 Truth
is Beauty, Beauty Truth, That is All We Need to Know
"In my entire scientific life…the most shattering experience has
been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general
relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, provides
the absolutely exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes
that populate the Universe. This 'shuddering before the beautiful,' this
incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful
in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to
say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest
and most profound." Chandrasekhar ("Chandra") 1975 (Martin
Rees. Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (1997). Reading, Massachusetts:
Perseus Books: 96-see this book for the ways in which Einstein's math panned
out in reality generations after the completion of the Theory of Relativity)
_______________________________
the
more "truth" a structure encapsulates, the greater that structure's
fit with reality (meaning with future events) and the larger or more influential
it will grow. hb
________
"the linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chomsky showed that much of the human capacity for grammar, rather than
being learned, arises from a complex inborn structure in the brain. Furthermore,
that inborn "universal grammar" probably did not evolve in the
usual way, the way that fins or wings did; instead, universal grammar
has somehow been an intrinsic part of the structure of matter ever since
the big bang, or possibly even a necessary part of the eternal Platonic
world of logic and mathematics, constraining matter whenever it is configured
into a mechanism capable of language." No Easy Way Out Sciences;
New York; Spring 2001; Stevan Harnad; Volume: 41 Issue: 2 Start Page:
36-42
_______________________________
A few years ago, Eshel Ben-Jacob posed a question: "what is
information." Eshel felt that a new definition would provide a
new way of understanding this universe. I answered that
information is a signal passed between two objects, entities, or
beings which the receiver was able to decipher. A gravitational
cue, for example, is a signal sent by one body to another and
interpreted as an impulse to approach. Electromagnetic
charges can be interpreted by similarly charged bodies as
repulsion and by bodies with an opposite charge as repulsion.
Now Samuel Bonasso has postulated that:
"Information, at various levels of probability and quality, allows
energy to self organize and condense into its various contracted
structural forms and to separate and re-expand into the general
field."
which leads to the following thoughts: the more "truth"
encapsulated in a structure, the greater that structure's fit with
reality (meaning with future events) and the larger or more
influential it will grow. So information is not just what a sender
sends to a receiver, it is also a signal in a one-way
transmission-from the past to the future. Transmission between
two objects existing simultaneously takes place via attraction
and repulsion cues. One-way transmission from past to future
takes place between the structure that was and the new
arrangement that will be. It takes place via survival, accretion,
and dissolution. Successful structures are those which manage to
attract the greatest number of successive survival or accretion
cues. They stick around. Those which anticipate the future
poorly are dissolved by it when it arrives. Information builds up
over time. Since it is constantly chiseled by the future it must
anticipate, by hauling its past lessons from one time frame to
another, it encapsulates and anticipates an increasing number
of future possibilities. Where does a proton fit into this? Protons
manage to anticipate the future magnificently. They survive
and survive the many changes of a universe tumbling through
the evolution of new forms and functions, new ways of being and
of doing, over time.
Two
corollaries of this overly abstract notion:
The
universe is constantly honing its constituents via their
interactions and is constantly building more data on past and
future into its constituent entities. Billions of years of inanimat
evolution are built into an iron atom--which carries within it the
evolution of the quark, the joining of quarks into neutrons and
protons, the joining of neutrons and protons into stable foursomes,
then, 300,000 years later, the sudden ability of these quartets to
attract and hold the attention of electrons in the embrace we
call an atom. But that's not the end of it. An iron atom also
contains the aggregation of galaxies, the birth of stars, and their
death--for it is in the death of stars that iron atoms are formed.
Each of the constituents of an iron atom has been honed by
natural selection--sharpened by its need to survive changes on
vast scales of explosive energy, the expansion of space, the
contraction of gravity, the swirling of mass vortices of form, and
the planck-instant microsecond alterations of arrangement we
call time.
corolllary
two--we contain within us twelve to seventeen billion
years of this cosmos' history. billlions and billions of years of stored
experience and stored prediction of possibilities. we say that
beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and that sounds like the idlest
form of poetry. but that which is not truthful to the future does
not survive. when our minds seek symmetry and other forms of
gorgeousness, are we seeking our most primal sense of what is
true and right--of a vast inner past feeling out the future
perfectly? Howard
Howard
Bloom wrote:
>In
a message dated 98?01?31 10:26:06 EST, Joa Sousa writes: > ><<
We have the impression that our decision > was taken thanks to "free"
will and we would like to believe that this is > really free, "we
have decided by ourselves", but this impression is an > illusion,
something comparable to a psychotic delirium or a dream. > If you ask
Dennett and Dawkins they will tell you exactly the same. >> >
>An interesting point of view, but it doesn't feel right intuitively,
for >whatever that's worth. However though Dennett is popular and Dawkins
is >utterly fascinating, the two of them have a very strong tendency
to go off on >the wrong track from time to time (don't we all?). Howard
Howard,
surely the key point is that it would be distinctly maladaptive if Joao's
suggestion felt intuitively correct. After all, we look somewhat askance
at folks who hear detached voices telling them what to do. In your other
posting you supplied most of the basic data that should enable us to get
an "undewy?eyed" handle on both free will and consciousness.
As you made clear, it has been shown over and over again that what we
call consciousness is a post hoc rationaliser, forced to come up with
explanations ? not infrequently wrong ? for decisions already taken elsewhere
in the brain, and always with the objective of falsely maintaining your
intuitive sense that it's in charge.
As
we can also have a good stab at determining where the sense of self, central
to consciousness, peters out in the animal kingdom ? experiments with
mirrors suggest that chimps have it whereas macaques don't ? it seems
almost certain that it is no more than an essential function of a novel?problem?solving
unit, at its most developed in us. It is almost certainly of very recent
evolutionarily origin, and even without the clear evidence that this has
not happened, it would seen highly unlikely that such a Johnny?come?lately
would rapidly supplant whatever it was that so successfully managed the
ancestral organisms over the preceding aeons.
Where
then does this leave free?will and the questions raised by Lyle Steadman?
Well, free will certainly cannot be truly free if it resides exclusively
in the conscious mind. The best that can offer is a non?binding, advisory
role to decision making devices located elsewhere. Does it then actually
lie, cheek by jowl, with those brain centres which actually call the shots?
Perhaps, but if so, there is not much comfort for those wedded to strong
notions of freedom of action. The reason the true decision centres "need"
consciousness is because it alone can actually manipulate information
and review it from a number of perspectives. It alone has the capacity
for what we would call choice. But subsequent processing, once input data
has left consciousness, seems to me almost certainly to be by means of
high?speed, rule?bound algorithmic devices. And it is these which actual
determine what "we" do. This leads me to assume that once a
given data set is feed into one of these, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Why
then can we not predict with unerring accuracy what an individual will
do? Perhaps principally because we cannot predict with certainty what
consciousness will feed into the decision?taking algorithms. However,
according to this model, the fact that you cannot tell what I will do
next, does not mean that I have free will. Sadly, I'm as much in the dark
as you are!
Mike makes a very strong point here about free will. If my rough theory
of consciousness is correct, consciousness is an afterthought rationalizer
(Gazzaniga's concept) which then feeds back its convictions and its fancies
to lower levels of the brain. Those lower levels are where decisions are
really made. So conscious will deludes itself when it thinks its in charge
of moment-to-moment decisions. Yet there's a reality hidden in the illusion,
too. If the feedback from the conscious will is shoved downward with enough
conviction and peristence, it can train the actual decision-makers to
follow the guidelines will has picked. Which means free will does not
exist in consciousness entirely but in the lower levels of the brain where
decisions are actually made. I say "not entirely" because the
consciousness DOES participate indirectly in decision making though the
concepts and distillations of them into actions which it fixes on as a
worldview or a sense of self or a determined commitment to values. These
it sends back and implants in the non?verbal brain for use in later processing
and decision making. To that extent the conscious mind IS involved in
choice.
However
since the instant of choice takes place in the non?verbal brain, and since
this is not deterministic, then there's a good chance that even a non?verbal
and non?cerebral organism like a bacterium which makes a not?totally deterministic
choice may well have "free?will" too. But, again, let's distinguish
between "free will"??the ability to make a non?deterministic
choice through the use of whatever physical mechanism one uses to decide
whether to make a right turn or a left??and what we humans call "will"??that
powerful sense of conviction which can drive us in a Nietzschean manner
to accomplish the impossible. Will is something we still have not located
or explained.
As
for Joa Sousa's arguments that everything in a physical mechanism is determined
in a LaPlaceian manner, this just doesn't seem to be so. LaPlace hasn't
ever been shown to work out on the level of macro, or even micro and quantum
entities. Photons and electrons have this annoying ability to jump around
and be in two places at once, two states at once. Or so it appears using
the primitive tools of our technology and of our current concepts. Who
knows what it will look like in a hundred years? Still, LaPlace's Newtonian
billiard ball model has been pretty well trashed, not because it is old
and out?of?fashion, but because it simply doesn't apply to very much at
all in the phenomenal, the empirical, the "real" world.
In
a message dated 98?02?01 10:21:46 EST,
<<
it has been shown over and over again that what we call consciousness
is a post hoc rationaliser, forced to come up with explanations ? not
infrequently wrong ? for decisions already taken elsewhere in the brain,
and always with the objective of falsely maintaining your intuitive sense
that it's in charge. << As we can also have a good stab at determining
where the sense of self, central to consciousness, peters out in the animal
kingdom ? experiments with mirrors suggest that chimps have it whereas
macaques don't ? it seems almost certain that it is no more than an essential
function of a novel?problem?solving unit, at its most developed in us.
It is almost certainly of very recent evolutionarily origin, and even
without the clear evidence that this has not happened, it would seen highly
unlikely that such a Johnny?come?lately would rapidly supplant whatever
it was that so successfully managed the ancestral organisms over the preceding
aeons. <<Where then does this leave free?will and the questions
raised by Lyle Steadman? Well, free will certainly cannot be truly free
if it resides exclusively in the conscious mind. The best that can offer
is a non?binding, advisory role to decision making devices located elsewhere.
Does it then actually lie, cheek by jowl, with those brain centres which
actually call the shots? >>
Then
Mike goes on to write:
<<The
reason the true decision centres "need" consciousness is because
it alone can actually manipulate information and review it from a number
of perspectives. It alone has the capacity for what we would call choice.
But subsequent processing, once input data has left consciousness, seems
to me almost certainly to be by means of high?speed, rule?bound algorithmic
devices. And it is these which actual determine what "we" do.
This leads me to assume that once a given data set is feed into one of
these, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
hb:
this seems an interesting idea, but I do strongly suspect that there is
a stochastic element, an element of unpredictability, of choice, even
in the physical processing modules, whatever they may be, of bacteria
when they hit critical choice points (and they frequently do??the "decision"
they make may be right or wrong and their lives may depend on its accuracy
in modelling future events to avoid a phagocyte or to find an opening
in a cell wall that offers opportunity??sperm are up against the same
problem, and very few have the right stuff, the physical makeup and the
correct decision making machinery to accomplish their goal, insemination
of the ovum; which means even sperm have to carry some rough future generation
module within them to make their long and complex trek to the spot where
an ovum awaits them, then to out?compete their fellow sperm swarming around
that ovum and to do whatever it takes to seduce the ovum??which also has
choice??into "deciding" that their serenade of chemicals, tactile
stimuli [a "mating dance"], or whatever sperm courtship consists
of??means they are "Mr. Right"). So I seem to be positing that
even bacteria have a future?generation module of some kind. An internal
"corollary generator," to revert to my corollary generation
theory. This, it is easy to suspect, is one of the primal elements of
consciousness. An infant has such future generation and decision modules
as well, though they are instantiated in a rapidly developing and changing
brain, an organ which the sperm or bacterium do not possess. And perhaps
some of the baby's choice?making machinery, its future?generation modules,
are located outside the brain??in the vagal "second brain" which
exists in the solar plexus, or in the adrenal system, which feeds its
guesses via roughly thirty different cortical chemicals throughout the
body and targets them to the thyroid, pituitary, and pineal gland in the
brain, and to other outside?brain decision centers like the thymus in
the upper chest, the pancreas, the testes, and the ovaries, all of which,
I suspect, must have their forms of future generators so they can make
correct decisions too.
This
leaves us with the radical difference between "free will," which
apparently does not need consciousness to exist, and "will"
of the Nietzschean variety, which involves consciousness quite heavily.
Yes, Mike, I think you are right. Will and consciousness are decision
refining mechanisms. Will and consciousness are future generators, corollary
generators, of far greater power than those available to an infant, a
bacterium, an adrenal gland, or a sperm. In fact, will and consciousness
can picture futures vigorously, "believe" in them fervently,
and send their conviction back to the non?verbal brain centers for participation
in future non?verbal decision making. So the non?verbal brain has "free
will." But only the story?telling, worldview making, vision?generating,
metaphor?maninpulating consciousness can participate in "will"
itself. And it does it precisely, I'd suspect, by generating complex pictures
of the future based on cultural premises and "conscious" choice
between differing views offered by various subcultures. Such subcultures
exist even in such primitive social groups as tribes, where clans and
moities insure a choice of worldviews and conscious attitudes??the stuff
of which will is made. Thus will is partly a choice maker between the
variety of worldviews available within a culture. It also sifts through
worldviews available from outside the culture, as when Paul Okami, a Californian
member of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, rejects standard western
models and takes on the models offerered by the Japanese worldview of
Zen. And will picks between points of view promoted by exceptional individuals,
those quirky souls who generate amalgams of previous notions, corollary-mashes
with new properties, emergent properties never seen before. All these
interactions of the individual and society, the personal consciousness
and the subcultural mix, the visionary's tendency to tap, blend and reinterpret
forgotten culture models to create new visions, all are future generation
mechanisms, corollary generators, with a sweep and power unavailable to
a lone myxobacteria attempting to make its way through its watery world.
Or even to a myxobacteria attempting to participate, as myxobacteria do,
in a pack attack on a potential source of food. That individual myxobacteria,
part of a larger social entity, needs to generate future possibilities
and act on them in the hope of getting some of the spoils if the group
manages to make its kill, or, if it is in the vanguard, to make sure the
struggle against a fish that's trying to escape, a seafood platter exercising
its own future?generation and decision making powers in a desperate struggle
to survive attack, becomes a meal and doesn't get away. Does this seem
to take us anywhere?
<<Why then can we not predict with unerring accuracy what an individual
will do? Perhaps principally because we cannot predict with certainty
what consciousness will feed into the decision?taking algorithms. However,
according to this model, the fact that you cannot tell what I will do
next, does not mean that I have free will.
hb??I
think you have made a magnificent contribution with your model. And, Mike,
I do think what you say means you DO have free will. Howard
|
|
Oscillation,
the primordial pulse
re:
sounds like habit hb: Yup, it sure does. We grasp at a novelty like roller-skating,
take a few weeks to learn it, fall, make fools of ourselves, then begin
to get the hang of it, rollerskate for a year or two in the local park
with great gusto, then get bored and look for something new to add to
our kit of habits and skills. We take up the tango and make fools of ourselves
all over again, then, once we've mastered it, it eventually grow bored
and look for some other novelty--white water rafting, camping in Alaska,
rock-climbing, snowboarding. What do we do with the kit of skills we assemble
in this way. Is all play really a form of practice for the everyday...and
for emergencies too? When we enter a conference room, do we see the problems
tossed our way in terms of roller-skating, tango dancing, white water
rafting, or rock climbing? Once we've got a big kit of skills, do we see
problems and opportunities in terms of all of these tricks we've learned
to perform? Do these muscular habits give us tools of comprehension, new
forms of metaphor? Boredom and the lust for novelty add to what we feel
and know...but how does that show up in everyday life? Howard In a message
dated 5/16/2003 9:02:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: It also sounds
a lot like habit. "There is a law in this succession of ideas. We
may roughly say it is the law of habit. It is the great 'Law of Association
of Ideas,' the one law of all psychical action." - Charles Sanders
Peirce At 12:57 AM 5/16/03 -0400, wrote: bite, chew, digest, use up, get
hungry, bite, chew, digest, use up, get hungry-this is the basic oscillitory
pattern of the cosmos.
_________
amazing, thanks. Howard In a message dated 1/3/2003 2:53:45 PM Eastern
Standard Time, writes: At 1/3/2003 01:55 AM, you wrote: gb: In a linear
system, these forces would be in a stable equilibrium. In a nonlinear
system, ie the brain, turning up the gain might result in bistable behavior,
with apparently sudden shifts between the two states. hb: after decades
of building radios and operating oscilliscopes, it is time for me to finally
reveal my ignorance. What does turn up the gain mean? Turn up the amplification
of random bits that may make sense...or that may crash the system with
their incoherence? If that were the case, turning up the gain would be
exploration and novelty testing. Turning the gain down to exclude the
fuzz and buzz of possible discoveries, to focus only on what's tried and
true, would be the equivalent of the k phase, the conservative phase,
digestion and consolidation. gb: In neural systems, gain refers to the
steepness of an S-shaped input-output function. This is typically used
to model neural functions in which there is a floor effect, eg once you
inhibit a cell, it's pretty much quiescent and doesn't have negative firing
rate, and with excitatory inputs, you eventually reach a saturation effect
where no matter how much more you drive the cell it doesn't fire any faster.
The gain describes how sharp the transition is between these two extremes.
Increasing the gain is equivalent to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio,
and in the extreme is equivalent to a thresholding function (on or off).
very interesting behavior occurs when you connect two neurons like this
in which they inhibit each other. If the gain (steepness) is not particularly
great, then the system behaves linearly (as one goes up the other goes
down). If the gain is large, however, then you observe bistable behavior,
where one neuron is completely on and the other is off -- no in between.
g
________
Hmmm, so ants create order using lateral inhibition of precisely the same
kind that sweeps the debris from between batches of matter competing to
become stars. Ants use oscillation to produce the architecture of a burial
place. Termites use a similar "local activation and long-range inhitition"
to create the pillars, arches, walls, and architecture of their mounds.
There's many a form of ebb and tide, of crest and trough, of primal wave,
in the way this universe is made. Howard
Orderly Ant Corpses NYT July 23, 2002 By HENRY FOUNTAIN [What are the
human analogies?] When it comes to planned communities, there is none
more planned than a graveyard. To ensure that the departed truly rest
in peace, many cemeteries have regulations to govern plot location and
size, maintenance, placing of flowers and wreaths and even access. (In
addition to being planned, most cemeteries are gated communities, too.)
Some ants keep their cemeteries just as well organized. Ants will move
a corpse and pile it up with others to create a tidy final resting place.
There are no rules and regulations, of course, but as researchers from
France, Belgium and Spain have discovered, there are some principles at
work. The researchers conducted experiments on ant colonies, distributing
corpses around the edge of a circular arena and then watching as worker
ants tended to the dead. After six or more hours, the ants had moved the
corpses into a stable pattern of piles of roughly equal size. Out of the
initial chaos and without communicating, the workers had created order.
Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers
noted that the pattern was produced by application of two simple rules.
First, ants are more likely to put a corpse where there already are a
bunch of corpses. Second, the growth of any one pile is slowed as the
supply of nearby corpses is reduced. Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing
may recognize that this is a demonstration of a process that he first
described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account for patterns in nature like
a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The process is called local activation
and long-range inhibition. In the ant experiments, pile growth involves
local activation (a growing pile induces more growth of the pile) and
long-range inhibition (a growing pile means that there will be fewer corpses
elsewhere). The researchers, using a mathematical model, say it is one
of the first demonstrations of this kind of self-organized behavior in
a biological system. Signals From Cells When a single cell within an organism
dies, it isn't buried or tossed on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another
type of cell called a phagocyte. But just how does a phagocyte know not
to eat a healthy cell? Scientists have long thought that in apoptosis,
the programmed death of cells that occurs, for instance, as an embryo
develops, the dying cells produce a chemical signal that tells phagocytes
that there is prey around. But a new study by scientists at two British
universities shows that another pathway may be at work, one that involves
the removal of an existing signal. Writing in the journal Nature, the
researchers described their experiments with healthy and dying white blood
cells. They found that these cells and the phagocytes that consume them
both have a protein, called CD31, that binds them together. If a blood
cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays bound to it only briefly, detaching
after getting a "repulsion" signal through the protein. But
if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked, so the phagocyte stays locked
to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what the signal consists of is
a subject for further research. Pterosaur's Dining Habits The fossilized
skull of a new pterosaur species has been discovered in Brazil, and the
finding shows that this flying reptile had an odd way of eating: it skimmed
along the surface of a lake or ocean looking for food. Pterosaurs lived
in the time of the dinosaurs, but little is known about them. The fossil,
discovered by two scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural
History, shows that this pterosaur, at least, had long jawbones that the
researchers suggest are similar to those of skimming birds. Writing in
Science, the researchers say the pterosaur, with a wingspan over 12 feet,
probably glided along the water and dipped its head when it ran into food.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
________
even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of
just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen
struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these
whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to
separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen
and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by
the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit
interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the
World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309>
100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001;
Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page:
68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
corpse where there already are a bunch of corpses. Second, the growth
of any one pile is slowed as the supply of nearby corpses is reduced.
Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing may recognize that this is a demonstration
of a process that he first described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account
for patterns in nature like a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The
process is called local activation and long-range inhibition. In the ant
experiments, pile growth involves local activation (a growing pile induces
more growth of the pile) and long-range inhibition (a growing pile means
that there will be fewer corpses elsewhere). The researchers, using a
mathematical model, say it is one of the first demonstrations of this
kind of self-organized behavior in a biological system. Signals From Cells
When a single cell within an organism dies, it isn't buried or tossed
on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another type of cell called a phagocyte.
But just how does a phagocyte know not to eat a healthy cell? Scientists
have long thought that in apoptosis, the programmed death of cells that
occurs, for instance, as an embryo develops, the dying cells produce a
chemical signal that tells phagocytes that there is prey around. But a
new study by scientists at two British universities shows that another
pathway may be at work, one that involves the removal of an existing signal.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers described their experiments
with healthy and dying white blood cells. They found that these cells
and the phagocytes that consume them both have a protein, called CD31,
that binds them together. If a blood cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays
bound to it only briefly, detaching after getting a "repulsion"
signal through the protein. But if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked,
so the phagocyte stays locked to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what
the signal consists of is a subject for further research. Pterosaur's
Dining Habits The fossilized skull of a new pterosaur species has been
discovered in Brazil, and the finding shows that this flying reptile had
an odd way of eating: it skimmed along the surface of a lake or ocean
looking for food. Pterosaurs lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but little
is known about them. The fossil, discovered by two scientists affiliated
with the American Museum of Natural History, shows that this pterosaur,
at least, had long jawbones that the researchers suggest are similar to
those of skimming birds. Writing in Science, the researchers say the pterosaur,
with a wingspan over 12 feet, probably glided along the water and dipped
its head when it ran into food. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
________
even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of
just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen
struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these
whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to
separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen
and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by
the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit
interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the
World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309>
100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001;
Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page:
68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
________
Here's a bit of maniacal thinking with consequences that could prove powerful.
Take a look and see if how daft and delusional it looks to you.
Physicists believe that this cosmos is addicted to symmetries. Symmetrical
obsession, in fact, is one of the reasons the human aesthetic sensibility
so often comes up with fantasies that turn out later to reflect realities.
Einstein and many other physicists have cooked up with abstract mathematical
systems that seemed to describe the "proven facts" of their
day. But there was often something wrong-a fly in the aesthetic ointment.
The equations worked right but didn't FEEL right. They weren't "beautiful"-usually
because they were off kilter, their symmetry wasn't perfect.
Time after time, a mathematical physicist has cheated and re-tweaked the
equations to wipe out the imbalance and create a factually inaccurate,
but gorgeous result. Then, voila, some years or decades down the road,
the fudge factors tossed in to satisfy the physicist's artistic sense
have accounted for new data pouring in from new scientific eyes and ears
like the Hubble Space Telescope. The cheating turned out to be an unrecognized
form of prescience. Why? Usually the answer has been symmetry.
With symmetry in mind, try this necklace of connections on for size. I've
been blabbering for years about the universe's propensity to work in paradoxes,
and have repeated what may be an utterly fallacious phrase of my own devising:
"opposites are joined at the hip." Then there's another thought
Martin Rees' book Before the Beginning and this group's five years of
discussion of entropy have triggered in the last few days-the universe
abhors a stasis; a sit-in-the-middle-and-do-nothing or a wandering-around-aimlessly-ness.
Or, to put it differently, the universe abhors a thermodynamic equilibrium-the
state of ultimate randomness toward which Second Law of Thermodynamics
Fans claim we are constantly drifting.
Add in yet another thought-the notion that there's oscillation no matter
where you turn in the universe--
-in the pressure waves ringing the post-Big Bang like a gong
-in the rippling waves of electromagnetic rays traveling in straight lines
-in the waveforms of electrons circling an atomic nucleus
-in the lateral inhibition that sets up crests and valleys between photoreceptors
in the iris
-and in the cultural oscillations of fads, fashions, conservatisms and
radical rebellions.
Sounds like an agenda of babbling topics for a convention of madmen, right?
OK, now look at a key finding of the article below. What happens when
you get one learning machine, one neural net, to train another? The two
become alike. They meet, says the article, at a common point in their
center. So far, so good. Studies done in the 1950s and 1960s of patients
in therapy showed something similar. Put a patient and a psychotherapist
together and the therapist will say that the patient is moving toward
a cure once the patient begins talking like the therapist. Or look at
the studies done by Condon and others in the Edward Hall school of anthropology-put
two people in a room, let them talk, and the pair will begin to synchronize
their body language and rhythms, and will enter into a non-verbal duet.
The odd thing in the piece below is the appearance of an ordinary, everyday
cliché. When neural nets train each other, they become mirror images
of each other-"equal but opposite." Equal but opposite? What
a bizarre concept. How can two things be equal yet opposite. How can they
be utterly alike AND totally opposed? The answer is symmetry.
So what does symmetry produce? Opposite ends of paradoxes joined at the
hip-good and evil, day and night, boom and bust, depression and elation,
convergence and dissipation, attraction and repulsion, wrong and right.
And what is oscillation? A wavering between two opposite (but equal) poles
of this sort.
Symmetry=opposites=equals=paradox=oscillation. What's more, oscillation=music=math=the
rules of the cosmos. And music=emotion. Which, if there's anything more
than gibberish to this, might mean that there's more than meets the eye
to the connection between the human emotions and the cosmos, between anthropos
and the universe, and between anthropomorphism and the inanimate form
of morphing we call evolution. Or, to put it differently, nature may abhor
a stasis and a thermodynamic equilibrium, but she's drunk on generating
opposites and symmetries, then on twisting and jumping from one end of
a symmetry to the other. We call this dance craze of mother nature an
oscillation, a wave form.
See, I told you it would sound crazy. Howard
________
Don--Thoroughly agreed and wonderfully put. No matter how much you homogenize,
hegemonize, or globalize, humans are simultaneously drawn to aggregation
and separation, to intimacy and the need to avoid being smothered, and
above all else to squabbling--finding minor differences and making a big
deal over them. Peter Richerson would say that though we are going global,
we still need to satisfy our old family and tribe instincts by congregating
in small, contentious subgroups. He'd be right. So would your meme-stack
predictions. No matter where you look in this cosmos, attraction and repulsion
are paired and keep us literally throbbing with lateral inhibition, the
constant creation of what Darwin called variation and what some call creativity.
Even some of the microbits suspended in water I just wrote about to Greg
Bear often pull together then push apart in a constant pulse. So do the
convection cells Dorion Sagan has described so vividly.
Another note: your statement of the need for horizontal and vertical dimension
viewed simultaneously is a good one. But I suspect we need to add a fifth
dimension to our thinking. And here I'm speaking literally. It's late,
and once again I'll have to end before I can explain exactly what I mean.
Howard
We pulse upward with fracticality. That's the Spiral Dynamic theme. From
the smallest hint of things come vast and strange unravellings.
In a message dated 3/28/02 9:28:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
Yes, Howard, and we are also engaged in meme swapping at a rapid rate.
It should be clear, however, we are not melting into a primal soup-of-sorts
that dissolve unique human differences into a glob of tasteless uniformity.
Rather, the magnetic pull in our vMeme stacks provide a cohesion principle
and process that maintains the real diversities in our mass mind. While
we often curse clans, tribes, empires, holy orders, enterprises, communes
and natural meshworks, these are the essential pillars that support and
facilitate the evolution of our kind. They provide the foundation stones;
the organizing principles; the developmental tracks, and the game board
for your intergroup tournaments. Flatlanders can't play on these board
because they lack the three dimensional depth-of-vision to enable them
to play both on the horizontal and the vertical trajectories simultaneously.
It takes both the horizontal and the vertical insights and actions to
keep us slightly ahead in our struggle with microbes.
This is the memome's way of making the great escape.
________
<http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992067> newscientist.com
Neural network 'in-jokes' could pass secrets 19:10 23 March 02 Charles
Choi, New York Artificial brains could use "in-jokes" to deliver
secret messages, according to computer scientists. The technique relies
on neural networks, computer systems designed to mimic the brain. Just
as the brain's nerve cells are wired together in a complex mesh, neural
nets consist of a web of electrical switches, or a computer simulation
of these connections. When neural networks tackle a problem, connections
that are ultimately successful become stronger than those that give a
wrong answer. The more lessons a network trains with, the better it learns
which pathways to follow to find the right answers. What happens, then,
when two different neural networks are used to train each other? Wolfgang
Kinzel of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Wurzburg, Germany,
and Ido Kanter of the Minerva Center in Ramat-Gan, Israel, tried it with
old-fashioned hardware networks, and found that the two met in the middle,
becoming mirror images. Equal and opposite In each lesson, the scientists
asked the computers to categorise unique, random pieces of information
with the aim of getting the same answer as their partner. After each round,
they compared each other's results. In a surprisingly short time, the
two networks became aligned so that their properties are equal and opposite
at every point. Connections that flowed one way in one network went in
the opposite direction in its partner. From there, it is a simple step
for one of the pair to reverse all its weightings so the two networks
end up identical. They would have the same weightings, without ever having
told each other what they were. The researchers realised that this phenomenon
could be useful in cryptography. At present, computers that need to exchange
information securely use codes or "keys" based on huge numbers.
But one weakness of this system is that the sender has to secretly tell
the receiver what the key is before they can start exchanging messages.
An eavesdropper who hears the key will be able to decode any subsequent
communications. But synchronised neural networks could use their hidden
weightings as the key. Jumping to conclusions Imagine two friends talking
in public surrounded by eavesdroppers. If the friends share an in-joke,
the spies - not having shared the same unique experiences - will have
a hard time figuring out what is going on. Similarly, synchronised networks
will jump to the same conclusion, given the same limited information.
Immediate applications might include anything that needs to send information
rapidly and securely, such as mobile phones, video conferencing and Internet
communication. Kinzel even speculates that living organisms might be using
the same principle to transfer information between different parts of
the nervous system. The technique could be quite powerful, says computer
engineer Don Wunsch at the University of Missouri in Rolla. "I could
see it becoming an alternative when users need to create a cheap and fast
encryption with a minimum of shared communication, when security is of
moderate, but not life-and-death, concern." 19:10 23 March 02 Return
to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
_______________________________
why do photons pulsate? Why do they grow larger, then smaller as they
travel? This seems like something one would expect of organisms--which
use pulsation for numerous purposes, from searching the opportunities
and hazards of their environment to taking in nutrients and expelling
wastes. But that a basic particle should pulsate? This means that the
conjoined opposites of shrinkage and growth were operating when the first
leptons made their grab for the big time--which means during roughly the
first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang. Interesting. So we had not just
repulsion and attraction, but their cousin, oscillation, from the first
instant of all that ever was in this particular universe. And it's now
complexifying via iterative processes into what will come next and the
nextnesses beyond imagining. Howard
________
Alex Burns and hb 1130-01 >hb: I noticed that. The manifestos of goth
culture and of rave and >ecstasy cultures are resurrections of what
I went through in the >sixties. they appeal to me hugely. Your observation
of pop culture's >fracticality is brilliant. ab: Actually, there's
a key idea here, called Dark Renaissance, that Richard and I have been
kicking around. The idea was first expressed on an alt.satanism group
posting, so I mapped out the cultural dynamics and added a lot of depth.
It might be part of a Masters/PhD proposal, if I get faculty approval.
hb: sounds neat, and it also sounds isomorphic to the material in the
Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe including the
human soul on the fracticality and oscilatory patter of generation gaps
and how those reflect more basic patterns from the big bang on up. This
universe is simply nuts about oscillation--put another way, it has a jones
for self-contradiction.
_______________________________
Van Philpot and I were discussing the universality of liquid patterns
of pulsation, turbulence, and vortex-like movement in the universe a few
weeks ago on the phone. Van has developed some ideas about the connections
between the patterns of those masses of membrane-bound liquids which we
call our bodies and the flows of form in the cosmos. At first glance,
this sounds like a very far stretch indeed. But when one examines such
books as Philip Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), one realizes that there are
fundamental cycles of self-organization in this cosmos which repeat on
numerous levels of complexity.
Physicist Lee Smolin proposes that galaxies are very much like evolving
ecosystems--interlinked meshes of entities repeating large and small scale
patterns whose iteration yanks them ever-so-slowly up a ladder of complexity.
Those patterns are partially governed by the same rules which shape the
swirls of cream in a coffee cup. The pulsations of the sun are driven
by many of the same rules--convection, for example. So when the authors
of an article like the one below about new rhythmic swirls discovered
in the sun's center compare solar rhythms to a heartbeat, they may be
utilizing more than anthropomorphic metaphor. They may be hinting at the
patterns of self organization genes must harness to create a regularly
beating circulator of liquids like the heart. Or they may not. But looking
for these basic patterns could be highly important to the science of the
new millennium. The SCIENCE of the new millennium, not its superstitions.
This is one reason that the move of physicists like Eshel Ben-Jacob into
biology may signal a turning point in the way we understand the continuities
between inanimate matter and life. If we are lucky, comprehending these
continuities may help us tackle an even larger mystery--the jump from
that which is not alive to life, and beyond that, the leap from non-conscious
life forms to those with that internal cosmos we call consciousness. Howard
P.S. Spending a month researching Pythagoras for Global Brain, it seems
at first glance, may have shredded what little sanity I had left. Pythagoras
saw a continuity between mathematics, music, man, and the spheres. But
another ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus had an equally nutty idea--that
matter was made up of invisible particles called atoms. Old ideas in the
light of new findings sometimes turn out to have a validity of a sort
their originators could never have imagined.
---------
Source: National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov) Date: Posted
3/31/2000 Solar "Heartbeat" Discovered: The Beat Goes On --
Inside The Sun Astronomers from the National Science Foundation's National
Solar Observatory (NSO) have discovered a solar "heartbeat"
in the motion of layers of gas circulating beneath the sun's surface.
Their research shows that some layers speed up and slow down about every
16 months. This internal motion provides clues to understanding the cycle
of activity observed on the surface. Understanding the solar cycle is
a fundamental objective of solar astronomy. Every 11 years, the normally
quiet sun exhibits a high level of activity in the form of sunspots, solar
flares and coronal mass ejections. These eruptions can affect cellular
phones, power distribution systems, satellites and other sensitive technology.
Rachel Howe, Frank Hill and Rudi Komm of the NSO in Tucson, Ariz., and
their colleagues analyzed more than four years of observations from the
Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), a worldwide network of solar
telescopes, to detect and model motion inside the sun. They report their
results in the March 31 issue of Science. The sun is made up of layers
of gas. Scientists probe these layers by using helioseismic methods to
analyze sound waves traveling through the sun's interior. The techniques
are similar to the seismic techniques used to study earthquakes. Howe's
team examined layers extending almost halfway to the solar core and measured
the speed of movement at different depths. They believe the patterns in
these movements are connected to the cycle of eruptions seen on the surface.
"We listen to the sun's 'heartbeat' to understand what is happening
in its core," explains Hill. Unlike the earth, all points on the
solar surface do not rotate at the same rate. The solar equator rotates
once every 27 days, while the rotation rate at the sun's poles slows to
once every 35 days. This "differential" rotation, long a mystery
of solar physics, extends through the sun's turbulent convective layer,
located about 210,000 kilometers below the surface -- nearly one-third
of the distance to the solar core. Below this layer, the differential
rotation vanishes. At the edge of the convective layer, Howe and her colleagues
used GONG data to determine that the rotation rate varies periodically,
completing a cycle about every 15-16 months. The team used data from the
NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
spacecraft to confirm the pattern of these variations. "At first
we were skeptical of the pattern. Knowing the complexity of models used
to explain the solar magnetic field and its connection to observed solar
activity, we were expecting nothing, or chaos, in our observations at
that location," said Howe. The GONG network (http://www.gong.noao.edu/sites/sites.html)
is an international project led by the National Science Foundation. It
provides continuous observations of the sun, monitoring the surface and
tracking its tiny oscillations 24 hours a day. These oscillations are
visual evidence of the sound waves traveling through the sun's interior.
-NSF- Editors: Images and video are available at http://www.nso.noao.edu/press/tach/
Also see http://www.gong.noao.edu Editor's Note: The original news release
can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0015.htm Note:
_______________________________
The previous rant on the relationship between viscous flows of galactic
material, solar plasmas, and those which DNA orchestrates to construct
and maintain an organism was inspired by the following article submitted
by David Schwaderer. We now have a field called astrobiology, reports
this piece. Which means that the link between life and the cosmos has
been posited in one direction-that there may be life on other planets
or moons. Now to see the connection pursued in the opposite directions-how
do the rules which give form to the cosmos show up in the formation of
life? What elemental algorithms of self-organization are choreographed
to create not just the massive motet of a star but the micro-symphony
of a human being? Howard
-----------------
This artist's conception shows a proposed ice-penetrating cryobot and
a submersible hydrobot that could be used to explore a hidden body of
Antarctic water known as Lake Vostok as well as what appears to be an
ice-covered ocean on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Astrobiology: A down-to-earth
view The search for life in the universe begins in your back yard By Alan
Boyle MSNBC SEATTLE, March 31 - The word "astrobiology" may
summon up images of boldly going in search of Vulcans or even more exotic
aliens. You might think it has to do primarily with Mars, or Europa, or
planets around other suns. But the fact is, Topic A in the rapidly growing
field of astrobiology is good old Planet Earth. THE EMPHASIS on Earth
comes through loud and clear in the agenda for NASA's Astrobiology Science
Conference, scheduled April 3-5 at Ames Research Center in California.
More than half of the 51 presentations on the schedule focus on life on
Earth - how it arose in the distant past, how it endures in extreme environments,
how it can be affected by climate and chemistry. "We define astrobiology
in the broadest way as the study of life in the universe," said David
Morrison, who heads Ames' astrobiology and space research directorate.
And since Earth is the only place in the universe where we know life exists,
"we have to start with what we know," he said. "One of
the fascinating aspects of astrobiology is that it's asking the same questions
that mankind has been asking for thousands of years," said Lynn Rothschild,
a NASA evolutionary biologist who chairs the conference's local organizing
committee. "We tend to be a very self-centered species." IN
THE CLASSROOM There are many strategies in the search for extraterrestrial
life. Which do you think could be the most fruitful? Looking for traces
of ancient life on Mars. Exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Listening
for faraway radio signals. Investigating distant Earthlike planets. None
of the above (discuss on Space News BBS). Vote to see results Earthly
matters also figure prominently at the University of Washington's astrobiology
program in Seattle, where graduate students in such fields as oceanography,
atmospheric science, astronomy, geology, chemistry and mathematics pore
through scientific papers and classroom seminars about life's place in
the universe. It's considered the nation's first doctoral program in astrobiology,
supported by a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's
Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program. Eight
students were selected for this first year of the program. The topic for
a recent class was the Snowball Earth theory, which proposes that our
planet went through a global deep-freeze hundreds of millions of years
ago. In some ways, the "ice-covered Earth was similar to an ice-free
Mars," suggested University of Chicago geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert,
the guest speaker for the day. The discussion ranged from the roles that
clouds, volcanoes and carbon dioxide levels play in determining a planet's
climate ... to different models for photosynthesis ... to plate tectonics
... to the latest findings from Mars Global Surveyor ... to the potential
traces of ancient life left behind in fossil formations known as stromatolites.
That kind of scientific cross-pollination may sound dizzying, but it's
just what the students were looking for. "I like the way different
disciplines interrelate with each other," said Craig Brown, a first-year
graduate student in atmospheric sciences. The instructors like it, too.
"Four years ago, you couldn't get an oceanographer to listen to you
for five minutes about planets," recalled Conway Leovy, an atmospheric
sciences professor who is a co-investigator in the astrobiology program.
Since then, scientists have become increasingly interested in the potential
parallels between the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans
and the conditions that may exist beneath the surface ice on Europa, one
of Jupiter's moons. TO BE OR NOT TO BE? Biologists have been surprised
to find life enduring at the volcanic vents, within polar ice and in rock
miles beneath Earth's crust. At the same time, revelations about water
beyond Earth and planets beyond our solar system have led astronomers
to wonder whether life might have gained similar footholds in otherworldly
environments. Advertisement Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in
the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee Scientists say the quest
is worth taking on, even if it turns out that life is unique to Earth.
If astrobiologists find no signs of life in extraterrestrial environments
that are similar to Earth's, "it's equally important for us to know
... why not?" Rothschild said. Whether or not there's life out there,
it's essential to take a closer look at life down here, Morrison said.
He voiced particular interest in Earth's extreme environments and the
largely undiscovered world of microscopic organisms. "If you dug
up a bucket of dirt in your back yard, you'd find more microbes in there
than there are stars in the galaxy, and 99 percent of them are unknown,"
he said. That's why some of the presentations at the astrobiology conference
focus on microscopic organisms found within Arctic sea ice, or within
the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, or within boiling-hot sulfide
chimneys on the bottom of the Pacific. Such organisms seem to be the most
likely suspects in the search for life beyond Earth. Advertisement In
fact, two University of Washington researchers argue that microbes might
well be the only kind of life that scientists could ever expect to find
out there. In the book "Rare Earth," paleontologist Peter Ward
and astronomer Donald Brownlee say Earth benefited from a hard-to-match
combination of fortunate factors - ranging from its position in the solar
system and the Milky Way galaxy to global climate changes and the timing
of asteroid and comet impacts. "This may be as good as it gets in
terms of diversity," Ward said. Ward and a colleague, astronomer
Guillermo Gonzalez, are now looking into whether supernovae or other cosmic
factors may have played a role in winnowing down Earth's species. "We
still have a bunch of mass extinctions that have no (apparent) cause,
but certainly we know that something caused them," Ward said. Some
evolutionary theorists argue that the development of complex life was
driven by close shaves that required organisms to adapt or die - a cosmic
manifestation of the saying, "That which does not kill us makes us
stronger." If that's the case, then the path toward higher species
traced a narrow line between the torpor of unconsciousness and the terror
of extinction. Even researchers involved in the search for radio signals
from extraterrestrial civilizations acknowledge that intelligent life
must be far rarer than mute microbes. Otherwise, the galaxy would be busier
than the alien-filled cantina in the movie "Star Wars." But
they contend that even if complex life is exceedingly rare, the vast number
of stellar systems in our galaxy evens out the odds. Ward admits he's
had some healthy debates with SETI researchers and calls them "first-class"
scientists - who happen to hold a different point of view. "We really
have to agree to disagree on some of these unknowable questions,"
he said.
_______________________________
Steve Goldberg refers to a New York Times article on string theory and
asks, "doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?
"
Steve--I've enclosed the article you mentioned below. Why does string
theory sound ad hoc? Yes, it does sound like it may be a mathematical
widget of the type used by Copernicans to shore up their shredding theory
of the universe back in 1500 or so. But on another level, like all mathematical
systems, it's its own self-consistent universe. It may or may not resemble
reality, but it has a sort of Platonic reality all its own. Or, to put
it differently, it is a rigorous fantasy guided by rules based on axiomatic
premises which are possible in this world of conceivable multiverses,
but which may never sneak from possibility into solidity. So, yes, it
does have the feel of a quick-fix patch on a leaking inner tube.
When one looks at the history of physics, one realizes how leaky that
inner tube might be. It is still trying to incorporate laws derived early
in the 19th century. Even the Theory of Relativity was an attempt to get
these antique concepts to segue smoothly with the new observations which
had accumulated since the days of Maxwell and Faraday.
In this sense, all the current efforts to find a GUT, a grand unified
theory of physics, seem a bit creaky. All incorporate approaches which
may have outlived their time. Physics seems to ache for a new paradigm
which will remove the mess of patchwork complexities added to keep the
rickety old machine operating--a paradigm which will satisfy the demands
of Occam's razor and dazzle us all with its simplicity.
One thing that strikes me is the manner in which string theory and many
of the other approaches of modern physics are consistently described as
musical. George Johnson, in the piece below, says the string theory he
describes would unify "all the forces ...into one.. -- as a kind
of mathematical music played by an orchestra of tiny vibrating strings.
Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent one of the many different
kinds of particles that make up matter and energy."
Schrodinger's equations for quantum wave mechanics were based on mathematical
descriptions of the vibration patterns of stringed instruments and drums.
(Sternglass: 28-29.) This isn't surprising when one considers that sound
is a pattern of waves, and music a subset of this form of oscillation.
The music of the universe--an old Pythagorean concept--comes up in astrophysics
as well. One of its latest manifestations is the notion that for its first
300,000 years of existence, the universe rang like a huge gong. The plasma
of proton-neutron clusters colliding at superspeed with was more like
a thick, hyperactive soup than like the gaping black space with which
we're familiar. Dip a spoon in a soup and you get ripples--pressure waves--yet
another equivalent of the pressure waves in air which our ears decipher
as sound.
Making things all the more Pythagorean is the fact that according to former
head of the Apollo Lunar Station Program at Westinghouse Research Laboratories,
Ernest J. Sternglass, Einstein was insistent on taming the wildly abstract
quantum mechanics of his day and turning it into a visualizable, geometric
system with its probabilistic uncertainties resolved into hard and fast
predictabilities. Sternglass had the privilege of a bit of time with Einstein,
so may know whereof he speaks.
Once you reduce the universe to music, you reduce it to oscillations and
begin moving in the direction of some very strange things indeed. We can
see the fractal repetition of oscillating patterns all over the place.
Aside from the aforementioned first 300,000 years, when the universe chimed
like a bell, the sun has a beat, a rhythmic pulse, that in many ways is
like the pulse of the human heart. Then there are human things like romance,
which pulse back and forth like the sun or like the masses of matter which
collect in galactic whorls. Humans fall in love with someone distant whom
they'd love to get close to. Once they gotten close, they panic and run.
Commitment phobia hits women as well as men. So in a romance, men and
women move together, then apart as regularly as the beat of the heart
The music of the spheres is alive in the way we love each other.
Then there are our intellectual cycles, wavering back and forth between
holism and reductionism but raising the same questions in 2000 as were
raised in 1830 by the holists Goethe inspired or in 1848 by the reductionists
who were rebelling against Goethe's influence. Just as the ringing of
the early universe helped move it forward in degrees of complexity, our
oscillations from left-brain micro-slicing to right brain piecing together
of big pictures and back again produces continuous movement upward. The
old questions take on new dimensions when they're asked in a medium thick
with new and as-yet-incompletely digested ideas and discoveries. So we
thinkers, too, oscillate like a plasma ringing with pressure waves.
It would seem that our curiosities, our passions, our music, the sun,
and the Big Bang are all linked. This makes sense if one believes in a
fractally unfolding universe. Fractal unfoldings oscillate back and forth
between fresh wonders of intricacy and the reemergence of the old patterns
on which they were initially based. We may be mere manifestations of an
ancient algorithm, a basic cosmic rule. infinitely superimposed and retraced.
Howard
In a message dated 4/8/00 1:04:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:
The
NY Times Tuesday Science Section had a lead article on string theory
(which now introduces "branes" to overcome problems of mathematics
and
explanatory power).
I'm
sorry T can't provide the article; I don't have a scanner (keep meaning
to get one). However, it was no doubt reprinted in other papers and is,
I
imagine, available on the Times web site.
Question:
I don't doubt that the theory is mathematically beautiful, even if,
to this point, entirely untested and, possibly, intestable in practice.
But
doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?
Best,
Steve Goldberg
>>
New York Times April 4, 2000, Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring
Theory By GEORGE JOHNSON For a quarter of a century, superstring theory
has promised that the universe could be understood more deeply than ever
before, with all the forces unified into one, if it were seen in a startling
new light -- as a kind of mathematical music played by an orchestra of
tiny vibrating strings. Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent
one of the many different kinds of particles that make up matter and energy.
But despite heroic efforts to keep this strange vision alive, with one
mathematical embellishment after another, a seemingly fatal credibility
problem has remained: no one has been able to figure out how to test the
idea with experiments. To give the strings enough wiggle room to carry
out their virtuoso performance, theorists have had to supplement the familiar
three dimensions of space with six more -- curled up so tiny that they
would be explorable only with absurdly high-powered particle accelerators
the size of an entire galaxy. It's a fact of life on the subatomic realm
that smaller and smaller distances take higher and higher energies to
probe. In the last few months, however, new ideas emerging from the theoretical
workshops offer some hope of connecting the airy speculations to reality.
Physicists are proposing a revised view in which at least one of the extra
dimensions is vastly larger -- large enough perhaps to be indirectly detected
with existing accelerators. "This is a field day for the experimenters,"
said Dr. Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. "Now there are all these things they
can look for." In fact, he ventured, it is conceivable that experimenters
have already found subtle hints of other dimensions. They just have had
no way of appreciating what they were seeing. Though human brains are
not wired to picture a world beyond the familiar three dimensions of space,
one can begin to overcome this myopia by pretending to be antlike creatures
in a two-dimensional fantasy world like the one in Edwin A. Abbott's story
"Flatland." Confined to the surface of a plane, the Flatlanders
can move left and right or forward or backward, but the idea of up and
down is inconceivable to them. Now suppose this two-dimensional world
were rolled into a long tube. The Flatlanders could still move in only
two directions -- along or around the outside surface of their soda straw
universe. But if the diameter of the straw were made extremely tiny, this
second, curled-up dimension would essentially disappear. It has long been
assumed that if, as required by superstring theory, our own world is accompanied
by additional dimensions, they too would have to be extremely tiny, curled
up smaller than what physicists call the Planck length, which is a hundred
million trillion times smaller than the width of a proton. To every point
in space would be attached a vanishingly tiny six-dimensional ball. But
the price for curling up the extra dimensions and tucking them out of
sight has been rendering superstring theory untestable. The subatomic
realm is explored by smashing together particles with powerful accelerators
and then studying the debris. Peeking below the Planck scale would require
collisions of unimaginable energies. "For the first 25 years, the
thinking has been that superstring theory is so difficult to see experimentally
that you have to figure it out by its own mathematical consistency and
beauty," Dr. Lykken said. "Now that's completely changed. If
this new picture is true, it makes everything we've been talking about
testable." But the result is a picture of reality that is no less
weird than before. Imagine again the two-dimensional realm of Flatland.
Suppose now that it is surrounded by an infinitely large, three-dimensional
"hyperspace." And maybe there are also other Flatlands floating
around inside the third dimension -- parallel universes separated by what
to these two-dimensional denizens would be an uncrossable void. Take this
vision and move up an extra dimension and you arrive at the theory that
is currently causing all the intellectual commotion. Dr. Lisa Randall
of Princeton University and Dr. Raman Sundrum of Stanford University suggest
that what we think of as The Universe may be just one of many islands
-- three-dimensional versions of Flatland -- floating inside a surrounding
megaverse with four spatial dimensions. Each ruled by different laws of
physics, the various island universes would be inaccessible to one another.
But the tantalizing prospect exists that each would be able to barely
sense the other's presence through the weak tug of its gravitational pull.
The idea may be easy to dismiss as absurd. But in return for a suspension
of disbelief, the new theories suggest answers to some of the biggest
riddles of physics. Cosmologists have inferred that as much as 90 percent
of the universe must be made from invisible matter that emits or absorbs
no light, that is evident only through its gravity. But what is the source
of this mysterious dark matter? Maybe it is just ordinary matter trapped
on another island universe, with its gravity but not its light able to
cross the fourth-dimensional divide. Most significant of all, the new
theory could be a step toward the goal of embracing all of physics with
one grand picture -- a vision that unites the reigning theory of gravity,
Einstein's general relativity, with the Standard Model, which describes
electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Theorists have
discovered that it is possible to bring about this merger -- on paper,
anyway -- if each kind of particle making up the universe is described
as a different note produced by tiny superstrings vibrating in nine-dimensional
space. This picture includes matter-making particles like the proton and
neutron (components of the cores of atoms) and force-carrying particles
like the photon (the conveyor of light) and the graviton (the conveyor
of gravity). As the unification quest has forged ahead, physicists have
found it necessary to expand superstring theory to include vibrating membranes
-- called branes for short. These are not just two-dimensional surfaces,
like the skin of a drum or the world of the Flatlanders. Hard as it may
be to picture, there can be branes with three, four, five or more dimensions.
These "surfaces" can be tiny like the strings but they can also
span across light-years. What this additional filigree offers is a novel
way to hide extra dimensions without making them extremely small. Suppose
that our entire universe is a three-dimensional brane (think of it as
a bubble) floating inside the four-dimensional megaverse. The reason we
cannot explore the surroundings of hyperspace or even sense its existence
is that the strings that make up everything in our own world are stuck
solidly to the surface of the gargantuan home brane, like ants on a sheet
of paper confined to move in only a limited number of directions. We cannot
peer into the extra dimension because photons, the carriers of light,
are also anchored solidly to our home brane. Several people had toyed
with this idea, but they kept running into an obstacle: there did not
appear to be any way to get gravitons to stick to the brane. That would
create a big problem: It can be shown mathematically that if gravity were
allowed to roam throughout all four dimensions, it would be much stronger
than the gravity experienced in this three-dimensional realm. "This
would clash with everything we've observed, from the motion of the planets
to that of climbers falling off cliffs," said Dr. Steve Giddings,
a theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Randall
and Dr. Sundrum's theoretical coup was to show that if the hyperspace
was curved in just the right manner, the gravitons could be kept from
escaping and becoming unreasonably strong. With that hole plugged, the
possibility arises that there are other brane worlds floating out there
too, neighboring islands separated by this higher dimensional void. And
that suggests how dark matter could simply be regular matter waving to
us from another brane. While its photons could move only along the surface
of the foreign brane, the gravitons would not be so tightly confined.
They could seep across the fourth-dimensional divide. Thus we could dimly
feel the matter's gravity without being able to see its light. The theory
also suggests why dark matter tends to be found in the halos around galaxies.
Because of gravitational attraction, large masses on the other brane would
tend to line up with large masses on our home brane. Sitting behind a
galaxy in this universe, separated by the void of hyperspace, would be
a dark galaxy in the other brane world. Because most of it would be occluded,
its gravity would be apparent only around the edges. Conversely, luminous
matter on this brane would be dark to observers in the other universe.
"We'd look mutually dark to each other," Dr. Sundrum said. "We
could only talk through the gravitational force." That would require
signaling somehow with gravity waves. Unlike many of physics' far-out
theories, the idea of a large extra dimension may be possible to test
indirectly. Since gravitons are not so tightly confined as the other particles,
sometimes they will stray into the surrounding hyperspace, becoming heavier
than the ordinary variety. According to the theorists' calculations, it
just may be possible to create momentarily these denizens of the fourth
dimension using the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, where protons are
slammed into antiprotons to produce energies measured in trillions of
electron-volts. Physicists would not be able to detect heavy gravitons
directly -- they would immediately fly off into the higher dimension --
but their existence might be inferred. Energy going into a particle collision
must equal the energy coming out. If some is missing and all other possibilities
are accounted for, physicists could surmise that the energy was spirited
away by the heavy gravitons, carried off into hyperspace. In fact, it
might be possible to concentrate so many heavy gravitons into a tiny volume
of space that they would collapse in on themselves and create miniature
black holes, those cosmic sinkholes from which nothing can escape. Experiments
like this will be on the agenda when the Large Hadron Collider begins
operation in five or six years at the CERN accelerator center in Geneva.
"These black holes should be quite safe," Dr. Giddings said,
for they would rapidly evaporate. The intellectual fun may be only beginning.
Combining the Randall and Sundrum theory with a conjecture made a couple
of years ago by a young Argentinian physicist, Dr. Juan Maldacena, yields
the latest big idea: the physics governing the particles stuck to this
brane might be a kind of shadow of a more fundamental physics prevailing
in the surrounding megaverse. In laser holography, a three-dimensional
image is encoded onto a two-dimensional surface. Viewed at the proper
angle, the third dimension seems magically to pop out. So think of each
separate brane world as a hologram carrying a flattened version of the
Truly Universal Laws. Each would capture the view from a slightly different
perspective, resulting in different universes ruled by different laws
of physics. What denizens of this universe call the Standard Model would
not be standard at all, but more like a book of local traffic laws. Viewed
from the fourth dimension, however, universality would prevail. If they
were clever enough, scientists on each brane world could deduce the same
overarching law of gravity, the lingua franca of the megaverse. As they
await the data that will provide a reality check, the physicists on this
brane are enjoying their new intellectual toy. "We can look at any
question we were previously mystified by and get a new handle on it,"
Dr. Lykken said. "That doesn't mean this is right, but it makes theorists
very happy." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
**
the sun. Then MAP will settle down to capturing microwave photons that
have been traveling for about 13 billion years, almost since the beginning
of time. For its first 300,000 years, the universe was a hot cauldron
ofprotons, electrons, and other charged particles. Light coul&t travel
far in this boiling subatomic stew before it bounced off some electron,
just as light inside a cloud scatters off droplets of water. The early
universe would have looked rather like a thick fog bank-opaque. But after
300,000 years, it cooled off enough to undergo a profound change: Electrons
settled down and combined with protons to form hydrogen, which is transparent.
Once the fog dispersed, photons traveled freely throughout the universe.
Those photons -light from the dawn of creation-bathe us here on Earth;
about 400 of them fill every cubic centimeter. If you use an antenna for
television reception instead of cable, photons from the cosmic microwave
background cause some of the snow on your television screen. Lyman Page
likes to call that radiation "the universe's baby picture."
m" will study that image in unprecedented detail. For its Survey,
COBF divided the sky into about 6,ooo patches, each about as large as
400 fiffl moons. mAp will look at more than 3 million patches, each less
than a quarter the size of moon. If coBE glimpsed God, mAp will see the
deity's fmg!e@- prints. Cosmologists expect many of their answers to come
from an echo frozen in the microwave background. As strange as it may
seem, cosmologists believe that before the primbr- dial fog cleared, before
light could travel unhindered throli& space, sound waves reverberated
freely throughout the universe. The sound waves may have originated in
the first instant of the universe's life, when the cosmos underwent an
extra- ordinary expansion. In fact, some astronomers would rather call
the Big Bang the "Big Stretch." Within a billionth of a billionth
of a billionth of a second, a region of space smaller than a proton is
thought to have ballooned to the size of Earth. Cosmologists refer to
this extraordinary growth as inflation. No one really knows what drove
it, but by stretch- ing the very fabric of space, it magnified a weird
subatomic phenomenon that is today detectable only in the careful ex-
periments of particle physicists: the spontaneous material- ization of
particles from a complete vacuum. Vacuum-spawned particles are constantly
flickering in and out of existence around us, arising from and sinking
back into the void. During inflation, this process, Uc everything else
in the universe, was magnified mmendously.'Me rapidly expanding early
universe imparted enough energy to these particle wannabes that instead
of quickly subsiding into the vacuum, they remained in the real world.
The sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like a stone
thrown into the dense particle pond of the early universe, sending out
ripples -pressure waves. And pressure waves through a gas are nothing
more than sound waves. The en- Ltire universe rang like a bell. THOSE
REVERBERATIONS WERE ABRUPTLY SILENCED 13 billion years ago, when the universe
became transpar- ent. Once photons were traveling freely through space,
there was no longer enough pressure to support the sound waves. But before
fading forever, those echoes of creation had left their mark on the cosmic
microwave background. When sound waves were still spreading through the
uni- verse, they compressed the particle soup in some regions of the cosmos
and rarefied it in others. Pressure changes cause temperature changes
-increase the pressure in a gas and the temperature increases. Microwave
photons com- ing from these various regions have slightly different tem-
peratures. By looking at temperature patterns in the microwave background,
MAP Will give researchers the in- formation needed to reconstruct the
precise size and shape of the primordial sound waves. The temperature
patterns show the universe just as it was when the particle fog- and the
sound waves -vanished. "It's almost like you had waves propagating
in a pond, and all of a sudden the pond froze and the pattern ofwaves
stayed there says Hinshaw. "We're capturing that-' a snapshot of
the time when the universe became transparent." The single most important
thing the sound waves will re- veal is the amount of matter present in
the universe. If there is a Holy Grail for cosmologists, this is it. Whether
the uni- verse will expand forever, or collapse back onto itself in a
fiery "Big Crunch," depends on how much matter it holds. With
sufficient matter, gravity could slow down or even re- verse the expansion.
With too little matter, and thus too lit- tle gravity, the expansion will
never end; galaxies will gradually sputter out until the entire universe
darkens. Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire,
/ Some say in ice." mAp could settle the issue. Cosmologists have
struggled for decades to measure the matter in the universe. They've tried
to infer it by carefully studying the motions of galaxies and calculating
how much matter and gravity would be necessary to produce the ob- served
movements. Their calculations show that visible mat- ter- stars and galaxies
- accounts for less than zo percent of the required gravity. The rest
is attributed to an unknown entity that cosmologists call dark matter.
MAP will discover not only the total amount of matter but how much of
it is in the form of dark matter. One of the paradoxes of the early universe,*that
it is so easy to describe, says Charles Bennett. Si@@ the physics of sound
waves are very well understood, cosmologists don't need much more than
freshman phocs to model the phe- nomena mAp will be studying.just as a
wave traveling through viscous oil will have a different size and shape
than one mov- ing through water, so will the composition of the early
uni- verse strictly define the size and shape of the sound waves measured
by mAp. Bylooking at the shape of the waves, cos- mologists will know
how much matter the universe contains, and thus its fate -fire or ice.
mAp should also give cosmologists their best v@lues for a number of other
quantities, including the Ifubble constant, which indicates how fast the
universe is expanding. An accu- rate fix on the expansion rate will make
it possible to gauge how long it took the universe to reach its present
size. Know- ing the expansion rate and matter density will allow them
to establish the age of the universe. Of course, there's always the possibility
that mAp won@t find the evidence they expect to find of sound waves, meaning
the theory cosmologists have relied on for the past few decades to explain
the universe- inflation- is somehow wrong. "It may be that the universe
will have the last laugh and that none of the models will come close to
fitting the MAP data," says Neil Cornish, a 32-year-old cosmologist
at Mon- tana State University in Bozeman. 'Then we'll be back to the drawing
board." The odds, however, are better than even that mAp will detect
the sound waves. In fact, Page and his colleague Aluk Devlin reported
last fall that they had already found some tantalizing traces in ground-based
observations. The string of MAPs potential discoveries will satisfy most
cosmologists, but not a team of three astrophysicists and one mathematician.
The four men, only one of whom is of- ficiaffy on the mAp team, have devised
a scheme to use MAPs data to work out the overall geometric shape of the
universe. ON THE DOOR OF DAVID SPERGEUS OFFICE AT PRINCETON, a cartoon
clipped from The New Yorker shows a close-up of a city sidewalk, with
a fire hydrant and sewer grating. The caption reads: "The MilkyWay
(Detail)." Spergel, who has just returned from dropping his son off
at school, is ex- plaining why he has problems with an infinite universe.
"In an infinite volume, eventually I can find a patch in which the
atoms are arranged just the way we see them here in my office. We could
be having this conversation an infuiite num- ber of times. So a truly
infinite universe is strange." The alternative is no less strange.
"In a finite universe," article on Big Bang and new space probe
designed to explore it DISCOVER MAY 2000 49
_______________________________
Frank Fox has provided the following remarkable example of a diversity
generator at work. This one, in which flashy males bunting finches elbow
out their competitors-birds almost as spiffy as they are but not quite.
Instead the dominant males, the ones with the most splendid feathers,
make room for downright schlumpfy males as their neighbors. Then they
do a bit of hanky pankying with the females of the scruffy birds next
door.
Setting the sexual aspect aside, we've got a perfect example here of lateral
inhibition, a phenomenon which shows up in mass behavior from the level
of humans to that of populations of sensory neurons and even in the evolution
of galactic and solar systems. In humans, those who go for power tend
to attack most savagely their direct competitors-the folks most similar
to them in style and substance. Marx levelled his most ferocious salvos
against fellow socialists. Lenin was more intent on demolishing Marxists
from rival groups-such as the Social Democrats-than he was on exterminating
the capitalists. Stalin was the same. Trotsky was a greater threat to
him than Hitler or Churchill, despite the fact that Hitler's platform
promised the extirpation of socialism. Stalin also took Lenin's hatred
of Marxist Social Democrats to a greater level of ferocity than even Lenin
had-not an easy thing to accomplish, given Lenin's skill at mass murder.
Stalin called for the utter annihilation of Social Democrats, the death
of every last one. Global Brain calls this "creative bickering."
It increases the number of alternative hypotheses available in the group
mind.
In the inanimate world, would-be galactic masses appear to compete for
the loose matter of an expanding universe. Those which seduce scraps and
bits of dust and rock into joining them gain more gravitational pull and
are able to scarf up yet more of the debris in their vicinity. Micro gravitational
centers grow to macro size. Macro scraps like asteroids pull yet more
to their bosoms and race toward larger scale. Meanwhile the competing
bits clean out the spaces in between themselves, preventing their inanimate
competitors from acquiring yet more. Most, however, are in turm acquired
by yet more successful gravitational attractors. Those which succeed big
time swirl the junk they've collected around themselves in the familiar
galactic whorl. Meanwhile, lesser competitors circling in thrall to these
cental masters also compete and clean out the space between them, inhibiting
the further growth of those most like them and those competing in the
same geographic (or is that astrographic?) territory. The central dancemasters
of material substance are galactic nuclei-most of of which become black
holes. Their lesser subjects ignite as suns. The next rank of winners
in the gravitational game consolidate as planets. Planets like our earth
continue the practice of impoverishing the space between them by scooping |