Recursive Dreams

An Inquiry into the Heavy Metaphysics of the 2000's

by Dr. Leland Gilsen

.........................................

If Immanuel Kant'..... who can?........ Madeline Kahn?!

Brother, can you spare a paradigm?....Graffiti

My glass is neither half full nor half empty, it has a head of quantum foam (Gilsen).

"The Athenians had a penchant for adorning their city with idols, which is why in 1638 Bishop John Wilkins pointed out the irony of a man who turned gods into stones being persecuted by people who turned stones into gods" (Singh 2004: 16)

INTRODUCTION

Based on extrapolations, all of the key decision that will determine if humanity survives as a species must be made in the next 10 years. What is belief: One person's trash is another person's treasure.

"There are two conflicting primal impulses of the human mind - one to simplify a thing to its essentials, the other to see through the essentials to the grater implications" (Laughlin 2005:ix).

"We cannot answer every correct question - but we can often answer questions which are not correctly asked, by first giving them a form in which they have meaning. Often the process of reformulating the question and giving the answer is the same process... This is the scientific approach. Do not expect answers before you have found clear meanings. Do not throw away unclear questions. Keep them on file until you have the means at the same time to clarify and to answer them. often these means result from developments in other fields, which at first sight appear to have nothing to do with the question" (Reichenbach 1971: 2-3).

"Today, the world of physics can be divided into two areas. First, there are the laws of nature - timeless, immutable. We have no influence over them. Second, there are the initial (or boundary) conditions...The regime of eternal laws of nature within the boundary conditions of a given point in time lends the world a measure of uniqueness. The laws of nature apply to numerous natural phenomena that differentiate themselves by their initial conditions. We don't know whether there are laws of nature beyond these - laws that set the initial conditions of the universe" (Genz 1999:49).

"I am increasingly persuaded that all physical law we know about has collective origins, not just some of it. In other words, the distinction between fundamental laws and the laws descending from them is a myth, as is the idea of mastery of the universe through mathematics alone" (Laughlin 2005:xv).

Laughlin may be throwing in a fundamental wrench into the mechanics of the universe... causing it to stop (in a theoretical way). "The great power of science is its ability, through brutal objectivity, to reveal to us the truth we did not anticipate" (Laughlin 2005:xvi).

"To us, natural law must be validated by experience - by observation or experimentation. In philosophy, this is called a contingency condition. The laws of nature are not true because of their logical deduction; they are contingent on verification. Things could be otherwise. The laws of nature, such as we see them, make statements about our world that could be conceivably be found to be invalid by observation. We might even say that every so-called verification of a law of nature is tantamount to a failed attempt at falsifying it. There is no such thing as definite verification" (Genz 1999: 70).

"Wittgenstein said, in his Tractatus, Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is."

As pointed out by Barrow (1991: 38) initial conditions can be so all pervasive that they look like natural laws, for example, the second law of thermodynamics. It can be theorized that the initial condition of the universe created many more ways for things to go from order to disorder then from disorder to order. This condition established time-order... the arrow of time is a reflection of entropy and the improbability of the initial conditions. Space and time are just dimensions where three directions define spatial parameters and the fourth direction defines movement within those other three. There may be other dimensions as well, that are tied up into the minute tube-like strings we call particles so completely that they react with each other as nearly point-like objects.... their other-dimensionality interfering with the other dimensions to produce the "illusion" of structure (i.e. - matter). The tension in strings is high in low energy environments, which binds the strings up into particle-like structures. Their stringiness is only seen in high energy environments, like the early stages of the big bang. Again, as Barrow noted (1999: 69), if the Universe is unique then the initial conditions are unique and become a law of nature. But if the Universe is just one of many possible universe, then the initial conditions have no special status.... but this just pushes the "origin" question back another level... and the "why" question back another level... the easy way out.

"Over the past three centuries, obsessive attention to detail has slowly revealed that some physical quantities are not only accurately reproducible from one experiment to the next but are completely universal. It is hard to overstate how astonishing and disturbing this is. The extreme reliability and exactness of these quantities elevates their status from mere useful fact to a kind of moral certainty...The deeper meaning of these discoveries is still being debated, but everyone agrees they are important, for such certainty is uncommon in nature and demands explanation" (Laughlin 2005:12-13).

"A universal constant is a measurement that comes out the same every time. A physical law is a relationship between measurements that comes out the same every time" (Laughlin 2005:30).

"Etched into a tombstone in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, near the graves of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Strauss, is a single equation, S=k log W, which expresses the mathematical formulation of a powerful concept known as entropy. The tombstone bears the name of Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the most insightful physicists working at the turn of the last century" (Greene 2004:151).

"The entropy of a system in a given macrostate is, roughly speaking, the amount of information - the number of bits - necessary to specify one of the microstates in that macrostate, with the mircostates all treated as if they were equally likely" (Gell-Mann 1994:219).

Determinism has been nullified by both quantum mechanics and our understanding of chaos theory. There is a relationship between initial conditions, the laws of nature, chaos theory and quantum mechanics that yields the needed degrees of freedom for our complex universe to operate. That all things must have a cause is not true in the strange world of quantum theory. Observations of specific cause cannot be traced to specific effects, and to some, this explains how the universe can be the ultimate free lunch.

"We can't ever know the exact location and exact velocity of even a single particle. We can't predict with total certainty the outcome of even the simplest of experiments, let alone the evolution of the entire universe. Quantum mechanics shows that the best we can ever do is predict the probability that an experiment will turn out this way or that" (Greene 2004: 79).

Thank the universe for the Law of Large Numbers

"We also know that systems with small numbers of atoms are motivated by simple deterministic laws of motion and nothing else. We also know that attempts to discover the scale at which these laws cease to work or are supplanted by others have failed. And finally, we know that elementary laws have the ability in principle to generate phases and phases transitions as organizational phenomena. Thus when one strips away the unhelpful complexities, one is left with the following simple argument: microscopic laws are true and could plausibly cause phases; therefore we are sure they do cause them, even though we cannot prove this deductively" (Laughlin 2005:35-36).

"Quantum mechanics is starkly efficient: it explains what you see but prevents you from seeing the explanation" (Greene 2004: 183).

"The fact that our universe is young and evolving puts the question of the origin of the laws of nature in a quite different light. If the universe is eternal, there are two possible answers for the question of why the laws of nature are as we find them to be: religion or Platonism. Either God (who is, in most tellings, eternal) made the laws of nature as he made the world; or they are as they are because there is a mathematical form for the laws that is somehow fixed by some abstract principle. But although deism and Platonism seem, at first, poles apart, in a certain sense these two kinds of explanation are not really very different. Mathematical truth is supposed to be eternal, as is god. Mathematical truth is supposed to be something that holds irrespective of what is in the world, or indeed whether the world exists at all. A world made by mathematical laws, like a world made by a god, is a world constructed by something that exists eternally and outside of the world it creates" (Smolin 1997: 17-18).

Almost everything in this booklet has nothing to do with "religion", therefore it has everything to do with "religion". Throw away every preconception you have. Be prepared to be non-linear.

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LOGIC

"Dissatisfied emotion has frequently been projected into logic. In theories of the universe it often reappears in the guise of logical queries and pseudo-logical constructions. A philosopher argues that he has discovered a puzzle of Being which logic cannot solve - he might as well say that he has discovered a fact that arouses his emotional resistance" (Reichenbach 1971: 4).

"The Theologians think they know the questions but cannot understand the answers. The physicists think they know the answers, but do not know the questions. An optimist might thus regard a dialogue as a recipe for enlightenment, whilst the pessimist might predict the likely outcome to be a state in which we find ourselves knowing neither the questions nor the answers" (Barrow 1991: 1).

"Irrationality is the square root of all evil." - Hofstadter

"Maybe I am being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me. My approach has been described as naive and simpleminded. I have been variously called a nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems to be refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it. Surely everyone knows the fatal errors of all those isms" (Hawking 1993:42).

Alphabetically defined:

Cosmology: A branch of philosophy dealing with the origin, processes, and structure of the universe. Divided into physics and metaphysics.

Epistemology: The division of philosophy that investigates the nature and origin of knowledge.

Metaphysics: The branch of philosophy that systematically investigates the nature of the first principles and problems of ultimate reality. It includes the study of being (ontology) and the study of the structure of the universe (cosmology) where theory cannot be verified or tested.

Physics: The science (learning or study concerned with demonstrated truths or observable phenomena and characterized by the systematic application of scientific method) of matter and energy and of interaction of the two.

Religion: The expression of the belief in and reverence for a superhuman power or powers regarded as creating or governing the universe and any personal or institutionalized system of beliefs or practices embodying this belief.

Universe: All existing things, including the earth, the heavens, the galaxies, and all herein, regarded as a whole, the cosmos, regarded as the whole; the cosmos, the sphere or realm in which everything exists and takes place

Multiverse: Parallel universes, post-inflation bubbles, quantum universes and other mathematical structures.

"By this very definition of "universe", one might expect the notion of a multiverse to be forever in the domain of metaphysics. Yet the borderline between physics and metaphysics is defined by whether a theory is experimentally testable, not by whether it is weird or involves unobservable entities" (Tegmark 2003:41).

"Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory" (Hawking 1988:10).

"The complaint about weirdness is aesthetic rather than scientific, and it really only makes sense only in the Aristotelian world-view. yet what did we expect? When we ask a profound question about the nature of reality, do we not expect an answer that sounds strange" (Tegmark, 2003:51)?

"Something that is logically necessary is not subject to change. If the world with all its present properties corresponds to this definition, it has to remain the same throughout the ages. Properties we call contingent are those that might also be different. Contingencies are subject to change and cannot be uniquely captured by thought" (Genz 1999: 308).

What do these definitions have in common? They are all systematic models for the way things are and the way things work in the universe.

"Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, including its size and shape, its history and destiny, from one end to the other, from the beginning to the end of time. That's a big topic. And it's not a simple one. It's not even simple to define what those concepts mean, or even if they have meaning" (Isaacson 2007:249).

The metaphysics of cosmology uses the scientific approach beyond its limits in one sense, but it approaches religion and epistemology as a limit in another sense. Things merge and get fuzzy. Just how something can exist outside of time (i.e. never existed) and suddenly just exists and set the parameters of time and space (i.e. simply defines existence).. is weird stuff.

Nobody should be afraid of "truth" as discovered by science. A religion or philosophy that cannot embrace reality derived from the scientific method shows a lack of sense and intelligence (i.e. is dull, obtuse = stupid). Fear of knowledge reflects dogma or doctrines used to define "us" verses "them"... creeds of the "enlightened" as opposed to the rest of the "barbarians". How can anyone declare enlightenment by excluding truth? All belief systems must contain its beliefs, and thus define its believers. That is just the way things are. Those who oppose science are opposing reality, and if there is a "god" in the religious sense, then that "god" created reality, and denying the truth of reality is denying "god".

Nobody ever said human beings are logical creatures. Most religions require their members to "believe" as faith (i.e. deny reality) the tenets of the system. In other word, they require that you become stupid in order to join.

People seem to flee from science because it offers no personal assurance for their moral and emotional needs. One does not have to have a religious creed to be moral, and most morals are defined by cultural values as well as human ecology. Since metaphysics and cosmology cannot prove or disprove "god"... anymore than religion or philosophy can... science cannot be the dogmatic basis for such beliefs or faith. Some people twist science to that end. But most people turn to religion or philosophy for defining their belief or faith systems. But people should not deny science or truth or reality when they choose a belief system, and they should never use science to "disprove" religion. Science has shown one thing, it is impossible to fully disprove anything. It has shown that it is possible to "confirm" things by experiment and predictions that are tested against results. Science is an optimistic kind of thing. Scientific pessimism is not science, it is a belief system disguised as science.

"Any string of symbols that can be given an abbreviated representation is called algorithmically compressible.... we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.... Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings" (Barrow 1991: 11).

"The problem of fitting human life into the impersonal tapestry of cosmic space and time has been pondered by mystics, philosophers, theologians, and scientists of all ages. Their views straddle the entire range of options. At one extreme is painted the depressing materialistic picture of human life as a local accident, totally disconnected and irrelevant to the inexorable march of the Universe from the "Big Bang" into the future "Big Crunch" of devastating heat, or the eternal oblivion of the "Heat Death". At the other is preached the traditional teleological view that the Universe has some deep meaning, and part of that meaning is ourselves" (Barrow 1991: 164).

Digression into authority:

Because people wrote things down in the past, and such writings are considered as coming from a "god" or through a "god"... anything that shows that the "word" is secular rather than spiritual is a threat. For some reason, people want to believe that founders of belief systems were somehow more connected directly to divinity than themselves... and have some special "authority".

I have some basic news for you... everyone who ever lived, that lives, and who ever will live, will have no better connection or authority than anyone else. Simply because someone said they were better connected, or other say that about them, does not make it true. If you believe that there are authorities on "god", then I have this bridge I would like to sell you. Simply because people drop out of normal society to "study" religion, does not make them experts on anything except the dogma they are studying. That they dropped out of society should tell you something right away. That someone should try to become an expert on a system of faith and belief by studying and pondering on everything related to that system should again tell you something about that persons emotional needs and drives. Those who reject the universe for the sake of a religious belief also speaks loud.

My basic advice:

Put your faith and trust in yourself (in moderation). Learn, but learn in moderation. Believe, but believe in moderation.... be moderately heretical about your own beliefs. Be moderately certain you are right, but you might be moderately wrong as well. Be open. Be willing to change. Do not blame. Affirm in moderation. Be tolerant of others and listen with an open mind and heart, yet question in moderation. Be moderately true to yourself and to others. Like yourself in moderation, and you can like others in moderation. Never fear change. Never fear "truth" but take it in moderation. Never fear what science brings, because even science must be taken in moderation. Scientific "truth" changes over time as more data comes in and more tests are done. Embrace reality, never fear it. Embrace the universe and respect your place in it as well as the place of others. Think about the consequences of your actions is relation to others. Be selfish in moderation. Be loving in moderation. Eat, drink and be merry in moderation. Exercise in moderation. You are the center of your universe, but you share that universe in connection with all non-living and living things. Live in moderation.

"If I were to put it into a very few words, my dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds - even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself. .... We rule with moderate strictness, and in return are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste and moderately honest. .... I can add that our community has various faiths and usages, but we are moderately heretical about them" (Hilton 1934:90-91).

"Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue" (Hilton 1934:187).

The reason WHY everyone has been wrong about "religion" is simple:

1) The people thinking about it have been humans (a bad starting point);

2) The people thinking about religion have been (living) amateurs (they have no experience as dead people);

3) God, or at least the Universe, is counter-intuitive. If "god"was intuitive, X^he/she/it would be just like us, although most people assume "god", at the very least, .... is intelligent. After looking at some belief systems, that is questionable among humans.

Also, as explained in a book for children (The Phantom Tollbooth), problems are not as simple as most thinkers want you to believe. While traveling, a group of critters met the Dodecahedron, a creature with many faces at a place in a road that split into three roads:

"Then perhaps you can help us decide which road to take," said Milo.

"By all means," he replied happily. "There's nothing to it. If a small car carrying three people at thirty miles an hour for ten minutes along a road five miles long at 11:35 in the morning starts at the same time as three people who have been traveling in a little automobile at twenty miles per hour for fifteen minutes on another road exactly twice as long as one half the distance of the other, while a dog, a bug, and a boy travel an equal distance in the same time or the same distance in an equal time along a third road in mid-October, then which one arrives first and which is the best way to go?"

"Seventeen!" shouted the Humbug, scribbling furiously on a piece of paper.

"Well, I'm not sure, but--"Milo stammered after several minutes of frantic figuring.

"You'll have to do better than that," scolded the Dodecahedron, "or you'll never know how far you've gone or whether or not you've ever gotten there."

"I'm not very good at problems," admitted Milo.

"What a shame," sighed the Dodecahedron. "They're so very useful. Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one foot tail?"

"Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil snapped.

"I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him."

"That's absurd," objected Milo, whose head was spinning from all the numbers and questions.

"That may be true," he acknowledged, "but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself."

"All three roads arrive at the same place at the same time," interrupted Tock, who had patiently been doing the first problem.

"Correct!" shouted the Dodecahedron. "And I'll take you there myself. Now you can see how important problems are. If you hadn't done this one properly, you might have gone the wrong way."

"I can't see my mistake," said the Humbug, frantically rechecking his figures.

"But if all the roads arrive at the same place at the same time, then aren't they all the right way?" asked Milo.

"Certainly not!" he shouted, glaring from his most upset face. "They're all the WRONG way. Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them HAS to be right."

He walked to the sign and quickly spun it around three times. As he did, the three roads vanished and a new one suddenly appeared, heading in the direction that the sign now pointed.

"Is every road five miles form Digitopolis?" asked Milo.

"I'm afraid it has to be," the Dodecahedron replied, leaping onto the back of the car. "It's the only sign we've got."

Does this sound familiar? Have you run into models that were internally consistent but have nothing to do with phenomenal reality? Have found answers to questions that were simply wrong? Are you stuck with the only facts you have?

Many models can be internally consistent, but be completely absurd. So much of human belief is built on such GIGO. Most is so absurd, that suspension of common sense is a basic tenant of the system: suspend your common sense and BELIEVE... have FAITH... "After all, it's the only SIGN we've got!" Most religions ask their adherents to cultivate ignorance as a high art: Instead of "Don't worry ... be happy" its more like "Be STUPID.... be happy." Or perhaps, as the disco lyrics go: "Lookin' for God in all the wrong places.... lookin' for God.... lookin' for God."

"The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. There will be reasons why the laws of physics are what they are, but these reasons may be partly historical and contingent, as in the case of biology" (Smolin 1997: 18).

What "god" and the Universe ain't:

1) OMNIPRESENT: I can definitely tell you from personal experience that loss of time sense is sheer madness. If "god" is omnipresent, X^he/she/it is bonkers. Time and entropy are part of the basic structure of the universe. The speed of light sets limits.

2) OMNISCIENT: Possession of universal and complete knowledge would be a total dead end. There is no intelligence in total knowledge, because there is no change. Without change, there is no meaning. A completely meaningful being is a meaningless being. Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations. An omniscient being cannot learn or interact with new or trying situations ... as they have already happened. The universe is not determined.

3) OMNIPOTENT: The ability to have unlimited authority or influence is again worthless. With nothing impossible, then why bother? Ultimate banality. The universe is currently not a singularity, and a singularity may have never existed.

4) OMNIFICENT: Having unlimited (endless, boundless, infinite) creative power is again useless. Creation without struggle has no merit. Infinity is really big. It is bigger than any bigness you can imagine. But with no bounds, there is no meaning. The universe may be the ultimate free lunch, but is has limits. The total energy of the universe is set.

So an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omnificent being is an insane meaningless banal merit less being and universe. I guess that to some people, that is a pretty good description of "god" or the universe. It certainly sounds like some people I know. Maybe one of them is "god"? I should probably ask.

Barrow (1991: 23-30) put things into perspective, which I have modified and commented upon. Using three variables (G = God, U = Universe, and L = Law), he looked at the following:

1) U is a subset of L That there was a pre-existing set of laws or logic that define the nature of the universe when it is born, that there is a structure larger than the universe. This is the position of cosmologists looking for the Theory of Everything. Since no theorem of the Universe can possess a larger information content than the axioms of the Universe, this may be impossible to discover... unless the Universe is incomplete (?) or flawed. It would be quite amusing to discover that the Universe is a flaw in an otherwise perfect symmetry.

2) L is a subset of U That law did not exist before the universe. In some places in the universe, it does not apply. That law perhaps evolves out of the structure of the universe and can change.

3) L is U This is more-or-less the singularity argument for the beginning of the universe, that law began with the birth of the universe that began out of nothing... it cannot explain why creation should occur. It implies a prior #5 below!

4) L is non-existent There may be no deep structure, everything may be chaos. What we think is law is illusion.

5) U is non-existent This is interesting because it is a logical outgrowth of version 3 above... a singularity requires the non-existence of everything before it exists. A logical problem.

6) U is a subset of G This is pantheism. That God is in all things but not identical to all things. That God existed before the universe and created it.

7) G is a subset of U God is a superbeing limited to this universe. That when the universe ends, God will end. This implies the prior existence of 9 below.

8) G is U God as nature, found in many Eastern philosophies, non-personal.

9) G is non-existent The view of the atheist. It is a precursor of number 7 above with its logical problems.

10) U is non-existent Same as possibility 5 above.

11) L is a subset of G The laws of nature are imposed by God the lawmaker.

12) G is a subset of L The evolving Deity where God is constrained by some higher order logic. If this relates to the universe, then implies 14 below as a pre-existing condition.

13) G is L The impersonal God as law or logic of nature.

14) L is non-existent Same as item 4 above. If relates to the universe, then can bring on logic issue with 12 above.

15) G is non-existent Same as item 9 above.

"Set theory can be viewed as a form of exact theology" - Rudy Rucker.

Meditate on the above. Remember that some physicists think there was no singularity, that the Universe has no beginning nor end, like a sphere has no beginning or end.

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THE UNIVERSE

"The logical unity of the Universe demands a single invariance that remains unchanged in the face of all the complexity and transience we see about us from the smallest sub-atomic scales to the farthest reaches of outer space. Identifying this over-arching symmetry, if it does exist and is manifest in a form that is intelligible to us, may be the nearest thing we could get to discovering the "secret of the Universe"" (Barrow 1991:31).

"Some philosophers of science have used Gödel's theorems regarding the incompleteness of arithmetic (and hence of any logical system containing arithmetic) to argue that we can never know everything about the physical universe in terms of mathematical laws of Nature because we cannot produce all the true, and only the true, statements of arithmetic, nor can all arithmetic statements be decided true or false" (Barrow 1991: 37).

But Barrow points out that while physical reality may be mathematical, it can be flawed in that it does not use all of it, and therefore can be proved (1991: 38). I like a flawed universe theory.

Probably the most remarkable thing about our universe is that at the sub-atomic level, the playing field is perfect... every particle that exists is an EXACT copy of every other particle of its type. To make a pun, if you have seen one photon, you have seen every photon! This remarkable fact is basic to the organization of the Universe. NOTHING at the microscopic level is ever an exact copy of anything else... which is the saving grace of the universe! These two differences are the key to everything. "It is this repeatability of things that is the hallmark of most basic entities in Nature and at root it is the reason why there can be accuracy and reliability in the physical world, whether it be in DNA replication or in the stability of the properties of matter" (Barrow 1991: 73).

But every exact copy is different in one respect, no two particles can occupy the same spacetime. Their "location" must be different. I suspect that the expansion (big bang) is simply an expression of this fact. My model explains why the universe is expanding and expanding at an increasing rate. If time = 0% then space = 100%: a particle traveling at the speed of light = 0% time and 100% space. Any shift from 0% time changes space and creates the arrow of time. Light, which is massless travels at the speed of light. If light had mass... it could not.

"... at 10 percent of the speed of light an object's mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light"(Hawking 1988:21).

"If there is space between two objects... we can and do consider the two objects to be independent. We regard them as separate and distinct entities. Space, whatever it is fundamentally, provides the medium that separates and distinguishes one object from another. That is what space does. Things occupying different locations in space are different things" (Greene 2004: 79).

I would revise this and substitute "spacetime" for space and add that things occupying different times are different things as well.

But things are odder yet: locality. What does it mean? It should mean that objects influence each other locally.. they interact because they are close to each other.

"But a class of experiments performed during the last couple of decades has shown that something we do over here (such as measuring certain properties of a particle) can be subtly entwined with something that happens over there (such as the outcome of measuring certain properties of another distant particle), without anything being sent from here to there" (Greene 2004: 80).

In my opinion... there is something "sent"... time!

There is no "space" and there is no "time"... there is only "spacetime". And time has an arrow because it is connected to space... and as "space" expands, "time" has a direction (spacetime expansion). What is entangled is time. Time allows/defines probability as well as entropy. Quantum mechanics simply add time to the equation, where it belongs. Both are at "light speed" and therefore at zero time.. so entanglement is not "spooky" as non-local entities simultaneously interact. The process of measurement is never at the speed of light (timeless).

"Recall another of Leibniz's principles, the identity of the indiscernible which requires that any two particles which have the same relationship with the other things in the universe must be in fact the same. For if things are only distinguished by their relations, then there is no way to tell them apart. A world constructed according to these principles must be complex enough to allow observers to distinguish each particle uniquely, by talking about their relationships with the other particles in the universe.

"How differentiated does the universe have to be, according to Leibniz's principles, in order to speak meaningfully of the universe as a three-dimensional space that exists in time? To use a word favored by Leibniz, the universe must have so much variety that no two observers experience the same thing, and no moment ever repeats itself"

"The common view, which we have inherited form Newtonian science, is that we live in a universe composed from a great many identical parts. The parts - the elementary particles - are each very simple, and each is identical to every other of its kind. Their arrangement happens to be very complex, but this is in no way necessary - it is just our good luck. The opposing picture, posited, each by Leibniz and Einstein, is of a world made by a great many particles, each of which is different. While each proton has the same charge and mass as every other, each is different, because each occupies a different place. Each elementary particle has a unique relation to the whole. The world they make is necessarily complex because a certain minimal complexity is required if each proton is to be distinguished from all others by its relationships to the rest. We may say that where something is, is determined by its view of the rest, which is to say by its relationship to the others. If each of a vast number of particles is to have a unique view of the rest, the world must have a fantastic variety of views" (Smolin 1997: 218-220).

The implications of this are interesting in relationship to the big bang and the entropy of the universe.

Possible Reality.

The Universe is filled with things that change through time and move through space. Life evolves out of non-life. Each living thing is born, lives and dies, and each is unique. There is some small variation in everything. This variation allows life to evolve and meet differing circumstances. Some change is detrimental to the individual. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. Some change is beneficial to the individual. This is neither good not bad, it just is. Shit happens.

The Universe was born, ages and dies. This is neither good, not bad, it just is. Life evolves in this universe. This is simply a mechanical process based on the structure of the universe. Life exists in those universes where life is possible. Life requires active systems that map the matter and energy needed to sustain life.... awareness is simply a basic aspect of living systems: how they seek and obtain the matter and energy required to sustain life. Reproduction is life's only meaningful goal ... to sustain continued life. What each life experiences, is all there is, nothing more, nothing less. Shit happens.

First Zen:

The Universe is really big. There are about one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Star Trek not withstanding, if you started counting one star a second 24 hours a day, your descendants will still be counting 3,000 years from now (Guth 1997:1)! There are at least a hundred billion other galaxies in the observable Universe (20-30 billion light years). According to Guth (1997:186) the Universe is at least 10²³ (100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times bigger than the small parcel we can observe through our telescopes! Multiply that hundred billion galaxies times that number: that is a lot of galaxies. That is a lot of the Universe we can never see or participate in. "If the inflationary theory is correct, then the observed universe is only a minute speck in a universe that is many orders of magnitude larger" (Guth 1997: 186).

Guth suggests that "false vacuum" is the key to understanding the creation of a universe. This false vacuum both grows and decays exponentially. Where it decays, it creates a universe, where it grows, it creates the probability of creating more universes... a process that goes on forever, increasing the rate of creation of universes, like the spreading complexity of a fractal pattern, an infinity of universes upon universes... "While life in our pocket universe will presumably die out, life in the universe as a whole will thrive for eternity" (1997: 248).

"The classical big bang didn't happen at a specific place within an infinite void; rather it happened everywhere because it was everything. There was "nothing" - not even empty space - outside of it. Hence the radiation is everywhere and goes in all directions, and will continue to do so as long as the universe exists..."(Smoot & Davidson 1993: 85).

Inflation jumped the beginning universe from the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit in an inconceivably brief period of time. One physicist, named Joao Magueijo believes that the speed of light has changed. That during the early birth of the universe, the speed of light was almost infinite, and that as the universe inflated, there was a phase transition as the universe cooled establishing the current speed of light (Folger 2003:36).

"The physicists assumed their theory affected only the very early universe. Once the speed of light froze to its current rate, the standard rules of physics would apply. But in that brief initial moment, a variable speed of light would solve two fundamental puzzles of cosmology" (Folger 2003:37).

"The first is something physicists call the horizon problem: No matter which way astronomers look in the sky, the universe - at the very largest scales - looks the same. Clusters of galaxies spangle the cosmos in a remarkably uniform manner" (Folger 2003:37).

"The second challenge facing Magueijo and Albrecht's theory was more daunting. Cosmologists say that the shape of the universe is "flat", meaning that it's delicately poised between two extremes: eternal expansion and imminent implosion" (Folger 2003:38).

"If energy and matter distort space-time, then the spontaneous creation or destruction of energy and matter, in Magueijo's theory, would change the curvature of the universe accordingly" (Folger 2003:38).

Oddly enough, light can be slowed down! Marguerite Holloway has slowed light down to 17 meters per second. When she measured light on and off in a coupling laser in a Bose-Einstein condensate. "light had come in with information, conveyed that information to matter and disappeared. Then matter produced light with that same information"

"I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period ... I was in the grip of the idea that Everything is particles ... I call my second period Everything is Fields ... Now I am in the grip of a new vision that Everything is Information" (Wheeler 1998).

Is space empty? Faraday created the concept of the "field" which pervades "space"... in other words, it pervades spacetime: electromagnetic fields and the Higgs (gravitational) field.

The thing to keep in mind is not that everything is moving because of the bang, but that space is expanding, and thus matter clumps are getting farther apart, like ink dots on an expanding balloon. There is some motion of matter due to gravity, but most of the movement is the result of space changing its size. This expansion is the Hubble flow, but galaxies also have independent motion that adds noise to the measurement of the Hubble constant. Galaxies are expanding withspace rather than into space (Smoot & Davidson 1993: 53). This makes me wonder if the relative density of matter is decreasing over time with the expansion of space?

"It is easy to have parts of the universe moving apart at greater than the speed of light (without violating special relativity) if space is expanding. If space is expanding, then two parts separated by a distance greater than the speed of light divided by the expansion rate must move apart faster than the speed of light even though neither of them is moving or moving very fast relative to its local neighbors or space-time. What is impossible is keeping things synchronized and matches. It is exactly this synchronization problem that leads to defects or a highly mismatched and lumpy universe" (Smoot & Davidson 1993: 177).

Forget about "space" and forget about "time".. instead wrap your mind around "spacetime" as a single unified concept.

"But, the term "big bang" is rather misleading because it was neither big nor loud, nor was it an explosion in the usual sense. If fact, the big bang did not occur anywhere in space, nor did it have an origin in time, because initially space and time did not exist. Instead, our current view of the big bang is that spacetime and energy were initially combined in an infinitely dense and infinitely hot state. Under these conditions everything was extremely simple. The four fundamental forces were unified; there were no particles because energy and mass were interchangeable; and there were no measurable events. Suddenly, 12 to 15 billion years ago, spacetime began expanding and as it did, mass-energy began cooling. Almost instantly, in a process known as symetry breaking, the force of gravity separated from the grand unified force (the still unified "strong electroweak force"). At this epoch, quarks and leptons, and their antiparticles were in equilibrium with energy (they materialized from energy and dematerialized back to energy in rapid succession). Another brief instant later, spacetime began inflating, exponentially, at speeds faster than light, in a process called inflation. (According to Einstein's theories, spacetime can expand faster than light. Mass-energy cannot travel through spacetime faster than light.) Inflation had the effect of flattening the geometry of spacetime, and expanding spacetime beyond the "light horizon."

"Yet the old dichotomy between the big bang and the steady state still points to the heart of a great cosmological dilemma - one that has yet to be resolved. The choice is simple: either the universe always existed or it did not. If the universe always existed (in any form at all), then we have to accept something that simply is - something infinite in time. Conversely, if the universe did not always exist, then we are forced to accept that existence arose from nonexistence - an equally daunting concept" (Bernstein 2000: 70).

If time existed before the big bang then space existed before the big bang as they are a single spacetime entity.

"But really, the full three-dimensional space and the full four-dimensional spacetime are warped. Time is warped because it too is a dimension from the vantage point of special and general relativity" (Randall 2005:110).

"... in all cases matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move. Curved spacetime sets up the geodesic paths along which, in the absense of other forces, things will travel. Gravity is encoded into the geometry of spacetime" (Randall 2005:110-111).

This implies, Ann Rand fashion, that every action I do as a material being changes the "outcome" of the universe.

"Among its many merits, general relativity eliminated the annoying action-at-a-distance of Newtonian gravity, which asserted that an object's gravitational effects would be felt everywhere as soon as it appeared or moved. With general relativity, we know that before gravity can act, spacetime has to deform. This process does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. Gravity waves (space deformation) travel at the speed of light(time deformation)" (Randall 2005:112). (Italics my comments).

The relative smoothness of the universe lead to the theory of inflation... an early time where all things could interact within the constraints of space-time.

"Our most refined theories of the origin of the universe - our most refined cosmological theories - tell us that by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinary low entropy. The big bang started the universe off in a state of low entropy, and that state appears to be the source of the order we currently see. In other words, the current order is a cosmological relic" (Greene 2004: 171).

"And of the fundamental forces of nature, gravity is the one that exploits this feature of entropy tally to the hilt. Because gravity operates across vast distances and is universally attractive, it instigates the formation of the ordered clumps - stars - that give off the light we see in a clear night sky, all in keeping with the net balance of entropy increase" (Greene 2004: 173).

"The more squeezed, dense, and massive the clumps of gas are, the larger the overall entropy. Black holes, the most extreme form of gravitational clumping and squeezing in the universe, take this to the limit. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that nothing, not even light, is able to escape, which explains why black holes are black. Thus, unlike ordinary stars, black holes stubbornly hold on to all the entropy they produce: none of it can escape the black hole's powerful gravitational grip. In fact.... nothing in the universe contains more disorder - more entropy - than a black hole" (Greene 2004: 173).

"When gravity flexes its muscles to the limit, it becomes the most efficient generator of entropy in the known universe" (Greene 2004: 173).

Does this imply that dark energy is the most efficient generator of order in the universe?

"But Wheeler observes that the black hole keeps a record of the information it engulfs. The more information swallowed, the bigger the black hole is - and the more space on the black hole's surface to accommodate boxes depicting bits. To Wheeler, this realization is curious and profound. A black hole can consume anything that exists and still be described in terms of how much information it has digested. In other words, the black hole converts all sorts of real things into information. Somehow, Wheeler concludes, information has some connection to existence, a view he advertises with the slogan "It from bit"" (Siegfried 2000: 2-3).

"It is not easy to grasp Wheeler's idea of connecting information to existence. He seems to be saying that information and reality have some sort of mutual relationship. On the one hand, information is real, not merely an abstract idea. On the other hand reality - or existence - can somehow be, described, or qualified, in terms of information" (Siegfried 2000: 3).

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It From Bit

"Many scientists now conceive of information as something real, as real as space, time, energy and matter" (Siegfried 2000: 7).

"Until recently, information was regarded as unphysical, a mere record of the tangible, material universe, existing beyond and essentially decoupled from the domain governed by the laws of physics. This view is no longer tenable" (Wojciech Zurek 1991: )

"In the beginning was the bit" (LLoyd 2006: ix). "Things, or 'its', arise out of information or 'bits'" (LLoyd 2006: ix).

"The universe is made of bits. Every molecule, atom, and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits." (LLoyd 2006: 3).

"What does the universe compute? It computes itself." (LLoyd 2006: 3). "Physical systems speak a language whose grammar consists of the laws of physics" (LLoyd 2006: 9).

"It has been known that any desired logical expression, including complex mathematical calculations, can be built up of of NOT, COPY, AND, and OR. They make up a universal set of logic gates" (LLoyd 2006: 33).

"The energy we see around us,then - in the form of Earth, stars, light, heat - was drawn out of the underlaying quantum fields by the expansion of our universe. Gravity is an attractive force that pulls things together. (As high school students will tell you, 'Gravity sucks'). As the universe expands (which it continues to do), gravity sucks energy out of the quantum fields. The energy in the quantum fields is almost always positive, and this positive energy is exactly balanced by the negative energy of gravitational attraction." (LLoyd 2006: 40).

"Energy makes physical systems do things. Information tells them what to do" (LLoyd 2006: 33). "To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information" (LLoyd 2006: 44).

"The theory of quantum mechanics gives rise to large scale structure because of its intrinsically probabilistic nature. Counterintuitive as it may seem, quantum mechanics produces detail and structure because it is inherently uncertain" (LLoyd 2006: 49).

"Chance is a crucial element of the language of nature. Every roll of the quantum dice injects a few more bits of detail into the world. As these details accumulate, they form the seeds for the variety of the universe". "Gambling for money may be infernal, but betting on throws of the quantum dice is divine" (LLoyd 2006: 50).

"The existence of complex and intricate patterns does not require that these patterns be produced by a complex and intricate machine or intelligence" (LLoyd 2006: 59).

"...the first law of thermodynamics is a statement about the energy: energy is conserved when it is transformed from mechanical energy to heat. The second law of thermodynamics, however, is a statement about information, and about how it is processed at the microscopic scale. The law states that entropy (which is a measure of information) tends to increase. More precisely, it states that each physical system contains a certain number of bits of information - both invisible and information (or entropy) and visible information - and that the physical dynamics that process and transform that information never decrease that total number of bits" (LLoyd 2006: 66).

"Information can be created, but it can't be destroyed" "Any process that erases a bit in one place must transform that same amount of information somewhere else" (LLoyd 2006: 77).

The laws of physics preserve information. The number of bits registered by a system (such as a helium filled balloon) does not decrease. (LLoyd 2006: 79). "Suppose an unknown bit of information interacts with a know bit of information. After the interaction, the first bit is still unknown, but now the second bit is unknown too. The unknown bit has infected the known bit, spreading the lack of knowledge, and increasing the entropy of the system" (LLoyd 2006: 81).

"In fact, as pointed out by Edward Fredkin of Carnegie Mellon University and Tommaso Toffoli of Boston University, atomic collisions naturally perform AND, OR, Not, and COPY logic operations. In the language of information processing, atomic collisions are computationally universal" (LLoyd 2006: 97).

"Plank found that if the energy of each of these (photon) particles (measured in joules) was equal to 6.63x10^-34 times the wave's frequency per second, then energy was conserved by the radiant heat. Plank's constant relates to frequency. It is so ubiquitous in physics that it has been given its own special symbol, h" (LLoyd 2006: 103).

The so called spooky double-slit experiment with light.

"Perform the double-slit experiment with particles. What do you see? The spots made by the individual particles fall across the photographic plate in a series of bands. When you cover one of the slits, the interference pattern disappears. Evidently, the particles behave as if they were waves" (LLoyd 2006: 106).

"Suppose you place a detector on the right hand slit. The detector registers the presence or absence of a particle at the slit, letting the particle pass through otherwise unchanged. When the detector detects a particle, it clicks. Now perform the double-slit experiment with the detector operating. Look at the screen. The interference pattern has disappeared" (LLoyd 2006: 107)!

"Observation (or measurement), as it is conventionally called) destroys interference. Without measurement, the particle merrily goes through both slits at once; with measurement, it goes through one or the other. In other words, measurement intrinsically disturbs the particle" (LLoyd 2006: 108).

"It is now clear why big things tend to show up in one place or another, but not both. Pebbles, people, and planets are constantly interacting with their surroundings. Each interaction with an electron, a molecule or air, a particle of light tends to localize a system. Big things interact with lots of little things, each of which gets information about the location of the big things. As a result, big things tend to appear here or there instead of here and there at the same time" (LLoyd 2006: 108).

Makes me wonder if one could block all interactions if the so called "warp" drive could exist? Be there instead of here? Impossible to block all = outside universe... but block enough to be elsewhere? How much is enough?

"The process by which the environment destroys the wavelike nature of things by getting information about a quantum system is called 'decoherence'" (LLoyd 2006: 108).

"The uncertainty principle states that if the value of some physical quantity is certain, then the value of a complementary quantity is uncertain" (LLoyd 2006: 111).

"What's going on is that quantum mechanics unlike classical mechanics can create information out of nothing" and "..entanglement is responsible for the generation of information in the universe" and "In fact, entanglement does not involve action at a distance, spooky or otherwise" (LLoyd 2006: 117-120).

"In the case of the double-slit experiment, for example, there are two possible histories. In one of them, the particle goes through the left slit and lands on the wall. In the other, the particle goes through the right slit and lands on the wall. These histories are coherent, not decoherent: they interfere with each other to create the pattern of bands on the wall"

"Now add the detector to the right-hand slit. There are still two possible histories. In one of them, the particle goes through the left slit and lands on the wall. In the other, the particle goes through the right slit, trips the detector, and lands on the wall. Because of the detector, the interference pattern goes away. These histories are decoherent: they do not interfere with each other" (LLoyd 2006: 125).

"You are to an atom as Earth is to an ant: very large. Atoms are typically a few ten-billionths of a meter across - tiny, bouncy spheres held together by electricity. An atom consists of a compact nucleus (Latin for 'nut') 100,000 times smaller still, made up of protons (which are positively charged) and neutrons (lacking a charge). Most of the mass of the atom lies in its nucleus, which is surrounded by a cloud of electrons, whose masses are a couple of thousands times smaller than those of protons or neutrons" (LLoyd 2006: 129).

If you have never seen the movie: Mindwalk rent it. It uses the following image: Atoms are essentially empty space. If the nucleus is about the size of a marble, then the first electron shell would be about one-half a kilometer away (1640 feet) and the electrons as particles would be like grains of sand. But the electrons are more like a smear of probabilities. The particles do not exist in a definite place but as probabilities across spacetime. Classical matter is solid because probability patterns are hard to compress. Classical solids are interaction probability patterns.

"The simplest wave that can fit around a nucleus is a sphere the wave wraps smoothly all the way around. The next simplest wave has one peak as it wraps; then comes a wave with two peaks, and so on. Each of these waves corresponds to an electron in a definite energy state" (LLoyd 2006: 130).

"When an electron jumps from a higher energy state to a lower one, it emits a chunk, or quantum of light - a photon - whose energy is equal to the difference between the energies of the two states" (LLoyd 2006: 130).

"Not only can atoms emit light, they can absorb it. Just as an atom can jump from a higher energy state to a lower one, emitting a photon in the process, an atom can absorb a photon and jump from a lower energy state to a higher one" (LLoyd 2006: 131).

A quantum bit is a qubit.

"When you zap an atom with light whose photons have the right energy, you can make the atom flip its state from [0> to [1> and back again. You are flipping the atom's bit. In other words, you are performing the logical operation known as NOT" and "Unlike classical bits, qubits can be in quantum superpositions of [0> and [1>; that is, they can register 0 and 1 at the same time" (LLoyd 2006: 136).

"A quantum computer given 10 input qubits can do 1,024 things at once. A quantum computer given 20 qubits can do 1,048,576 things at once. One with 300 qubits of input can do more things at once that there are elementary particles in the universe" (LLoyd 2006: 138-139).

"In a quantum computer, however, there is no distinction between analog and digital computation" (LLoyd 2006: 152).

"Thus at bottom, the universe can be thought of as performing a quantum computation" and "...a simulation of the universe on a quantum computer is indistinguishable from the universe itself" (LLoyd 2006: 154).

"Information can't travel any faster than the speed of light. Because the universe has a finite age and because the speed of light is finite, the part of the universe about which we can have information is also finite. The part of the universe about which we can have information is said to be within the horizon. Beyond the horizon we can only guess as to what is happening" (LLoyd 2006: 164).

"When we look through a telescope, we also look back in time, and the most remote objects we can see appear as they were a little under 14 billion years ago. In the intervening time, because of the expansion of the universe, those objects have moved farther away, and right now they are 42 billion light-years from us" (LLoyd 2006: 164).

"The horizon is 42 billion light-years away. On average, every cubic meter of the universe withing the horizon contains a mass of about one hydrogen atom. Each hydrogen atom contributes energy E=mc². Toting up all the energy in the universe, we find that the universe contains about 100 million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10⁷¹) joules of energy" (LLoyd 2006: 164).

"The result is that every second, a computer made up of all the energy in the universe could perform 100,000 googol (10¹⁰⁵) operations. Over the 14 billion years the universe has been around, this cosmological computer could have performed about 10,000 billion billion googol (10¹²²) ops" (LLoyd 2006: 165).

"The result is that the cosmological computer could store 100 billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10⁹²) bits of information" (LLoyd 2006: 165).

"The fact that a quantum computation doesn't care how it is embedded in spacetime means that the spacetime derived from the quantum computation obeys the laws of general relativity. Why? Because Einstein derived the laws of general relativity by requiring that those laws don't care how the underlying physical dynamics of matter is embedded in spacetime. Under the proper assumptions, general relativity is the only theory of gravity that is generally covariant" (LLoyd 2006: 172).

"The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity" (LLoyd 2006: 176).

"Logical depth referred to bit strings, computer programs and logical operations. Heinz wanted a measure of complexity that referred to physical systems - energy and entropy. So he and I concocted a physical analog to logical depth, which we called thermodynamic depth, to emphasize the connection to Bennett's work" (LLoyd 2006: 191).

"Recall that entropy is measured in bits. Entropy consists of random, unknown bits. The opposite of entropy is called negentropy. Negentropy consists of known, structured bits. A systems negentropy is a measure of how far away that system is from its maximum possible entropy. A living, breathing human being has lots of negentropy, as opposed to, say, a gas of helium atoms at room temperature, which has no negentropy" (LLoyd 2006: 191).

"..effective complexity, a measure of the amount of regularity in a system; this definition of complexity was originally proposed by Murray Gell-Mann. Over the last decade, Gell-Mann and I have worked to make the notion of effective complexity mathematically precise" (LLoyd 2006: 193).

"The amount of information required to describe a system's regularities is its effective complexity" (LLoyd 2006: 193).

"The computational capacity of the universe means that logically and thermodynamically deep things necessarily evolve spontaneously" (Lloyd 2006: 200)).

In other words, LIFE is a probable outcome where the environmental variables allow it to survive.

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The universe revisited

While our sun has been fusing hydrogen into helium for 4.5 billion years, it can continue for another 5 billion (Rees 1979: 9). All of the heavy elements were created in solar furnaces after the "big bang" and were distributed into space by supernova. So the early universe stars and planets were lifeless as the chemicals required for life as we know it, did not exist. The universe evolves and changes. Over time, heavy elements are becoming more common and lighter elements are being used by stars: "We are stardust - the ashes of long dead stars" (Rees 1997: 17). But since most star systems are binaries... the chances for life on planets gets less likely.

"Planetary nebulae were named, or rather misnamed, two centuries ago by English astronomer William Herschel. He was a prodigious discoverer of nebulae - fuzzy, cloudlike objects visible only through a telescope. Many had a vaguely round shape that reminded Herschel of the greenish planet Uranus (which he discovered), and he speculated that they might be planetary systems taking shape around young stars. The name stuck even though the opposite turned out to be true: this type of nebula consists of gas molted from dying stars. It represents not only our past but our future and our fate. In five billion years or so our sun will end its cosmic tenure in the elegant violence of a planetary nebula" (Balick & Frank (2004: 51,52).

"Over the past century, astronomers have come to realize that stars cleanly separate into two distinct classes as they die. The elite massive stars - those with a birth weight exceeding eight solar masses - explode suddenly as supernovae. More modest stars, such as the sun, have a drawn-out death. Instead of detonating, they spend their last years burning their fuel spasmodically, like an automobile engine running out of gas" (Balick & Frank (2004:52).

"Initially the loosely bound outer layers stream off the star at 10 to 20 kilometers per second - a relatively slow outflowing wind that will carry the bulk of the nebula's eventual mass. As the star strips down to its still hot core, it evolves from orange to yellow, then white, and finally blue. When its surface temperature exceeds about 25,000 kelvins, it bathes the surrounding gas in harsh ultraviolet light, which has enough punch to dismember molecules and strip atoms of their electrons."

"The stellar wind carries ever less mass at ever increasing speed. After 100,000 to one million years, depending on the original mass of the star, it ceases altogether, and the remnant star settles down as an extremely dense and hot white dwarf - a stellar ember crushed by gravity into a nearly crystalline orb about the size of earth" (Balick & Frank (2004:52).

"At least 50 percent of the all the "stars" you see at night are really pairs of stars orbiting each other. In most of these systems, the stars are so far apart they develop independently. But in a small fraction, the gravity of one star can deflect or even control the material flowing out of another. This fraction matches the fraction of planetary nebulae that are bipolar" (Balick & Frank (2004:57).

"Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a huge disk 100,000 light-years across and containing a hundred billion stars. Its oldest stars formed more than 10 billion years ago. The primordial material contained only the simplest atoms - no carbon, no oxygen, and no iron. Our Sun, a middle-aged star (some others are more than twice as old), formed 4.5 billion years ago, by which time several generations of heavy stars could have been through their entire life cycles. The chemically interesting atoms - those essential for complexity and life - were forged inside these stars. Their death throes, supernova explosions, flung these atoms back into interstellar space" (Rees 1997: 18).

"Gradually, though, it has become clear that the Milky Way is not a finished work but rather a body that is forming" (Wakker & Richter 2004:40).

"Our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars most of which are concentrated in a thin disk about 100,000 light years across and 3,000 light-years thick. These starts revolve around the galactic center in nearly circular orbits. The sun, for example, trundles around at nearly 200 kilometers per second. Another 10 billion stars form the galactic "halo", a huge spherical envelope that surrounds the disk" (Wakker & Richter 2004:40-41).

There is what is called the Magellanic Stream, an arc of gas in the orbit of two small companion galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. These are the large and small Magellanic Clouds.

"Most galaxies are scattered through space far from their nearest neighbor, ans of these only 10 to 20 percent are ellipticals,; spirals dominate. The remainig galaxies, however, are packed into clusters, and for them the situation is reversed. Ellipticals are the majority, and the spirals that do exist are anemic systems depleted of gas and young stars. This so-called morphology-density relation has long puzzled astronomers" (Kauffman & van den Bosch 2002:16).

"The high efficiency of star formation during mergers explains why ellipticals typically lack gas: they have used it up. The merger model also accounts for the morphology-density relation: a galaxy in a high-density environment will undergo more mergers and is thus more likely to become an elliptical" (Kauffman & van den Bosch 2002:19).

"... researchers are still far from working out all the processes involved. Moreover, they have yet to resolve some troubling inconsistencies. The simple picture of a gas cooling inside dark matter halos faces an important problem known as the cooling catastrophe. Calculations of the cooling rates imply that the gas should have cooled briskly and pooled in the centers of halos, leaving the intergalactic space virtually empty. yet the space between galaxies is far from empty. Some extra input of energy must have prevented the gas from cooling down" (Kauffman & van den Bosch 2002:21).

In 2006, The "bullet Cluster" seemed to demonstrate the presence of a dark matter halo from gravitational lensing. The dark matter seemed to correspond to the galaxies, not the gas produced from their collision. But the "Abell 250" collision cluster appears to show dark matter in the gas center of the colliding galaxies and not near the galaxies at all (Schilling 2007:32). The data almost suggests a fifth force of nature, but needs better observations to clarify the issue.

My model, I believe, resolves this issue.

"Another problem concerns angular momentum. The amount of angular momentum imparted to protogalaxies in the models is comparable to the angular momentum that we actually see in spiral galaxies. So long as the gas retains its angular momentum, the CDM (cold dark matter) picture reproduces the observed sizes of spirals. Unfortunately, in the simulations the angular momentum leaks away. Much of it is transferred to the dark matter during galaxy mergers. As a result, the disks emerging from these simulations are a factor of 10 too small. Apparently the models are still missing an essential ingredient" (Kauffman & van den Bosch 2002:21).

Again, I believe my model resolves this issue.

"A third inconsistency has to do with the number of dwarf galaxies. Hierarchical theories predict a proliferation of low-mass dark matter halos and, by extension, dwarf galaxies. These are simply not seen. In the neighborhood of the Milky Way, the number of low-mass dwarfs is a factor of 10 to 100 lower than theories predict. Either the dark matter halos do not exist or they are present but have eluded decection because stars do not form within them" (Kauffman & van den Bosch 2002:21).

Again, my model resolves this issue.

There was a time when it was thought the earth was the universe. People thought the heavens rotated around the earth, including the sun. Then it was found that the earth rotated around the sun and that the earth was not the center of our planetary system. So people thought our sun was the center of the universe. Later, is was realized that the sun was just a minor star in our galaxy, the "Milky Way". So people thought our galaxy was the universe. Then it was discovered that our galaxy was one of many. Our galaxy was not even a particularly big nor impressive one. Still later, it was discovered that the galaxies group along bubble-like regions and that our area is not within a very impressive wall of galaxies.

Over time, we have fallen from the center of things as a planet and star. So now, we think that life so rare that we are the center of the universe because we are alive. Or, if life is common, intelligence is not, thus we are the center of the intelligent universe. Will we ever learn from what the history of research has been telling us for a very long time? Some day, this life or intelligence provincialism will fall as well.

Believe it or not, but "In October 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of Geneva Observatory in Switzerland reported the first planet" (Marcy & Butler 1998:11).

As more planets were found, planets moved in eccentric and oval orbits. Many large gas giants were discovered close to their stars. The old ideas about planetary formations had to be abandoned as another provincial view. The so-called 51 Peg planets are gas giants with orbits as short as 1.5 days and would be inside the orbit of Mercury (Marcy & Butler 1998:13).

"It transpires that there exist a number of very unusual coincidences regarding the values of particular combinations of the constants of nature which are necessary conditions for our own existence. Were the fine-structure constant to differ by roughly one per cent form its actual value, then the structure of stars would be dramatically different. Indeed, there is every reason to suspect that we would not be here to discuss the matter. For the biological elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus are produced during the final explosive death throes of the stars. They are blown out into space where they become incorporated into the planets and, ultimately, into people. But, carbon, the crucial biological element which we believe to be essential for the spontaneous evolution of life, should really only exist as the minutest trace element in the Universe instead of in the healthy abundance that we find. This is because the explosive nuclear reactions that make carbon in the late stages of stellar evolution are typically rather slow at producing it. However, there exists a remarkable coincidence of Nature that allows carbon to be produced in unexpected abundance" (Barrow 1991: 95).

The values of the particles is important, they are parameters rather than absolutes:

"Although many different kinds of elementary particles have been discovered, almost all the matter in the universe is made of four kinds: protons, neutrons, electrons and neutrinos. These interact via four basic forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak electromagnetic forces. Each of these forces is characterized by a few numbers. Each has a range, which tells us the distances over which the forces can be felt. Then, for each kind of particle and each force, there is a number which tells us the strength by which that particle participates in interactions governed by that force. These are called the coupling constants" (Smolin 1997: 37).

Smolin (1997: 59) says there are three universal phenomena: 1) everything that moves is described by the principles of relativity; 2) everything that exists is described by quantum theory; and 3) gravity, which applies to everything universally. I think he is wrong, in my opinion there is another universal that applies to everything: 4) time. He notes there are three universal physical constants: 1) Newton's gravitational constant (G); 2) Planck's constant (h); and 3) the speed of light (c). The Planck mass is about 10^-5 grams and the Planck length is 10^-33 cm (18 powers of 10 smaller than a proton or neutron!).

"Planck realized that physicists had never seen the granular nature of energy because the "size" of each packet was incredibly tiny (determined by the number h=6.5x10^-27 erg sec, now called "Planck's Constant"). This number is so astronomically small that we never see quantum effects in everyday life" (Kaku & Thompson 1987:38).

"...The fabric of space on scales smaller than the Planck length - a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth (10^-33) of a centimeter - space becomes a seething, boiling cauldron of frenzied fluctuations.... the usual notions of left/right, back/forth, and up/down become so jumbled by the ultramicroscopic tumult that they loose all meaning. Even the usual notion of before/after... is rendered meaningless by quantum fluctuations on time scales shorter than the Planck time, about a tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth (10^-43) of a second (which is roughly the time it takes for light to travel a Planck length)" (Greene 2004:333).

Gravity is universal, has infinite range, is always attractive, but is very weak (10^-38). Because of its peculiar nature, it dominates the large structure of the universe (as does time). The weakness of gravity is critical for the existence of stars and the life of stars. Weak gravity allows large masses to exist to create stars that can burn for billions of years.

"If the gravitational force were stronger by only a factor of ten, the lifetime of a typical star would decrease from about ten billion years to the order of ten million years. If its strength were increased by still another factor of ten, making the gravitational force between two protons still an effect of order of one part in 10³⁶, the lifetime of a star would shrink to ten thousand years" (Smolin 1997: 39).

"Carbon originates in the Universe via a two-step process from nuclei of helium, or alpha particles as we usually call them. Two alpha particles combine under stellar conditions to make a nucleus of the element beryllium. The addition of a further alpha particle is necessary to transform this into a carbon nucleus. One would have expected this two-step process to be extremely improbable, but remarkably the last step happens to possess a rare property called "resonance" which enables it to process at a rate far in excess of our naive expectation. In effect, the energies of the participating particles plus the ambient heat energy in the star add to a value that lies just above a natural energy level of the carbon nucleus and so the product of the nuclear reaction finds a natural state to drop into. It amounts to something akin to the astronomical equivalent of a hole-in-one. But this is not all. While it is doubly striking enough for there to exist not only a carbon resonance level but one positioned just above the incoming energy total within the interior of the star, it is well-neigh miraculous to discover that there exists a further resonance level in the oxygen nucleus that would be made in the next step of the nuclear reaction chain when a carbon nucleus interacts with a further alpha particle. But this resonance level lies just above the total energy of the alpha particle, the carbon nucleus, and the ambient environment of the star. Hence, the precious carbon fails to be totally destroyed by further resonant nuclear reaction. This multiple coincidence of the resonance levels is a necessary condition for our existence" (Barrow 1991: 95).

"But for the existence of stars requires not only that the gravitational force be incredibly weak. Stars burn through nuclear reactions that fuse protons and neutrons into a succession of more and more massive nuclei. For these processes to take place, protons and neutron must be able to stick together, creating a large number of different kinds of atomic nuclei. For this to happen, it turns out that the actual values of the masses of the elementary particles must be chosen very delicately. Other parameters, such as those that determine the strengths of the different forces, must also be carefully tuned" (Smolin 1997: 39).

"Were the electron's mass not about the same size as the amount that the neutron outweighs the proton, and were each of these not much smaller than the proton's mass, it would be impossible for nuclei to stick together to form stable nuclei" (Smolin 1997: 40).

"Mystery number one is why the proton mass is so tiny compared to the Plank mass. Mystery number two is why the cosmological constant is so much tinier still. Between the scale of the cosmological constant and the Plank mass is a ratio of 10⁶⁰. It is extraordinary that such a huge ratio should come into fundamental physics. But this is not all. Taking these values into account, it turns out, apparently coincidentally, that the lifetime of a typical star is about the same as the lifetime of the universe, measured as best we can by the speed of its expansion"

"In fact, we will see that the history of the universe is, to a large extent, the history of symmetry. The most pivotal moments in the evolution of the universe are those in which balance and order suddenly change, yielding cosmic arenas qualitatively different from those of preceding eras. Current theory holds that the universe went through a number of these transitions during its earliest moments and that everything we've ever encountered is a tangible remnant of an earlier, more symmetric cosmic instance" (Greene 2004: 219-220).

"Most, if not all, of the attributes set by symmetry breaking appear to be fine-tuned. Changing their values by modest amounts would have resulted in a quantitatively different universe - one in which we probably would not exist. If protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms. If the electromagnetic force were 4 percent weaker, there would be no hydrogen and no normal stars. If the weak interaction were much weaker, hydrogen would not exist; if it were much stronger, supernovae would fail to seed interstellar space with heavy elements. If the cosmological constant were much larger, the universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form" (Tegmark, 2003:46).

"Why should the expansion rate of the universe have been set to the scale of the lifetime of stars, if the first stars formed millions of years after the big bang? What kind of physical mechanism could account for this" (Smolin 1997: 42)?

In summary, Smolin says: "... we should ask just how probable is it that a universe created by randomly choosing the parameters will contain stars.... The answer, in round numbers, comes to about one chance in 10²²⁹" (1997: 45).

But this creative power is also destructive power. Recent research into the center of our galaxy has shown it is a very chaotic mess. Stellar matter is being swirled into giant blobs that is being thrown out into the spiral arms. Near the center of our galaxy, one arm of our galaxy (northern) is distorted and fanned out by this massive tumult. Our galaxy has a disk, bulge and halo. The bright central halo is about 10-30 parsecs (3.26 light years) across. The nuclear bulge is filled with stars so close together, they cannot be resolved. Near the center of the bulge is the circumnuclear ring about 1.5 parsecs from the center and about 180 parsecs in circumference. This is a cloud of nuclear material from exploded stars. The center is a black hole with a density of about 3 million solar masses. The nearby 15-star cluster (IRS 16) is the fuel pouring into this black hole and losing their mass at about 500-700 km/sec. The gas outflow from IRS 16 is thrown out as huge blobs about every 100 years. It is these blobs that are fracturing the structure of the inner northern spiral arm. The gaseous wind is so powerful it creates a tail of ionized gas around supergiant IRS 7 and a huge shock wave in the circumnuclear ring behind IRS 7. This entire complex can collapse at any time, reshaping the center of our galaxy and having effects throughout our Milky Way.

Molecular clouds create stars and planets. These clouds generally range from 100 to 300 light-years in diameter. The presence if dust and ice provides the process for collapse into proto-stars and planetary systems. Our Milky Way has at least 6,000 such clouds. The matter is cold, only about 30 Kelvin and only contain about 1,000 million atoms per cm²... so one liter would weigh only 3 billionth's of a gram. The chemistry of such clouds is complex. It includes hydrogen, helium, ethanol, ring and acetylenic chains, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, neon, magnesium, iron and sulphur. In the Orion nebula, the molecular cloud is several times larger than the entire nebula! Nagoya University studied clouds in the direction of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Yonekura, Dobashi, Mizuno, Ogawa, and Fukui found that clouds occur all over the place. Out of 48,000 positions, they observed 1015 clouds of which 188 were creating proto-stars, and of these 101 had never been catalogued before. This indicates there is a lot more matter out there than previously known, and a lot more star and planetary formation.

But these star forming and relatively cool clouds exist because they contain carbon that radiates excess heat and because they are dirty with dust that shields them from star light and heat. This dust is mostly carbon. Since the elements within these clouds were made in stars... how did the early stars form from the relatively pure hydrogen and helium that filled the early universe (Smolin 1997:110)?

Light takes 25,000 years to reach our sun from our galactic center. Our sun rotates one full turn in our galaxy every200- 240 million years. We are about 28,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. We use one trip around our Sun as our "solar year". If we assume the universe is 10-15 billion years old and our Milky Way was created about a billion years after the big bang than one trip around the Milky Way for our Sun could be called our "galactic year". This galactic year would take about 200-240 million years and would make our Sun a mere 58 galactic years old! (Magee 2000: 106). Galaxies in these terms are still young systems, still gobbling up other galaxies and growing like children in their early childhood.

"But although the Milky Way may be a glorious sight, it is a constant source of frustration for astronomers who study the universe beyond our galaxy. The disk blocks a full 20 percent of the cosmos, and it seems to be a very exciting 20 percent."

"Somewhere behind the disk, for example, are crucial parts of the two biggest structures in the nearby universe: the Perseus-Pisces supercluster of galaxies and the "Great Attractor," a gargantuan agglomeration of matter whose existence has been inferred from the motions of thousands of galaxies through space" (Kraan-Korteweg & Lahav 2000: 75).

In 1994, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy was discovered only 80,000 light years away, in fact, well inside the Milky Way but on the other side of our galaxy. We are colliding with this galaxy, and it is being incorporated into the Milky Way in several orbits. The Magellanic Clouds pass through our galaxy every billion years and loose energy and matter each time. In about 10 billion years (when the universe is twice its present age), the Milky Way will have eaten them as well. Bizarrely enough, many of the oldest stars in the Milky Way galactic halo move in retrograde orbits... which suggests the proto-galaxy out of which we formed captured sizeable fragments moving in the opposite direction! (van den Bergh & Hesser 2000: 111).

"The Milky Way was though to have about 10 satellites, but within the last year or so, that number has nearly doubled" (Selim 2007:12). and..."the large and small Magellanic clouds are shooting by us at about 200 miles a second, faster than a satellite would" (Selim 2007:12-13).

Andromeda, our nearest neighbor is 2 million light years away and is heading for our galaxy and will hit in about 5 billion years. It has been found to be at least 5 times larger than previous estimates with a halo of stars half a million light years out from the center, and "much of the space between the milky Way and Andromeda is filled with stars that belong to the galaxies...They practically overlap. It really challenges the notion of galaxies as groups of stars with empty space between them" (Selim 2007:12 quoting astronomer Raja Guhathakurta of the University of California, Santa Cruz).

Our local group of galaxies consists of us, Andromeda and about 20 smaller galaxies. We are part of the Virgo cluster centered about 50 million light years away which are part of a larger wall-like filament about 200 million years away (Rees 1997: 31). While the so-called dark matter has not been defined, there is about 0.1 atom per cubic meter of space in the universe and 400 million quanta of radiation per cubic meter as well. There are about a billion photons for every atom in the universe (Rees 1979: 50). In the centers of some galaxies are black holes weighing as much as millions or billions of stars. M47 has a dark central mass weighing about 3 billion suns and Andromeda's weighs about 30 million suns (Rees 1997: 88). Galaxies are at least 10 times bigger and heavier than previously thought based on dark matter. Our Milky Way requires about 10 times the dark matter to luminous matter to maintain its structure and rotation. Galactic clusters need about 100 times their visible mass to maintain their gravitational attraction (Genz 1999: 298-299). Baryonic matter is heavy: mostly protons and neutrons. Since 99% of the matter in the universe is dark (and if the universe is flat) only about 10% can be baryonic. What this matter consists of is unknown.

"The skinny black line on a plot of stellar rotation speed versus distance was expected to go down - stars close to the galactic center should orbit faster than stars at the edge because all the mass concentrated at the center of the galaxy pulls most powerfully on the closest stars. The same thing happens in the solar system: Mars moves faster than Jupiter because the sun's gravity pulls harder on it. Jupiter orbits faster than Saturn, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. A plot of orbital speeds and distance - a rotation curve of the solar system - does decrease with distance. The skinny black line just falls, just as Newton's laws say it should" (Frank 2006:34).

"The rotation curves for spiral galaxies do not. At a certain distance from the galactic center, the rotation curves for stars in most spiral galaxies simply do not fall; instead, at some point they flatten. All the stars in the middle and out parts of these galaxies orbit with the same speed, in seeming defiance of newton;s laws. Why don't the outer stars move more slowly than the inner ones" (Frank 2006:34)?

"Faced with flat rotation curves that seemed to flout Newton's laws, astronomers assumed the existence of a halo or dark matter around every spiral galaxy. Whatever the stuff was, it did not emit light, but it did exert gravitational pull. The dark matter tugged on the stars, cranking up their speeds and creating the flat rotational curves" (Frank 2006:34).

"Common knowledge has it that part of this extra mass consists of ordinary matter that gives off too little radiation for present technology to detect: planets, dwarf stars, warm gas. Such material is more precisely called dim matter. It could represent up to 10 times as much matter as astronomers see, but even so it could account for only a fraction of the missing mass. When researchers refer to dark matter, they usually mean an exotic breed of matter that makes up the difference" (Milgrom 2003:4).

"In sum, astronomers widely believe the current energy content of the universe to be roughly 4 percent ordinary (or "baryonic") matter, about a tenth of which is seen as stars and gas; a third dark matter in some unknown form; and two thirds dark energy, the nature of which is even less understood" (Milgrom 2003:4).

"Milgrom found that the best way to resolve the problem of the flat rotation curves was to modify this hallowed equation" (i.e. -Newton) (Frank 2006:35).

"I (Milgrom) assumed that when the acceleration due to gravitational forces becomes very small, the formula changes to F = ma²/a_o" (Frank 2006:35).

"According to Milgrom, this change holds only when accelerations fall below one 10-billionth of a meter per second every second. Not only does this work best with the data, he adds, but the new constant, a_o, may be of cosmological significance: Accelerating at this rate will take you from a resting state to the speed of light in the lifetime of the universe" (Frank 2006:35).

Milgrom called this idea MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). "how does MOND fare when confronted with the data? Orbital velocities in spiral galaxies, instead of declining with increasing distance from the galactic center, flatten out to a constant value, as predicted by MOND. Moreover, , according to an observed correlation known as the Tully-Fisher relation, this constant velocity is proportional to the fourth root of the galaxy's luminosity. This too, emerges naturally from MOND" (Milgrom 2003:5).

"Just as Planck's constant appears in many roles in quantum theory, so does a_o appear in many ways in MOND's predictions for galactic systems. It is a part of the success of the theory that the same value - approximately one angstrom per second per second - works for all these diverse appearances" (Milgrom 2003:7).

"MOND appears to suggest that inertia - the responsiveness of a body to a force - is not an inherent property of bodies but is acquired by the body by dint of its interaction with the universe at large.This idea falls within the framework of an old concept, Mach's principle, which attributes inertia to such an interaction.... If so, what could be the agent whose presence impedes acceleration and thus produces inertia" (Milgrom 2003:9)?

"An Exciting possibility is the vacuum. The vacuum is what is left when one annihilates all matter (or, equivalently, energy) that can be annihilated. According to quantum theory, the remnant is not a complete void but rather a minimal representation of all forms of energy. The interaction of all the vacuum with particles might contribute to the inertia of objects" (Milgrom 2003:9).

The Coma Cluster consists of about 100 galaxies containing 10¹¹ stars (Rees 1979: 116). The Hubble deep scan indicates that in our 10 billion light year volume of viewing, there are at least 100 billion galaxies. Puts things into perspective, if one can grasp such numbers and scales. The group of galaxies making up the "Great Attractor" contains at least 600 galaxies and is larger in scale and mass than the Coma Cluster. This would dominate our sky if we were on the other side of the Milky Way.

"The farthest you can see is the distance light has been able to travel during the 14 billion years since the big bang expansion began. The most distant visible objects are now about 4 x 10²⁶ meters away - a distance that defines our observable universe, also called our Hubble volume, our horizon volume or simply our universe" (Tegmark, 2003:41).

"A typical group is 50 million times as massive as the Sun, and has a temperature of 10 million degrees C. By comparison, a typical cluster weighs 1,000 trillion Suns and registers a temperature of 75 million degrees C., the heaviest known cluster is five times as massive and nearly three times as hot" (Henry, Briel & Böhringer 2000: 46).

The idea that we are alone in such scales approaches silly as a limit (to paraphrase what little I remember from calculus). One person, Ksanformality (Space Research Institute in Moscow) and Arkipov think life is so prevalent, that we are bombarded by artifacts from other civilizations at a rate of about 4,000 artifacts in the last 4.5 billion years.

"Astromomers suspect that our Hubble volume has at least 10²⁰ habitable planets; some might well look like Earth" (Tegmark, 2003:42).

"Those beautiful spiral patterns that one sees in pictures of galaxies are not, in most cases, the patterns of where the stars are. In many cases, if one looked at a picture of where the stars are actually distributed, one would not see a spiral pattern. The spirals are only the region in which new stars are currently being formed. As a result, while it is true that spiral galaxies rotate, it is not true that the spiral structure, which is only the trace of the process of star formation, rotates with the stars of the galaxy. Instead, observations suggest that it moves through the galaxy, dissolving and reforming on scales somewhat slower than the rotation of the galaxy" (Smolin 1997: 121).

"Embedded in the halo one finds a disk of stars, gas and dust rotating slowly around an axis through the halo's center. This rotational motion is definitely not random; in any region of the disk the velocities of nearby stars differ by not more than ten percent from the overall rotational speed. One of the interesting and unexpected facts about the disk is that it does not rotate rigidly, like a merry-go-round or a top. Instead, the stars and clouds of gas rotate with roughly the same velocity no matter how far they are from the center, so that those father out take more time to complete a rotation.

The constancy of the rotational speed of the stars in a spiral disk is one of the spectacular scientific discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century. This is because it is possible to use Newton's laws to deduce this distribution of matter in a galaxy, given only the knowledge of the velocities of the stars. In most galaxies, the result of this is a very different distribution of matter than is seen in the stars and gas. Typically, between 80 and 90 percent of the matter of a galaxy is found to be spread out beyond the disk and is not in the form of visible stars and gas" (Smolin 1997: 121-122).

"As they have been mapped by astronomers, the interstellar medium of spiral galaxies are quite complex. The different phases of the medium, which differ dramatically one from another in density, temperature and composition, coexist side by side. One of these phases consists of the very cold and dense molecular clouds in which stars are formed. Very different from this is an extremely hot plasma phase, in which the electrons and nuclei have become disassociated. Still another phase consists of normal atomic gas, with rather moderate temperatures extending up to room temperature" (Smolin 1997: 123).

Smolin deduces that spiral galaxies are not in thermal equilibrium and that there is a flow of matter and energy as a complex system through feedback mechanisms. Supernova explosion fuel the system (input), and star formation eats the fuel (output), and the spiral galaxy forms the means for the process (throughput). Star formations occur in groups in the dense clouds of gas and dust... and this causes the cloud to heat up and be pushed away... stopping local star formation (feedback). The push of gas hits other dense clouds which triggers new star formation (feedback). As stars age, those that go supernova refuel the system with gas and dust and also send out pressure waves that trigger star formation (feedback) in relatively stable clouds (Smolin 1997: 123-128).

"It has been estimated that in a typical spiral galaxy an amount of material equal to about three to five times the mass of the Sun in each year converted from gas to stars. On the other hand, the estimates are that each year the stars return, on the average, at least half of this same amount of material to the interstellar medium, through stellar winds and supernova explosions" (Smolin 1997: 131).

The universe is full of structure, from the smallest to the largest things we have observed: "At the upper end, the largest scales we have been able to probe are about half a billion light years, which is roughly 10⁵⁹ times the fundamental Planck length. The smallest scale we have so far been able to probe is about one hundredth the diameter of the proton, which is 10¹⁸ Planck length. Thus from the largest to the smallest phenomena we have yet studied, the known world spans forty-one orders of magnitude (Smolin 1997: 163). At the top end this is within one percent of its visible diameter and it is till structured.

[Back to top]

TIME

What about the other universal: time?

"The present is the only reality. While it slips away, we enter into a new present, thus always remaining in the eternal Now" (Reichenbach 1971: 2).

"The deterministic conception of time flow may be compared to the happenings seen in a motion picture theater. While we watch a fascinating scene, its future development is already imprinted on the film; Becoming an illusion, because it makes no difference to the happenings at what point we look at them. What we regard as Becoming is merely our acquisition of knowledge of the future, but it has no relevance to the happenings themselves" (Reichenbach 1971: 11).

Reichenbach (1971: 20-23) argues the following: 1) Time goes from the past to the future; 2) The present, which divides the past from the future, is now; 3) The past never comes back; 4) We cannot change the past, but we can change the future; 5) We have records of the past, but not of the future; 6) The past is determined; the future is undetermined.

He argues that time order is related to causal order... that "every asymmetrical, connected, and transitive relation establishes a serial order" (Reichenbach 1971: 26). The laws of thermodynamics enter here:

"The first law states that in all changes there exists a certain quantity, called energy, which retains a constant value. In its classical form the second law states that there exists another quantity, called entropy, which in some changes remains constant, but in other changes increases, whereas it is impossible that this quantity ever decrease. Irreversible processes are those in which entropy increases" (Reichenbach 1971: 50). In other words: 1) you can't win.

"Since completely reversible processes do not occur, the second law of thermodynamics can be stated in the form that the entropy of a closed system increases as long as any processes are going on within it, or, in other words, so long as a state of equilibrium has not been reached" (Reichenbach 1971: 53). In other words: 2) you can't break even.

"We see that our conception of causality, of the past that determines the present and the future, is closely connected with our definition of positive time in terms of growing entropy. In opposite time we find it's equivalent in a conception of finality, according to which the future determines the present and the past" (Reichenbach 1971: 154). In other words: 3) you can't get out of the game.

Thus the cause produces the effect and the effect records the cause. There is a close connection between entropy and information. Information is derived from the past. Information is created in the now. "Entropy measures the degree of randomness of a system" (Gatlin 1972: 26), while Information measures the degree of order of a system.

"If I stretch my imagination, I can just begin to believe in the idea that space is not something fundamental, but emerges only as an approximate way of describing the way things are organized and interrelated. Temperature is such an emergent property; it has no meaning on the atomic level. It is only a measure of the average energy of vast numbers of molecules. In the picture I described in the last chapter, space is something like this; there is a fundamental level in which there are only the connections among the nodes and edges of a network. These networks do not exist in space - they simply are. It is their network of interconnections that define, in appropriate circumstances, the geometry of space, just as the jumps and dances of all the atoms in a cubic centimeter of air define its temperature. Perceived at vastly larger scales than the Planck length, the network seems to trace a continuous geometry, just as the cloth of my shirt is woven from a network of threads. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is the way the world is" (Smolin 1997:286).

"But what about time? Could time also be something that emerges from some more fundamental level? Is it possible that at this level there is no time, no change" (Smolin 1997: 286)?

The indeterminacy principle of Heisenberg now enters the equation. It says that for every physical quantity there exists many other quantities which cannot be measured simultaneously.

Heisenberg discovered that one could discovery either the position (space) or the momentum (time) of the light, but never both at the same time. The uncertainty of this turned out to be Planck's constant divided by the mass of the particle. At this level, partitioning by space or time into successive events is not possible. This area of uncertainty is what I call god's loaded dice.

"The Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible to predict the precise behavior of individual atoms, let alone the universe. Moreover, according to the theory, in the subatomic realm, only probabilities can be calculated" Kaku & Thompson 1997: 44).

"The uncertainty principle, so simple and yet so startling, was a stake in the heart of classical physics. It asserts that there is no objective reality - not even an objective position of a particle - outside of our observations. In addition, Heisenberg's principle and other aspects of quantum mechanics undermine the notion that the universe obeys strict causal laws. Chance, indeterminacy, and probability took the place of certainty" (Isaacson 2007:332).

"This inability to know a so-called "underlying principle" meant that there was no strict determinism in the classical sense. "When one wishes to calculate 'the future" from 'the present' one can only get statistical results, "Heisenburg said, "since one can never discover every detail of the present"" (Isaacson 2007:333).

There is another term that is nice to snuggle up to on a long cold winter night: eigenstate. Eigen is German for "particular". It can be said, that for states where the uncertainty principle applies that as long as no measurement of a system has been done, it is impossible to know the eigenstate of the of that system.... and the system itself does not know what its eigenstate is until the observer measures it. The thought experiments called "Schrödinger's Cat" illustrates this concept. A cat is placed into a box where a small sample of radium with a 50-50 probability of a decay in any one hour could trip a switch that breaks a beaker filled with cyanide gas. After an hour, the lid is lifted to see if the cat is alive or dead. According to one extreme view of quantum mechanics, at that instant, the system will be forced to jump to one of the two eigenstates: alive or dead (like a wave or a particle)... and that until the observer looks, the cat is in both states, partly alive and partly dead(!) ... that the cat exists in two possible parallel universes, one in which it is alive, and one in which it is dead. Is light a wave or is light a particle... does light exist in two parallel universes where the action of the observer determines which one. Do previous states constrain future states? This implies that the history of the universe impacts the future of the universe... but that the each "present" can branch into different paths at the "now".

"One distinguishes two things about a wave. First, a wave has a front, and a succession of wave fronts forms a system of surfaces like the layers of an onion. A two-dimensional analog is the beautiful wave circles that form of the smooth surface of a pond when a stone is thrown in. The second characteristic of a wave, less intuitive, is the path along which it travels - a system of imagined lines perpendicular to the wave fronts. These lines are known as the wave "normals" or "rays".

We can make the provisional assertion that these rays correspond to the trajectories of particles. Indeed, if you cut a small piece out of a wave, approximately 10 or 20 wave-lengths along the direction of propagation and about as much across, such a "wave packet" would actually move along a ray with exactly the same velocity and change of velocity as we might expect from a particle of this particular kind at this particular place, taking into account any force fields acting on the particle" (Schrödinger 2000: 28-29).

"One interpretation of wave phenomena extensively supported by experiments is this: at each position of a uniformly propagating wave train, there is a twofold structural connection of interactions, which may be distinguished as "longitudinal" and "transversal". The transversal structure is that of the wave fronts and manifests itself in diffraction and interference experiments; the longitudinal structure is that of the wave normals and manifests itself in the observation of single particles" (Schrödinger 2000: 29).

Ultimate Zen: Can our choice, within the constraints of the history of previous choice, be directed by conscious thought?

Einstein showed that space and time are really space/time.

"Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht" meaning "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not" (Isaacson 2007:297).

"The relativity of space and time is a startling conclusion. I have known about it for more than twenty-five years, but even so, whenever I quietly sit and think it through, I am amazed. From the well-worn statement that the speed of light is constant, we conclude that space and time are in the eye of the beholder. each of us carries our own clock, our own monitor of the passage of time. Each clock is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these clocks do not agree. They fall out of synchronization; they measure different amounts of elapsed time between two chosen events.* The same is true of distance. Each of us carries our own yardstick, our own monitor of distance in space. Each yardstick is equally precise, yet when we move relative to one another, these yardsticks do not agree; they measure different distances between the locations of two specified events.* If space and time did not behave this way, the speed of light would not be constant and would depend on the observer's state of motion. But it is constant; space and time do behave this way. Space and time adjust themselves in an exactly compensating manner so that observations of light's speed yield the same result, regardless of the observer's velocity" (Greene 2004:47).

*Remember.. it is spacetime... not space and time... so they are connected relative to each other.

"It is hardly possible to explain how a length of space and a length of time can each appear differently to differently moving observers, while their combined space-time interval remains the same for all, except by pointing out a peculiar mathematical fact: that the interval squared always equals the difference between its space squared and its time squared, a difference that is constant and unaffected by shifting observer's viewpoints or the relative proportions of space and time involved" (Murchie 1961: 547).

The faster you are moving in relation to the velocity of light in relation to other objects in the Universe... the slower your clocks appear to tick in comparison. A person traveling near the speed of light may age only a few minutes while the slower person would age hundreds of years. Fast objects operate more in time than space, and slow objects operate more in space than time. So if someone calls you "spacey", you work it out.

"Interval is the sole objective physical relation between events, the mathematician's fundamental invariant, the prime ingredient of world texture and probably one of the few absolutes left in our fathomless new ocean of relativity" (Murchie 1961: 547).

Now for some additional counter-intuitive stuff (stuff is a highly technical term used by great scientists):

"If you are surprised to see that the past meets the future only here, not elsewhere, just remember the Einstein has quite thoroughly exploded the myth that simultaneity prevails throughout the universe. And this means that the only definite location of now is here. In fact, every man's now is here (the "here" meaning "where he is"). While beyond here, now becomes more and more a matter of viewpoint, or relative motion" (Murchie 1961: 556).

"That the whole abstraction of place, which we once learned to trust, turns out to be nothing but a viewpoint that is different from every side .... it is neither the point in space, nor the instant in time, at which something happens that has physical reality, but only the event itself" (Murchie 1961: 560561).

Einstein found that gravity and accelerated motion are profoundly intertwined. His mind experiment found that an observer confined inside a compartment cannot distinguish between acceleration and gravity: the equivalence principle. But in reality, I think there is a profound difference. Accelerated motion require the expenditure of energy on the part of the moving object. What energy is expended by gravity? It takes energy to accelerate... does it take energy to gravitate? If they are equivalent, then something must be expending energy to create the equivalent effect. What energy? From where? The observer must know about the source of energy expended for the accelerated motion. Then why does the observer not observe the energy expended by gravity? This indicates to me that they are not equivalent. Is time perhaps the observable energy?

Two stories about relativity:

1) "The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them.

The shy Quaker said nothing. "Don't be so modest, Eddington!" said Silberstein.

Replied Eddington, "One the contrary. I'm just wondering who the third might be."" (Isaacson 2007:262).

2) "It was by all accounts, a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weizmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weizmann gave a delightful reply: "During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it."" (Isaacson 2007:292).

I finally think I understand relativity a bit more after reading the following:

"Einstein proclaimed that all objects in the universe are always traveling through space/time at one fixed speed - that of light. This is a strange idea; we are used to the notion that objects travel at speeds considerably less than that of light.... We are presently talking about an object's combined speed through all four dimensions - three space and one time - and it is the object's speed in this generalized sense that is equal to that of light... If an object is sitting still (relative to us) and consequently does not move through space at all, then ... all of the object's motion is used to travel through one dimension - in this case, the time dimension. Moreover, all objects that are at rest relative to us and to us and to each other move through time - they age - at exactly the same rate or speed. If an object does move through space, however, this means that some of the previous motion through time must be diverted... the object will travel more slowly through time than its stationary counterparts, since some of its motion now is being used to move through space... We see that this framework immediately incorporates the fact that there is a speed limit to an object's spatial velocity: the maximum speed through space occurs if all of an object's motion through time is diverted to motion through space. This occurs when all of its previous light-speed motion through time is diverted to light-speed motion through space. But having used up all of its motion through time, this is the fastest speed through space that the object - any object - can possibly achieve... Thus light does not get old; a photon that emerged from the big bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passing of time at light speed" (Greene 1999: 50-51).

I tried to visualize our solar system in this way... that the light generated by matter is standing still and that the matter is moving and distorting space at the "speed attributed to light", and that it is us, not light that is traveling through the universe... and it twisted my brain into a knot.

Thus, I thought these factors can be viewed as vectors whose total value is equal to the speed of light. I wondered if it was possible to substitute this vector as an equation for the "c" in e=mc² ... and then solve the equation for the Planck length of a string to gain a numeric value for "time" : e=m(vectors)², where "vectors" includes directionality and time as an equation? I sent an email to Brian Greene, asking this question. He replied that the factors refer to different quantities in the units and it is more like a conversion factor than something that can be solved for... so this is not an equation in that sense. I also wondered if it is possible to solve for the amount of information in the universe? I have this GUT feeling for a law of the conservation of information parallel to the conservation of energy... that information cannot be destroyed, only converted to chaos, and that there is a simple isomorphic relationship between e=mc² and disorder, order and some constant: e(disorder) = m(order)c²... chaos=(information)c².

Hermann "Minkowski imagined that the spatial distance measured by two pbservers in relative motion is a projection of an underlying four-dimensional spacetime distance onto the three-dimensional space that thet can sense; and, similarly, that the temporal "distance" between two events is a projection of the four-dimensional spacetime distance onto their own spacetime" (Krauss, 1995:29).

"So the crazy invariance of the speed of light for all observers provided the clue to unravel the true nature of the fout-dimensional universe of spacetime in which we actually live. Light displays the hidden connection between space and time. Indeed the speed of light defines the connection" (Krauss, 1995:29).

"...if light rays map out spacetime, then spacetime must bend in a gravitational field. Finally, since matter produces a gravitational field, then matter must bend spacetime" (Krauss, 19595:32-33).

"The central premise of Einstein's general relativity is simple to state in words: the curvature of spacetime is directly determined by the distribution of matter and energy contained within it. Einstein's equations, in fact, provide simply the strict mathematical relation between curvature on the one hand and matter and energy on the other:

LEFT HAND SIDE.................RIGHT HAND SIDE

............................ =

(CURVATURE)...................(MATTER AND ENERGY)

(Krauss, 19595:34)

"The left had side of this equation fixes the geometry of spactime. The right hand side fixes the matter and energy distribution" (Krauss, 19595:49).

Douglas Adams put it best:

"We live in strange times..... We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, "Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How's Carol?" involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your kid a break, okay?

Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally Demented Universe" (Adams 1997:737).

I wish I had said that. I like the image of a fractally demented universe....but dementia is in the mind of the beholder.

There is no time at the speed of light. Light does not age, it just is. Does this sound like a description of a god-like property?

"It's name not withstanding, Einstein's theory does not proclaim that everything is relative. Special relativity does claim that some things are relative: velocities are relative; distances across space are relative; durations of elapsed time are relative. But the theory actually introduces a grand new sweepingly absolute concept: absolute spacetime. Absolute spacetime is as absolute for special relativity as absolute space and absolute time were for Newton, and partly for this reason Einstein did not suggest or particularly like the name "relativity theory." Instead, he and other physicists suggested invariance theory, stressing that the theory, at its core, involves something that everyone agrees on, something that is not relative" (Greene 2004:51).

"Absolute space does not exist. Absolute time does not exist. But according to special relativity, absolute spacetime does exist" (Greene 2004:59).

There is a distance, called the Planck distance (German physicist, Max Planck), of 1.61 x 10-³³centimeters where general relativity ceases. If you divide this distance by the speed of light you get Planck time: 5.35 x 10-⁴⁴ second (Morris 1985: 194-195).

ZEN 1

Time stops at the speed of light. Light is unchanging, non-aging so it is the perfect "bit" of information. But light expands the observers universe at the speed of light, and from the point of view of the observer, light expands across a larger and larger area of the universe. As it expands, the amount of light per surface area is reduced. So while light is instantaneous and unchanging, it changes in relation to any observer. So what is changing, the light, or the observer?

ZEN 2

If the entropy of the universe increases to a ball of universal light, does the universe convert to a ball of ultimate information? Is there a correlation between matter and chaos and energy an entropy?

ZEN 3

Is a black hole the fundamental unit of chaos, anti-information, anti-order?

ZEN 4

"It appears, therefore, that we exist in a very improbable kind of universe, one that was fine-tuned to an accuracy of one part in 10¹⁵ at a time of one second after the big bang. In fact, this fine-tuning was even greater at earlier times. At some point, when the universe was only a fraction of a second old, it would have been not one part in 10¹⁵, but one part in 10⁵⁰.... If this fine-tuning had not taken place, we would not exist. In a universe that had slightly less matter than ours, the stars and galaxies would never have formed. Matter would have expanded outward at such a