuum itself, a false vacuum which presumably continues to be
that universe's environment. Howard Roukema has
analyzed the patterns made by quasars on different parts of the sky--the
quasar equivalent of constellations. He has found two pairs of constellations
where the patterns in different directions look like distorted images
of each other (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol
283, p 1147). Roukema admits that with such a small sample, the effect
could be due to chance. But if he is right, the implication is that
our Universe is not only toroidal, but twisted. A strange twist in the
tale of the Universe THE IDEA that the Universe may be shaped like a
torus--rather like a bicycle inner tube--has long fascinated cosmologists.
But a theorist in Japan is now arguing that the inner tube may also
be twisted in a fourth dimension. His claim is based on studies of the
patterns made by quasars in different parts of the sky, which he says
look like images of each other reflected in a distorted way, as if in
a fairground mirror. Imagine that the Universe is a flat strip of paper.
Now put a single twist into the strip and join its ends together. This
makes a continuous surface in which the inside of the loop becomes the
outside. An ant could crawl around and arrive back at its starting place
after travelling twice round the loop. This is the classic Mobius strip.
Now imagine that the strip is a cylinder joined at both ends to form
a circle--a torus, or inner tube. The tricky bit is to imagine twisting
the inner tube in a fourth dimension to create a toroidal Universe in
which the inner and outer surfaces become continuous, as in a Mobius
strip. But it's worth the effort, because according to Boud Roukema,
a theorist at the National Observatory of Japan, that may be the shape
of the Universe. The way to tell if the Universe is "multiply connected"
like this is to look in different directions on the sky at objects hundreds
of millions of light years away. Quasars are about the only things bright
enough and distant enough to fit the bill. If you see the same geometrical
pattern in different directions (not necessarily in opposite directions,
because the Universe may be crumpled as well as toroidal), you will
know that it is indeed multiply connected. Should the idea be taken
seriously? Malcolm MacCallum of Queen Mary and Westfield College in
London says that the mathematics is sound, and "the general idea
is not very surprising"--at least, not to a mathematician. It is
worth pursuing the possibility, researchers believe, because if Roukema
is correct, cosmologists will be able to see the same quasars by light
which has taken different times to reach us around the twisted Universe--in
other words, to see them at different stages of their evolution. John
Gribbin From New Scientist, 4 Jan 97 I just had my first decent lecture on String Theory or as the Germans coin it "Weltformel" hb: a splendid term. ? a much more dignified term. Oh yes, I got it out of Der Spiegel, which covered the recent conference on that matter held in Potsdamm. Der Spiegel made it cover story news hb: fantastic. I was just on Der Spiegel's website today, however my inability to make out more than a tad of German had me at a distinct disadvantage. and gave a most informative account of the quest for the "Everything formula". After what physics presented us with half a century ago, it is gratifying to see an enthusiastic quest for something without application ? or so some claim. I can embrace science as Art, but the do?gooder attitude and promises of benefits to come, a common approach to greater funding, scare me. hb: me too. It kills the curiosity and the joy of doing it for its own sake which produces, ironically, the most fundamental insights, and hence the insights with the most practical applications in the long run.We have had busy, happy days, but there were tears today. During a little hike into the woods my oldest granddaughter stepped on a wasp nest....She got stung four times, her dad three times, her uncle twice and one of the dogs at least once. hb: yoiks. This just happened to a close friend of mine yesterday. Renate had not stepped on the log within which the nest was hidden and escaped being stung ? a blessing in her condition. After a lot of hugging and some medication ? her dad is a medical physiologist and physicean ? there are smiles again. I have just sent off the last corrections on the proofs of my moose book which is due out in November. I teamed up with Michael Francis a very fine photographer on this one. It is more than a book about moose based on front edge research, as it also deals with human matters, in particular with moose in captivity. These huge deer do not act at all like deer when raised by humans, but more like very loyal, intelligent, mischevious dogs six to seven feet at the shoulders. hb: amazing. I've told you about my friend the bison. How I'd love to befriend a moose! I like moose very much, but not only for reasons implied in the above. Moose have excellent meat, and I lived on it for long stretches of time in my career in the wilderness. When working on snow shoes at 30 or 40 below, one craves fat, and nothing ? but nothing ? is as good then as the roasted yellow fat on the rim of a moose steak. Mere words cannot describe it, and the Gods are wellcome to their ambrosia as long as I can have fat moose meat. As to paeleo matters: that type of food sustained us during our last formative period which was not on the plains of Africa, but the glacial Mediterranean (North Africa, Western Europe) which shaped those characteristics we share with other large Ice Age mammals. Even nutrition al fashions now favour the view that fats and proteins might be better for us than endless carbohydrates (and old age diabetes, as a consequence). hb: strange. several weeks ago I read a scientific ariticle whose author seemed to assume that we are capable of living easily with no meat, and that, as a consequence, the work done back in Paleolithic days by men was completely expendable. It's true that there's fat in nuts and other plant offerings, but one of the best tales in the anthropological lore is that told by ethnologist Richard Borshay Lee who attempted to buy the tribe he'd been studying a present, and purchased a nicely marbled cow. The results were not only hilarious, but showed how starved for fat his hunter?gatherers were. (Lee's essay is entitled "Eating Christmas In the Kalahari.") Best regards,Val From: <HBloom>
To: geist Date: August 7, 1999 7:17 PM you write: > > > I did
not save Kent Bailey's e?mail address. Would you be please so kind and
> send it to me. I want to send him the article on urban landscapes
and > wildlife I now completed, as I have cited his 1987 book there
in. > > Hope you are doing well! >> > >>I'm in
good spirits today. Learned a whole lot today about views of the >nature
of galaxies which have just gained credence in the last three years.>It
seems galaxies are now thought to contain black holes at their center,
and >many of those black holes are very active places indeed. However
despite >going through over 20 articles, I haven't yet get a handle
on how the huge >flares of energy these "Active Galactc Nuclei"
produce is generated. Still, >it was a fascinating voyage. Be well??Howard
Once an up quark had paired with a down quark the pair could attract either another up or down quark to complete the threesome and form a nucleon. If the wiggle room of the early cosmos was so small that the forms it precipitated rained down with almost absolute uniformity, what does that tell us about the substrate from which universes come? What does it tell us about the nature of the extra-cosmic nothing? That it presumably is even more constrained than are the cosmoses this nothing generates. Which implies that the principles of manic mass production and supersimultaneity that cranked out huge numbers of identical atoms in just three forms 380,000 years down the line of this cosmos--when the wiggle room was comparitively huge--probably works for the production of cosmoses as well. With no wiggle room, how many differences in cosmoses can there be? Are universes produced in massive numbers almost identically? Are they produced in massive flurries simultaneously? That's what the way this cosmos works seems to imply. But are there different species of cosmoses--just as there are nine basic forms of quarks in mega quantities at this cosmos' start? I'd normally regard all of what I've said above as meaningless speculation. We have no evidence of other cosmoses that I know of, none at all. But these days the existence of many universes is taken for granted. Smolins and Guth both tout the view as if it were self-evident. If they are right, I suspect that when they DO find evidence supporting their many-universe point of view, they'll discover a lockstep march from the nothing into somethingness--manic mass production supersimilarity and supersimultaneity. pw: But I had a few thoughts in my chapter in Pribram's edited paperback book, Origins, from Erlbaum. I like to believe that the whole book is worth looking at. _________ Howard In a message dated 6/11/2003 3:28:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, werbos writes: At 10:34 AM 06/11/2003 -0700, James N Rose wrote: >1) A question about tensors and metrics, in relation >to the current topics. > >Physics designates speeds of transference of information >in spacetime. > >Mathematics .. presumes instantaneous distribution of >information in metric equations. > >This seems to be a problem disparity. Comments? Mathematics allows for many different types of possible systems with different properties. For quasilinear partial differential equations, solved in a time-forwards progression, it is well known that information cannot really propagate faster than the speed of light. That's rigorous mathematics. With nonquasilinear systems, like general relativity or Wheeler's "already unified" field theory (of electromagnetism and general relativity), people usually assume that information propagation is limited to the LOCAL speed of light, IN the tensor mathematics. But I haven't tracked the exact theorems. I assume this IS a theorem for small perturbations. But they tell me there is an Alcubierre solution and the like, which might allow faster speeds for some macroscopic situations. And the issue really gets clouded when time symmetry is assumed, and life gets truly complex; the whole notion of time-forwards progression can itself become fuzzy. >===== > >2) A proposition regarding dissipative fields. > >Could dissipation (re-distribution) be considered >a smoothing / normalization process? It certain is not renormalization of the kind we talk about in QFT. But the word renormalization has been used for many things... I think of dissipation as a kind of nonergodicity, or the consideration of dynamical systems which are initially allowed to be outside of their "ergodic core(s)" It is common, for example, to have causal symmetry WITHIN the ergodic core, but not when we allow the following boundary conditions: off-core states allowed at a finite initial time, but not at infinity. That's just a choice of boundary cnditions. >And if so, what aggregation of factors could >account for (initial) disproportioning states? > >And, could there be an a priori primitive-condition >which starts things in that disproportionate >condition to begin with? Again, boundary conditions. Also, what are boundary conditions to an open subsystem may be ergodic conditions for the more complete system description. >====== > >Jamie
It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr. Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter. The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer roughly the same estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark matter to dark energy domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion years ago. Dr. Perlmutter said that much more research would be necessary to determine whether the changing density of the expanding universe was the only reason dark energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have the physical properties of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr. Perlmutter said that in the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the true nature of dark energy "would be No. 1 on my list of things to figure out." The research teams are planning new observations of more distant supernovas to determine when cosmic acceleration began and to gather clues about the properties of dark energy. Some observations will be conducted with ground-based telescopes, others with the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's group has proposed putting a spacecraft in orbit with telescopes especially designed for supernova hunting and pinning down the nature of dark energy. In "The Extravagant Universe," published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote: "We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe rubs it in." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html
Ultimately, our ideas will be a matter for astronomical observatories to prove." One concept included in his mathematical theory is that we all could be living inside of a huge gravistar called "the universe," something that might explain the dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the universe, he said. But to understand that, one first must understand what a black hole is. Traditionally, a black hole is believed to be created after an extremely large star explodes and collapses. After it collapses, more and more material gathers on it until it condenses into a single point of infinite energy and mass. At a certain distance from this point, light can't even escape, and it gets sucked back toward that point, which astronphysicists call a singularity. Einstein said in a 1939 paper that he just wasn't comfortable with the concept, and in 1962 another famous scientist, P.A.M. Dirac, raised similar doubts. Mottola postulates that inside a gravistar is a different type of universe. In a small gravistar, say the size of a traditional black hole and its radius, atoms get packed together so tightly that they start acting as if they were a single atom bound with the force of dark energy. That mass would push out against a boundary area, where it intersects with normal space. This area is the spot where, in conventional theory, light cannot escape. "In black hole theory there's nothing there - there's nothing at that boundary and nothing in the black hole until you get to the center," Mottola said. "In our theory, it's a real physical boundary." As a gravistar is created, the phase shift would discharge energy in the form of big quantities of gamma rays, which would explain the phenomenon of gamma ray bursts, something astrophysicists haven't been able to explain with the standard models. "One very speculative idea is that maybe a gravistar could be a much more efficient central engine driving the effects we see in the universe," Mottola said. "In the classical model, once matter falls in, it's gone. In our model, matter hitting a gravistar would have a physical effect. It should make the boundary vibrate; it should have a spectrum that we can see." Maybe we don't entirely understand the idea because we're living inside it, he said. "Another speculation about this is, rather than thinking about a gravistar from the outside in, think about it from the inside out - we might well be on the inside of one of those bubbles," Mottola said. "Obviously we don't live in a universe that is all dark energy, but 70 percent of our universe is. It's real, and it's been calculated. If you make the mass of this thing, a gravistar, equal to the size of the universe, it actually works out. The Big Bang, in fact, could be the formation of this bubble." Mottola has been developing his theory for the past 10 years and started working on it full time through a grant for Los Alamos last year. Reactions to his concept have been mixed in the scientific community, something that frustrates Mottola at times. "I've been giving a lot of talks, and people are very polite and they listen," he said. "Some get very excited, and the people that are used to the black hole theory look at me strangely and say, `Bah.' I think that's healthy skepticism, and the burden of proof is on us." Still, he said, "I didn't just wake up one morning with this loony idea in my head and decide to become an outcast in my field," he said. "I think we've done our homework. I don't come to this point lightly. There are several people that think this is a really neat idea, and they're not stupid people - one's a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford University." Whatever the resistance or the challenge, Mottola said he's dedicated to working on the task. "Nature can do what it wants - it doesn't depend on any of these theories," he said. "Ultimately we just want to understand what it's doing."
Subj: NYT: From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe' Date: 6/3/2003 4:19:58 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: checker From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe' New York Times, 3.6.3 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NASHVILLE, May 30 - New observations of exploding stars far deeper in space, astronomers say, have produced strong evidence that the proportions of the mysterious forces dominating the universe have undergone radical change over cosmic history. The findings, reported here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which ended Thursday, supported the idea that once the universe was expanding at a decelerating rate but then began accelerating within the last seven billion years, scientists concluded. "We are now seeing hints that way back then the universe was slowing down," said Dr. John Tonry, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who is a member of one team studying exploding stars, or supernovas, for signs of cosmic expansion rates. The new research by Dr. Tonry's group and another, led by Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, confirmed the earlier surprising discovery that the universe is indeed expanding at an accelerating rate and has been for at least the last 1.2 billion years. But four supernovas, almost 7 billion light-years away, appeared to exist at a time the universe was slowing down, Dr. Tonry said. "A stop-and-go universe" is the way Dr. Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics characterized the phenomenon. Well, the expansion never really stopped, he conceded, but it has certainly revved up. "Right now, the universe is speeding up, with galaxies zooming away from each other like Indy 500 racers hitting the gas when the green flag drops," said Dr. Kirshner, a member of the Tonry team. "But we suspect that it wasn't always this way." The changing pace of cosmic expansion, combined with recently announced measurements of the cosmic microwave background, revealing conditions soon after the Big Bang, encourages theorists in thinking that a tug-of-war has been going on between dark forces of matter and energy no one yet understands. The combined gravitational pull from all matter in the universe, most of which is beyond detection, has acted as a brake on cosmic expansion. The so-called dark matter apparently had the advantage when the universe was younger, smaller and denser. Now the ever-increasing pace of expansion suggests that something else even more mysterious is at work. Theorists are not sure what the antigravity force is, but they call it dark energy. It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr. Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter. The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer
roughly the same estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark
matter to dark energy domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion
years ago. Dr. Perlmutter said that much more research would be necessary
to determine whether the changing density of the expanding universe
was the only reason dark energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have
the physical properties of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr.
Perlmutter said that in the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical
astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the
true nature of dark energy "would be No. 1 on my list of things
to figure out." The research teams are planning new observations
of more distant supernovas to determine when cosmic acceleration began
and to gather clues about the properties of dark energy. Some observations
will be conducted with ground-based telescopes, others with the Hubble
Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's group has proposed putting a spacecraft
in orbit with telescopes especially designed for supernova hunting and
pinning down the nature of dark energy. In "The Extravagant Universe,"
published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote:
"We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of
the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly
the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus
taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present
picture of the universe rubs it in." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html
_____ Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition
Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind
From The Big Bang to the 21st Century www.howardbloom.net Visiting Scholar--Graduate
Psychology Department, New York University Founder: International Paleopsychology
Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding
council member, The Darwin Project; Founder, Big Bang Tango Media Lab;
member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement
of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science,
Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society of Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor
-- New Paradigm book series. For two chapters from The Lucifer Principle:
A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the
Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net For Reinventing
Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine, see: http://howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism
or http://www.howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf Bear with me while I fanatasize about Pavel's find, which appears below. The research reported in this article says that the speed of light is frequency dependent. Long wavelength light travels faster than short wavelength light. Light is both a wave and a particle. A paradox, right? Maybe it's less of a paradox than it seems. Let's go back to the Big Bagel Theory-The Toroidal Theory of the Universe. And let's violate a nice Jewish boy's sense of what a bagel should be. Let's imagine that instead of being plump, the bagel is as thin as a membrane. Let's imagine that light is a discrete bundle of energy-a quantal energy lump-a bit of plasticine or clay one-quantum in mass no matter how it's distended or clumped. Let's imagine that it oscillates back and forth between the ordinary matter side of the bagel/membrane and the anti-matter side of the bagel/membrane. When this quantum-sized ball of clay squeezes fully into the anti-matter plane, it disappears from the plane of ordinary matter entirely. In the ordinary matter world, this appears as a zero-point. Then the quantum ball of clay begI have another of my mathematically ignorant questions. I can understand why Pi shows up on numerous equations describing the physics of this cosmos. Pi is a property of circles, and circles show up at every level from the atom to stars and galaxies. The circle is one of the many iterative patterns of this universe that shows up on level after level of emergence. To what pattern in this cosmos does the square root of minus one pertain? Let me try to guess. The square root of plus one is plus one. The square root of minus one is NOT minus one. Why? Minus one times minus one=plus one. In this universe--the universe we see, the square root of minus one doesn't exist. But if my toroidal theory--or perhaps some other toroidal theories--of the cosmos is true, there is a universe in which the square root of minus one DOES exist. It's the anti-matter universe on the underside of the torus. If any positive number in the anti-matter universe is negative in ours, then in that universe the square root of minus one is minus one. Why? Because in that anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says.ins to oscillate back across the membrane from the anti-matter world to the matter world. The more of it appears in the matter world, the more it expands toward the peak point of its amplitude. And the more it declines toward it's zero-point in the anti-matter world. This quantal blob goes forward-in-time in the ordinary matter world. But it swishes backward-in-time in the anit-matter world. It works like a molecular module in a wave of water. That is, the clay quantal ball squeezes back and forth from our world to the anti-matter world, but never actually moves more than the distance of its wavelength. However, like the water molecules in a ripple or the molecules of water in a wave crossing an ocean, the local motion of the quantal ball passes its energy on. The molecules of water don't really travel more than the length of the wave they're momentarily participating in. A molecule of water in the Atlantic Ocean wave passes its energy on, but merely moves in a small circle, a circle twice the size of the wave's amplitude. The energy travels, but the molecules expressing that energy oscillate around a center…they never leave that local center's domain. The quantal ball never leaves its space on the Planck-length checkerboard of time-space either. It simply loops out a full wavelength into the matter cosmos, hits the limits of its amplitude, then bloops back across the membrane into the anti-matter world. There it circles back in time and ends where it began, waiting for another perturbation in the membrane-another traveling wave--to loop it forward in the matter universe and backward in the anti-matter universe again. The backward-time move of a photon on the anti-matter side of things is very reminiscent of Paul Werbos' backward-propagation, and of the back-and-forth consultations between Planck units of future and past called for in Pavel Kurakin's toy photon model. Time space is a rubbery membrane in this vision of things. A membrane with two opposite sides that begin their journey at a common point. Both sides start with the big bang (which just happens to be not only in the center of this torus but also at its periphery). They spread apart then go over a hump. Their energy no longer holds them apart. Slowly they fall under the influence of each others' gravity. This results in what we call quintessence, anti-gravity, and dark energy. Finally the two universes meet at the bagel's edge and annihilate. That annihilation is the bagel's center. It's a big bang that starts two cosmoses again- An anti-matter cosmos
on the underside. The universe blips locally-it oscillates-just like the waves of photons to which it gives birth. If this were a comic book, we'd round things off with this. A cosmos is a blip in yet a bigger universe. It's an oscillating Planck-style unit in a cosmos of nearly infinite other universes, each passing along information when it's called upon. Passing the message on by oscillating-by participating in a larger wave. We're a photon in some giant's bigger time and space. Now for the frequency dependency of the speed of light. Not to mention a photon's energy. The shorter the wavelength, the tighter the squeeze of a quantal ball. The greater the squeeze, the more energy per unit of time-and-space. The longer the wavelength, the more the quantal ball is spread out. The less energy it has per unit of time-and-space. So a photon is a traveling wave made up of standing waves roughly akin to Paul Werbos' soliton. That soliton is our quantal ball of space time that's malleable as clay and can either rest peacefully or wobble back and forth across the membrane that separates the ordinary matter cosmos from the anti-matter cosmos. The greater the wavelength, the more space each quantal ball of energy traverses. Yes, it loses energy. But it makes up for that loss with its gain in speed. The shorter the wavelength, the more energy, but the shorter the strides each quantal ball of energy traverses. The more little steps, the slower the speed. But by this reasoning the difference in speed between high frequency photons and low frequency photons should be huge. Would knowing more about Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions help me out here? Also by this reasoning a photon is not at all what it seems. It's both a wave and a particle-but it does not move more than a tiny bit-1,000 meters if it's a radio wave…and 1/1,000,000,000,000 meter if it's a gamma ray. What moves is its motion, its energy. What medium does the energy move in? The membrane between the matter world and the anti-matter world. That membrane is what Eshel Ben-Jacob referred to in a conversation several days ago as a firmament. A giant caveat-this does NOT mean that Eshel endorses any of my oddball Big Bagel views. The bottom line is this. When a photon is absorbed by an electron it's a local event. Yes, the movement, the wobble in the membrane, has traveled a great distance-perhaps from as far as the galaxy Markarian 501. But the photon is a local manifestation, a quantum blip in the membrane, a distortion in time and space, a twist in the fabric of the cosmos, a temporary blister in the stretched drumhead of time-space. The electron doesn't care whether the photon is a long-distance traveler or a local wobbler. It gobbles up the packet of motion in that quantal oscillation blob and uses it to jump a quantum length outward from its atomic shell. There's a flaw in this reasoning. If an electron from the positive universe swallows the quantal glob, the bit of blooping quantal clay, and imprisons it on this side of the cosmos, it should disappear from the anti-matter side of the cosmos. And vice versa. Do we actually see such disappearances in our cosmos? In a sense, yes. For the first 100,000-380,000 years of the cosmos (depending on whose figures you're using) there were no free-ranging photons, no photons traveling in straight lines, no light. Then came the first photon blast-the background radiation. There were no visible photons until roughly one million years later, when the first stars ignited. What does this have to do with photons disappearing? The further this cosmos has evolved, the more light it has produced. The further we go down the The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen molecule, the first potassium molecule, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos says, "Hey, nut case, it went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accelerate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But the Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Gravity tells space how to bend. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Bohr's complimentarity). Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of toward it. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos too. The two are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. I'm trying to show that the square root of minus one may not as imaginary as we think. Minus one is a real number in the anti-universe. So is its square root.cosmos' evolutionary timeline, the more stars, quasars, and supernovas appear. Even black holes evolve in the hearts of galaxies and, as they grind matter up and carry it away, they blast their surroundings with particle geysers thousands of light years in size. Many of those particles are photons. New photons appear in this cosmos. And in black holes photons do disappear. But do they disappear in the manner I've described-seemingly randomly, swallowed up by positrons going backward in time on the bagel/membrane's underside? Sorry, I have no answers. Can anyone help me out? Which leads to a question-how does a cosmos with black holes follow the laws of the conservation of energy? Meanwhile, there's no need to worry that we've lost our bagel when spreading it out to the thinness of a membrane, far thinner than the stingiest smear of cream cheese. Topology says that if a continuous surface has an upside, a downside, and a hole in its center, it is still a torus. Its surface still maintains toroidal-that's Big Bagel-properties. Yes, I realize all of this is speculative insanity. But who knows? With a little lox I may be right. Howard Retrieved from the
World Wide Web May 31, 2003 The hypotheses put
forward by Nanopoulos and his collaborators has been under experimental
scrutiny, and the results obtained during the last few months are encouraging.
"One way to experimentally test our hypothesis is to consider galaxies
or other objects in the sky that are very far from us," says Nanopoulos.
"Then we collect the photons (particles of light) simultaneously
emitted by these sources, and we look at differences of arrival times
in a detector on earth between photons of different frequencies. The
photons of higher frequencies should come later." The frequency-dependent
expression of the speed of light depends on the gravitational constant,
a quantity that is known since Newton established his law of gravitation.
By using the differences in photon arrival times of six astronomical
sources, Nanopoulos and his collaborators estimated an upper bound of
the value of the gravitational constant from the data, and compared
their results with the expected value. "We were amazed to see that
if we use all these astronomical data, we find very reasonable values
for the gravitational constant," says Nanopoulos. "That was
our first surprise: the fact that, put together, a bunch of data that
had nothing to do with the gravitational constant, gave us values so
close to what we would expect to find." A second experimental encouraging
result about the frequency-dependence of the speed of light was provided
by the HEGRA (High Energy Gamma Ray Astronomy) experiment, which is
detecting photons from outer space, and is situated in La Palma, Canary
Islands, * high-energy physics Dimitri Nanopoulos is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and holder of the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics at Texas A&M University, head of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) Astroparticle Physics Group, and fellow and chair of Theoretical Physics, Academy of Athens in Greece. Professor Nanopoulos received his B.S. in 1971 from the University of Athens and his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of Sussex, England. He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology. He works in string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and quantum-inspired models of brain function. Nanopoulos is fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Curie Fellow at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique de l'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1975-76), Research Fellow Harvard University (1977-79); CERN staff member (1979-86), Professor of Physics, University of Wisconsin (1986-88) and joined Texas A&M University in 1989. He is author of more than 515 refereed articles, with an excess of 25,500 citations, placing him as the fourth most cited High Energy Physicist of all time according to the 2001 census. He has given more than 250 invited presentations at international conferences.
Because in that
anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus
one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may
be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside
of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe
and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal
model says.ave similar spiral patterns. We start a universe with simple
rules and those rules show up fractally on level after level--explaining
why metaphors work, why a water wave behaves a bit like light, and why
artists are the antennae of society. Artists sense the elements of what's
been formed so far, elements that seem to flee each other in opposition,
and sense the attraction inherent in these disparate, emergent processes
and forms. Artists sense the new ways old patterns seek re-formation.
Like the cosmos itself, artists are corollary splicers, working out
the latest implications of the ancient rules with which the cosmos started.
So are all creative culture-makers, be they scientists, priests, or
politicians. I hope that these amateurish ramblings are not wasting
your time. But I've been working on them for a long, long time. Paul,
I'd love to get your alternative take on this--the steady state as opposed
to the big bang perspective. Greg, your musing about the role of math
in a cosmos capable of producing biology--a cosmos capable of producing
forms of complexity no math has ever been able to grapple with--is extraordinary
and is also part of the Bloomian grand unified theory of everything
in the universe including the human soul. (There'll be no room for it,
alas, in The Big Bang Tango.) You've just said it better than I could.
The Bloom Big Bagel Theory of the Cosmos keeps getting more support
every day (the NY Times reported on another toroidal theory of the cosmos
several days ago--the second toroidal theory I've heard about this year).
It's based on topology. The cosmos pulses like a photon, too. It goes
from attraction to repulsion--from the outward rush of the Big Bang
to a consolidation when the anti-universe and the positive universe
join at the Bagel's edge and become a bagel's center, a big bang, again. Howard In a message dated 3/16/2003 5:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time, grbear writes: Subj: RE: its from bits paper Date: 3/16/2003 5:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time From: grbear To: werbos HowlBloom, Sent from the Internet Very stimulating thinking here. I must admit, mathematical ignoramus that I am, that my thinking emerges from other areas--a kind of instinctive approach that asks the same questions in physics I might ask when cobbling together any other complicated system. To that end, like Paul, I have no objection to extra dimensions--but am deeply worried by making assumptions of infinity just to get the math to fit with the logic. Geological/topological solutions could be much more elegant--but (and pardon my naivete here, already admitted) are we still just begging the question? (Perhaps to justify my own ignorance!) I wonder if mathematics per se can create a theory of physics. It produces beautiful but somehow unsatisfying models. What if the universe is as complicated as, say, a living organism? Then we must use other intellectual means to create theories and describe them, and bring in math later to help us figure out parameters and implications. Math as tool, and not master. Most physicists do this anyway, but are sometime reluctant to admit it! I doubt we'll ever have a final theory of physics. There's wonder in taking that as a prime assumption--what if the universe, as it is observed, subtly and locally alters ground rules to evade final detection and description? What if a final theory kills a universe? How would we describe a universe that can smoothly transition from one locally applicable theory (an ecological adaptation to large populations of thinking and reality-pinning beings) to another, with its own infestation of differently theorizing beings? A trickster? Or a mother? Talk about endless and full employment for theorists! But again this has little to do with what I try for in MOVING MARS. In that book, I use a computational approach, not a biologically perverse approach! The weakness in applying information theory to physics is that Shannon describes transmission of data, but barely begins to describe what happens when users receive the data. The former is mathematically tractable, the latter is not. If particles are users, and photons, bosons, etc., are among the means of transmission of data... Well, I just get lost trying to figure that out. My instinct tells me, however, that if a "computational" universe needs some finite length of time to "update" or "refresh" its various constituents, we could derive gravity as a vector change created by the increased time(?) it will take larger masses to compute their situations and update/refresh. The longer the refresh "time", the stronger the gravity. Some connection between a spacial component and a true time component of the total particle bit description could also produce special and general relativistic effects. Sorry to be obscure here! Greg Bear Greg ----- Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 7:24 AM To: HBloom. Lissa Werbos Subject: its from bits paper Hi, folks! Thanks much for passing on the its from bits paper by Wilczek in Nature. I regret that I took a few days before getting to it -- but the bits are a bit out of control these days in my life. (Friday last, a colleague said: here is a list of over 1000 proposals for about $3 million each up on the computer. Come back and evaluate the nature and degree of real engineering content in each of them, and report back immediately... Just one of many little things.. Still, I did learn a few things in reading through them...) My impressions: It often happens that some folks try to apply A to B, while others do B on A, and others do more complex connections. Wilczek's vision of its from bits is very different from what I saw in Moving Mars, and different in spirit from other things I have seen. One version of "its from bits" is... basically trying to model the universe as a kind of computer or as a kind of intelligent system. That's like what I saw in Moving Mars. Wolfram's notion of modeling the universe as a cellular automaton (an approach Kurakin also likes) is maybe a step in that direction. (P.S. A Fruedian slip: as I was typing, I typed "autonomaton" at first...) But Wilczek uses the title "its from bits" to address a totally different idea, which he describes much more precisely in the text: the "Pythagoras-Planck program." I have seen shadows of that approach before, and I suspect a very long history -- but Wilczek's account is far more coherent than what I have seen before. Certainly Wilczek has shown important, unique insights in other areas. (There may be another aspect to the "Pythagoras-Planck" approach emanatng from some speculations of Dirac, which I have not trcaked down either.) ========================== But your real question may be: OK, what do you make of it? Is it real, and where does it go? I am intrigued by the TRUE its from bits (as in Moving Mars) as a kind of possible "generation after next" of physics model. But when I get time to do my own work in this area, I try to focus just on the next generation, something more in front of us here and now. That is already radical enough for today's physics. Wilczek's paper is also pointing towards the next generation. (After all, he is prominent member of the PRESENT generation!) He sees some important points, but also misses a few, in my view. (Or maybe he just doesn't choose to talk about some important points which might be over people's heads.) In my view, everything he talks about here relates to the traditional Einstein view of the universe, where everything is a matter of continuous force fields fluctuating over space-time in a local, continuous way. He argues that natural quantities in physics, like the mass of a proton, ought to be near one, if the laws of physics were expressed "in pure natural form," in dimensionless units. That's an important observation. But where do masses come from? How do we explain them anyway? There are three alternative answers to this question, in different streams of modern physics. The oldest answer would be "they come from renormalization." In other words, out of thin air. In the original formulation of quantum field theory (QFT), due to Heisenberg, Dyson, Schwinger and Feynmann (and Tomonaga?)... particles like electrons or quarks would be seen as perfect point particles. It was just like the very old, pre-Einstein stuff of Lorentz, where "particles" and "forces" were considered to be two kinds of things in nature. "Particles" were idealized objects more perfect than the ancient Greek "atom." When they used QFT to calculate the mass-energy of these particles... there was a problem. When a charge is concentrated at a point, the energy of self-repulsion is infinite. So people added an assumption into the laws of physics, to deal with this. They assumed that nature somehow added a counterbalancing negative infinity to the mass, a negative infinity of just the right size to make the total mass come out to be whatever is observed. And this was done for every type of particles. This was a very big assumption in the physics, but most people made it sound as if it was just a kind of calculating procedure... (I am oversimplifying the sociology here. Most physicists would just shrug their shoulders -- a behavior they have had to repeat over and over again -- and say "I don't really believe nature is like this, but this is a placeholder for an unknown truth that people will discover someday..". And a lot of work was done to further that kind of interpretation. But it still leaves open the question: what is that underlying truth?) Wilczek's paper focuses almost entirely on the Standard Model and such. The Standard Model of physics is generally regarded as the far frontier of what has actually been proven out empirically -- "Beyond this point lies speculation." It includes QCD (discussed at length in this paper) and electroweak theory ("the modern extension of Maxwell's Laws"). The Standard Model is built entirely on renormalization. And so... it would appear, on the surface, that Wilczek is talking about the problem of how to explain particle masses... without bothering to mention that they are actually TOTALLY unexplained and unexplainable within the framework of traditional QFT which he invokes!!! ----- But... I know a bit about Wilczek, and I know it is not so simple. There is a SECOND approach (historically the third) to trying to explain particle masses -- superstring theory, including the modern n-brane versions. And many people believe that that is the "underlying truth." In superstring theory, the electron is NOT a perfect point particle, but a kind of extended body whose radius is about the size of the Planck length. Even though there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for superstring theory, physicists are excited by the fact that it provides a way to explain things WITHOUT renormalization. No more magic hand coming out of the sky to tweak all the masses!!! Wilczek's paper
could be interpreted as... a stream of argument which points very strongly
and suggestively towards superstring theory "or something like
it" as the natural way to explain everything we see in nature.
Particles should have radii about like the Planck length. If we accept
the superstring interpretation, this is not all pointing towards "Moving
Mars" exactly. It points towards whatever superstring theory offers.
Which is not entirely obvious to ANYONE... =============================
OK, superstring theory is coherent, relatively speaking, though I do
not know whether it could ever be converted into a truly axiomatic theory....
-- But personally, I do not believe it. All those extra dimensions coming
out of thin air. If the extra dimensions were motivated by something
empirical, that would be one thing. Extra dimensions are a very plausible
idea to me, in principle... but when the origin is just a lack of ability
to close the math, I am very, very skeptical about these particular
proposed extra dimensions. Who knows? But there are grounds to try to
find alternative hypotheses.... I tend to believe that the next generation
of physics (if we ever get there, if we survive the events of the coming
week...) will involve a third explanation for particle masses, also
part of the mainstream, but not so prominent. And I myself go a bit
beyond or outside the mainstream in how far I would take it. For the
next generation of physics... I think particle masses would emerge as
the mass-energy of TOPOLOGICAL SOLITONS. They, like the superstring
objects, have finite radius -- and Wilczek's article suggests that they
ought to be about as big as the Planck radius. HOWEVER: (1) they do
not require that we assume the existence of additional dimensions in
nature; (2) it looks to me as if they can explain the mass (and existence!)
of the electron, without renormalization, simply by adding a few terms
to the "Higgs field" (a part of the standard model which we
HAVEN'T been able to get good data on yet); (3) they even allow the
more radical plossibility of "returning to reality," returning
to Einstein's kind of field theory. That last bit is very far from mainstream.
But the logic holds up. And I had a couple of papers last year backing
it up. However -- there is a huge amount of work required to really
push through any basic paradigm shift requiring difficult mathematics,
and I may or may not have the time or ability to pass this off to the
more full-time physicists who would have to carry it ahead. It
may be that the sheer social/cultural entropy pulling physics into something
more and more like medieval theology is too much to hold back... I worry
whether this time the epicycles may win, in part because of iron triangle
effects. For what it's worth... most people who talk about topological
solitons haven't got the foggiest idea of what they are. The clearest
explanation I have seen was in a book by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk...
a really neat book, in some ways... but it is not the kind of book you
can learn from by just reading in the usual way... I am tempted to say
"it is definitive but it is no BIble.." but then again, is
the real Bible a bible? Best, Paul Here's a simpleton's suggestion. The motive power is...gravity. Take the bagel model I keep tossing around (or loxing up). If both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. When the gravity-dimples around matter-suns and anti-matter-suns meet, they may well produce a mini-bagel hole-a black hole. Talk about tautological, I've got gravity working because of….gravity. But my blithering doesn't remove the fact that it seems to me there's more than mathematical description needed to explain attraction at a distance. Math can map the manner in which gravity works. But does it tell us why force at a distance applies? If it takes objects to generate a field, and it takes an intersect of fields to generate an object, ummm, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what is a photon-a rippled intersect of electrical and magnetic fields? My ignorance is showing all over the place, but sometimes it's worth asking naïve questions. Occasionally we become so used to using words like "force" that we don't recognize our ignorance anymore.I have another of my mathematically ignorant questions. I can understand why Pi shows up on numerous equations describing the physics of this cosmos. Pi is a property of circles, and circles show up at every level from the atom to stars and galaxies. The circle is one of the many iterative patterns of this universe that shows up on level after level of emergence. To what pattern in this cosmos does the square root of minus one pertain? Let me try to guess. The square root of plus one is plus one. The square root of minus one is NOT minus one. Why? Minus one times minus one=plus one. In this universe--the universe we see, the square root of minus one doesn't exist. But if my toroidal theory--or perhaps some other toroidal theories--of the cosmos is true, there is a universe in which the square root of minus one DOES exist. It's the anti-matter universe on the underside of the torus. If any positive number in the anti-matter universe is negative in ours, then in that universe the square root of minus one is minus one. Why? Because in that anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says. It's like the doctor
who feels he's explained your stomach cramp when he tells you that you've
got gastritis. Sorry, you knew that before you walked in to his examining
room. Gastritis is Latin for irritation of the stomach. In other words,
all your doctor has done is parrot your question back at you in another
tongue. You asked why does my stomach ache and the doc has said because
you have an ache of the stomach. Hb 3/25/2003 Oscar Wilde once said: "to be understood is to be found out." It's a risky business, explaining yourself clearly. Many of those who publish peer-reviewed articles in abstruse journals would discover that stripped of their jargon and their acronyms, they have nothing to say at all. But, as I mentioned in an earlier email, Einstein saw clear explanation AS A SCIENTIFIC IMPERATIVE. And Einstein was the ultimate scientist--an outsider, an oddball, a man who'd been written off as having a shabby and substandard mind, but a man with vision...a vision that stabbed through what Herman Melville calls "the pasteboard mask" on the surface of things and found a deeper reality. Unlike many of our colleagues, you, Paul, have a great deal to say. You have a unique form of vision. You can see math as clearly as others see their fingernails and their toes. You've been able to do this since you were a child. It's as if the rest of us only saw visible light, and you saw, with no difficulty whatsoever, infrared and ultraviolet light. Your vision would be dazzling. You could see at night. You could see the strange ultraviolet visions of a flowers signals, its critical information, that bees see. But you'd have to tell us blind folks what was clear to you, or you'd miss out on vision's reason to be. You'd fail to be what you can be--an antenna of human culture, a brilliant seer of new visions that add to the collective enterprise we call culture. Yes, you can choose to leave behind traces that only a few can read. But a mind like yours should never be lost that way. Never, Paul. Never. Your contribution would be enormous if you wrote in Discover Magazine vocabulary...in the vocabulary of the best science magazines of our era, Science 86 (from the AAAS) and The Sciences (from the New York Academy of Sciences). All of the following statements make my mouth water. But all call for clear explanation: pw: One does not need to introduce fermions-ex-deus-ex-machina at a higher level of organization in order to have the emergent behavior. That being said -- it HAS been tremendously convenient (both in Lagrangian systems and in network automata ala Wolfram) to have one specific higher-level concept -- topological charge -- embedded in the system dynamics, to make particle-like stuff emerge hb: now this, the following, is vivid English. Are you saying that a symmetry break--one in which two things are separated by a membrane, a firmament, a clear dividing line--is not the way this cosmos works? Are you saying that time exists precisely because of assymetry? That this cosmos has a tilt that runs from the past toward the future, with a little backward leakage? If you are, you are inadvertently supporting the elephant in the room, the theory everyone has been kind enough not to comment on because of its obvious amateur stupidity--The Toroidal Model of the cosmos, The Big Bagel. The Big Bagel calls for a kick that sends one universe spinning assymetrically in one direction, and another spinning assymetrically in the other. Together these two cock-eyed, assymetric planes of being make what I mentioned last night, a shape like a wok with its lid on. More accurately, they make a doughnut, a torus, a bagel. The angry kick of god is the big bang--a non-Hoylesian way of starting things. For those who don't know, Paul and I both grew up eating and breathing cosmology. The brilliant explainer who made things clear to Paul was Sir Fred Hoyle, a man so good at making the most complex things clear to untutored minds that he had his own TV and radio shows in Britain. Hoyle was a terrific self-promoter--a very necessary thing if you feel you have ideas of importance to convey. But, most important, Hoyle was the creator and champion of the steady state model of the cosmos--a model in which matter is continually erupting from I'm-not-sure-where. I grew up fascinated by another great explainer--George Gamow, a creator andchampion of Big Bang theory. So Paul and I see the cosmos differently. We FEEL it differently. Why? Because of passion points, imprinting moments, glomming with all our energy onto role models who shape our very core and soul. This is transgenerational communication. I suspect that Hoyle, like Gamow, opened a cornucopia of thoughts of previous theorists and explainers and made them glisten for the two of us. Through these minds who were eager to bend and entertain us with their insights, we were given the works of Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Cantor, and a host of other ancestors. This is the sort of cross-generational communication that makes the weave of information in a social system perk. That's true whether the social system is a colony of a trillion intercommunicating bacteria, a community of bees, or a community of human beings. I also suspect some aspects of it are true in the community of atoms that make a mote of space dust, a galaxy, a bursting, photon-bleeding sun, and all the wonders the preceded humanity. But we are human Paul. You and I are the Hoyles and Gamows of my son's generation and of his sons too--if we choose to be. You can and must become a Hoyle. He's in your bones and ordering you to do for others what he did for you. And Gamow is doing the same for me. Howard >>FIQFT might be described as the following picture: >> >>"In the beginning, God created the universe. He created it in perfect >symmetrical harmony, >>symmetry following the ancient images of Euclid, for a four-dimensional >world. >>He rolled the dice endlessly to decide what to put where. >> >>"And then he looked out upon his work, and decided it was not good, >that it was >>like a hopeless Christmas tree. So he gave it a good kick, which spun >it around ninety degrees, >>and left the scene forever. >> >>"The direction where he gave it a kick we now call 'time.' The kick is >called a Wick rotation." >> >>In fact, most true FIQFT calculations (those which are not reducible to >the old second quantization) >>actually proceed by simulating this picture on a computer. >> >>It is interesting to ask whether this picture admits a truly axiomatic >formulation, >>I doubt that such an axiomatic formulation exists anywhere in the >literature, >>but I suspect it can be done after all. At least that's what I suspect >this week. In a message dated
5/23/2003 7:49:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, >paul.werbos writes:
>> >> >> Hi, Howard! >> >> >>hb:
Paul, it's good to have you back. >> >> >> >>
pw: The original Lagrange and Hamiltonian formalisms were like >strict
gradient-based local optima. Therte is some analogy between the >new
FIQFT extensions and the simulated annelaing kind of mathematics >people
use to try to overcome local minima... which is basically the >foundationof
creativity in intelligent systems. >> >> hb: Paul, this
sounds fascinating can you explain it to >me? What's FIQT? What's
annelaing mathematics? What would be the >opposite of a gradient-based
optima--aside from a gradient-based >minima.Can you tell me in word
pictures? >> .howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf >>
>> ================================== >> >> Sorry
to have taken so long to reply. >> My first impression was that
I needed to write something in >English, pedagogical, >> to
elaborate on what a Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. They have >been
fundamental >> to almost all basic physics for some time. (Kurakin
and Wolfram are >exceptions. >> SOME its-from-bits modelers
would start out by trying to avoid the >usual reliance on Lagrangians.
>> But... most high-power mainstream physicists would say the
search >for the "theory of everything" >> is essentially
the search for the true Lagrangian of the universe.) >> >>
But... looking at your questions, maybe you did already did get the
>basic idea... >> >> When I talked about a "gradient-based
maximum" of a function f(x) -- >> I am thinking of a function
f whose value is always a real number, >and a VECTOR x >> taken
from an N-dimensional vector space -- >> I am thinking about a
"local maximum of f." We could say that f has >a local
maximum >> at point x if there exists some finite number u >0,
such that f(x) >is greater than >> f(y) for ALL vectors y "close
enough to x". "Close enough" is >defined to mean >>
|x-y|<u. >> >> In fact, there is a huge literature out
there in applied >mathematics on how to find >> minima and
maxima of a function f. One of the oldest methods is the >"method
of steepest descent." >> In that method, you start out with
a GUESS x0. Then you calculate >the gradient of f >> at x0.
The "gradient" is just a vector which points uphill... it
>points in the direction >> where f increases most rapidly.
You move uphill as far as you can, >generarte a new x, >> and
keep repeating the process. This kind of gradient-based >optimization
will take >> you reliably to a LOCAL maximum or minimum of f.
But when you get >to the top of a foothill, >> it will not
tell you how to jump off that foothill to a bigger >mountain nearby.
The gradient doesn't >> tell you where the mountain is. This is
a practical issue of >pervasive relevance in engineering >>
and in physics, and even in evolutionary theory. In my view, it is >of
pervasive importance >> to understanding why humans often seem
highly irrational; many >cases of human irrationality are >>
really just cases of lack of creativity -- lack of ability to think
>or work one's way out of a kind >> of local optimum in behavior.
>> >> Notice that I am talking about a function f(x) which
is >"deterministic" -- no white noise >> in the discussion
so far. >> >> Classical physics used Lagrangians and Hamiltonians
in a >deterministic way. Thus even in Lagrange's >> version,
when he thought the universe was maximizing something, he >was really
just using >> the assumption that the universe finds a local maximum.
But in the >theories we have >> used for a long time, it is
not even a local maximum or minimum but >a kind of "saddle point,"
>> which looks like a mximum in some directions and a minimum
in others. >> >> --- >> >> Then add noise. >>
>> Simulated annealing is one of many methods now used to >>
look for a true global optimum -- the peak of the highest mountain >--
for a function f which may >> have many local optima. It is like
a gradient serach but with white >noise deliberately added, >>
in order to encourage a certain amount of exploration. (Many >believe
that "novelty seeking" in humans >> is likewise a kind
of genetically-programmed tilt towards a kind of >exploration...)
>> >> Functional INtegral Quantum Field Thoery (FIQFT) looks
a lot like >classical Lagrangian field theory, >> BUT WITH
white noise added!! As if the universe were maximizing BUT >doing
some simulated annealing! >> The simulated anneating would allow
it to "tunnel" from one local >maximum to another. >>
>> But.. it's not so simple. It's LIKE what I just said, but factors
>of "i" thrown in in ways >> that make it incompatible
with any notion of reality (or even with >axiomatic >> mathematics,
last I heard). >> >> FIQFT is basically today's most orthodox
modern latest formulation >of quantum mechanics, >> the "language"
in which the theory of everything is assumed to be >written. >>
The mainstream idea today is that the theory of everything equals >FIQFT
plus >> the choice of the appropriate Lagrangian. >> >>
But I myself am not entirely mainstream. I suspect that we can do a
>bit better than today's FIQFT, >> particularly in how we explain
the process of quantum measurement >and the role of time. It may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says. pk: What this arrows are summed in destination VECTORILY, this gives new long (or may be short, if interference plays) arrow. The square of this arrow gives probability of THIS final detector. hb: Vectors are one of those few things I understand. But it would help if you could tell me a bit more--in English-- about how these vectors are determined. pk: It's crazy, but it works! hb: it may not be so crazy. >>pk: Who exactly choses - source or vacuum? It should be discussed! >>Essentially, >>it is this discussion, what is my aim. Hac> hb: great, because precisely this kind of "choice" underlies vast number of Hac> phenomenon in this cosmos. These micro-nano-choices determine the shape of Hac> the past and, more important, of the future. The absolute determinism of Hac> Einstein's worldlines (if I understand them correctly) seems off-base to me. Hac> There's wiggle-room in the universe. And, as Arthur's material says, that Hac> wiggle-room can lead to less-than-optimal outcomes from some segments of the Hac> cosmos. But I'd be willing to bet that those suboptimal outcomes provide Hac> information about dead ends to the larger system in some way. I suspect we Hac> have a cosmos that is optimizing itself in some strange way, pk: Hurrah! I believe the same. hb: the title for one of my upcoming books is: The Wobble Factor-Search Engines of the Cosmos-photons, fads, stock markets, and the lust for novelty. This assumes that I'll have sufficient time to someday write all of the books whose raw materials are on my hard drive. But, in essence, the book says that this cosmos is a giant search device, a prober of the myriad potential implications of its starting rules, an explorer of the nooks and crannies of what Steward Kaufman calls "possiblity space." The wobble refers to oscillation, a pattern that shows up at every level of the universe, from the pressure waves in the cosmos' early plasma and the waving blip we call a photon to the wobble back and forth in stock markets, fashions, generation gaps, and in the evolution of culture. Hac> The only glitch is the word optimizati on. The cosmos keeps producing Hac> astonishments and surprises beyond belief. So when a mathematical economist Hac> speaks of optimization, his concept is dry and stale compared with the Hac> robustly triumphant (and often terrible) creativity inherent in a cosmos that Hac> is constantly reinventing herself. pk: Yeeees!!!! Reinventing
is also MINE word to use. I believe that rules of world of the world
are actually a kind of attracting cycle, when particles are constantly
killed and revived. There's simply no another way to live so long as
Universe does! hb: so the oscillation of a photon--its reduction to
a zero point--is actually a micro-nano birth and death, a wink out of
existence and a wink back into existence again? We live in a cosmos
whose fabric is made up of constant recurrences of spontaneous generation?
>>pk: In the paper You can find at http://toyphoton.narod.ru I
sketch a >>scheme where distributed medium between sourse atom
and (possible) >>detecting atoms makes choice TOGETHER with source.
>> Hac> hb: let me send you an unpublished paper I received
tonight for comments. It Hac> explains how a similar interactivity
between sender, receiver, and medium Hac> takes place in bacterial
colonies. pk: How interesting. Hac> The paper comes from Eshel Ben-Jacob,
head of the physics department at The Hac> University of Tel Aviv.
Eshel sees the continuity between abiotic and biotic Hac> patterns.
In fact, he entered microbiology via his interest in Hac> self-organizing
abiotic patterns. He suspected that abiotic forces could Hac> account
for the fractal patterns of bacterial colonies. What he discovered Hac>
was a form of creativity in bacterial colonies that astonished him,
that has Hac> astonished me, and that has led to roughly fifteen
papers in journals like Hac> Physica A. pk: Great. I shoud find these
papers. hb: yes, they're amazing reading. Hac> The creativity of
a self-organizing cosmos is the biggest puzzle of them all. Hac>
I suspect that the interaction between toy photons and their receivers
may Hac> hold part of the solution. pk: Thank You for Your support.
We, like-minded persons, need a kind of web to work successively upon
problems You formulate so bright. hb: thanks, pavel. Hac> I've saved
your short explanation of your paper and began answering it a week Hac>
or so ago--but have been swamped for time. pk: Hmmm... It is in Russian
still. How do You read? I still AM to translate, but I didn't succeed
yet. hb: you sent me a summary and simplification that I believe you
fashioned to fit our conversation. >>hb: the idea of a single
electron determining the next tick of the >>cosmos--you have to
explain it to me. pk: I need time to elaborate some readable and short
text upon it - SOME ideas are in my full-text "manifesto",
which exists in English version also. hb: and I have been having a very
rough time finding spare minutes in which to read and answer. However
our conversation is at the top of my email priority list. Hac> hb:
how the electron governs is of great interest to me. That's why I'm
Hac> hoping you have the time to give me more explanation. pk: Yeh,
let me have some time to prepare a paper upon Emperor Electron. Thank
You very much, especially for ants and bees and for paper on communication
of bacteria and genes - I've recieved it already in another Your letter.
hb: you're welcome. Many thanks for your patience with my limitations.
Howard The square root of minus one is NOT minus one. Why? Minus one times minus one=plus one. In this universe--the universe we see, the square root of minus one doesn't exist. But if my toroidal theory--or perhaps some other toroidal theories--of the cosmos is true, there is a universe in which the square root of minus one DOES exist. It's the anti-matter universe on the underside of the torus. If any positive number in the anti-matter universe is negative in ours, then in that universe the square root of minus one is minus one. Why? Because in that anti-universe what's minus here is plus. If the square root of minus one shows up frequently in equations describing this universe, it may be a hint that indeed an anti-matter universe--the cosmos on the underside of the Big Bagel--does exist. it may also be a hint that the anti-universe and the normal universe are deeply connected, which is what the toroidal model says. pk: What this arrows are summed in destination VECTORILY, this gives new long (or may be short, if interference plays) arrow. The square of this arrow gives probability of THIS final detector. hb: Vectors are one of those few things I understand. But it would help if you could tell me a bit more--in English-- about how these vectors are determined. pk: It's crazy, but it works! hb: it may not be so crazy. >>pk: Who exactly choses - source or vacuum? It should be discussed! >>Essentially, >>it is this discussion, what is my aim. Hac> hb: great, because precisely this kind of "choice" underlies vast number of Hac> phenomenon in this cosmos. These micro-nano-choices determine the shape of Hac> the past and, more important, of the future. The absolute determinism of Hac> Einstein's worldlines (if I understand them correctly) seems off-base to me. Hac> There's wiggle-room in the universe. And, as Arthur's material says, that Hac> wiggle-room can lead to less-than-optimal outcomes from some segments of the Hac> cosmos. But I'd be willing to bet that those suboptimal outcomes provide Hac> information about dead ends to the larger system in some way. I suspect we Hac> have a cosmos that is optimizing itself in some strange way, pk: Hurrah! I believe the same. hb: the title for one of my upcoming books is: The Wobble Factor-Search Engines of the Cosmos-photons, fads, stock markets, and the lust for novelty. This assumes that I'll have sufficient time to someday write all of the books whose raw materials are on my hard drive. But, in essence, the book says that this cosmos is a giant search device, a prober of the myriad potential implications of its starting rules, an explorer of the nooks and crannies of what Steward Kaufman calls "possiblity space." The wobble refers to oscillation, a pattern that shows up at every level of the universe, from the pressure waves in the cosmos' early plasma and the waving blip we call a photon to the wobble back and forth in stock markets, fashions, generation gaps, and in the evolution of culture. Hac> The only glitch is the word optimizati on. The cosmos keeps producing Hac> astonishments and surprises beyond belief. So when a mathematical economist Hac> speaks of optimization, his concept is dry and stale compared with the Hac> robustly triumphant (and often terrible) creativity inherent in a cosmos that Hac> is constantly reinventing herself. pk: Yeeees!!!! Reinventing is also MINE word to use. I believe that rules of world of the world are actually a kind of attracting cycle, when particles are constantly killed and revived. There's simply no another way to live so long as Universe does! hb: so the oscillation of a photon--its reduction to a zero point--is actually a micro-nano birth and death, a wink out of existence and a wink back into existence again? We live in a cosmos whose fabric is made up of constant recurrences of spontaneous generation? >>pk: In the paper You can find at http://toyphoton.narod.ru I sketch a >>scheme where distributed medium between sourse atom and (possible) >>detecting atoms makes choice TOGETHER with source. >> Hac> hb: let me send you an unpublished paper I received tonight for comments. It Hac> explains how a similar interactivity between sender, receiver, and medium Hac> takes place in bacterial colonies. pk: How interesting.
Hac>The
paper comes from Eshel Ben-Jacob, head of the physics department at
The Hac> University of Tel Aviv. Eshel sees the continuity between
abiotic and biotic Hac> patterns. In fact, he entered microbiology
via his interest in Hac> self-organizing abiotic patterns. He suspected
that abiotic forces could Hac> account for the fractal patterns of
bacterial colonies. What he discovered Hac> was a form of creativity
in bacterial colonies that astonished him, that has Hac> astonished
me, and that has led to roughly fifteen papers in journals like Hac>
Physica A. pk: Great. I shoud find these papers. hb: yes, they're amazing
reading. Hac> The creativity of a self-organizing cosmos is the biggest
puzzle of them all. Hac> I suspect that the interaction between toy
photons and their receivers may Hac> hold part of the solution. pk:
Thank You for Your support. We, like-minded persons, need a kind of
web to work successively upon problems You formulate so bright. hb:
thanks, pavel. Hac> I've saved your short explanation of your paper
and began answering it a week Hac> or so ago--but have been swamped
for time. pk: Hmmm... It is in Russian still. How do You read? I still
AM to translate, but I didn't succeed yet. hb: you sent me a summary
and simplification that I believe you fashioned to fit our conversation.
>>hb: the idea of a single electron determining the next tick
of the >>cosmos--you have to explain it to me. pk: I need time
to elaborate some readable and short text upon it - SOME ideas are in
my full-text "manifesto", which exists in English version
also. hb: and I have been having a very rough time finding spare minutes
in which to read and answer. However our conversation is at the top
of my email priority list. Hac> hb: how the electron governs is of
great interest to me. That's why I'm Hac> hoping you have the time
to give me more explanation. pk: Yeh, let me have some time to prepare
a paper upon Emperor Electron. Thank You very much, especially for ants
and bees and for paper on communication of bacteria and genes - I've
recieved it already in another Your letter. hb: you're welcome. Many
thanks for your patience with my limitations. Howard What possibly could keep electrons from falling into the heart of the nucleus and huddling there, bundled tightly by electromagnetic attraction? The key was the quantum, said Bohr. There are quantum steps separating the first shell of electrons from the nucleus, the second shell of electrons from the first, etc. Move down from one electron shell to another an you release a quantum unit of energy, a photon. To move up one level, you need to absorb a quantum unit of energy, once again a photon. So when math proves useful it's usually because it reflects a reality that's just around the bend. The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen molecule, the first potassium molecule, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos says, "Hey, nut case, it went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accelerate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But the Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Gravity tells space how to bend. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Bohr's complimentarity). Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of toward it. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos too. The two are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. I'm trying to show that the square root of minus one may not as imaginary as we think. Minus one is a real number in the anti-universe. So is its square root. Am I making a fool of myself? I'm sure I often do. Howard ps the math of coupled oscillators sounds fascinating. Coupled oscillation is one of the simplest forms of synergistic behavior imaginable. But simple as it is, I suspect the more we can figure out about it, the closer we'll get to understanding a cosmos that thrives on synergy-weaving--with a google of coupled objects (that's google the number, not google the search engine), not just two. And with most of those objects oscillating in some way. This multiplexed weave of oscillations could apply for all kinds of forms of mass behavior, from that of photon floods to that of humans and the cultures many generations of humans iterating knit as they thread old rules through the fabric of newly-emerged patterns. Howard In a message dated 5/16/2003 10:50:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin writes: Howard, You should have strict and clear understanding of what imaginary unit is, and why does it deal with QM. My duty is to explain it to You. 1st. Don't let anyone mislead You, that i = sqrt(-1). Don't You think that there can be such a square root. Square roots DONT exist for negative numbers. Don't let anyone make You a clown. Yes, mathematitians can say, that COMPLEX numbers CAN behave in a strange way. In THEIR wild terminology they are correct. But the very ESSENCE of "i" is NOT scholastically mathematical, it is PHYSICAL. It so occurred in our Universe, that ANY physical system needs at least TWO (simple, usual) numbers to describe it. In classical mechanics it's obvious - one needs a coordinate and velocity, i.e., how the coordinate tends to change in time. The same in classical electrodynamics. QM also needs 2 numbers, but simply it uses these 2 numbers in some Bysantian (Your bright term!) way. Wave function, which is "complex" number (depending on coordinates of all particles involved, their spins, and time), is actually 2 numbers: psi = x + i * y. This is a FORM of writing two numbers: (x, y), nothing else. Sometimes such a direct notation is met also. (Yes, there are rules to multiply two complex numbers, but it is irrelevant for QM, as far as I know). To be true, thogh, we have to use i * i = -1, its irreelevant. What is relevant is that when particle copy moves along one of Feynman's paths to final point, this psi = (x, y) pair, which is FLAT ARROW, it rolls in some way (assume it like an angle of a wheel). And when it comes to final point, these arrows are summed as vectors. No one knows, WHY this ultimate summary arrow gives "probablity amplitude" (NOTHING oscillates! it's a word only), but it is widely talked by us in other places. 2. Imagine a pendulum. When painted at (x, velocity) plan, point that shows pendulum's state, draws a circle. This plan is called "phase space". So, oscillater = rolling arrow. I also think that I can show, how this simple oscillators, when coupled in some way, can SUM arrows. Simply I have now time to do it. Once I did it. Let me have time. Maybe I'm mistaken. -- "Our line is right. The victory will be ours". (c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin
Ever since you mentioned the origins of your corollary generator idea I have had my eyes opened ?? I have been rereading and rethinking in its terms your ideas about the five principles of the society learning machine. Here are some thoughts.You will be familiar with computational automata [game of life, lattice line automata] hb: yup, sure am. and Wolfram's four classes (1984, Physica D, vol 10, 1). hb: no, this sounds interesting. Class I is where the cells die off; class II is where they show constant dead patterning; class III is where things are totally formless and chaotic, and class IV, the interesting one, the transitional one between II and III, where patterns constancy change, shift and evolve producing ever novel complexity. hb: sounds like Kauffman's delicate balance between order and chaos, or the real?life marriage of diversity generation and conformity enforcement, a marriage bond so strong that it's virtually impossible to go to one extreme completely and stay there.Now there is a bug with this work: computational automata may seem to be entities but they are not ?? they are just mathematical products of rules that get reiteratively reapplied upon a previous calculation's product [ultimately upon some seed numbers]. hb: but that's what we are too, or so The Big Bang Tango will argue. Math, for all of the incredible misuses of it in the social sciences, is one of the most magnificent ways in which we can feel out realities (and possiblities) it's more difficult to perceive with other tools??though usually there's a visual metaphor into which math can be translated. But what we see with them surely is general in someway to the real world where actual entities exist and create complex interactions between themselves. That is where Bloom's corollary generator comes in. We live in and witness a world that is class IV ?? an enormously prolific generator of complexity ?? patterns, phenomena, and things built out of other patterns, phenomena, and things created from ones produced earlier in time. How can we describe this manifold of happening ?? that has gone from quacks to civilizations in terms of general processes? hb: one of our group members, a new one who hasn't posted anything yet, had a realization a few weeks ago. His name is Nathan Goldberg, and here's his revelation. Absolute zero is a total stillness, an absence of all molecular and atomic motion. So it is the lower limit of a narrow band in which our universe is channeled. Meanwhile, c, the speed of light is the fastest speed at which a particle could travel. If you had a group of atoms travelling at the speed of light in a chaotic but confinedm manner, you would have the hottest thing imaginable. So the speed of light is the upper limit of whatever this band is within which we live. Let's put it differently. If absolute zero is the highway of the universe's left hand curve, then the speed of light is the right hand curb. We move forward via an engine we call time, and we do it within limits. There are undoubtedly more limits than merly those of motion/temperature. They may be the constraints which keep conformity enforcement and diversity generation walking hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder, never parting company, but constantly pushed into new possiblity space, new branchings of the highway, new choice points into their route. but whatever the strange, one?way only impulse we call time may be. Now to add a bit of total speculation from a notion I came up with at the age of sxiteen when I was doing cancer research at Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute by day and leading a discussion group at night which focussed on cosmology. Imagine that this is a toroidal universe, a universe shaped like a doughnut or a bagel, depending on your ethnic preference. The hole at the center is infinitesimal. From it squeezes the big bang, which begins in the depression of the pinpoint central opening and rapidly spreads upward on the bagel's inner curve. At this point the four forces yank things together and simultaneously separate them (diversity generation and conformity enforcement??the tendency of opposit polarities to attract and similar polarities to repell, etc.), creating quarks, photons, electrons, atoms, molecules, then stars, planets, galaxies, multi?galactic whorls, etc. Gravity fights the explosive force of the initial bang on the bagel's upward curve, insuring that there is cohesion despite the frantic flight from the central massive burst. When the fringes of the corollary generating universe reach the bagel's hump they begin to slide down the outer curve. Why? At the hump the cosmological constant shifts, and gravity, the one force which seems to us to attract but never repel, reverses. It was a cohesive force. Now it becomes a force of repulsion. Those things like stars, planets, and multi?galactic swirls remain intact. They are still close enough to experience gravity as an attractive force. The forward advancing elements on one end of the universe, however, have spread for enough from their counterparts on the opposite edge that gravity is now acting to repel them. Hence the acceleration of distant objects recently spotted and puzzled over by astronomers and astrophysicists, who were forced to resuscitate the cosmological constant in an effort to catch up with the hastening outer fringes of everything we know. Though objects at great distance rush away from each other, they are still operating within a universe of constraints??constraints so rigid that identical protons and neutrons can be found from one end of the universe to the other. And they are still forced to explore new possibility space by the conformity generators which in the beginning insured that protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons would each be different. However the axioms which started the whole shebang (probably attraction and repulsion) may have infniite possibilities implicit in their nature, but this is a *bounded* infinity. Back to our cosmic torus, our big donut of creation. acceleration is carrying the universe toward an a curve which will reverse its direction??the curve which leads to the donut's underside. At this point the positive matter becomes anti?matter, experiences its own form of Big Bang and reverses direction via a reversal of time. Why? The edge of the positive matter donut is the hole in the center of the antimatter universe. The rush toward an outer edge is, when seen from the other side of an admittedly more than four dimensional donut, a grand collapse into a minuscule opening. An antimatter big bang occurs, it rushes in the opposite direction temporally as it spread on the donut's underside, crosses the equator at which its cosmological constant reverses its gravity, then rushes toward its edges, which happen to be the center of the positive matter universe on the other side, and bang, we have big blooped all over again. Physicists are currently trying to figure out why it seems so easy theoretically and in colliders to create equal numbers of positive and anti?matter particles, yet there are so few anti?matter particles in this universe. The answer is (ahem) simple???? Anti?matter particles can be created by brute force in this universe, but the axioms of a universe in which time runs from our past to our future are inconsistent with the continued existence of anti?matter particles, whose time runs in the opposite direction. And the direction of time on either side of the torus is another absolute constraint. So being an anti?matter electron, a positron, is not an evolutionarily stable strategy given the niches or constraints imposed by the axioms of this universe. Being a positron IS highly consistent with the axiom?defined constraints of a universe whose time is rushing in reverse, however. Hence a positron in the right environment represents an evolutionarily stable strategy which will self assemble in vast numbers. This indicates three axioms at the universe's beginning??attraction, repulsion, and time. Time is what Timothy Perper once called the "operator", the force turning the crank of the corollary generating machinery. Admittedly, this
began as the brainstorm of a teenager who'd spent a mere five years
studying cosmology and a wide variety of other sciences. And it reamins
that??a speculation. But during the last forty years, my amateur tracking
of astronomy and cosmology seems to have presented one new finding after
another which were consistent with this adolescent intutition. Perhaps
because young as I was, and ignorant as I remain, you and I are elements
of a corollary generatng system whose constraints are sufficient to
nearly guarantee that given one set of corollary choices, the next steps
are nearly inevitable. I'm one more speckle on the cosmic bagel. Could
someone please pass the cream cheese and lox? (Or the liquid hydrogen
and lox??liquid oxygen??which is making some of these wild fantasies
possible via information garnered by telescopes and other instruments
tossed into space by liquid fuel rockets.)js: The answer is your idea
that is happening out there is a corollary generator. At the beginning
there were very simple processes but because things interact in terms
of a few basic processes, that create yet other processes that come
into existence as corollaries ?? literally 'gifts or a garland' that
emerge into being from them. In turn, they create yet further processes,
phenomena and entities. It is all rather like the class IV of computational
automata but created not by mathematic rules and initial seed numbers
but real processes in the universe and the fact they started off ??
'big bang' ?? and have been constantly producing new processes, phenomena,
and entities out previous ones ever since. What you have done is transfer
the vision of mathematic axioms and their enormous ?? and surprising
capacity to create mathematic phenomena [from set theory, number theory,
from number theory, information theory etc] ?? to the real world. Other
people have seen the entities described by mathematics as a tool to
understand the universe ?? the mathematicisation vision, you have done
is something entirely novel see 'mathematics' in terms of its axiom/corollary
creativity as the tool to understand its creativity of processes, phenomena
and entities. Thus while others try and see the world in terms of mathematical
processes [Euclidean ?? Newton, nonEuclidean ?? Einstein ] ?? a vision
first started by Plato; you try and so something very different ?? see
the world in terms of its own nonmathematical axioms, deductions and
corollary generations and how come to produce its constant generation
of new processes, phenomena and entities. Whereas others want to reverse
engineer the universe to an underlying mathematics, you want to reverse
engineer out its own nonmathematic axioms from which its complexity
emerges as corollaries. hb: hmmm, interesting material to ponder. I
never saw it that way before. Be well and come back to New York quick.
Howard For example, Arp's discussion of nonDoppler redshifts makes a lot of sense to me -- and if you don't hold to the usual red shift assumptions, I have the impression that the non-Big-Bang alternatives seem a bit less strained than the Big Bang ones, on the whole. hb: yes, I've been pondering the red-shift problem--whether our assumption is correct or not--since I was twelve and started thinking about these things. Guth's inflation is also very hard to swallow. It seems like a Ptolemaic sort-of-contortion attempting to explain things. Plus, I've never seen a lucid explanation of how space and time precipitate in protons at the universe's big-bangation. Nor of why all the zillions--10(81) or something of the sort--are absolutely identical. Nor of why electrons and protons suit each other so perfectly, no matter where they were born or spent their time. And no physicist has been able to explain to me whether electical current is a stream of electrons travelling long distances or whether it's like waves of the sea, where no molecule of water moves more than 20 feet or so, but merely circles and transmits its motion to the next batch of water molecules down the line. The problems the folks in superconductivity have in making electrons travel in straight lines indicates to me that the cycle-transmitting-motion model is correct, not the long-distance-flow-of-electrons. No matter what the superconductivity people do, their electron streams insist on breaking up in circular turbulence. Doesn't that mean the electrons are telling us something? That they don't want to travel straight, they want to circle and loop. Which doesn't mean they won't do our electrical work for us. They simply want to do it by circling as water molecules in the sea do. They do not want to follow Ben Franklin's ancient metaphor of a "current"--that is, of a stream. I'm with the folks who've looked at the cosmos through an assumption, a metaphor, of a siren coming in your direction at 80 mph screeching with a high pitch and a siren travelling away at 80 mph leaving a lower pitch. If the metaphor is wrong or needs adjusting, it's time for a whole new picture of the cosmos. Do you have one to propose? If the metaphor of a current doesn't really catch the natural proclivity of electrons, then those who use it and do not know they're working with a hidden picture, a hidden assumption buried in a metaphor are bound to fail over and over and over again--something the superconductivity folks have been doing since the 1980s--back in a different century. pw: Well -- another foundation issue, besides red shifts, is the issue of the arrow of time and thermodynamics and such. hb: which I've been attacking as ass-backwards...and my friend Eshel Ben-Jacob has been kind enough to jump into this with me. However I suspect that you may have a heretic vision that makes my decades of heresy look very orthodox indeed. I inherited the disgust with entropy from Jacob Bronowski, a hero of my younger years. Which means that like my attachment to George Gamow, whose book One, Two, Three...lnfinity helped father me, my attachment to Bronowski connects me to the thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s--when I was a toddler and a grammar school kid. Imprinting, science, and the flow of culture. The turbulence or cyclic path of electrons is mirrored in the cyclic shifts of culture. Imprinting is the cycloid's moving axle. Are there moving axles to a cycloid cosmos and to the whorling of electons in what we mistakenly call a current? Is oscillation a temporary stand-in for something that looms ahead of us like the ellipse in the history of astronomy? Is everything cycloidal? And how do we ever describe cycloids to a layman without pictures and/or animations, something I'm working on. I learned them when I was twelve from another mentor, this time one who tutured me in person, not through books. He was head of research and development for the Moog Valve Corporation. Frankly, Paul, if i hadn't inserted a pencil into the outer edge of a rolling piece of wood and made the cycloids with my own hands, I would never have known what they were. (The dictionary discipline is incomprehensible to someone who's never made a cycloid: "a curve generated by a point on the circumference of a circle that rolls, without slipping, on a straight line.") How do cycloids fit with Mandelbrot equations? What if we subsitituted cycloids for circles? Would tha make the pattern of fractals any less tedious, any more like the patterns of complexity in this universe? I use Mandelbrot graphics and pictures of strings and lumps of galactic clusters to show kids how with a few simple rules you can build a universe. The strings of galactic clusters like precisely like the strings generated by the Mandelbrot equations. Even the circling and budding, the two central rules of the Mandelbrot pattern, show up in photos of galactic superclusters in the making. However I may be teaching the tale of the unfolding of a universe all wrong. pw: Prigogine and I have back-to-back papers on the arrow of time and the cosmological implications in an edited book called Origins, edited by Karl Pribram, a paperback from Erlbaum. Prigogine and I argued (from very different assumptions) that the arrow of time is really not the decisive argument it is commonly held to be. For people who rely mainly on English language thinking, it may be that the recent book by Huw Price is the most accessible explanation of some of the issues. (I agree with Price, on the whole, but Prigogine would not.) hb: I'm trying to order Huw's book so I can keep up with you. The readers' reviews say it's tough sledding. pw: Price points out that Hawking himself postulated a temporal symmetry -- a Big Bang model in which time runs forwards in the "early" region, and "backwards" in the "later" region. hb: I've maintained the symmetry but have handled the spit a bit differently--thanks to the primitive topology that Gamow's book taught me. pw: In many ways, that is the most coherent and plausible version of Big Bang around. But the treatment of time suddenly puts into question the apriori assumptoins about the flow of time which probably underlie the degree of religiosity about Big Bang in the first place. hb: I'm a times-arrow-only-goes-forward person--at least for the positive matter universe. But I suspect that positive and negative particles annihilate each other because they collide in time. That is, the positive particle is moving forward in time (relative to us) like this --> and the negative particle is moving backwardy in time (relative to us) like this <--. Two objects can not occupy the same space at the same time. And this is precisely what an electron and positron positioned togethe in space are trying to do. By the way, Paul, do positrons attract electrons? If they do it would help support my admittedly unsophisticated argument that the anti-matter universe attracts the positive matter universe after the two of them pass the fattest hump of the bagel. Just checked. Yes, a positron should attract an electron--the two have opposite charge. So a negative universe could be attracted to a positive universe by more than the vagaries of gravity. Gravity is switched from an attractive to a repulsive force by huge galumphs of distance (space, time, and motion). Again, I suspect that the gravity of the negative and the positive universe attract each other. Especially because of this. As they move toward the edge of the bagel, the gravitation of the positive universe should be negative--repulsive. The gravity of the negative universe should be positive--attractive. Attraction on the negative side of the bagel is pulling the negative universe backward in time, to that point of singularity with which it began. The repulsion on the positive side us pushing the positive universe toward the same spot--since the rim is the center and the center is the rim. Plus, a positive force and a negative version of the same force ATTRACT. So these two universes on the underbrane and upperbrane of the bagle are attracting each other gravitationally and electromagnetically after they get past the bagel's hump. The one thing I don't understand about Steinhardt's theory is why he needs trillions of years to get to the outer edge that's actually the center singularity. It's only taken 10 billion to fifteen billion years to get to the hump. That indicates a universe that reigenerates from its initial rule-based megadensity after somewhere between 20 and 30 billion years. Another thing. The positive universe is working out the corollaries of the rules with which it began, and presumably being influenced on which direction to go next at many a bifurcation point. Meaning there is wiggle room for accident and free will. But the negative universe is doing the reverse homework assignment. It's figuring out its axioms from its final corolllaries, from its ending tangle of huge chandeliers of intricacy. Does it have wiggle room? My instinct says yes, and my reason says no, it is an automatic universe, one where the suspence depends on moving backwards in time and figuring out what peculiar root an orchid's come from. One value of Stephen Wolfram's book: it shows us how difficult it is to figure out the underlying rules of a system that's moved so far from its original moves--from its original advances on the Plank time chessboard--that it's generating something that we human see as randomness and chaos. Does this mean there have to be humans or perceivers in the counter-universe to have a sense of wonder and suspense? No to the necessity of having perceivers. Yes to the likelihood of having perceivers. After all, the negative universe is born of the same singularity and its rules as is the positive universe. It's quite likely to work out many of the same implications. And humans are implicit in this cosmos' initial rules. If that weren't true we wouldn't be here. And, yes, it's necessary fo have perceivers who try to comprehend the past and future if you're going to have wonder and suspense. In fact those perceivers will need to be emoters if these feelings are to exist. But a Paul Werbos and a Howard Bloom running strictly backwards from gray hairs to infancy is something I severely doubt. Though a strange thing just happened. As I was typing this on my computer my mind went through an instant shift and started seeing the lines and feeling my fingers as if in some way they were untyping, moving from right to left. moving in reverse. I am not kidding and not trying to be poetic or whimsical. It is a very weird feeling. Which makes me think. Last night the letter d kept showing up in the wrong places in what I was typing. I looked at the keyboard and discovered that it popped out of my fingers and brain whenever I tried to type the letter k. K is in the mirror opposite position from d on the keyboard. When I was a kid I had a very subtle, very strange dyslexia. Without a lot of guidance it seems the brain is set up to go either way in its symmmetries. But never in the symmetry of time. At least for humans, symmetry is broken. Time's arrow goes from baby hair to gray. OK, enough of my nutty theories for the evening. hb: Many of the more orthodox people basically called Hawkings on the carpet, and he recanted. Thus in Borders this week, I see a "new and expanded" issue of... his best seller... where he explains why he recanted. In essence he says :"My colleagues pointed out to me that IT IS POSSIBLE to construct a Big Bang scenario without temporal symmetry." hb: ok, I've got one. And it leads to two times arrows, one running backwards and another running forwards, each in a matching clamshell-half of a cosmos. Does that help?
Or am I like the nuts who sent me grand theories they've wored out connecting
everything, theories so far from my scientific vocabulary that I don't
have time...or the motivation to comprehend them. Am I simply ignoring
them because they don't come from people who are part of the scientific
clique I like to remain a part of? Am I disregarding them as cranks
because I, for all my rebellion and heresy, don't want to be called
on the carpet the way Stephen Hawking was? Besides, I have my own pet
theories to peddle. And once I get out of my Big Bagle, I can back my
statements on cosmology with so many citations its absurd. What are
citations? They're the validation of the herd. Even a heretic measures
himself by his distance from the center of where the herd is standing.
A nasty thing to realize for us heretics, right? Remember, evolutionary
biologist David Sloan Wilson said in his introduction to my first book,
The Lucifer Principle, that "Howard Bloom is a heretic even among
heretics." So here I am admitting that the doppler assumptions
are questionable and that even my heresy is negative conformity, all
in one email. God, Paul, you've disrobed me. Without a big bang and
heresy, what's left of my identtity? pw: Possible, yes. Just as it was
possible to resurrect Ptolemy with epicycles. But the earlier version
was far more parsimonious. Only a lot of apriori religion about time
could justify preferring epicycles. ]hb: is a cycloid an epicycle, or
simply a promising way of possibly understanding a few new things? Again,
many thanks for the mental workout. Nobody gets this much thinking out
of me late at night but you. Howard In each universe it probably appears as if everything is running forward. But that's not my point. One can start from axioms and reach an elaborate system of corollaries, as one does when extracting the natural number system from Peano's postulates. Or one can start from an elaborate system like that of natural numbers and go backwards to uncover Peano's postulates--as Peano presumably did. The beginning is implict in the end and the end is implicit in the beginning. Are you with me so far? But here's the trick. The route one takes to go from the elaboration to the axioms may be very different from the route one took to get from the axioms to the elaboration. If I'm trying to figure out the basic postulates underlying the natural number system, you're trying to do it, and Peano is trying to do it, we may all go about it different ways, take a different set of steps, and still go from an identical end to an identical beginning. Meaning that events are not predetermined. There's wiggle room and freedom in the system. There's even freedom for a human thing like will. Yes, there is serious constraint. Anything inconsistent with the axioms can not exist. There is no total randomness. Neo Darwinians can kiss their cherished totally random mutation goodbye. Rules beget form. Form is a set of rules in motion. So is process. As soon as we say that form is rules in motion, we've implied two basic assumptions---time and space. And we have no idea of what and why time and space are. But that's a matter for another night. There are many paths from the beginning to the end, but those paths are just a small subset of infinity. Only those forms that fit the rules can survive. There's natural selection built into a universe that kicks off with simple rules. Defy the rules and die--or never even come to be. The end is implicit in the beginning, no matter how many different routes there are from one to the other. Which means that in one sense time is pushing us forward from a distant past. And looked at from another point of view, our future is pulling us forward. The ultimate future of the cosmos keeps beckoning. God is waiting for us at the end of this long journey, his arms outstretched, and we hope with a smile on his face and endless sunshine. (I'm an atheist, but it's hard to keep an anthropomorphic god from getting a bit of airtime.) This supports your the-future-pulls-a-particle view--or is it radically different? Is your view constrained to events on the tinest levels of planck space and time? Reason apes the processes of the universe. Reason is a product of the universe. Why? At the very least because reasoners are. And also because anything inconsistent with the rules and current corollaries of the cosmos can't survive. Obey the rules or die. Math apes the processes of the universe. Metaphor apes the processes, too. It captures pattern at one level and assumes that if similar pattern appears at another level, it must follow similar rules. If light passing through two slits flicks in alternating bands on a screen on the other side, its pattern is similar to the interference pattern of two waves of water, two water ripples. Water ripples are waves, hence light may be a wave. If light is, it must follow other rules that water waves obey. With math, reason, and metaphor, we tap into the universe's fracticality---its repetitions of its early rules and corollaries appearing over and over on different levels of complexity. Metaphor works. We know. We've tried it. We've used the form of metaphor called math and managed to lob objects into space, to loop them around planets and slingshot them, all by using a math based on metaphor. We use the math of turbulence and find that it applies to flows of electrons in a supercomputer, to flows of water in a stream, bathtub, or toilet bowl, to storms of water in the sea, to the flow of atmosphere and weather here on earth and up on Jupiter, to the flows of plasma in a sun, and to the flow of matter in a galaxy. So many reappearances of the same pattern defined accurately by the same formulae of turbulence and we never ask why. To me it's evidence of a recursive universe, a fractal universe, extracting the corollaries from initial rules. Doing it as if this were a Fibonnaci cosmos whose rules say, among other things.--take the sum of your previous steps and run them through the same old rules again. Guess what you'll
come up with? Something new. Sorry for the overlow of words and thoughts,
but you stimulate me hugely and are pulling the basics of a book I haven't
had time to write--The Big Bang Tango: Quarking in the Social Cosmos--Notes
Toward a Post-Newtonian Science--out of me. P.S. One thing which some
people find very compelling is the complex mathematics of stochastic
differential equations. It seems so impressive (and time-forwards) that
mypoic mathematicians easily lose their ability to envision how there
could be anything else BUT time-forwards causality. But there is a new,
more complete mathematics of mixed forwards-backwards SDE. there is
a book, backwards stochastic differential equations, which I would highly
recommend to a true purist mathematician with an interest in the Return
to Reality. (In light of Clauser's theorem, the only tenable alternatives
to allowing some backwards causality are to give up on reality altogether,
or to assume a combination of parallel universes perpetually interfering
with each other AND to assume nonlocal field interactions of a uniquely
ugly sort.) Best, Paul W. hb: one version
of the big bagle I've been toying with takes care of the problem of
time symmetry by making time go in one direction in the anti-universe
on the bottom of the bagle and in the opposite direction on the positive
matter side. Since the bagle's hole is its perimeter--its outer edge,
and the outer edge is its hole, the big bang of the anti-universe can
emerge from the edge and go back to the hole while the big bang of the
positive universe can come from the same singularity but emerge from
the bagle's center. This is hard to put into words but easy to put into
pictures. I don't buy the notion of reversible time in the standard
physics sense at all. But then I don't buy entropy, either. I had a
five hour brainstorming session with a flat-out entropist a few nights
ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
He's another polymath with a grand unified theory of the cosmos that's
radically multi-disciplinary. Apparently he was flown in from Georgia
by some folks in the Transhumanist clique because they were curious
to see what would happen when the two of us got together. It is eery
how well the entropic explanation of things works but how poorly it
serves our need for an intuitive grasp of things. It is also disturbing
that the entropic viewpoint takes so many mental contortions that it
leaves no brain energy for the really big problem of the universe--its
creativity, its ability to spew huge suprises every few billion years
or so. But another peculiarity is that entropy feels like something
that belongs on the bagel's underside, where time is running backwards.
So I feel like a proton colliding with an anti-proton when debating
with an entropist--and Eliezar is an impressive debater, very into the
math that you would comprehend but that I would not. It feels like we
are describing the same universe and as if we are identical but rushing
toward each other from opposite directions. So despite our identical
features, we annihilate. hb: description is representation, not reality. It is translation from one frame of reference to another, from one system to another. The fact that numerous systems can be isomorphic and reflect each other is one of the things we examine too infrequently. How does math map the cosmos? How does thought map math? How do equations on paper equate with brain processes and the processes that birthed a universe? Metaphor is one compression technique, one way of representing "reality" in a more concise manner. Math is another. Religion is yet a third. Poetry a fourth. But how do we manage to convey the essence of something in so many ways?What quality of the universe allows for this representation, this digestion down to something more compact, something usable in entirely new ways, in ways that change the cosmos as profoundly as the shift from atoms in streams of gas and dust to the formation of galaxies? Yes, by representing things in new frames of reference we piles of thinking quarks introduce new things into the stream of cosmic evolution--space travel, physics, equations, visual representations of nonlinear math, computers, cyberspace, and movies in which we share our dreams. Compression and expansion, that's how the cosmos reinvents itself. It is a cosmos whose profound fracticality explains why brains and lines of paper can model the explosions of novas deep in space. Patterns repeat on many levels because the repetition of things on new levels is how this cosmos grows new patterns, processes, and things--from singularity to a sheet of time-space expansion, from that sheet of hurried departure from less than a single point to many points, to quarks, then to nucleons, and onward 300,000 years later to atoms and straight-line-travelling photons, then, 700,000 years down the road to galaxies, the ignition of stars, and light. Now we take nearly infinitessimal streams of that light and shift if from one frame of reference to another--from the tiny light-twitches the human eye can't see to the twitching of electrons in a CCD sensor to the image made by luminescent particles on a computer monitor, to the pixels of an image, to the ink of wood pulp of a picture, to the mathematics of an astrophysicist and from there to the technical language of a journal article and the colloquial language of a press release. But that's not the end of the condensations and translations from one from of reference to another, not be any means. If the information officer in charge of the press release makes just the right a bursts of electrons and photons move on the telephone lines and rearranges the neurotransmissions in a New York Times reporter's mind, the numerous translations of the twitch of light can be reconstructed in the minds of millions as a vision of a process that once occurred on the very edges (or at the very center) of this spreading universe. Then prophets, preachers, and politicians can use the resulting genesis tale to change the course of human history. Compression and expansion all over the place. Representation and translation. Why does it all work? Because the original ancestors of stars, of atoms, of photons, and of you and me were a handful of rules that can be expanded and compressed iteratively--folded over and under and upon themselves endlessly. Or endlessly until the positive universe meets the anti-universe and they destroy each other, releasing the energy that begins the spread of two new time-space manifolds, two blank sheets on which a new anti and a new positive universe will write themselves. At least this is the Bloomian view...the Big Bang Tango model. However I don't dare put the Big Bagel into this book. It's treading in territory I've been accustomed to since I was ten, but in which I have never undergone the proper mathematical initiation. And without knowledge of the math, I'm not allowed to be as sure as I actually am that there's a good chance my toroidal compression of the cosmos is right. pw: The modern quantum picture is not exactly the same as Einstein's picture... though I personally think they can be reconciled with each other precisely... and it is similar in flavor in any case. hb: my impression is that you've shown a mathematical connection between the two that indicates the systems are isomorphic--they are representations in different frames of reference that represent a common reality. Your math, if I understand aright, has shown that there is greater consistency between the two than the quantum phyisicists of today would ever admit. And my impression is that your math has said that the multiple outcomes of quantum dynamical math is not the simultaneous alternative realities it's been interpreted to be. Have I got it wrong? hb: Here's a simpleton's suggestion. The motive power is...gravity. Take the bagel model I keep tossing around (or loxing up). If both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. Talk about tautological, I've got gravity working because of….gravity. But my blithering doesn't remove the fact that it seems to me there's more than mathematical description needed to explain attraction at a distance. Math can map the manner in which gravity works. But does it tell us why force at a distance applies? pw: In Einstein's picture (and mine, for the next generation), it doesn't. hb: aha! a very important statement. you've just pointed to a horizon we have to go over to find what strange frontier awaits on the other side. pw: Einstein certainly talked a lot about the picture with gravity. An OBJECT at a distance can influence another object millions of miles away... BY "BENDING" the gravitational field in its OWN neighborhood, which propagates through space to the neighborhood of the other object. Local interactions produce global effects. hb: neat. any bend in the sheet alters its total topography. the topology remains the same. the sheet is still a sheet. but one topographic lump or dimple can influence all the rest? pw: If it takes objects to generate a field, and it takes an intersect of fields to generate an object, ummm, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what is a photon-a rippled, rapidly traveling intersect of electrical and magnetic fields? pw: My opinion... is that electromagnetism is basically a collection of four numbers (a "four vector") which vary over space and time. One of the four numbers is basically just the level of "voltage" hb: voltage=a sucking from one end of the trajectory and a push from the other? If so, how does the trajectory exist before the photon has traveled it? Does this bring us back to the short-term backwards causality you've proposed? If a photon travels 13 billion miles, is there the a sucking on one end of a 13-billion mile end straw and a push that comes from the other? Doesn't that mean that future and past both influence the present big time? 13.5 billion years is the age of the cosmos. And if this is a 27-billion-light-year cosmos, as I suspect it is, and if we are at the mid point, which I suspect we are, then this means the backward influence of the future isn't short term at all. It's as long as the lifetime of the universe. We are sucked forward by our future if this view is accurate. But two bizarre questions: 1) where is the wiggle room, the room for oddities like free will? 2) I've defied the current wisdom, which says that even if the universe is toroidal, we are very close to the beginning of things. The meeting between branes is trillions of years in the future, or so says Steinhardt. So are we being pulled by a future trillions of years down the line? 3) We are sentient beings. We saddle and ride disasters like Niagara Falls--we tame them and use their energy. Someday, if we don't incinerate ourselves, we may tame the spurts of energy that flare from black holes. And beyond that we may even tame and bend the saddle curves of time and space. We are just one of many surprises this cosmos has produced. What next? Will it have an ability to disaster-ride even greater than we do? Will it harness the wild flail of entropy and turn it into something useful, energy? Will that use reshape the cosmos? Will the fifteenth step beyond sentient life become a race of brane riders who can tell the cosmos not to end but instead can bend it up to any skyward climb they choose? pw: free-floating in space. I personally believe that there probably is no such thing as a"photon," really, as a distinct object. Rather, there are quantized emitters and absorbers of electromagnetic radiation. hb: hmmm--kurakin sees a photon as a range of possible transmissions between sender and receiver. Which receiver gets the message is determined by a process I haven't quite deciphered. Does this bring us back to mistaking the limits of our observation for the limits of reality? A photon from an early star 13.4 billion years away reaches the ccd of the Hubble, is translated to electrons and beamed down to a community of astrophysicists who decipher it--translate it into their math and into their conversations made by tongues wobbling air over lunch. They publicize it and the news gets to you, and later on to me. We are sinks and the star is source, but is there really nothing in between? And how does that photon manage its amplification--being translated into so many forms, being inserted into the minds of so many human beings? You and I are not the only humans who read the astrophysics news as it comes rolling in. The New York Times makes sure this news excites (not sinks, but synchs) many, many a mind. I'm sure there is something--call it a photon for the moment--that travels the path of the trajectory. What is it? Is it a what at all? Is it a thing or a process or both? Isn't every thing a process on a timescale too big for us to see? So what, exactly, is a thing. I know darned well that on the timescale of consciousness, it's distinctly different from a flow. I say the timescale of consciousness because there are many "human" timescales...most of them non-conscious. Right now 100 trillion cells in me are loading phosphorus atoms onto molecules of adnenosine diphoshpate, then passing the loaded molecules along to others that strip the phosphorus from the backbone of the atp and extract a snip of energy. This is happening at a speed my mere consciousness can only imagine--that is, represent in another frame of reference. It's a timescale I can only grasp thanks to the work of thousand of humans of generations that produced language, culture, and science--generations working on another timescale I can only represent but can't perceive. Are these inhuman timescales inhuman? No, they're vital parts of what makes a human being. But still I can only comprehend them through imagination and representation, through human-invented compressions, human uses of fracticality. pw: But perhaps I might change my mind if the analysis of electroweak theory with topological solitons points in a different direction. I am just going by what I see in quantum optics. My ignorance is showing all over the place, but sometimes it's worth asking naïve questions. Occasionally we become so used to using words like "force" that we don't recognize our ignorance anymore. It's like the doctor who feels he's explained your stomach cramp when he tells you that you've got gastritis. Sorry, you knew that before you walked in to his examining room. Gastritis is Latin for irritation of the stomach. In other words, all your doctor has done is parrot your question back at you in another tongue. You asked why does my stomach ache and the doc has said because you have an ache of the stomach. Howard pw: Don't worry. We are all ignorant. The problem is to deal with the folks who don't KNOW how ignorant they are. hb: thanks, Paul. Silly as it sounds, I needed that reassurance. You decoded the signals of my insecurity very well. Limbic system shivers translated into subtext--more shifting from one frame of reference to another, one more use of fracticality. I needed your kindness. pw: which I have tried to explore. (As in arXiv.org/abs/patt-sol-9804003, hb: yikes--tried to get the paper and arXiv says it's not there. Oops. patt-sol/9804003. The archive can also be searched by author's name. hb: bear with me. I'm inserting the abstract so everyone can see it. Indeed you seem to have done it. If I read you correctly, you're saying that that a photon IS a trajectory across time and space--and that it has room for multifarcation--wiggle room. Rather an amazing proposition, Paul. The more you can put it in English, the more minds you can blow--and the more minds you can bing into thinking along new trajectories, thinking along new lines. Ladies and gentlemen, Paul's abstract: Retrieved from the World Wide WebMarch 26, 2003 http://arxiv.org/abs/patt-sol/9804003 Pattern Formation and Solitons, abstract patt-sol/9804003 From: Dr. Paul J. Werbos Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 21:03:16 GMT (274kb) New Approaches to Soliton Quantization and Existence for Particle Physics Authors: Paul J. Werbos Comments: 60p., no figs, 200+ eqs. Companion to "Can 'soliton' attractors exist in realistic 3+1-D Conservative Systems", Chaos Solitons and Fractals, in press Subj-class: Pattern Formation and Solitons This paper provides mathematical details related to another new paper which suggests: (1) new approaches to the analysis of soliton stability; (2) families of Lagrangian field theories where solitons might possibly exist even without topological charge; (3) alternative approaches to quantizing solitons, with testable nuclear implications. This paper evaluates the possibility of strong energy-minimizing states in four families of systems, two promising and two not promising. In these examples, it presents new methods for second-order stability analysis, and analyzes persistent multifurcation. Section 6 presents three alternative formalisms for quantizing solitons (topological or nontopological), all of which have major implications for the foundations of quantum theory: (1) the standard formalism, based on functional integration, reinterpreted as an imaginary Markhov Random Field (iMRF) across time and space, with parallels to fuzzy logic; (2) two radically conservative formalisms, consistent with the core of Einstein's vision, based on a true MRF model. Bell's Theorem, bosonization, time-symmetry and macroscopic asymmetry are discussed, along with some testable alternative possibilities and heresies, like nonDoppler redshift. Full-text: PDF only References and citations for this submission: CiteBase (autonomous citation navigation and analysis) Links to: arXiv, patt-sol, /find, /abs (-/+), /9804, ? pw: Based on what I know, I would be VERY surprised if it weren't there. hb: it's there. not to worry. hb: I suspect Witten went into superstring theory because he saw it as one of many highways to the same place. Here's my favorite Witten quote: "String Theory, as developed by the mid-eighties, was characterized by the fact that there were five theories we knew about. And that raised a rather curious question, that was always a little bit embarrassing. If one of those theories describes our universe, then who lives in the other four universes? We've come to understand that those five theories we've been studying are all parts of a bigger picture. In the last couple of years the picture has really changed to something which is called Duality. Duality, is a relationship between two different theories which isn't obvious. If it's obvious you don't dignify it by the name duality. So, we have different pictures and it's not that one is correct and the other isn't correct; one of them is more useful for answering one set of questions, the other is more useful in other sets of questions. And the power of theory comes largely from understanding that these different points of view which sound like they're about different universes actually work together in describing one model. So, those theories turn out to all be one, so it's a big conceptual upheaval to understand that there's only one theory, which is uncanny in nature." hb: Witten is saying that you can view the cosmos through a variety of lenses. You can represent it with a variety of translations from one frame of reference or language to another. But all of these translations, these simple pictures, these condensations of cosmic complexity, echo each other in ways that are hard to grasp at first. The budding bubble of the Mandelbrot set repeats itself in ways that at first seem very different. But if you look hard enough, you'll the the ancestral patterns--the big bang or steady-state rules, axioms, or commandments--reappearing. Five theories=one reality. Am I wrong, or is this not an instance of iteration, of non-linear evolution, of deconstruction, and re-evolution. Is it not a manifestation of fracticality? pw: Here he was talking about different varieties of string or n-brane theories. But in his paper in Chodos, he was talking about a totally different TYPE of consistent theory. hb: aHA!!!! pw: Part of the problem is that people were using topological soliton models mainly as a kind'of rough-and-ready rule of thumb... in predicting practical nuclear experiments. (The sacred Standard Model mostly can't be used for that purpose, because it is too hard to use in making predictions. Thus mere experiments are studied using a totally different flavor of model. MRS discuss that.) hb: this has amazing implications. It undercuts the likelihood that Standard Theory is right. It indicates that it's at best a very, very rough approximation of particle-level reality. It's a convenient myth to see us through to the day when we can cobble together something less primitive. Today's math always reminds me of Olduwan stone tools--even if the formulae remain beyond my comprehension. The oversimplifications it forces physicists to use are frighteningly backward. And when you look at its history, it seems to have advanced very little from the math of the 19th Century. I prefer the pretty pictures of the Mandelbrot set. They resonate so much more to me. And I do demonstrations when folks come here of the way the mandelbrot set is nearly identical to the patterns seen in clusters of galaxies. I also can explain the mandelbrot set in terms of attraction and repulsion, two things we know are basic to this cosmos, two underlying fractal principles...principles that show up on the level of elementary particles and on the level of the most complex human problems--their bonding binges and battles...and their love affairs. Remember, humans are piles of quarks. It shouldn't seem outlandish that we repeat the ancient patterns of the stuff of which we're made. pw: The idea of using them to explain why electrons exist at all may simply not have occurred to people. hb: aha--so electrons have been pulled in here. Very interesting, Paul, since electon streams are the mistaken metaphor from which the idea of source of sink, of voltage, is derived. But electrons do not travel in currents. They merely bonk each other into motion. We've agreed on that in past discussions. There is something wrong in the voltage metaphor. It doesn't describe a trajectory. It describes a social transmission of minimal motion from the electon shell of one atom to that of another. I'm an idiot about these things, You know that. But isn't this an inconsistency? Even a bit of a mystery? Let's run with it for a second. If a photon and an electron work in a similar manner, then a photon is a tiny swirl that bonks the next bit down the line into twirling too. Which brings us back to the ether, something I believe Pavel Kurakin feels we shouldn't have abandoned so hastily. Let's not call it the ether. Let's call it the space-time manifold, Steinhardt's macro-brane, or Einstein's space-time sheet. If a photon is a travelling ripple in the sheet--a bit of motion imparted from one swirl to another, what are the swirlable twitches of which time-space is made? What is the nature of time and space's weave? Let me propose something. Suppose that nothing in this cosmos actually travels in straight lines. Suppose that straight lines are an illusion, an emergent property of curves and circles. What the heck do I mean. Download Rudy Rucker's fractal program from http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/chaos.htm . Watch a Mandelbrot set unfold. The set is based on two commandments--gather around a common center, then rebel and bud. Attraction to a common center makes a circle. Repulsion sends stuff fleeing beyond the circle's perimeter. Attraction to a common center makes even the rebellious circle-breakers make new circles of their own. Watch this pattern grow for a while. You'll see it begins to make absolutely straight, straight lines. Now zoom in on those lines and you discover that straightness is a matter of translation, it's a matter of scale. On the microlevel those lines are made of fractal bubbles and their rebels, fractal circles and their buds. Take your constrained whirpool, your soliton. Let it pass its motion on. Let's imagine that space is composed of swirlable, circular units on roughly the Planck scale. A photon is a whirl around the center transmitted from one unit to another. Or it's a cascade, a parallel surge of twists passed along from one phalanx of top-like units to another. That's what an ocean wave is. A massive series of parallel cascades, circular twists passing their twirl along. Then what is the difference between a photon and an electron? Why does a photon appear to go in straight lines. Why doe electrons and nucleons have the freedom to wobble and bobble around? Or do they? Is their motion very constrained? Electrons travel in straight lines unless they're trapped in the enclosure of an atomic shell. Or, like photons, they seem to travel in straight lines. If space is a weave of twirlable bubbles, How does a sun assemble and move? A solar body works on the basis of attraction to a common point, so its roughly circular, fractally aping the atoms of which it's composed. But as it speeds around the center of another circular attraction-whirl, a galaxy, how and what is transmitted in the Planck weave of twirlable bubbles that in some way stitches, knits, and nano-swirls all things? How is a galaxy woven on the microloom? And how does it move on that fluid fabric, that nano-bubble sea? See where working with metaphor instead of math will get you? Into potential lunacy. (Thank God Einstein and Feynman worked primarily with metaphor and secondarily with math or I'd be lost in space without an oxygen tank.) hb: Paul, it sounds to me like you're probably the only human with the ability to see this intersection, this new theoretical approach, and to write it up. Which means that write it up you must. This won't be the first time you've broken new ground and done something revolutionary. For what it's worth, here's the latest email address I've got for Witten-- pw: But then I remember of the time, back around 1972, when I tried to recruit Minsky and Grossberg (and ...) to backpropagation.... pw: At some level,
the duty is real and important and life-and-death. hb: yes. the first
precept of science as I absorbed it at the age of ten was this: The
truth at any price including the price of your life. The truth you see
will someday die with you unless you write it up. By the way, the second
precept of the science I imbibed was this: Look at things everyone takes
for granted as if you've never seen them before, then work from the
awe and the questions thatnew view rouses in you. Hence the silly questions
I ask. And hence my gratitude that you let me get away with it. pw:
And it is really scary to neglect something so important. hb: precisely.
pw: But at another level, I DID mention some of these possible directions
(among others) in quant-ph 0202138 and the longer journal paper that
followed it up. That's probably not enough.. but.. I have to go with
the flow of what opportunities seem most likely to materialize in a
real way, hb: here's the bottom line--the one that neglects all the
realities of day to day life. You have a vision of what the work you've
published to date implies. No one has your unique experience and your
mind. If you don't write up what you see today, it may be gone tomorrow.
Insights fade and are replaced. Capturing them before they can get away
is what computers and paper are for. I have the same problem. My latest
solution, which isn't working yet--a tie-clip microphone I've gotten
into the habit of wearing every day. The wire is under my shirt, just
as it is when TV crews come in here and wire me up for sound. The wire
goes to an amazingly tiny digital voice recorder clipped to my belt.
Then there's the part that doesn't work--the voice recognition software
that's supposed to transcribe my brainstorming sessions or private mutterings
into wordprocessor form. I don't know whose language it understands,
but so far it doesn't comprehend mine. Things like this seem embarrassingly
egomaniacal, but they're not. Those thoughts that disappear so quickly,
the insights that you have while walking from one room to another and
are so ridiculously important that you know you'll never forget them,those
insights melt before you can find the time a day or two later to type
them up or write them down. Let's say only one out of ten of them is
really meaningful, thought-changing, solid and good. That could generate
two culture-rearranging thoughts a week or more. That's over a hundred
minor culture-quake makers a year. And, Paul, you are literally the
only person I know who started seriously in science earlier than I did,
and who understands the variety of things you do. So your cultural contribution
is one of the rarest kinds, those offered to humanity by only the rarest
minds. pw: for the life-and-death issues which have the greatest chance
of emerging. Topology is the area of mathematics which studies how different points on an object (or in a space) are connected to each other. For example, it is often pointed out that to a topologist a donut and a tea cup are the same. If you ignore how far apart points are, and what shape the surface takes (both of which are studied by geometry, not topology) then the only significant feature about these two objects is the hole (in the middle of the donut and in the handle of the tea cup.) This may make topology sound a little bit silly; it is not! Surprisingly, there are many unexpected and deep theorems in topology, and topology is very important in other areas of mathematics like geometry and even calculus! The easiest example of unexpected topological results is the "Mobius band", a simple twisted cylinder of paper with surprising topological properties. Making a Mobius Band Take a rectangular piece of paper which is at least twice as long as it is wide. Laying it on the table in front of you, color the top-left and bottom-right corners green and color the top-right and bottom-left corners red. Then roll the paper (with a twist) so that the two red corners meet each other and the two green corners meet each other. Fasten it in this shape with tape or glue. You have made a topological Mobius band (or "Mobius strip"). (It would be best if you now ignore the "seam" where you have fastened the two ends together. A perfect band would not have any such break but would be smooth all around...I just can't figure out how to tell you to make one of those!) How Many Sides? This is wonderful. Yes, in the Big Bagel theory the outer periphery is the hole in the middle. I saw this as a Klein's bottle kind of thing. Now let me chew on your mobius strip. Howard In a message dated 6/18/2003 4:37:17 AM Eastern Daylight Time, rob writes: Howard: Thank you for sending me that e-mail. Wow, it actually made sense to me.......! It made so much sense to me because about a year ago, I was thinking/daydreaming about how the universe could possibly expand and keep expanding and still have matter meet back at a single point. Nothing came of it, but I could not stop thinking of one line of thought I took in regards to topology and the shape of the universe. This was the mobius loop. After I read your theory, something instantly went click in my mind and I thought of the following. What comes next may be of no help and just a neat little mind trick, or perhaps not. When I read your theory, everything made sense to me except my mind wanted to see the matter and dark matter(antimatter) meet back at the same point in which they started. Now this expectation may be ignorance on my part....I don't know.? However, when I thought of the mobius loop, I thought.... hey.........what if?--- Now, It may be helpful to make one as per instructions below: When you look at the mobius loop and its shape, you can see a similarity to the cross section of a bagel (the "C" shape) Now pick a point on the loop and make a dot there-this will be matter. Now take the point on the opposite side of your loop: this is antimatter. Now move the dots in opposite directions on the mobius loop and watch what happens....(that is what went click in my head) Yes, while they started on opposite sides of the paper(or whatever you made your loop out of) and moved away from their points of origin, yet somehow they collided on the same plain at the same point in which they began. Cool........? I think so.---- Profound......? You tell me. Thanks - Rob
Topology Topology is the area of mathematics which studies how different points on an object (or in a space) are connected to each other. For example, it is often pointed out that to a topologist a donut and a tea cup are the same. If you ignore how far apart points are, and what shape the surface takes (both of which are studied by geometry, not topology) then the only significant feature about these two objects is the hole (in the middle of the donut and in the handle of the tea cup.) This may make topology sound a little bit silly; it is not! Surprisingly, there are many unexpected and deep theorems in topology, and topology is very important in other areas of mathematics like geometry and even calculus! The easiest example of unexpected topological results is the "Mobius band", a simple twisted cylinder of paper with surprising topological properties. Making a Mobius Band Take a rectangular piece of paper which is at least twice as long as it is wide. Laying it on the table in front of you, color the top-left and bottom-right corners green and color the top-right and bottom-left corners red. Then roll the paper (with a twist) so that the two red corners meet each other and the two green corners meet each other. Fasten it in this shape with tape or glue. You have made a topological Mobius band (or "Mobius strip"). (It would be best if you now ignore the "seam" where you have fastened the two ends together. A perfect band would not have any such break but would be smooth all around...I just can't figure out how to tell you to make one of those!) How Many Sides? What to do: Using a crayon, draw a circle on the band. Pinch the band between your index finger and thumb with your index finger inside the circle. Now, pull the band between your pinched fingers until the circle comes around again. Notice that this time your thumb is in the circle and your index finger is on the "other side". What does it mean: The Mobius band only has one side (even though the paper you made it out of had two). If you try to color "just one side" of the band with a crayon, you will find that you have colored the whole thing. It also only has one edge: draw a mark anywhere on the edge, start your finger at any other point on any edge (even opposite the mark) and run your finger along the edge. You will eventually touch the mark. Cutting Tricks There are two good
tricks you can do with a Mobius band and some scissors. In each case,
the outcome is surprising...unless you already know some topology in
which case you can predict exactly what will happen! Keep learning If you find the Mobius band interesting, you should learn more about its properties (like "non-orientability") and about other topological objects (like the Klein bottle) by reading a book on topology or taking a course in topology. (last modified Thu Aug 23 08:41:08 EDT 2001) howlbloom wrote:
In a message dated 6/17/2003 2:31:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time, rob writes: *Also check out
this new theory via the link below. Seems to be consistent with the
Microcosm=Macrocosm line of thought, I think we both share.
if we have the courage
to work with expanded
The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen atom, the first potassium atom, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos says, "Hey, nut case, it went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accelerate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But the Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Matter (that's gravity) tells space how to bend. Space tells matter how to move. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Bohr's complimentarity). Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of pulling you toward it. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. When the two universes meet at the outer limits of the Big Bagel they annihilate to a pinprick of energy and are back where they started, in the center, big banging and big bageling again. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos too. The two are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. I'm trying to show that the square root of minus one may not as imaginary as we think. Minus one is a real number in the anti-universe. So is its square root. Big Bagel theory theory says that once the cosmos goes over a gravitational hump it begins to slide at increasing speed down the other side. Evidence that this is true emerged from the world of astrophysics just a week or two ago with the following report that the universe began a strange acceleration once it passed some sort of hump 1.2 billion to 7 billion years ago. As for your big bang article, if both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. When the gravity-dimples around matter-suns and anti-matter-suns meet, they may well produce a mini-bagel hole-a black hole. By the way, none of this is part of the Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul. It's too speculative. Howard --------- The combined gravitational pull from all matter in the universe, most of which is beyond detection, has acted as a brake on cosmic expansion. The so-called dark matter apparently had the advantage when the universe was younger, smaller and denser. Now the ever-increasing pace of expansion suggests that something else even more mysterious is at work. Theorists are not sure what the antigravity force is, but they call it dark energy. It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr.
Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe
is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter.
The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent
of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer roughly the same
estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark matter to dark energy
domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion years ago. Dr. Perlmutter
said that much more research would be necessary to determine whether
the changing density of the expanding universe was the only reason dark
energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have the physical properties
of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr. Perlmutter said that in
the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical astrophysicist at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the true nature of dark energy
"would be No. 1 on my list of things to figure out." The research
teams are planning new observations of more distant supernovas to determine
when cosmic acceleration began and to gather clues about the properties
of dark energy. Some observations will be conducted with ground-based
telescopes, others with the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's
group has proposed putting a spacecraft in orbit with telescopes especially
designed for supernova hunting and pinning down the nature of dark energy.
In "The Extravagant Universe," published last fall by Princeton
University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote: "We are not made of the type
of particles that make up most of the matter in the universe, and we
have no idea yet how to sense directly the dark energy that determines
the fate of the universe. If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we
are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe
rubs it in."Â http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html Mottola and Mazur have done mathematical calculations on the theoretical existence of gravistars, and so far, they said, the theories hold up. Proving that gravistars exist might be at least 10 years off, because the two need to add considerably more complexity into those models, and technology must improve before astronomers can see a gravistar closely enough to take a look at what's really happening inside, Mottola said. "What we're saying is, this is theoretically possible; we're not saying it's absolute fact," Mottola said. "Although I personally believe it. Ultimately, our ideas will be a matter for astronomical observatories to prove." One concept included in his mathematical theory is that we all could be living inside of a huge gravistar called "the universe," something that might explain the dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the universe, he said. But to understand that, one first must understand what a black hole is. Traditionally, a black hole is believed to be created after an extremely large star explodes and collapses. After it collapses, more and more material gathers on it until it condenses into a single point of infinite energy and mass. At a certain distance from this point, light can't even escape, and it gets sucked back toward that point, which astronphysicists call a singularity. Einstein said in a 1939 paper that he just wasn't comfortable with the concept, and in 1962 another famous scientist, P.A.M. Dirac, raised similar doubts. Mottola postulates that inside a gravistar is a different type of universe. In a small gravistar, say the size of a traditional black hole and its radius, atoms get packed together so tightly that they start acting as if they were a single atom bound with the force of dark energy. That mass would push out against a boundary area, where it intersects with normal space. This area is the spot where, in conventional theory, light cannot escape. "In black hole theory there's nothing there - there's nothing at that boundary and nothing in the black hole until you get to the center," Mottola said. "In our theory, it's a real physical boundary." As a gravistar is created, the phase shift would discharge energy in the form of big quantities of gamma rays, which would explain the phenomenon of gamma ray bursts, something astrophysicists haven't been able to explain with the standard models. "One very speculative idea is that maybe a gravistar could be a much more efficient central engine driving the effects we see in the universe," Mottola said. "In the classical model, once matter falls in, it's gone. In our model, matter hitting a gravistar would have a physical effect. It should make the boundary vibrate; it should have a spectrum that we can see." Maybe we don't entirely understand the idea because we're living inside it, he said. "Another speculation about this is, rather than thinking about a gravistar from the outside in, think about it from the inside out - we might well be on the inside of one of those bubbles," Mottola said. "Obviously we don't live in a universe that is all dark energy, but 70 percent of our universe is. It's real, and it's been calculated. If you make the mass of this thing, a gravistar, equal to the size of the universe, it actually works out. The Big Bang, in fact, could be the formation of this bubble." Mottola has been developing his theory for the past 10 years and started working on it full time through a grant for Los Alamos last year. Reactions to his concept have been mixed in the scientific community, something that frustrates Mottola at times. "I've been giving a lot of talks, and people are very polite and they listen," he said. "Some get very excited, and the people that are used to the black hole theory look at me strangely and say, `Bah.' I think that's healthy skepticism, and the burden of proof is on us." Still, he said, "I didn't just wake up one morning with this loony idea in my head and decide to become an outcast in my field," he said. "I think we've done our homework. I don't come to this point lightly. There are several people that think this is a really neat idea, and they're not stupid people - one's a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford University." Whatever the resistance or the challenge, Mottola said he's dedicated to working on the task. "Nature can do what it wants - it doesn't depend on any of these theories," he said. "Ultimately we just want to understand what it's doing." For two chapters
from For two chapters
from In a message dated 6/17/2003 2:08:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time, integrity writes: if we have the courage to work with expanded evaluations re a 'communication universe'. hb: I like this concept--a communications universe. I also suspect we have mutually supportive explanations for the slit screen experiment. Meanwhile here's something I wrote on the problem you raised--the relationship of the square root of minus one to reality: The Bloom Big Bagel theory of the cosmos says that at the infinitessimally small point of the beginning of the Big Bang, two cosmoses whomped out, each into its own curved plane of space. One is the cosmos in which we live. The other is the cosmos of anti-matter. Do we need a silly, comic-book level theory of this sort? We sure as heck do. When I went through several hundred astrophysics papers trying to find the dates of nucleogenesis of the various complex atoms--the atoms beyond hydrogen, helium, and lithium--I couldn't find the information. Why? Because there is a subject in astrophysics called nucleocosmochronology. You'd think that chronologists of the birth of nucleii would try to figure out the date of the first iron atom, the first, oxygen atom, the first potassium atom, and so on. But, no. There's something else on nucleocosmochronologist's minds. It's a simple question. Why is there so much ordinary matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Theory says that the amount of ordinary matter and anti-matter should be the same. So where did all the anti-matter go? The Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos says, "Hey, nut case, it went into a negative universe, a universe in which time runs in reverse, a universe in which its obstreperous backwardness actually fits." Meanwhile, astrophysicists are now asking why the universe's elements--novas, stars, and galaxies--accelerate away from each other once they pass a certain point. They've tried a bunch of names to account for whatever the cause might be--negative gravity, quintessence, the cosmological constant, and, this year's favorite, dark energy. But the Big Bagel theory says that a curved space represents a curve in gravity. Matter (that's gravity) tells space how to bend. Space tells matter how to move. Reach the highpoint of the bagel and you begin to slide down a gravity curve. You begin to accelerate. You do it for two reasons simultaneously (two reasons that are simultaneous and seem each others opposites may be instances of Bohr's complimentarity).  Once you get over the hump, gravity turns negative--it pushes you away from a common gravitational center instead of pulling you toward it. And once you get over the hump, you're being pulled by the gravity of the anti-universe. When the two universes meet at the outer limits of the Big Bagel they annihilate to a pinprick of energy and are back where they started, in the center, big banging and big bageling again. The idea of an anti-universe gains a peculiar kind of support--and a new kind of reality--from the concept that i=the square root of minus one. There is no square root of minus one, so why does it show up in calculations that actually predict things we can measure? Because the square root of minus one doesnt' exist HERE. It exists THERE...in the anti-universe on the underside of the bagel. Those two universes were once one. They will be one again someday...when they meet on the bagel's outer limit, its periphery. So it makes sense that the math of this cosmos--our cosmos--has to use the math of the negative cosmos too. The two are twins and will continue to be connected--even if only distantly--so long as they both exist. I'm trying to show that the square root of minus one may not as imaginary as we think. Minus one is a real number in the anti-universe. So is its square root. Big Bagel theory theory says that once the cosmos goes over a gravitational hump it begins to slide at increasing speed down the other side. Evidence that this is true emerged from the world of astrophysics just a week or two ago with the following report that the universe began a strange acceleration once it passed some sort of hump 1.2 billion to 7 billion years ago. As for your big bang article, if both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. When the gravity-dimples around matter-suns and anti-matter-suns meet, they may well produce a mini-bagel hole-a black hole. By the way, none of this is part of the Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul. It's too speculative. Howard --------- a bit of supporting data: From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe' New York Times, 3.6.3 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD NASHVILLE, May 30 - New observations of exploding stars far deeper in space, astronomers say, have produced strong evidence that the proportions of the mysterious forces dominating the universe have undergone radical change over cosmic history. The findings, reported here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which ended Thursday, supported the idea that once the universe was expanding at a decelerating rate but then began accelerating within the last seven billion years, scientists concluded. "We are now seeing hints that way back then the universe was slowing down," said Dr. John Tonry, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who is a member of one team studying exploding stars, or supernovas, for signs of cosmic expansion rates. The new research by Dr. Tonry's group and another, led by Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, confirmed the earlier surprising discovery that the universe is indeed expanding at an accelerating rate and has been for at least the last 1.2 billion years. But four supernovas, almost 7 billion light-years away, appeared to exist at a time the universe was slowing down, Dr. Tonry said. "A stop-and-go universe" is the way Dr. Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics characterized the phenomenon. Well, the expansion never really stopped, he conceded, but it has certainly revved up. "Right now, the universe is speeding up, with galaxies zooming away from each other like Indy 500 racers hitting the gas when the green flag drops," said Dr. Kirshner, a member of the Tonry team. "But we suspect that it wasn't always this way." The changing pace of cosmic expansion, combined with recently announced measurements of the cosmic microwave background, revealing conditions soon after the Big Bang, encourages theorists in thinking that a tug-of-war has been going on between dark forces of matter and energy no one yet understands. The combined gravitational pull from all matter in the universe, most of which is beyond detection, has acted as a brake on cosmic expansion. The so-called dark matter apparently had the advantage when the universe was younger, smaller and denser. Now the ever-increasing pace of expansion suggests that something else even more mysterious is at work. Theorists are not sure what the antigravity force is, but they call it dark energy. It has apparently gained the upper hand. This is the latest turn of events in the unfolding story of cosmic history. Once scientists believed the universe was everlastingly static. Along came Edwin P. Hubble, who discovered seven decades ago that the galaxies of stars are rushing away from one another in all directions. The universe, Hubble announced, is expanding. Five years ago, astronomers were in for a surprise. They had assumed that after an initial burst of rapid expansion from the originating Big Bang the gravity of matter was gradually slowing things down. Then the two supernova survey teams found that the universe was accelerating instead. This pointed to the existence of some kind of dark energy permeating all of space. For the current research, astronomers observe what are called Type Ia supernovas, stellar explosions that at their peak are brighter than a billion stars like the Sun. They are thus visible across billions of light-years of space, and a close examination of their light reveals the distances, motions and other evidence of conditions. As the light travels to Earth, the wavelengths are stretched by an amount that reflects the universe's expansion when the star exploded. Dr. Kirshner said the four extremely distant supernovas indicated that the universe seven billion years ago was "in fact winning this sort of cosmic tug-of-war," but now dark energy is more dominant. Scientists said they assumed that with the stretching out of space the proportion of dark energy to dark matter had been reversed. In the earlier and denser universe, matter of all kinds, the invisible dark matter and the visible ordinary matter of stars and planets, predominated. The team of Dr. Tonry and Dr. Kirshner estimates that about 60 percent of the universe is filled with dark energy and 30 percent of the mass is dark matter. The remaining 10 percent consists of ordinary matter, only 1 percent of which is visible in the galaxies. Theorists offer roughly the same estimates and surmise that the changeover from dark matter to dark energy domination probably occurred before 6.3 billion years ago. Dr. Perlmutter said that much more research would be necessary to determine whether the changing density of the expanding universe was the only reason dark energy came to rule cosmic dynamics. Or have the physical properties of dark energy, whatever it is, changed? Dr. Perlmutter said that in the words of Dr. Edward Witten, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the true nature of dark energy "would be No. 1 on my list of things to figure out." The research teams are planning new observations of more distant supernovas to determine when cosmic acceleration began and to gather clues about the properties of dark energy. Some observations will be conducted with ground-based telescopes, others with the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Perlmutter's group has proposed putting a spacecraft in orbit with telescopes especially designed for supernova hunting and pinning down the nature of dark energy. In "The Extravagant Universe," published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote: "We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe rubs it in." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/science/space/03ASTR.html and more supporting data: http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news03/060903_news_bright.shtml Albuquerque Tribune SEARCH CONTACT US HELP SUBSCRIBE ALBUQUERQUE New Mexico, U.S.A. June 17, 2003 Black holes? Think again, he says darkly By Sue Vorenberg Tribune Reporter Emil Mottola cringes every time he hears the words "black hole." The concept - having an infinity of energy in a pinpoint - just doesn't make sense, the Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist says. He contemptuously consigns the idea to the same level of reality as unicorns and flying pigs. "Actually, I'm not the only one who has a problem with that," he said. "In 1939 a fellow named Albert Einstein - perhaps you've heard of him - took issue with that problem, and it was part of his theory. Up until the mid-1960s, other scientists also questioned it. "The problem is after Einstein died people just started accepting the traditional theory without questioning it, and it's become ingrained in the scientific consciousness." Mottola and Pawel Mazur, an astrophysicist at the University of South Carolina, have their own theory about what black holes are, and it has nothing to do with infinite energy. They call the objects gravistars. Gravistars are of such great gravitational density that, within them, gravity itself goes through a phase shift - like water turning to vapor or freezing. The phase shift creates dark energy inside a real physical bubble that intersects with normal space, and the interaction between the two forces the object to hold its shape, Mottola said. Dark energy is a mysterious force that many astronomers believe is pushing the substance in the universe farther and farther outward from the central point of the Big Bang. While no astronomer or astrophysicist can say for sure what dark energy is, mathematical calculations and theoretical data have shown it to be a real concept, and it is generally accepted by the scientific community, Mottola said. Mottola and Mazur have done mathematical calculations on the theoretical existence of gravistars, and so far, they said, the theories hold up. Proving that gravistars exist might be at least 10 years off, because the two need to add considerably more complexity into those models, and technology must improve before astronomers can see a gravistar closely enough to take a look at what's really happening inside, Mottola said. "What we're saying is, this is theoretically possible; we're not saying it's absolute fact," Mottola said. "Although I personally believe it. Ultimately, our ideas will be a matter for astronomical observatories to prove." One concept included in his mathematical theory is that we all could be living inside of a huge gravistar called "the universe," something that might explain the dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the universe, he said. But to understand that, one first must understand what a black hole is. Traditionally, a black hole is believed to be created after an extremely large star explodes and collapses. After it collapses, more and more material gathers on it until it condenses into a single point of infinite energy and mass. At a certain distance from this point, light can't even escape, and it gets sucked back toward that point, which astronphysicists call a singularity. Einstein said in a 1939 paper that he just wasn't comfortable with the concept, and in 1962 another famous scientist, P.A.M. Dirac, raised similar doubts. Mottola postulates that inside a gravistar is a different type of universe. In a small gravistar, say the size of a traditional black hole and its radius, atoms get packed together so tightly that they start acting as if they were a single atom bound with the force of dark energy. That mass would push out against a boundary area, where it intersects with normal space. This area is the spot where, in conventional theory, light cannot escape. "In black hole theory there's nothing there - there's nothing at that boundary and nothing in the black hole until you get to the center," Mottola said. "In our theory, it's a real physical boundary." As a gravistar is created, the phase shift would discharge energy in the form of big quantities of gamma rays, which would explain the phenomenon of gamma ray bursts, something astrophysicists haven't been able to explain with the standard models. "One very speculative idea is that maybe a gravistar could be a much more efficient central engine driving the effects we see in the universe," Mottola said. "In the classical model, once matter falls in, it's gone. In our model, matter
hitting a gravistar would have a physical effect. It should make the
boundary vibrate; it should have a spectrum that we can see." Maybe
we don't entirely understand the idea because we're living inside it,
he said. "Another speculation about this is, rather than thinking
about a gravistar from the outside in, think about it from the inside
out - we might well be on the inside of one of those bubbles,"
Mottola said. "Obviously we don't live in a universe that is all
dark energy, but 70 percent of our universe is. It's real, and it's
been calculated. If you make the mass of this thing, a gravistar, equal
to the size of the universe, it actually works out. The Big Bang, in
fact, could be the formation of this bubble." Mottola has been
developing his theory for the past 10 years and started working on it
full time through a grant for Los Alamos last year. Reactions to his
concept have been mixed in the scientific community, something that
frustrates Mottola at times. "I've been giving a lot of talks,
and people are very polite and they listen," he said. "Some
get very excited, and the people that are used to the black hole theory
look at me strangely and say, `Bah.' I think that's healthy skepticism,
and the burden of proof is on us." Still, he said, "I didn't
just wake up one morning with this loony idea in my head and decide
to become an outcast in my field," he said. "I think we've
done our homework. I don't come to this point lightly. There are several
people that think this is a really neat idea, and they're not stupid
people - one's a Nobel Prize winner at Stanford University." Whatever
the resistance or the challenge, Mottola said he's dedicated to working
on the task. "Nature can do what it wants - it doesn't depend on
any of these theories," he said. "Ultimately we just want
to understand what it's doing." In a message dated 99?10?07 06:02:42 EDT, Eshel Ben Jacob writes: Thre is no. However if you take the Planck lenght about 10?33 cm and use the speed of light you get atime delT of the order of 10?23 sec. >> Eshel??Many thanks. I started fiddling with Planck numbers last night, but could not for the life of me figure out if they marked successive steps in time, basic units, as the quantum seems to in many areas. In other words, as seen at the moment, is time continuous or does it move from point to point to point to point? Your recommendation of Lee Smolin's _Life of the Cosmos_ is outstanding. He either gets the jump on me in publishing several ideas I've been waiting years for the time to write up in a book, or he gives additional credence to the ideas, depending on whether my ego is feeling up or down at the moment. His clarity is amazing. His ideas??especially his application of a source and a sink to the concept of an open system??make splendid accompaniments to your realization that there can be no closed systems because of the ubiquity of gravity. Though he hasn't
gotten around to saying it in the parts of the book I've read so far,
it seems fairly obvious that this universe is either an open system
with the big bang as its source and black holes as its sink (though
I wonder??is more energy swallowed by black holes than is emitted by
the flares which jet from some of However the structure of our universe so far as we can see it and the nature of the background radiation seem to indicate that there was one big bang, not a lot of little ones. Or do they? Is what we read primarily a matter of interpretation imposed on the evidence by believers in the Big Bang (a nice concept to which I also cling)? Would that same evidence make more sense if there were multiple and ongoing mini?bangs? Back to the real
question??is time discontinuous, like the motion produced by a cogged
ratchet, or is it continuous? Or, as Smolin implies, are there too many
holes in modern physics for us to answer this question? L'hit??Howard And the crystal radio has its sink??a ground wire which allows the electricity produced to run through a pair of headphones (which transform the electical pulses into mechanical pulses of a diaphragm producing sound) and down literally into the earth via a pipe or a wire simply rammed into the soil. My impression was that Smolin would develop his argument further to show that this universe is in no way closed. It has a source??the Big Bang. And it has several possible sinks. One is its expasionary capacity to provide more and more room into which the unfolding cosmos can flow. Another, I thought, would be black holes, famous for their abiity to swallow matter, energy, and even a poorly cooked meal or garbage barge and take it to???well, we're not sure where??perhaps to another universe or to the chaos of false vaccuum from which new universes spring. But Smolin did not complete his argument. He did not clarify what this universe's source and sink might be. Which leads to the puzzle of black holes. Initially they were touted as swallowers of everything which came near them, including, I'd suspect, space?time itself??the stretch fabric on which this cosmos is embroidered. Then came the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X?Ray Obersvatory, and other instruments, all delivering the news that galaxies are, as Smolin aptly puts it, self?organizing and Gaea?like self?regulating and sustaining ecosystems. At the heart of galaxies are what are now called nuclei. It is beginning to appear as if that focal organizing center of a nucleus is usually a black hole. And in many cases, the black hole in question is not merely swallowing, it is actively spewing energy in massive amounts. It is operating more as a source than as a sink. The black hole at the center of the galaxy Centaurus A, for example, is belching forth a stream of spinning electrons??x?rays??so gigantic that the energy?flow is larger than the entire milky way. My question is this. How does an alleged devourer of all become a creator or converter of the raw stuff from which stars, galaxies, planets, and life forms are made? Does a black hole absorb more than it emits?If so, it is a sink and this universe is an open system for more than just the reasons Eshel has givien. If not, it is a source. Is the sink, then, as I've suggested, the constant ballooning outward of the time?space manifold, or is their another sink? And is it proper to use the term space?time manifold to describe this rubbery universe which keeps mushrooming in size while we sit here pondering its ever?active enormity? Below more information on the energy source in Centaurus A. Howard Source: Chandra X?Ray Observatory Center (http://chandra.harvard.edu) Date: Posted 10/28/99Extended X?Ray Jet In Nearby Galaxy Reveals Energy Source This picture shows the Chandra X?ray image overlaid on the optical image of Centaurus A. The optical image shows that Centaurus A is an elliptical galaxy with huge dust lanes across the middle of the galaxy. X RAY: Chandra X Ray Observatory/High Resolution Camera image (Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO). OPTICAL: Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory 4?meter Blanco telescope image (Credit: AURA/NOAO/NSF)). NASA's Chandra X?ray Observatory has made an extraordinary image of Centaurus A, a nearby galaxy noted for its explosive activity. The image shows X ray jets erupting from the center of the galaxy over a distance of 25,000 light years. Also detected are a group of X?ray sources clustered around the nucleus, which is believed to harbor a supermassive black hole. The X?ray jets and the cluster of sources may be a byproduct of a titanic collision between galaxies several hundred million years ago. "This image is great," said Dr. Ethan Schreier of the Space Telescope Science Institute, "For twenty years we have been trying to understand what produced the X rays seen in the Centaurus A jet. Now we at last know that the X?ray emission is produced by extremely high energy electrons spiraling around a magnetic field." Schreier explained that the length and shape of the X?ray jet pinned down the source of the radiation. The entire length of the X?ray jet is comparable to the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Other features of the image excite scientists. "Besides the jets, one of the first things I noticed about the image was the new population of sources in the center of the galaxy," said Dr. Christine Jones from the Harvard?Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics . "They are grouped in a sphere around the nucleus, which must be telling us something very fundamental about how the galaxy, and the supermassive black hole in the center, were formed." Astronomers have accumulated evidence with optical and infrared telescopes that Centaurus A collided with a small spiral galaxy several hundred million years ago. This collision is believed to have triggered a burst of star formation and supplied gas to fuel the activity of the central black hole. According to Dr. Giuseppina Fabbiano, of Harvard?Smithsonian, "The Chandra image is like having a whole new laboratory to work in. Now we can see the main jet, the counter jet, and the extension of the jets beyond the galaxy. It is gorgeous in the detail it reveals," she said. Dr. Allyn Tennnant of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center agreed. "It's incredible, being able to see all that structure in the jet," he said. "We have one fine X?ray telescope." Indeed at a distance of eleven million light years from Earth, Centaurus A has long been a favorite target of astronomers because it is the nearest example of a class of galaxies called active galaxies. Active galaxies are noted for their explosive activity, which is presumed to be due to a supermassive black hole in their center. The energy output due to the huge central black hole can in many cases affect the appearance of the entire galaxy. The Chandra X?ray image of Cen A, made with the High Resolution Camera, shows a bright source in the nucleus of the galaxy at the location of the suspected supermassive black hole. The bright jet extending out from the nucleus to the upper left is due to explosive activity around the black hole which ejects matter at high speeds from the vicinity of the black hole. A "counter jet" extending to the lower right can also be seen. This jet is probably pointing away from us, which accounts for its faint appearance. One of the most intriguing features of supermassive black holes is that they do not suck up all the matter that falls within their sphere of influence. Some of the matter falls inexorably toward the black hole, and some explodes away from the black hole in high energy jets that move at near the speed of light. The presence of bright X?ray jets in the Chandra image means that electric fields are continually accelerating electrons to extremely high energies over enormous distances. Exactly how this happens is a major puzzle that Chandra may help to solve. To follow Chandra's
progress, visit the Chandra site at: http://chandra.harvard.edu AND
http://chandra.nasa.gov Dr. Stephen Murray of the Harvard?Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics is the principal investigator for the High Resolution
Camera. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, manages
the Chandra program. TRW, Inc., Redondo Beach, CA, is the prime contractor
for the spacecraft. The Smithsonian's Chandra X?ray Center controls
science and flight operations from Cambridge, MA. High resolution digital
versions of the X?ray image (JPG, 300 dpi TIFF) and other information
associated with this release are available on the Internet at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/0157/index.html
or via links in: http://chandra.harvard.edu Editor's Note: The original
news release can be found athttp://chandra.harvard.edu/press/press_102599.html
?????????? Howard Bloom (founder: International Paleopsychology Project;
member: New YorkAcademy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement
ofScience, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science,Human
Behavior and Evolution Society, European SociobiologicalSociety; board
member: Epic of Evolution Society), executive editor?? New Paradigm
book series International Paleopsychology Project 705 President Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215 www.paleopsych.org for two chapters fromThe Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,see www.bookworld.com/lucifer
for serialized chapters from the upcoming Global Brain: the evolution
of massm
_______________________________ symmetry and symmetry
breaking seem basic to the big bang. They also seem basic to the marriage
of opposites. From that marriage the first fruits may have been the
etiquette book on which the universe was built, attraction and repulsion,
the rules of who shall consort with whom and who shall not. (for symmetry
breaking see the last pages of Kurt Suplee, Physics in the 20th Century;
Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos; and Alan Guth, the Inflationary
Universe) opposites are symmetries which have broken in two. Matter
and anti-matter are begat together. This cosmos almost certainly has
a counter cosmos operating on a time which runs the other way. Of such
things are the cosmic bagle made.
From those reactions, they assembled a perplexing picture of the proton. At the May meeting, a consensus emerged that Einstein's theory of special relativity, which explains how things moving near the speed of light have smooshed lengths and increased mass, seemed the likeliest explanation for the weird experiment results. "The new thing we've figured out is that quarks are moving around inside the proton at relativistic (near speed of light) speeds," days physicist Gerald Miller of the University of Washington-Seattle. Quarks moving at those speeds simply elongate the particle's electromagnetic shape, Miller says. In a paper in the journal Physical Review C, he outlines how quarks moving at high speeds, about 90% of the speed of light, stretch out protons. "The proton is the simplest thing around, and it is not spherical," says physicist Charles Glashausser of the Rutgers University campus in Piscataway, N.J. The neutron, the uncharged partner-particle to the proton in the nucleus of atoms, also is built of quarks, he notes. A Jefferson Lab experiment now underway is looking for similar effects, harder to tease out, in the neutron. Neutrons contain three quarks, like protons, but they're organized in a different fashion. "We've got to understand protons and neutrons. They are all the matter in the nearby universe," Miller says. "These are tremendously exciting new results." ________ While Pasteur was working in his lab, the two founders of cell biology-Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow-got together for dinner and agreed to merge their discoveries into something called cell theory. Virchow's contribution to cell theory was an extremely important but often overlooked proposition: it takes a cell to make a cell. All life is cellular. All life comes from one cell making another. DNA is not alone, not by any means. Nor are those little resource-gobblers and form-tyrants called genes. DNA only manages to do its thing if a cell is kind enough to give it a home. But genes are another matter for another day. This mini-essay is about spontaneous generation. Pasteur, Schwann, and Virchow proved that LIFE does not come from spontaneous generation. Numerous living beings periodically reduce themselves to seed and bloom again when those seeds drift to a promising location and spring into action. But life is only a tiny part of the contents of this universe. A century after the discoverers of life's continuity advanced biology, another science took big leaps. That was astrophysics-the science of the cosmos. And here, in empty space, things did indeed pop from nothingness. Things not only generated spontaneously, but they did so strangely and humongously. They did it in a process called baryogenesis. 10(81) identical protons emerged from the no-thing of pure energy in less than a second. The raw material for an entire universe of matter leapt into existence instantaneously. This was spontaneous generation on a scale that made the sudden appearance of 200 mice or of two trillion mold cells look smaller than the eyelash of a gnat. Which returns us to pondering a 19th Century question-- just how does this spontaneous generation take place? Why and how do an infinity of doppelgangers, innumerable duplicates, infintuplets and infinitwins, spin from the nothingness of a newly-born, fast-moving manifold of time and space? And how, while we're at it, do ideas spring from nothingness into the human mind? These are the two linked ideas we'll pursue in The Big Bang Tango. How did the cosmos come to be? And how does the universe do its work in the brains of you and me? Does what birthed the cosmos connect to human creativity? Does it participate in the way we think and see? And if so, how in the heck does it pull this off? Those are the questions behind the Big Bang Tango. I've asked the question before, but answers continue to elude me. Yes, I have a few, but they're not at all complete. If anyone else has an idea, let me know. Howard Ps. I may have a
few details wrong in Pasteur's experiment. In one version of the story,
Pasteur had only one flask with a meat brew in it-a consommé-like
soup. The only entry to the flask was through a tube shaped like an
S laid sideways. The brew failed to spoil. But when Pasteur tipped the
brew so it could make contact with the spores trapped in the U's of
the sideways S, microorganisms galore sprang up. There was a contest
on at the time to see who could solve the problem of spontaneous generation
first and improve a host of French industries. Pasteur won the prize. Apparently some physicists felt out the social rules of quarks, their etiquette, and came to the conclusion that there are unfilled possibilities implicit in the rules of quark aggregation and separation. If quarks were properly introduced to each other, they could clump together in groups of five. Now that social prediction seems on the verge of being verified. Howard Retrieved from the
World Wide WebJuly 04, 2003
The antimeteorite flux may leave its explosive gamma signature by colliding on lunar soil as well as on terrestrial, jovian and solar atmospheres. However the propagation in Galaxy and the consequent evaporation in galactic matter gas suppress the lightest (m<10-2 g) antimeteorites. Nevertheless heaviest antimeteorites (m>10-1 g up to 106 g) are unable to be deflected or annihilate by the thin galactic gas surface annihilation; they might hit the Sun (or rarely Jupiter) leading to an explosive gamma event and a spectacular track with a bouncing and even a propelling annihilation on cromosphere and photosphere. Their antinuclei annihilation in pions and their final hard gammas showering may be observable as a ``solar flare'' at a rate nearly comparable to the observed ones. From their absence we may infer first bounds on antimatter-matter ratio near or below 10-9 limit applying already recorded data in gamma BATSE catalog. Bibtex entry for this abstract Custom formatted entry for this abstract (see Preferences) Find Similar Abstracts: Use: Authors Title Abstract Text Return: Query Results Return items starting with number Query Form Database: Astronomy Instrumentation Physics/Geophysics ArXiv Preprints NASA ADS Homepage | ADS Sitemap | Query Form | Preferences | HELP | FAQ pw: It is com mon knowledge that there is certainly no serious quantity of antimatter in our "neighborhood" (order of a million light years or so from here). I was pinged badly on another list on this awhile back. Yet do a google on "antimatter galaxy," and you'll see solid empirical evidence from NASA contradicting that. The common knowledge is simply wrong. hb: your wish is my command. yes, nasa agrees with you. and the information is far more Hoylesian than Gamowian. It is far more suggestive of inanimate spontaneous generation than of a one-time Big Bang cosmic formation. Here's one Nasa story picked at random: Antimatter Clouds and Fountain Discovered in the Milky Way RELEASE: 97-83 ANTIMATTER CLOUDS AND FOUNTAIN DISCOVERED IN THE MILKY WAY Scientists using data from an instrument on NASAÕs Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) have discovered two unexpected clouds of antimatter in the Milky Way Galaxy which scientists call Òantimatter annihilation radiation.Ó Scientists from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC, and other institutions used CGROÕs Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE) to make the discovery, which points to the existence of a hot fountain of gas filled with antimatter electrons rising from a region that surrounds the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The nature of the furious activity producing the hot antimatter-filled fountain is unclear, but could be related to massive star formation taking place near the large black hole at the center of the galaxy. Other possibilities include winds from giant stars or black hole antimatter factories. The researchers used maps of gamma ray sources from CGRO which they expected to show a large cloud of antimatter near the galactic center and along the plane of the galaxy. The maps, surprisingly, also show a second cloud of antimatter well off the galactic plane. The second cloud may be caused by the explosions of young massive stars. "The origin of this new and unexpected source of antimatter is a mystery," said William R. Purcell, research scientist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University. "The antimatter cloud could have been formed by multiple star bursts occurring in the central region of the galaxy, jets of material from a black hole near the galactic center, the merger of two neutron stars, or it could have been produced by an entirely different source," said James D. Kurfess, head of the Gamma and Cosmic Ray Astrophysics Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory. The researchers presented their findings today at the fourth Compton Symposium in Williamsburg, VA. The results have been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. A second paper presented at the conference, titled "The Annihilation Fountain in the Galactic Center Region," examines theoretical models for one possible source of the antimatter -- star bursts in the central region. The second paper is authored by Dr. Charles Dermer and Dr. Jeffrey Skibo of NRL. They note that the gamma-ray observations permit us to see clearly, for the first time, a new part of our galaxy made of a hot column of gas filled with antimatter electrons (also called positrons by scientists), and they argue that the antimatter electrons come from newly created elements produced by exploding stars formed near the center of our galaxy. "It is like finding a new room in the house we have lived in since childhood," comments Dr. Dermer. "And the room is not empty -- it has some engine or boiler making hot gas filled with annihilating antimatter. No one is certain whether the antimatter comes from exploding stars, black holes or something entirely different, and that is what makes this discovery so exciting." Evidence points to the existence of a black hole with the mass of a million Suns at the very center of our galaxy. Unlike in other galaxies which harbor huge black holes, very little light comes from this source. Huge dense clouds of gas also surround the galactic center. Prolific star formation, powerful stellar winds from massive stars, and supernovae are all found here. Another theory, based on observation of radio emissions showing some black holes produce X-rays and jets, is that such outflowing jets could be made of antimatter. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched from the Space Shuttle in 1991, views the universe in a search for gamma rays and their source. Gamma rays are extremely energetic light photons produced by high-energy particles, by the decay of excited nuclei, and when matter and antimatter annihilate each other. Antimatter cannot be found in large quantities on Earth because it would instantly vaporize anything it came into contact with. All evidence points to the universe being composed almost entirely of normal matter, though opinions differ on this. Using the OSSE experiment, the OSSE team found antimatter positrons to be annihilating with normal matter electrons at an astonishing rate. Scientists are speculating on the origin of this antimatter, with a "black-hole lobby" favoring antimatter production in the jets of black holes. Other scientists favor freshly synthesized radioactive material in stellar explosions being ejected up above our galaxy in an annihilating fountain of gas. Drs. Dermer and Skibo favor the latter scenario, because exploding stars will eject large quantities of hot gas made up of normal matter. This hot gas provides a target with which the antimatter electrons can annihilate. Related images may be obtained via the World Wide Web at URL: http://www.astro.nwu.edu/aetro/purcell/511kev_presa_re lesse "Payload Specialists Selected For Future Shuttle Mission" By the way, the leakag of huge amounts of anti-matter into the matter universe would fit in the Big Bagel model. But it's certainly not something I expected to find. In fact, blackheads of anti-matter make me aesthetically queasy. pw: Maybe the ratio is heavily one way. Maybe not. Maybe someone really and truly knows. But based on what I saw of the previous controversy, I wouldn't make strong assumptions one way or another without seeing a solid argument somewhere. Before explaining something, one should first ask whether it is actually there at all. Who knows? hb: good point. I think the matter/anti-matter ratio problem is real, is worth solving, and is solvable by the Big Bagel model. If only I knew the language of math and physics and had spent 40 years establishing myself as a physicist, the big bang model might be taken seriously and a lot of nucleocosmochronologists could move onto more important questions--like exactly when and how each of the 89 "new" atoms-the post star-crash atoms--appeared. When and how there were enough of these new atoms to begin the formation of complex molecules (my guess is that the first 27 of the 92 natural atoms on the periodic table evolved one by one. When they were all present, moleculogenesis began. Which means the path to life was carved from a star/particle/and-galaxy wilderness. But when did this happen? It would be eye-popping if it took ten billion years to produce the 27 atoms necessary for life. It would be eyeball stopping if the other 65 atoms were necessary to provide the environment for moleculogenesis. And the greatest treat of all would be to find that the materials necessary for carbon-based moleculogenesis arrived on the cosmic scene roughly ten billion years ago. Why? It would mean
that life formed with enormous rapidity once the leggo blocks of life
had all spontaneously generated in the hearts of croaking, groaning
stars. However I suspect complex moleculogenesis began anywhere from
one billion years after the Big Bang to six billion years abb (after
the big bang). This would be disappointing. But it would also raise
an intriguing question. Why did it take four billion years more for
the genesis of the basic building blocks of life? What environment or
long and grinding process took us from simple molecules like two hydrogen
atoms bound together to the really neat molecules that bonded hydrogen,
carbon, oxygen, sulfer, and nitrogen? What processes were then necessary
to build molecules of 6,000 atoms and beyond--the molecules of proteins?
Could these molecules be generated in space? So far, the answer is no.
Only the components of complex proteins evolve in the clouds that float
between the stars. When did these amazing cosmic events occur and why?
This is the mystery of moleculogenesis, a field that both the NASA Astrophysics
Data System (ADS) and Google say does not exist. Howard Best, Paul
NASA ADS Astronomy Abstract Service · Find Similar Abstracts (with default settings below) · Electronic Refereed Journal Article · Also-Read Articles · · Translate Abstract Title: Antimatter bounds from antiasteroid annihilation in collisions with planets and Sun Authors: Fargion, D.; Khlopov, M. Affiliation: AA(Department of Physics, Universita' degli studi ``La Sapienza'', 5, Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, I 00185, Roma, Italy), AB(Department of Physics, Universita' degli studi ``La Sapienza'', 5, Piazzale Aldo Moro 2, I 00185, Roma, Italy) Journal: Astroparticle Physics, Volume 19, Issue 3, p. 441-446. (APh Homepage) Publication Date: 06/2003 Origin: ELSEVIER Abstract Copyright: (c) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. Bibliographic Code: 2003APh....19..441F Abstract The existence of antimatter stars in the Galaxy as possible signature for inflationary models with nonhomogeneous baryogenesis may leave the trace by antimatter cosmic rays as well as by their secondaries (antiplanets and antimeteorites) diffused bodies in our galactic halo. The antimeteorite flux may leave its explosive gamma signature by colliding on lunar soil as well as on terrestrial, jovian and solar atmospheres. However the propagation in Galaxy and the consequent evaporation in galactic matter gas suppress the lightest (m<10-2 g) antimeteorites. Nevertheless heaviest antimeteorites (m>10-1 g up to 106 g) are unable to be deflected or annihilate by the thin galactic gas surface annihilation; they might hit the Sun (or rarely Jupiter) leading to an explosive gamma event and a spectacular track with a bouncing and even a propelling annihilation on cromosphere and photosphere. Their antinuclei annihilation in pions and their final hard gammas showering may be observable as a ``solar flare'' at a rate nearly comparable to the observed ones. From their absence we may infer first bounds on antimatter-matter ratio near or below 10-9 limit applying already recorded data in gamma BATSE catalog. Bibtex entry for this abstract Custom formatted entry for this abstract (see Preferences) Find Similar Abstracts: Use: Authors Title Abstract Text Return: Query Results Return items starting with number Query Form Database: Astronomy Instrumentation Physics/Geophysics ArXiv Preprints pw: It is com mon knowledge that there is certainly no serious quantity of antimatter in our "neighborhood" (order of a million light years or so from here). I was pinged badly on another list on this awhile back. Yet do a google on "antimatter galaxy," and you'll see solid empirical evidence from NASA contradicting that. The common knowledge is simply wrong. hb: your wish is my command. yes, nasa agrees with you. and the information is far more Hoylesian than Gamowian. It is far more suggestive of inanimate spontaneous generation than of a one-time Big Bang cosmic formation. Here's one Nasa story picked at random: Antimatter Clouds and Fountain Discovered in the Milky Way ANTIMATTER CLOUDS AND FOUNTAIN DISCOVERED IN THE MILKY WAY Scientists using data from an instrument on NASAÕs Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) have discovered two unexpected clouds of antimatter in the Milky Way Galaxy which scientists call Òantimatter annihilation radiation.Ó Scientists from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC, and other institutions used CGROÕs Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE) to make the discovery, which points to the existence of a hot fountain of gas filled with antimatter electrons rising from a region that surrounds the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The nature of the furious activity producing the hot antimatter-filled fountain is unclear, but could be related to massive star formation taking place near the large black hole at the center of the galaxy. Other possibilities include winds from giant stars or black hole antimatter factories. The researchers used maps of gamma ray sources from CGRO which they expected to show a large cloud of antimatter near the galactic center and along the plane of the galaxy. The maps, surprisingly, also show a second cloud of antimatter well off the galactic plane. The second cloud may be caused by the explosions of young massive stars. "The origin of this new and unexpected source of antimatter is a mystery," said William R. Purcell, research scientist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University. "The antimatter cloud could have been formed by multiple star bursts occurring in the central region of the galaxy, jets of material from a black hole near the galactic center, the merger of two neutron stars, or it could have been produced by an entirely different source," said James D. Kurfess, head of the Gamma and Cosmic Ray Astrophysics Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory. The researchers presented their findings today at the fourth Compton Symposium in Williamsburg, VA. The results have been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. A second paper presented at the conference, titled "The Annihilation Fountain in the Galactic Center Region," examines theoretical models for one possible source of the antimatter -- star bursts in the central region. The second paper is authored by Dr. Charles Dermer and Dr. Jeffrey Skibo of NRL. They note that the gamma-ray observations permit us to see clearly, for the first time, a new part of our galaxy made of a hot column of gas filled with antimatter electrons (also called positrons by scientists), and they argue that the antimatter electrons come from newly created elements produced by exploding stars formed near the center of our galaxy. "It is like finding a new room in the house we have lived in since childhood," comments Dr. Dermer. "And the room is not empty -- it has some engine or boiler making hot gas filled with annihilating antimatter. No one is certain whether the antimatter comes from exploding stars, black holes or something entirely different, and that is what makes this discovery so exciting." Evidence points to the existence of a black hole with the mass of a million Suns at the very center of our galaxy. Unlike in other galaxies which harbor huge black holes, very little light comes from this source. Huge dense clouds of gas also surround the galactic center. Prolific star formation, powerful stellar winds from massive stars, and supernovae are all found here. Another theory, based on observation of radio emissions showing some black holes produce X-rays and jets, is that such outflowing jets could be made of antimatter. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched from the Space Shuttle in 1991, views the universe in a search for gamma rays and their source. Gamma rays are extremely energetic light photons produced by high-energy particles, by the decay of excited nuclei, and when matter and antimatter annihilate each other. Antimatter cannot be found in large quantities on Earth because it would instantly vaporize anything it came into contact with. All evidence points to the universe being composed almost entirely of normal matter, though opinions differ on this. Using the OSSE experiment, the OSSE team found antimatter positrons to be annihilating with normal matter electrons at an astonishing rate. Scientists are speculating on the origin of this antimatter, with a "black-hole lobby" favoring antimatter production in the jets of black holes. Other scientists favor freshly synthesized radioactive material in stellar explosions being ejected up above our galaxy in an annihilating fountain of gas. Drs. Dermer and Skibo favor the latter scenario, because exploding stars will eject large quantities of hot gas made up of normal matter. This hot gas provides a target with which the antimatter electrons can annihilate. Related images may be obtained via the World Wide Web at URL: http://www.astro.nwu.edu/aetro/purcell/511kev_presa_re lesse "Payload Specialists Selected For Future Shuttle Mission" By the way, the leakag of huge amounts of anti-matter into the matter universe would fit in the Big Bagel model. But it's certainly not something I expected to find. In fact, blackheads of anti-matter make me aesthetically queasy. pw: Maybe the ratio is heavily one way. Maybe not. Maybe someone really and truly knows. But based on what I saw of the previous controversy, I wouldn't make strong assumptions one way or another without seeing a solid argument somewhere. Before explaining something, one should first ask whether it is actually there at all. Who knows? hb: good point. I think the matter/anti-matter ratio problem is real, is worth solving, and is solvable by the Big Bagel model. If only I knew the language of math and physics and had spent 40 years establishing myself as a physicist, the big bang model might be taken seriously and a lot of nucleocosmochronologists could move onto more important questions--like exactly when and how each of the 89 "new" atoms-the post star-crash atoms--appeared. When and how there were enough of these new atoms to begin the formation of complex molecules (my guess is that the first 27 of the 92 natural atoms on the periodic table evolved one by one. When they were all present, moleculogenesis began. Which means the path to life was carved from a star/particle/and-galaxy wilderness. But when did this happen? It would be eye-popping if it took ten billion years to produce the 27 atoms necessary for life. It would be eyeball stopping if the other 65 atoms were necessary to provide the environment for moleculogenesis. And the greatest treat of all would be to find that the materials necessary for carbon-based moleculogenesis arrived on the cosmic scene roughly ten billion years ago. Why? It would mean that life formed with enormous rapidity once the leggo blocks of life had all spontaneously generated in the hearts of croaking, groaning stars. However I suspect complex moleculogenesis began anywhere from one billion years after the Big Bang to six billion years abb (after the big bang). This would be disappointing. But it would also raise an intriguing question. Why did it take four billion years more for the genesis of the basic building blocks of life? What environment or long and grinding process took us from simple molecules like two hydrogen atoms bound together to the really neat molecules that bonded hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, sulfer, and nitrogen? What processes were then necessary to build molecules of 6,000 atoms and beyond--the molecules of proteins? Could these molecules be generated in space? So far, the answer is no. Only the components of complex proteins evolve in the clouds that float between the stars. When did these amazing cosmic events occur and why? This is the mystery of moleculogenesis, a field that both the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) and Google say does not exist. Howard Best, Paul
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