Fewer people are probably familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” than they are with the reversed-time novels by Martin Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, or Lewis Carroll. But don’t worry, you will be!
In this case, the protagonist is born as an old man who grows younger with time, eventually dying as a baby. His father, not to mention the hospital staff, are somewhat nonplussed at his birth.
Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.
“Am I mad?” thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. “Is this some ghastly hospital joke?”
“It doesn’t seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse severely. “And I don’t know whether you’re mad or not—but that is most certainly your child.”
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
No word of what Mrs. Button had to say about the whole affair.
Fitzgerald’s story takes a different approach to running the arrow of time backwards: Benjamin Button has experiences and memories that are completely conventional (although, for expository purposes, he is born with a full vocabulary), while his physical body ages backward.
The reason why I know everyone will be hearing about the story is that “Benjamin Button” is being made into a feature film, directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Major photography has been completed, and it’s currently in post-production, scheduled to be released late in 2008. Major Oscar buzz.
Leaked photos seem to indicate that the film will portray Benjamin as being born baby-sized (albeit old and wrinkly), rather than as a full grown human being. Different actors will be used to portray Button’s reverse aging at different stages of his life, while CGI effects insert Brat Pitt’s face onto each body.
That’s good stuff Sam. I’m going to feed this back to you in my own words to see if I’ve got this right, then ask a couple questions.
2.8 trillion new cycles of the cosmos occur every moment, resulting in our present experience of reality. Our experience of reality in this present is only possible because these 2.8 trillion cycles occur each moment (all equally sized as the present cosmos which is severely time dilated by gravity [the same ~100 billion years]). So, our accumulated phylogenic evolution over these 2.8 trillion cycles of cosmos per second results in the experience we have in each passing moment. In a way, this is the best possible moment we could be experiencing in this cycle of the cosmos, since each cycle of the 2.8 trillion is a more complex and more ordered version of our consciousness than the ones before.
Considering the present moment, we are also a cycle in the 2.8 trillion cycles per second of some higher form of ourselves. Some higher cosmos.
I’m going to stop for a second. I’m tripping balls Sam, this is nuts. Beautiful, ecstatic, and so incredible I feel it’s too awesome to be true. Then when I remember that the cosmos is that awesome, it comforts me that it’s the closest to the truth of anything I’ve considered before. I knew I liked the idea when I first read about it on your site, but that this is blossoming in ways I didn’t think of before is quite soothing. Indeed the universe is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. The stranger we are able to think, if one considers strange to be totally incredible, awe-inspiring, and beautiful (which I do), then the more the cosmos becomes incredible, awe-inspiring, and beautiful. Whew. Wow.
It’s incredible. It’s incredible because I’m feeling the resonances of what exactly this means in so many other beliefs. So many other interpretations of the cosmos, so many other beliefs about the cosmos are normally so distant each other it is difficult to entwine them together under a common understanding, even when we already know they should be entwined somehow.
I’ve always thought of the cosmos as an eternal recombination of what has happened into something new, with a direction into something greater or higher or more complex than it was before. There must be some structure to it I thought, but how can you explain the structure of eternity. I feel this does quite a job at it.
So where does the number 2.8 trillion come from again? If every passing moment is the result of evolution (transcendence and inclusion) over 2.8 trillion cycles of a “lower” cosmos (if I can call it that), then the amount our consciousness can develop each passing moment becomes limited to this number. But then again, we are also embedded in a higher cosmos in which this present is one of 2.8 trillion cycles, which isn’t really limiting at all. There certainly is no limitation to eternity.
One other question that I could muster out of all that was this, for each of the 2.8 trillion cycles that make up our reality every moment, would you say that, in each of those cycles, there are 2.8 trillion cycles occurring for their every moment (all ~100 billion years of moments for all 2.8 trillion cycles)? So every single “level” of the cosmos would be evolving at all times, every moment. I think that’s right, just checking.
Alright that’s all I can manage for now. Great stuff Sam.
Wayne
Sam,
I sort of lose it with the last few paragraphs of your response to Wayne. I also feel we are a focus of some more elemental consciousness and our complexity is a result of very long term evolutionary processes, but that the integrative nature is more prosaic. That we are simply the linkage between what came before and what comes after. Eternity requires information construction and destruction as two sides of the same process, otherwise it would quickly overload on informational stasis and grind to a frozen state. This is why accumulation and storage of information has taken so long to evolve, since our lifetimes are optimal mutations toward necessary survival and reproduction, but the resulting constant loss of educational awareness make a larger structure of institutional stability hard to maintain. When you compare biological evolution and conscious technical evolution, our societies are culturally less evolved than dinosaurs were biologically evolved. Yes, dinosaurs had brains the size of a peanut and they functioned largely as subconscious reaction, but compare that to our governmental institutions and their general inability to transcend circumstance. Yes, we have mastered technology, but do our electro-mechanical devices really go much beyond the biological mechanisms that have traversed the surface of this planet for hundreds of millions of years? We like to think we are special and our abilities multiply by the decade, but consider the internet; It is essentially the central nervous system of an infant organism, just starting communication among millions of individual cells.
So I don’t think it is so much a form of transmigration of individual souls through a variety of lives, but one large nascent organism and we are simply nerve and neuron cells trading packets of energy and information. This process consumes the old as it creates the new and memories of the past are little more than bleached bones, being nibbled away by small creatures looking for calcium. The information that is our defining individuality falls into the past, as the energy of consciousness proceeds into the future.
John, I don’t disagree with what you have to say, and I don’t think Sam would either. The discussion is concerning how it is we exist to begin with, what allows us to be present every moment, why we experience each moment the way that we do, and what it takes for that to arise. Finding a way to explain this in the realms of scientific models that has thus far been proven experimentally is where the 2.8 trillion pulse per second comes in.
I think everything you said is a great description of what is going on each cycle of the cosmos, your words being a model or a description of how the cosmos unfolds. However, it is not where our description ends, for there is much more going on than that.
I was going to try and explain the 2.8 trillion pulse per second, but as I wrote a response it seemed that the only way to understand it is to work it out oneself over time. I need to think about it all some more personally, give me a day or so and I’ll try and explain it the way I understand it. It’s tough stuff to see, but so worth it indeed. Think about it some more, try to think in much larger scales than just our one cosmos. Indeed, 2.8 trillion successive cycles of cosmos per second (each successive cycle tweaked a little based on the evolution of our consciousness over each cycle) giving rise to a single moment in another cosmos, some higher ordering of cosmos. Whew, it freaks me out just writing this. But it’s so awesome! Holy crap!
Wayne
John said,
“So I don’t think it is so much a form of transmigration of individual souls through a variety of lives, but one large nascent organism and we are simply nerve and neuron cells trading packets of energy and information. This process consumes the old as it creates the new and memories of the past are little more than bleached bones, being nibbled away by small creatures looking for calcium. The information that is our defining individuality falls into the past, as the energy of consciousness proceeds into the future.”
I’ll write something for Wayne a bit later, but I wanted to point out again that the universe exists as it is observed, and the universe gives high priority to individual existence…with a certain necessary social relatedness. The very fact that invariant frames of reference are fundamental in the geometry implies the importance of individual existence at frames of reference which are modest in space/time/energy coordinates by comparison with the vastness of the structure as a whole.
Look at what I said from the aspect of perspective. Viewing the structure of the universe from 4D on a complex set of particulate event horizon surfces, from a remote location in the manifold (at the center of the geometry), the gravitational accelerations and relativistic effects result in a certain cross-section of the universe- and a very real one. Consciousness in the universe is not like some giant all-encompasing Amoeba…it relates to individual particulate entities which are linked (entangled) only at the lowest levels of scale in the quantum Planck Realm.
I recall that old science fiction movie where an Amoeba came from outer space and gradually started to devour all life on Earth! The generals decided to destroy it with an atomic bomb. When they did, baby Amoebas rained down over the whole world out of the mushroom cloud. The last scene of the movie was the horrified look on the generals faces when they realized their fate, and understood they had only discoverd how the thing reproduced! You and I are individuals. without our unique frame, our unique genetic heritage and our unique set of experiences in life, we would not and could not exist. The universe needs us as the particulate beings we are- and likewise values the unique frame of every other living thing in the universe, but even in 4D encourages social relatedness and interdependence!
When I look at my desk, I look at one cross section of eternity. It is real because its frame is invariant…eternal. At the heart of my desk, every quark undergoes a proper time pulse 2.8 trillion times per second- forever, so in that sense, since the frame is invariant, and the pulses continue forever- that desk REALLY isn’t going anywhere!
If I change my frame and view the desk remotely in space and time, I take not a single frame, but a set of frames and view the desk as a tree, being milled, constructed, existing on my desk and eventually being destroyed. That perspective is also valid.
If I view the desk as a part of not a 4D but a 7D structure, I see the desk in a different way yet…as Oxygen, Hydrogen and Carbon atoms forming in the big bang and the hearts of stars. These atoms then gradually combine to form a desk, which then becomes Oxygen, Hydrogen and Carbon atoms again and goes back into the primordial black hole, where particle charge inversion occurs and the process repeats forever. This last perspective is justified also by the carefully verified models of the universe at our disposal.
Each perspective is correct…each way of viewing my desk teaches us something very signifiicant about the nature of the universe- and its “n” dimensionality.
I liked that last comment of yours that “the energy of consciousness proceeds into the future”. And HOW! From our frame, we remember the past and forget the future, but in this model, the universe and all it will be in the eternal future is already formed and eternally ahead of us. The single process time dimension prohibits our remembering the future- from our present coordinates. However, it can be seen from the model, that the future (and anything consciously directing it) is already an eternity ahead of us.
Errata: “Existing AS my desk…etc”
Wayne,
I suppose my views are generally anthropocentric in the sense that while I try to be objective, it is a view that is encompassing of human reality, so my appreciation for the Planck realm is tempered by a concern for the various economic, ecologic and political tipping points we appear to be headed for and what insights might inform where we are headed. In that sense, what hundreds of millions of religiously motivated people believe is actually far more important than scientific speculations into other dimensions and other alternate realities. Whether it’s due to objective logic or subconscious bias, these outlooks all seem to have a beginning to end narrative structure and it is far more likely we will be subject to the effects of a self-fufilling end of civilization religious prophesy than be affected by the big crunch, disappearing universe, etc.
Not to be too grumpy, just reading too much news…
John, I understand completely. I’m a religous person myself but I have personally seen the damage errant religion can do, and believe that any religous person should be advised to keep an open mind and refect carefully on the implications of what they are being taught….
Wayne, the work below was done with the B-sub-s meson, but the context indicates a general phenomenon of this kind at the quark level is probable… The trace of the pulse (which generally resembles the astronomical power spectum), can be found posted on the Fermi site…Sam
06-19
September 25, 2006
Media Contacts:
Fermilab – Mike Perricone, mikep@fnal.gov, 630-840-3351
For immediate release
IT MIGHT BE…IT COULD BE…IT IS!!!
Fermilab’s CDF scientists make it official: They have discovered the quick-change behavior of the B-sub-s meson, which switches between matter and antimatter 3 trillion times a second.
BATAVIA, Illinois – Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (September 25, 2006) that they have met the exacting standard to claim discovery of astonishingly rapid transitions between matter and antimatter: 3 trillion oscillations per second.
Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy, congratulated the CDF collaboration on the result.
“This remarkable tour de force details with exquisite precision how the antiworld is tied to our everyday realm,” Dr. Orbach said. “It is a beautiful example of how, using increasingly sophisticated analysis, one can extract discovery from data from which much less was expected. It is a triumph for Fermilab.”
The CDF discovery of the oscillation rate, marking the final chapter in a 20-year search, is immediately significant for two major reasons: reinforcing the validity of the Standard Model, which governs physicists’ understanding of the fundamental particles and forces; and narrowing down the possible forms of supersymmetry, a theory proposing that each known particle has its own more massive “super” partner particle.
Many experiments worldwide have worked to perform high precision measurements of the behavior of matter and antimatter, especially as it pertains to strange, charm and bottom quarks. Scientists hope that by assembling a large number of precise measurements involving the exotic behavior of these particles, they can begin to understand why they exist, how they interact with one another and what role they played in the development of the early universe. Most importantly, they could also be the place in which to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model, which scientists believe is incomplete. Although none of these particles exists in nature today, they were, however, present in great abundance in the early universe. Thus, scientists can only produce and study them at large particle accelerators.
With a talk at Fermilab on Friday, September 22, Christoph Paus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, representing the CDF experiment, presented the discovery to the scientific community. The experimenters acquired their data between February 2002 and January 2006, an operating period known as Tevatron Run 2, where tens of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions were produced at the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. The results have been submitted in a paper to Physical Review Letters.
This first major discovery of Run 2 continues the tradition of particle physics discoveries at Fermilab, where the bottom (1977) and top (1995) quarks were discovered. Surprisingly, the bizarre behavior of the B_s (pronounced “B sub s”) mesons is actually predicted by the Standard Model of fundamental particles and forces. The discovery of this oscillatory behavior is thus another reinforcement of the Standard Model’s durability.
“Scientists have been pursuing this measurement for two decades, but the convergence of capabilities to make it possible has occurred just now,” said CDF cospokesperson Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida. “We needed to produce sufficient quantities to be able to study these particles in detail. That condition was met by the superb performance of the Tevatron. Then, with a process this fast, we needed extremely precise detectors and sophisticated analysis tools. Those conditions were met at CDF, along with the skill and contributions of a great team of people.”
CDF physicists have previously measured the rate of the matter-antimatter transitions for the B_s meson, which consists of the heavy bottom quark bound by the strong nuclear interaction to a strange antiquark. Now they have achieved the standard for a discovery in the field of particle physics, where the probability for a false observation must be proven to be less than about 5 in 10 million (5/10,000,000). For CDF’s result the probability is even smaller, at 8 in 100 million (8/100,000,000).
“Everyone in Fermilab’s Accelerator Division has worked hard to create the number of collisions that were required to reach this impressive result,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. “We’re glad that CDF has been able to put these efforts to such good effect. This is one of the signature measurements for Run II, and as we collect several times the data already on hand, I have great expectations for future discoveries.”
Determining the astonishing rate of 3 trillion oscillations per second required sophisticated analysis techniques. CDF cospokespersons Konigsberg and Fermilab’s Rob Roser explained that the B_s meson is a very short-lived particle. In order to understand its underlying characteristics, scientists have to observe how each particle decays to determine its true make-up.
“Developing the software tools to make maximal use of the information in each collision takes time and effort,” said Roser, “but the rewards are there in terms of discovery potential and increased level of precision.”
Many different theoretical models of how the universe works at a fundamental level will be now be confronted with the CDF discovery. The currently popular models of supersymmetry, for example, predict a much higher transition frequency than that observed by CDF, and those models will need to be reconsidered.
Marvin Goldberg, Division of Physics program director of the National Science Foundation, emphasized the collaborative role of the experimenters.
“This result reminds us that discoveries in particle physics require the coherent efforts of many people as well as advanced physical infrastructure,” Goldberg said. “By combining the luminosity of the Tevatron, the precision of the CDF detector and the intellectual prowess of the international CDF collaboration with sophisticated data analysis, this remarkable result from a remarkable effort will advance our understanding of the way the universe works.”
To further advance that understanding, Roser, Konigsberg and their colleagues continue to seek phenomena that are not predicted by the Standard Model. The prize would be a discovery of new physics.
“While the B_s oscillation discovery was one of the benchmark results that we wanted from the Tevatron,” said Roser, “we still have more than half the data from Run 2 waiting to be analyzed. We’re looking forward to more results, and we’re always hoping for surprises.”
CDF is an international experiment of 700 physicists from 61 institutions and 13 countries. It is supported by DOE, NSF and a number of international funding agencies (the full list can be found at http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/collaboration/Funding_Agencies.html). With the Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, in 1995 the CDF and DZero collaborations discovered the top quark, the final and most massive quark in the Standard Model.
Fermilab is a Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.
Graphic: The figure shows the CDF measurement of the B_s oscillation frequency at 2.8 trillion times per second. The analysis is designed such that possible oscillation frequencies have an amplitude consistent with 1.0 while those not present in the data will have an amplitude consistent with zero. Image courtesy CDF collaboration.
InterAction Collaboration media contacts:
Fermilab, US: Mike Perricone, 630-840-3351, mikep@fnal.gov
INFN, Italy: Barbara Gallavotti, + 39 06 6868162 (office), + 39 335 6606075 (cell phone), + 39 06 6868162 (fax), Barbara.Gallavotti@presid.infn.it
High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan: Youhei Morita, + 81 029 8796047, + 81 029 8796049 (fax), youhei.morita@kek.jp
IN2P3-CNRS, France: Dominique Armand, + 33 01 44 96 47 51, darmand@admin.in2p3.fr
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia: Boris Starchenko, + 7 096 221 6 38 24, irinak@jinr.ru
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), United Kingdom: Peter Barratt, + 44 (0) 1793 442025, + 44 (0) 787 602 899 (mobile), peter.barratt@pparc.ac.uk
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA: Ron Kolb, + 1 510 486 7586, rrkolb@lbl.gov
CDF institutions:
1. Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
2. Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois
3. Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies (IFAE-Barcelona), Spain
4. Baylor University, Waco, Texas
5. Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
6. University of California at Davis, Davis, CA
7. University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
8. University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA
9. University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA
10. Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria, CSIC-University of Cantabria, 39005 Santander, Spain
11. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
12. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
13. Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia
14. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
15. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, Illinois
16. University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
17. University of Geneva, Switzerland
18. Glasgow University, United Kingdom
19. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
20. University of Helsinki, Finland
21. University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois
22. INFN, University of Bologna, Italy
23. INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Italy
24. INFN Sezione di Padova, Universita di Padova, Italy
25. INFN, University and Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy
26. INFN, University di Roma I, Italy
27. INFN, Trieste, Italy, and Universita di Udine, Italy
28. IPP, Institute of Particle Physics, McGill University, Montréal, Canada
29. University of Toronto, Canada
30. ITEP, Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia
31. The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
32. Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany
33. National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan
34. The Center for High Energy Physics(CHEP) Kyungpook National University, Seoul National University, and SungKyunKwan University, Korea
35. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Berkeley, California
36. University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
37. University College London, United Kingdom
38. CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain
39. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts
40. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan
41. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
42. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
43. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
44. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
45. Osaka City University, Japan
46. Okayama University, Japan
47. University of Oxford, United Kingdom
48. LPNHE and CNRS-IN2P3 – Paris, France
49. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
50. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
51. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
52. University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
53. Rockefeller University, New York, New York
54. Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey
55. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
56. Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
57. University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
58. Waseda University Tokyo, Japan
59. Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
60. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
61. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Hi Wayne,
Thanks. It really is an interesting concept…actually more of a cosmic vision. I tried to include some further reflections in my note to John.
Sam
Sam,
I’m not completely knocking a particulate view of reality, just trying to put it in context.
Think of the history of your desk as a tree, with its trunk and branches in the past, where we can see them and the roots in the future where we can’t see them. All the parts draw together into the trunk of the desk and the present is the plane between air and ground. What we have is a bottleneck of the desk, but there are innumerable other desks and trees and bottlenecks out there, all coming together and pulling back apart.
Now what you are arguing is that there is one grand bottleneck out of which we came and another into which we fall and I’m saying that ain’t so. It is an inifinite sea of bottlenecks, some much bigger than others, but even if we propose the biggest universe-swallowing bottleneck of them all, it still exists in some larger matrix of other bottlenecks and trying to argue otherwise requires extreme stretches of logic, such as Inflation Theory. As I’ve argued, the default absolute is the void out of which the network of sandbars emerge as the water drops, not one singular peak/node from which we have all descended.
Hi John,
Thanks for your note. I completely understand your point of view. My main concern was that I didn’t come across too strongly re my point of view on religion. Being raised in a very devout home, I fully respect the positive aspects of religous faith very much. However I have seen religous fanaticism really hurt vulnerable people, and I urge all my friends and family to be as discerning as possible in matters of faith and religous philosophy.
The information about the matter- antimatter occillations was posted as a discovery by Fermi in October 06. While the experiments were confined to the quarks of a single particle, the write-up made it clear that what was learned probably reflected a general principle of the universe, and was predicted by the Standard Model.
Sam
Sam,
I’ve long had a suspician that the anti-matter anomaly could be resolved within the context of the microcosmic and didn’t require it to be in some other realm/dimension. From my perspective, it further re-enforces the concept that reality is a function of activity and motion, rather than just little particles bouncing around. The network as much or more than the nodes.
Being raised as a minimally church going Episcopalian, my religious views tend to be based more on personal experience. I would describe myself as more of a pantheist, than monotheist. That is because there is some elemental basis of biology that we are nowhere near explaining. The question of whether material reality is particle based, or field based is difficult enough to decipher, so whether consciousness is particle based or field based is a further question. Since I’m of the opinion that the physical is field based more so than modern science is willing to go, the same questions arise with consciousness.
I would say that in imagining what a 7D desk looks like, we are considering in this case the desk as a particulate, one 7D particulate cross section, which essentially is one single moment in space and time where the desk exists as a desk, and all past events resulting in the desk, and all future events that occur following the existence of the desk. There is a white whole at the left exploding all of time, space, and events (resulting in oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon atoms and all energy required to make the desk) into a desk at the moment we are cross sectioning, and a black hole at the right slowly pulling them back into the primordial. Remember, we are taking one cross section in 7D of this particulate, the desk in the moment it exists as a desk. Nothing else.
I completely agree that there are an infinite see of particulate cross sections that behave this way within the universe. When you say the universe itself is also connected to an infinite see of bottlenecks, I can kind of agree with this, but regardless, when you consider the whole of the cosmos, you must consider the whole thing as particulate as well, behaving in the same white hole to black hole type evolution. This is cosmology, the big bang to big crunch, or big dissolution, whatever causes us to return to the primordial and repeat the cycle, looking at the universe itself as particulate just as we look at all particulate cross sections within the universe.
John, I’m just as upset about the shite state of affairs on this planet as you, or Sam, or any other mindful being is on this planet. We all know we’re on the boundaries of something big, good or bad, or inevitably, both. I follow the news more closely than I ever have in my life, and resonances occurring in the present with the past are staggering.
In my defense of using discussion like this to at the very least boost our own comfortability in understanding the cosmos, it is evolution in itself. We are wishing to become comfortable with the cosmos, so that we may act in absolute clarity, utter fluidity, with no distractions or obstacles that arise from a lack of comfort with ourselves and our environment. We are all hurtling through this life attempting to achieve some state of peace to live in, and this state of peace, at least for fellows like us, takes discussing the Planck realm and 7D Schwarzchild geometry. I would say that humans, and indeed all of evolution, is particulate forms and beings drawing themselves into some new state of equilibrium where we can observe the universe unobstructed, undeterred by the universe itself.
We, as humans, are only able to act most efficiently when our minds are in some state of peace or comfort, that’s what’s allowed American technology to skyrocket in the past two hundred years, we aren’t hungry, or worried about climate, or worried that we’ll be killed at any moment. Just enough comfort breeds advancement, too much comfort breeds apathy. We are in a state of too much comfort, which is why our education system, our government, and our quality of life for our children and even ourselves has decayed. The tide is about to turn. Every one of us feels it.
In all of this, however, if we can achieve some peace in our own lives, and try to simply be peaceful, clear-headed, and concentrated- others around us will be influenced to feel the same way. It’s not a show, or an act, it is knowing that we are at peace because we know that whatever terrors are to come are going to happen whether we are frantic or calm about it. We all feel fear or upset when everyone else feels fear or upset. It takes the stronger willed to show everyone else to be collected in the face of hardship that leads the struggling to equilibrium again. This is the way the cosmos has unfolded forever, and forever more. Utter pandemonium, to utter peace, lather rinse repeat.
The key is realizing that we are dipping into disarray, and then prepare for it by doing just what I said, being calm and concentrated as examples for all those who don’t quite see the trend. Doing this is one more iteration of complexity and order, knowing what has come in the past, and consciously changing the future by acting on what we remember. Indeed, we remember much more that simply what has happened since our conception. We have an eternity of experience on our side. It is a comforting thought.
Sam, could you get back to me about where the 2.8 trillion pulse number comes from? And also, does each pulse or cycle experience the 2.8 trillion pulse in each of their respective moments? Since each pulse is itself a full blown 100 billion year cycle in it’s own frame?
Last thing, I would venture that duality has much to do with the nature of the cosmos. In this, matter becomes particulate and field based, as does consciousness. I don’t feel that there are always equal parts of both, but that the cosmos is always in a state of these parts being in a back and forth with each other, always drawing into the equilibrium, giving rise to our experiences.
Thanks guys. Remember John, we’re all discussing this for a reason, it’s what we take from our discussions and experiences, how much we are paying attention and interacting with the present that will allow brighter futures.
Wayne,
It’s difficult to tie everything I’m thinking into a few paragraphs, so I wasn’t taking you to task for your focus on the cosmos, but that the Big Bang/Big Crunch chronology is emblematic of a particularly monolithic thought process which tends to see reality as a singular unit, rather than unitary, which as I pointed out to Sam, are completely different concepts. This tendency to confuse unitary with a unit, is a source of social conflict as we assume our political and religious constructs must be ideals that apply to everyone else, rather than mutations from a basic state. We all do focus, as that is how the brain functions. The problem is when large groups all focus on the same thing and the resulting mass movement has nothing to balance it and becomes destablizing. Cosmology does have a tendency to trumpet what it sees as confirmation of its theories and given bottlenecks are a primary defining factor of reality, it isn’t hard to patch together a convincing argument the entire universe is between two of them. In its confidence though, it does tend to plaster over inconsistancies with whatever logical compromise it takes to fill the gap.
The matter/anti-matter relationship is more logical as polarities than actual particles.
Time is not a passage from left to right, front to back or any other direction. It is a method for measuring the rate of motion, just as temperature is. As a measure of motion, any direction is relative. To the hands of the clock, the face is going counterclockwise. Past and future do not physically exist because the energy is in a state of constant change and the passage of time are the series of forms it describes. As energy goes from past form to future ones, these states go from being in the future to being in the past. As our physical brain moves into the future, our mind is a record of the events receding into the past.
Much that we consider permanent; institutions, currencies, religions, theories, etc., is going to turn to dust and we will pick up the pieces and build something new.
Hi John and Wayne,
I’ve been following your ideas carefully and they are interesting. It is really clear that Wayne understands the 7D idea fully. Wayne, check the Fermi website and look at its press releases from October 06. Although the quarks of one particle were specifically evaluated, it is clear from the writeup that the character of the whole universe at the quark level of scale is at issue.
Femi people and scientists in the know are very excited about this field discovery…as Wayne noted, papers are appearing. This is a field discovery, NOT a paper or something. The Hadron equipment will further explore this aspect of the basic units of particulate existence later this year and into the more distant future, I am sure.
The tracing of the occillation is shown on the release and is enlargable right on the Fermi posting. Compare that tracing with the Astronomical power spectrum trace on Ned Wrights website!
One final comment. Ones’ life…our period of existence, in this model, takes on a new significance, not just structurally because we are an eternal,important part of the universe, but most importanly, for ourselves, humanity at large and the total ecosystem.
The decisons we make, the attitudes we have and as Wayne mentions, our state of mind in general are very important. John Kennedy said: “God’s work on Earth must truly be our own”. He hit the nail on the head. The peoples of the world, with each of us doing our small part, can either make our perpetual existence a kind of heaven, or we can personally and collectively construct our own hell.
Love kindness and peace are NOT the esotric bublings of idiots with their heads in the clouds…these are to be personal and collective goals for all mankind. Our eternal security, satisfaction, happiness and peace depend upon the achievement of these goals.
Sam
Sam,
It is still a study in opposites. The world to come will have to endure birthing pains.
Love, kindness, happiness are the expansion of the spirit, yet it’s the contractions that punctuate history.
John said,
“It is still a study in opposites. The world to come will have to endure birthing pains.”
I completely agree John. If I could make a wish, impossible for the universe to grant though it is, I would not wish for money, love, position or power, but rather that I could understand what I understand about the nature of the universe now, as an old man- when I am young. One of my first memories is chasing my younger brother around the house and glancing in the mirror on my parents dresser. I stopped briefly, looked in the mirror and recognized myself for the first time. My main reaction; I wondered why I was so young, but not for long! I continued my game of tag- into eternity.
Young people need, desperately need compassion, acceptance, knowledge and wisdom, and they need it early and effectively transmitted. I guess what I really am wishing for are good parents, mentors and trained, effective teachers. Mine I would give only a “B”, but my situation was “A+” compared to that of many young people around the world. Perhaps the universe will eventually rectify that situation.
I was sitting across the table at “Applebees” the other evening from one of my 18 grandchildren, in his teens. Most of the 9 of us were laughing and having a great time eating our baby back ribs, but he was distracted and ill at ease. He was obviously surprised that I read his feelings, and was very relieved when I looked him straight in the eye and told him that his grandpop and grandmom loved him very much, thought about him all the time, and were very concerned about his well being.
The Japanese say that childhood is like the spingtime…an appropriate observation. Each part of our lives has its own challenges, headaches and dangers. The universe is constructed in such a way that we experience existence that way. However, it is much easier I think, to face eternity with the support of ones friends and family, some understanding and wisdom gleaned from years of experience and education- and above all, a little optimism!
Errata…
The date on that Fermi press release was 9/25/06
The address is: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/CDF_meson.html
The tracing is of the overall occillation frequency…NOT a profile of overall quark/antiquark occillation behavior.
Errata…
The date on that Fermi press release was 9/25/06
The tracing is of the overall occillation frequency…NOT a profile of overall quark/antiquark occillation behavior.
Sam,
I’m in the same boat. Lots of times we look up and wonder why it isn’t better and sometimes we look down and are glad it isn’t worse.
I guess I’m in this conversation because after a lifetime of reverse engineering reality, trying to figure out what could be done better, I find the same conflict between a reductionistic and linear human viewpoint in a wholistic and relative reality where our obsession with specifics blinds us to the consequences of our action. Short term thinking defeats long term planning. I’m somewhat resigned to the fact that that’s just the way things work, but I do see an opportunity with the coming financial meltdown and the political instability it will cause to try and inject a few very basic memes into the larger conversation. Specifically that money is actually a form of public utility, like a road system and if we were to begin thinking of it as such, we might begin treating it as such, which would instill a natural balance between rights and responsibilities. Suffice to say, the situation hasn’t gone much past the denial stage yet, so considering new ways of thinking is still some distance in the future. Not that anyone will listen even then, but not because I didn’t try.
So I’m mostly using my limited interneting time to argue some of the more esoteric aspects of this disconnect between what is western absolutism and eastern dualism. Or possibly between Plao’s ideals and Aristotle’s reasoning. As much as modern physics has incorporated relativity, I still see a subversive vein of absolutism in the need to objectify process. We created an all-knowing God and now that we killed it, we want to replace it by knowing everything ourselves. To do this we assume everything must exist for us to find it, so time must be a permanent dimension in which all information remains locked, rather than a process which destroys as it creates. A big part of what you know was the journey of finding it, then losing it and finding it again, maybe from a slightly different perspective that put the original knowledge in a totally different light. You can’t pass that kind of knowledge onto the young, they have to do the journey themselves. That’s the problem with objectifying reality; we think there is some final destination, but it’s entirely about the journey. Those matter antimatter particles are polarities that don’t exist otherwise. A final destination would be like absolute zero; nothing. Flatline.
As somebody famous once put it, it’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish.
John said,
“A big part of what you know was the journey of finding it, then losing it and finding it again, maybe from a slightly different perspective that put the original knowledge in a totally different light. You can’t pass that kind of knowledge onto the young, they have to do the journey themselves. That’s the problem with objectifying reality; we think there is some final destination, but it’s entirely about the journey.”
I appreciated all of what you said, but I think the above pretty much summarizes things.
It is true that everyones frame of reference is different and frame of reference is never perfectly repeated- even in 7D and up. My grandchildren have a quite different genetic endowment and a very different set of life circumstances. We all are kind of “stuck” with what we have, and have to live life for ourselves. We don’t feel paralyzed, but the nature of the social and natural universe indicates that any real prerogatives we as individuals may have are quite limited.
Yet the biosphere is a study in interdependence, social relations are a study in interdependence, and even the inorganic universe itself is an entangled lesson in related interdependence. We all can and should play our part, however small. Free will is NOT an illusion in the quasi-static model…it is an intergral part of the process which keeps the universe stable by phylogenic development and a gradually increasing trend in overall complexity of information.
For others following this thread who are also aware of the Fermi discovery of matter-antimatter occillations, I would like to point out that the results of this fieldwork work indicate not only occillations of a certain specific frequency, but synchronicity in this behavior, which is also predicted as a general characterisitic of the universe by the Standard Model.
The fact that the universe acts in a predictable (and synchronous) way so deep in the quantum realm has profound significance.
Sam,
The reason life doesn’t have meaning is because meaning is static and reductionistic, while life is dynamic and wholistic. It is all about integrated purpose. We pull back on the string of the cosmos as much as they pull on us. Without this interdependence, we would have no use for anything else and everything else would have no use for us.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the earth flipping its polarity every several thousand years?
Hi John,
“I wonder if this has anything to do with the earth flipping its polarity every several thousand years?”
I wouldn’t think directly, but such behavior is dimensionally projective. It’s like the waterfall, which exists as an entity at a fixed position, yet the water flowing over it is dynamic, has momentum and reflects the continuous action of the periodic water cycle…evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff and again evaportation. Of course waterfalls are not completely invariant in their location either, they generally gradually shift upstream…projective of gradual coordinate shift in this quasi-static model. Our world is filled with 1,2,3 and 4D projections of the higher dimensional structure…and of course, this is to be geometrically expected. All that we observe is but a thin cross-section of reality. We think the universe we observe is awesome, but if we could observe the universe as it actually exists, it would blow us away…
Sam,
Our brains model reality as reductionist dimensional structures because we could not process the amount of input otherwise. It’s static modeling of dynamic reality. Science is determined to develop a static description of reality. A God’s eye view. There is no such “universe as it actually exists.”
I tend toward a feral view of informational complexity. What can be created, will also be destroyed.
In other words, it does blow us away.
Hi John,
The double meaning was intended!…Sam