EPISODE 56

The Carolyn and Joe show have witnessed Criss Angel in person! Find out how, only on the newest Carolyn and Joe Show! Plus additional stories that will tingle the nerve endings like, seeing MJ everywhere, Lost is the DC universe, little boys putting on girl thongs and being trapped in a blizzard and MORE! Bum Bum BUMMM. Enjoy.

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String and Unification theory people are excited about the new theory posited by Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois.

The theory requires some back story: Several different scientific groups that have been studying gravitational waves were picking up unexpected (and unexplained) noise between 300 and 1500 hertz. Independently these research teams had been trying to figure out why their gravitational wave detectors were picking up this noise, described as “an extra sideways jitter.”

It turns out Hogan’s theory mathamatically predicted the pattern of the noise, using the idea that space was not the smooth expanse of general relativity predicted by Einstein, but instead that our universe, and reality, was a result of light bouncing off of a physical process in a 2D environment creating a hologram. Because I’m not a scientist, and just a nerd, I’ll let the New Scientist Article do the grunt work of explaining exactly what that means:

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointeddirector of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and ‘t Hooft’s remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely “black” but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein’s work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole’s entropy – which is synonymous with its information content – is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and ‘t Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too – the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What’s more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length, a mere 10^-35 metres. The Planck length is far beyond the reach of any conceivable experiment, so nobody dared dream that the graininess of space-time might be discernable.

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. “Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,” says Hogan.

So all of this is good news for theoretical physics, especially the string theory/ M theory people who predict that our entire universe exists on the membrane of a larger space, inside an 11 dimensional environment.

However, the same issue that plagues String theory and M theory is going to apply to hologram theory: while there might be some good circumstantial evidence for the theory, it’s not one that can be “proved” in a lab setting, and therefore doesn’t fall into the realm of science so much as philosophy.

Will we ever understand how life, the universe, and everything works without a provable theory? Are human beings even capable of exploring the universe beyond our own physical and technological limitations? So far human exploration into the functioning of reality has left us with more questions than answers. Newton’s theory of gravity was correct…to a point, as was Einstein’s theory of relativity. But there’s a point in our exploration where then known world, and science breaks down and we are unable to explain things beyond our own human experience.

gift for Jo
about 4 feet tall by 3 wide
©2010 Daniel Wetmore

See Part 1 & 2… (continued)

So back to how I believe the Universe works and how “karma/darma” operates. The Universe is intelligence beyond our comprehension.  Ours is one of an infinite number of Universes and ours is one of an infinite number of dimensions. The best way to describe it is a circle within a circle within a circle forever smaller and larger than the circle we occupy. The Great Intelligence is infinite in every direction without beginning or end. It does not directly create, have judgment or take sides.

Actually, it is my belief that the Great Intelligence (I don’t want to call it God or Goddess because these terms are to anthropomorphic and loaded) is an energetic field in and part of all of creation – meaning each of us carries a piece of this animating force known in occult literature as the Higher Self or in religious vernacular, the soul.

So we literally have direct access to the Great Intelligence. All of us are equally connected, equally a part of this Great Intelligence as the Great Intelligence experiences/learns and grows through our processes of individuation which is also and equally a part of the Great Intelligences’ individuation and growth process – in other words we are one and the same, all of creation is directly linked to the Great Intelligence.

This being said, conversely the Great Intelligence is eternal, all-knowing, pure unconditional love. And I don’t mean love as an emotion, but love as a beingness or energetic glue of oneness which in our language is best expressed as love. The Great Intelligence is in a constant state of creative evolution and experiences all of Itself (of which I’m including you, I, and everything in the Everythingness) as an extension of itself. The Great Intelligence does not possess human emotions, motives or anything we can remotely wrap our heads around. This is where karma/darma comes in. Each Universe is set up with a set of rules and conditions that those who occupy that Universe must abide by. Our Universe is dualistic; we have light and dark, good and evil, black and white, man and woman and all that lay in-between these opposites.

In our Universe we can not know one side without experiencing the other. It is through contrast that we learn and evolve, for whatever reason this is the path our soul took in this lifetime to learn whatever it needed to in order to further our own individuation and add to the collective growth/knowledge and self-understanding of the Great Intelligence. Or, hey, maybe we just like it and find it fun and entertaining.

We know through science that time is an illusion and actually as quantum physics evolves (through string theory) the notion of parallel dimensions has become a primary component, without this string theory is rendered useless. Just by extrapolation of this theory (which dovetails well with ancient occult teachings) there are endless versions of our world where: you are born, you are not born, you decide to marry, not marry, have children, not have children, etc. And of course you are but one component of the endless possibilities and how all these things coalesce to make for the current universe we inhabit. In a sense karma helps to keep the balance among all these possibilities, without this law our souls could not make the connection between the light and dark or between action and reaction.

Karma in other words is the connective tissue between the call and the answer. I don’t believe it is punishment or favor. It is nothing more than a universal law set up so we may understand how our actions create and effect our world, loved ones, future trajectories, and really everything.

In eastern religions it is thought that we are on a wheel of Samsara or suffering. That our world is a kind of purgatory from which the ultimate goal is to ascend. I don’t believe that either. In this version of karma the idea is to reach a state of karma-lessness through meditation, and never causing injury (or help for that matter) to anything whether it be ant or human. The problem with this idea is (of which there are many in my opinion) is in order to live someone else has to die, be that plant, animal or even microbes that one breathes. There is no escaping the impact one will have by the very act of being alive. And hiding away on a mountain to meditate all night and day, eating only things without faces is a form of escapism (in my opinion, not that one doesn’t learn a lot about the soul and ones connection to the Great Intelligence this way, one does, and there is great wisdom to garner from a lifetime spent in meditation, but it won’t get anyone off the wheel).

I have this opinion because I would like nothing more than to spend all day in a tower meditating, having someone else put some bread and a bowl of soup at my door for me to “evolve” off the wheel of Samsara. But from my own memories I’ve spent many lifetimes doing just that, and I’m still here. And we have the example of the Dali Lama who keeps coming back despite leading countless ascetic hermetic lives. I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to hide away in this lifetime because I realized life was and is meant to be lived, mistakes are meant to be, and one moves off the wheel, or off this planet whenever one feels he or she is ready. It’s really that simple. What isn’t simple is our souls are far wiser than we are and hold us to a standard not easy to pass until we are truly ready and have exhausted all growth needed to move on

….In other words I believe we participate out of choice, a choice to grow and become greater than we started and whatever it is in the human experience that moves us forward, it is one of many experiences our soul will have in its eternal life. And we can choice to incarnate here or there or wherever. We have to play by the rules of the game we get into and that is that. Let’s face it hanging on the astral plane and reading the Akashic records all day would get pretty boring after awhile and one would hunger for a new way to experience the self just as the Great Intelligence hungers to grow more intelligent and to experience the self through all of Its many facets and pieces.

In part 4 I’ll talk about heaven and hell…

Best to all,

Denise

So in my opinion karma/darma is one in a set of governing laws provided as boundaries/laws which evolved to move us and the Great Intelligence (of which we are one with) forward. Christ said, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within,” a quote often overlooked and in many ways misunderstood. What he meant isn’t you can find internal peace or happiness inside, but that the way to Heaven (or the Great Intelligence) is through the divine part of the self, the part that is at one with the Great Intelligence, the part that returns to the eternal oneness, the part that is itself eternal just as the Great Intelligence is, sometimes referred to as the soul, spirit, higher-self.

We are like innumerable sparks taken from the Great Intelligence, cast out by It on myriad of adventures to expand, grow and bring back greater knowledge of the Great Self.

I had a knowing in my early 20s that we were all Individual and all One at the same time. That the nature of our dualistic universe does not allow us to see beyond Ain Soph to Kether. These restrictions are placed on us so we will stay grounded in our agreed upon time and space, so we may interact in order to learn the lessons we feel we need to learn in order to grow.

As odd as it seems, it’s been my experience and belief that to a lesser or greater degree we are co-creators of our lives. I do not believe in The Secret’s idea of this. It is far more complicated, delicate and random than the New Age has sold this idea. I do not believe people born into poverty or to terrible parents did awful things in their past lives. Chances are better that these are highly evolved souls who choose a more difficult path, one they knew would be fraught with sacrifice and hardship in order to learn far more than those who live an easy life.

I do not believe being wealthy, famous or born into those privileges are a blessing. Instead I believe they create distortion, a bubble of isolation, misunderstanding of the world around, often a lack of empathy, a feeling of aimlessness and self-absorption. Faust sold his soul to the devil for fame and fortune and indeed this metaphor is apt. In our narcissistic culture it seems everyone is all too ready to sell even their children soul (such as Balloon Man) for a taste of fame – a tiny rush of power and a chance at prosperity.

Yet all that we seek here in the west, fame, fortune, power over others – those things that have become hallmarks of being “special,” actually take us away from the true experience of life and those things that are actually precious. It is no accident that Christ said, “It’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of heaven.” And what he meant was: the more one looks outward for reward (through riches, power, fame) the further one gets from their connection to God/Great Intelligence as they fall into a bubble of narcissistic power tripping that others are all to happy to indulge due to their own ego driven narcissistic tendencies.

Take for example the recent example of Andrew Young’s book The Politician which exemplifies this idea. From Young’s interview (I haven’t read the book yet) he seemed to lack insight and of course this was and is to his benefit. He sold his soul to be close to power. John Edwards may have been his devil, but Young was surely Faust, and his attempt to purge his conscious and clear his name lacked the same insight. He didn’t seem to understand the position Elizabeth Edwards was put in, or have much compassion for her – a woman who was diagnosed with cancer and had her husband lie and cheat on her. I suppose this was because his ego was bruised from his participation in her injury and the fact that she took out her anger on him in her desire to believe her husband. I’m not saying she was perfect or that she didn’t have issues. But it’s clear that she was a typical woman, she’d been in love and married to the same man (faithfully) for 30 years. Gone through the loss of a child with this man, supported his dreams and sublimated her own desires for his. Young mentioned that they had an “odd” relationship, that Elizabeth was more like a mother than anything else to John.

Well, this is often the case when both partners are in love with the same person – in other words she was in love with a narcissist, but I’d hate to give narcissists such a bad name, I think we can go several steps farther and say this man was more likely a non-violent sociopath (they do exist – an excellent book on the topic is called The Sociopath Next Door). John Edwards not only lacked empathy, he was pathological in his lack of care for those he “loved.” His crazed narcissistic high was so great he was willing to throw everyone,  under the bus, including his dying wife, his best friends, his mistress and the whole of the Democratic Party for his own selfish ambition. Let’s face it if the dude had gotten the nomination and his affair and love child came out then, well, hey we’d have 8 years with Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the red button. That to me proves he is at the darkest levels of selfishness besides his pathological lying, cheating and general douchbaggery.

Part 3 of karma tomorrow…

as a child
things are one-sided
blind-sighted
as you try to fight it

the dimensions add
once you mention that
second dimension and
feel apprehension’s hand

this staircase is invented
angles beyond angles dangle
inverted in endless tetris

How long is a piece of string? depends where you cut it. String is amzing stuff and used in so many different ways. Tying up loos ends is another phrase that comes to mind and could be related to string, also String theory A ball of string as in the above photo changes context when compared to a length of string.

Quote:
It’s allright now–I learned my lesson well. You see, you can’t please everyone: you got to please yourself.

Tennessee has proposed a bill to allow only married couples to adopt children. It has failed once, I think. What is surprising is not that the bill has been proposed (this IS Tennessee, after all), but that it initially failed. It is still being pushed forward though and is getting it’s turn at being considered again. What do you expect? It’s Tennessee.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde
of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and
internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational
attraction could be the result of the way information about material
objects is organised in space. If true, it could provide the
fundamental explanation we have been seeking for decades.
link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527443.800-the-entropy-force-a-new-direction-for-gravity.html

Wandering Cities That Roam The Steppes
link:
http://io9.com/5454406/wandering-cities-that-roam-the-steppes/gallery/#

Quote:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson (1912-2002)

Some of the COOLEST ARCHITECTURE IN THE WORLD:
link:
http://www.offbeatearth.com/33-of-the-worlds-strangest-buildings/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+OffbeatEarth+(Offbeat+Earth)&utm_content=Google+Reader

Real-Time 3D Modeling for Augmented Reality
These two videos below show how on the fly modeling of objects can help create a fully interactive world with occlusion, shadows and other 3D illusions needed to created reality out of pixels.
link:
http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2010/01/22/real-time-3d-modeling-for-augmented-reality/

Daredevil Space Diver To Leap Toward World’s First Supersonic Free-Fall From 120,000 Feet — he will take a balloon up, then jump, using a canopy of some sort to slow himself down before re-entry. He is wearing a space-suit type apparatus, by the way.
link:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/120000-foot-jump-daredevil-space-diver-become-first-human-break-sound-barrier-free-fall

Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones Blog
One hundred questions answered about the coming age of our own cyberconsciousness and techno-immortality.
link:
http://mindclones.blogspot.com/

Quote:
If you can keep your head about you while all others are losing theirs, you’ll have the pick of the hats. ~~ Maximilien Robespierre

Sorry for the extended hiatus.  I will get back with other posts and part III of my spiritual autobiography soon.  In the mean time:

The mouse over text for this abstruse goose comic is, “God is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we CAN suppose … or something like that.”

by Carl Strang

Winter is a time when we slow down and become introspective. Sitting and staring into the fire, we ponder the big questions. If you have been following this blog, you know that the focus here is science, science that can be done simply in outdoor settings. But we are more than scientists, and science has well defined limitations that need to be understood by everyone who does science or studies its findings. This winter I am using one post per week to develop my own viewpoint and biases, in particular sharing my take on the relationship between science and spirituality. In part this defines for me what these two realms of human experience are all about, and also develops the separate methods used for inquiry in each realm. I plan to place this paragraph in front of each entry in this series, so that those who are interested only in natural history or in scientific practice can skip these posts.

Bringing Quantum and Relativistic Physics Together

Certain theoretical and experimental outcomes of quantum theory demonstrate that events removed from one another in space somehow influence one another, as though communicating with one another, despite the fact that they are too far apart for anything traveling at light speed to connect them. These “nonlocal phenomena” or “entanglements” are difficult to explain. They exemplify a conflict between quantum theory and general relativity theory (i.e., both can’t be correct as currently understood) that scientists are attempting to resolve. The theorists’ emphasis on what happened at the Big Bang is tied into this conflict, because it is there that the universe was so small that quantum and relativity effects would have influenced one another strongly. During the Big Bang the universe inflated from less than marble sized to billions of light-years across in the first 10^-35 second, a quandary again because of the implied faster-than-light speed. The universe now is understood to consist of a smattering of ordinary matter, much more unseen dark matter, ordinary energy, and a huge amount of poorly understood dark energy. This dark energy apparently is causing the universe to experience a newer round of less explosive but accelerating expansion. The first stars appeared 400 million years after the Big Bang, and we are now at the 13.7-billion-year-point seeing their grandchildren, stars of later generations.

Stephen Hawking devoted his 2001 book The Universe in a Nutshell to discussing theories of quantum gravity, which are needed to bring large scale general relativity together with small scale quantum uncertainties. Hawking is a proponent of M-theory, which is the current form of what earlier was called superstring theory (according to which the elementary particles all are composed of one-dimensional, string-like entities that vibrate in different ways to produce the different particles). M-theory, which also is strongly based on the physics of black holes, describes the universe as having been derived from the interactions of complexly vibrating, multidimensional “branes” (extra-dimensional expansions of the one-dimensional strings). These branes are said to be in close proximity, and their cymbal-like collisions create the wave patterns with holographic properties that we experience as our universe.

M-theory has the biggest following at present, but not all physicists buy into it. The leading contender is loop quantum gravity, described by one of its principal proponents, Lee Smolin, in a January 2004 Scientific American article. One basic idea of loop quantum gravity theory is that not only is matter composed of elementary particles, but time and space as well are built up of tiny indivisible units.

I recently finished reading another book on this subject, The Labyrinth of Time, by Michael Lockwood (2005). Lockwood delves more deeply into the history, derivation, advantages and limitations of the various theories I’ve been discussing, and adds other significant ones I haven’t mentioned. His book occasionally touches upon mathematical formalities that I don’t fully understand.  He characterizes the difficulty of bringing quantum physics and general relativity together by saying that no one has found a way to reconcile the changing curvature of space over time (i.e., space-time’s structure as general relativity describes it) with the structure of quantum fields that describe matter. I am left with the impression that while M-theory does indeed have the largest following among physicists, it requires flattening out the curvature of space-time, translating it into other terms that some physicists (including loop quantum gravity supporters) are unwilling to accept. These matters are far from settled. However, holographic properties of the universe are common to both M-theory and loop quantum gravity.

Today I will begin to discuss the universe-as-hologram notion more fully. That idea, along with the illusion of time as a separable quality, have the most profound impact on how to interpret our experience of this amazing reality, in my view. Here, I suspect that I am favoring what Lockwood refers to (p. 359) as “a strong holographic principle, which teeters on the edge of mysticism.”

One prominent physicist who has thought deeply about holographic properties of the universe is American David Bohm. My source here is Talbot’s Holographic Universe book. Bohm’s model describes the entire universe as a seamless whole (and so ties into Einstein’s notion that matter is folded space-time), but interconnected in such a way that each part reflects the whole. There are no “parts,” in fact, though the structure is differentiated. Bohm believes that all things are enfolded throughout the universe, which Bohm sees as an explicate order reflecting an underlying implicate order that ties it all together. His own term for the model is “holomovement,” so as to avoid the static image of a hologram.

I was fascinated to read that one of Bohm’s metaphors is one I came up with on my own in 1986. I was walking in Maple Grove Forest Preserve in late March, practicing advanced awareness techniques. Quoting from my journal: “At one point, as I succeeded in becoming … sensitive to the forest around me, I grew conscious of the fact that I am not as separate an entity as my ego would have me believe. Rather, I felt that I was a focus or eddy of energy within the matrix of the spiritual flow of reality.” I was struck by the notion that we all could be part of a universal whole, and yet entities of our own, if we were like river or lake features. In a river there are tiny whirlpools, waves, eddies, holes and so forth that are part of the river and its flow and yet are distinguishable features. Their boundaries are more or less distinct, though the closer you look the harder they are to draw. Lakes similarly have waves which cycle through increasing energy until they crest, then start over again.

Compare that to this description of a Bohm metaphor as passed along by Talbot (p. 49): “…he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to determine where any given whirlpool ends and the rest of the river begins” (though the location of that boundary sometimes is very important to whitewater kayakers). “Thus Bohm is not suggesting that the differences between ‘things’ is meaningless. He merely wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the holomovement into ‘things’ is always an abstraction, a way of making those aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking.”

Sheik Khaled Bentounès (2002. Sufism: the heart of Islam) describes an Islamic perspective that sounds like this characterization of the holographic universe: “In our tradition, we say that the entire universe is contained in the four Holy Books, the four Holy Books in The Qur’an, which is itself contained in fatiha, itself contained in the invocation, the basmala (in the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful), which is contained in the letter ba (ب ), itself found in the dot under letter ba. We go from the universal, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, from the macrocosm to the microcosm―the dot―which is the origin of all things. It is the dot that contains the whole universe.”

Here’s another relevant quote from Bentounès: “I discover that to love others is to love God, and is also to love oneself, for many people hate themselves; they do not accept what they are. By doing so, they do not accept God, when that which He has made of me and what He has given me is true and right. As a creature, I must be aware of this fact and love what I am. We are not talking here about the love of the ego. Our individuality does exist, but in fact it integrates into the Ultimate Being and harmonizes itself with the whole, just like the grain of sand in the dune; unfortunately people usually live to care for this individualistic ego which seeks but its own interest and which breathes for no other reason but to satisfy its ephemeral needs.” He also makes reference to the wave metaphor, quoting a poem by Sheikh Al Alawea: “They realized that every manifestation / Is identical to its root / For the wave is no longer seen / In the immensity of the ocean.”

The holograph idea adds depth to the Golden Rule, and to the notion that healing acts of any kind heal the whole, not just the person or place to which the healing is applied. I will have more to say about the implications of holographic ideas, as well as those of time-as-illusion.

“NEXUS” (Working title) – Film still – Mr J Landon 2010

Ever since Newton discovered gravitational force, people tried to understand how it worked. Unlike other forces gravity continued to puzzle scientists and people all the same.

Gravity – A Weak Force

Gravity is a weak force. The gravitational force is given by

.

Where is a constant, and is mass of the two respective bodies. Now, why do I call it as weak force?

Consider this scenario, when you are combing your hair, the hair falls down. When you calculate gravitational force, it take the entire mass of earth to act over a single hair. To make things worse, all you need is the static energy from the comb to lift the hair from floor. And yet you can not rule this force altogether. There were several theories put forward to explain gravitational force. Several approaches include string theory and quantum mechanics treatments.

Holographic Universe

Newton’s theory on gravity was often challenged by other theories. One of Newton’s contemporaries and natural philosopher Robert Hooke put forward a elasticity theory to explain gravity. However Hooke could not last long, and for a brief time Newton had the last laugh. But the controversies surrounding gravity dint stop there. Holographic hypothesis was one such recent theory put forward.

Holographic principle describes the volume of space is possibly enclosed on a boundary to the region, some thing like a gravitational horizon. It heavily depends on string theory and quantum gravity.

End of Gravity as Fundamental Force

In a recent paper published by Erik. P. Verlinde, a theoretical physicist, observes

One of the main points of this paper is that the holographic hypothesis provides a natural mechanism for gravity to emerge. It allows direct “contact” interactions between degrees of freedom associated with one material body and another, since all bodies inside a volume can be mapped on the same holographic screen. Once this is done, the mechanisms for Newton’s gravity and Hooke’s elasticity are surprisingly similar. We suspect that neither of these rivals would have been happy with this conclusion.

So, as it goes, it looks like time has caught up with Newton’s gravitational theory. A detailed explanation can be found here and Erik Verlinde’s explanation on his paper.

SIMON SINGH – “THE CODE BOOK” (1999)

Fascinated by codes as a kid, this entertaining history of ciphers takes us all the way from the Ancient World, where messages would be written across paper rolled around a stick, to the near future where quantum computers will finally provide us with an unbreakable means of encryption.

In between we are treated to many historical asides such as Babbage’s early computer, the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, and the war-winning breaking of the sophisticated Nazi code machine ‘Enigma‘ by unsung hero Alan Turing, a major chapter in the centuries old struggle between code makers and code breakers.

Rich in detail, bursting with intrigues and eccentrics, Singh makes an already thrilling subject come alive without overly tiring the reader in the often complex mathematics behind the various forms of secret writing discussed.

BRIAN GREENE – “THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE” (2000)

Having thoroughly enjoyed Greene’s second volume ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos,’ I was really looking forward to more of the same in this, his first popular work.

Part one of the book covers the familiar territory of cosmology (the macro world as described by Einstein) and quantum mechanics (the description of the sub-atomic world), both of which theories are in themselves correct and demonstrable for their own realms, but which are at odds with each other.

So far, so good: nothing that I had not encountered before, and I found Greene’s lucid explanations helpful in reinforcing my knowledge and understanding of these areas.

The problems begin, however, when Greene moves into String Theory, his speciality, the main contender for a new universal theory which will be able to explain away both the micro and macro worlds which have hitherto appeared totally incompatible.

Perhaps it is my admitted lack of ability in following logic, but it was at this stage that I soon found myself hopelessly lost and bewildered, not being able to comprehend the main thrust of the argument.

This is regrettable, since the book is an attempt at presenting this difficult theory to the layperson, which in my opinion fails, in stark contrast with the ease with which I could work through ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos.’

Indeed, my lack of comprehension eventually resulted in that rare event for me, the abandonment of the book before the end.

Very disappointing.

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have been instrumental in supplying alternative theories to the creation of matter. The late Sagan proposed the idea of an eternal universe and Hawking has supplied his own theories on how the Big Bang is not actually the beginning of the universe. Of course, due to recent evidence, it’s becoming more and more clear that the universe does in fact have a finite beginning. This poses a problem because it inevitably raises the question of God.

It seems proponents of an eternal universe, or one that doesn’t have a finite beginning, have found a new way to teach their methods…via T-Pain (yes, I know the video is a joke, an absolutely hilarious one that needed a serious introduction):

Via KurzweilAI.net — Do hit the “Read Original Article” link for this entire interesting intersection of mathematics, string theory and practical physics.

Most beautiful math structure appears in lab for first time

New Scientist Physics & Math, Jan. 7, 2010 A complex form of mathematical symmetry linked to string theory has been glimpsed in the real world for the firsttime, in laboratory experiments on exotic crystals. The structure is also the basis for another proposed theory of everything advanced in 2007 by surfer-physicist Garrett Lisi, who refers to E8 as “perhaps the most beautiful structure in mathematics“. Read Original Article>>

From the New Scientist link:

Radu Coldea of the University of Oxford and his colleagues chilled a crystal made of cobalt and niobium to 0.04 °C above absolute zero. Atoms in the crystal are arranged in long, parallel chains. Because of a quantum property called spin, electrons attached to the atom chains act like tiny bar magnets, each of which can only point up or down.

Strange things occurred when the experimenters applied a powerful 5.5-Tesla magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of these electron “magnets”. Patterns appeared spontaneously in the electron spins in the chains – in a simplified example with three electrons, the spins could read up-up-down or down-up-down, among other possibilities. Each distinct pattern has a different energy associated with it.

The ratio of these different energy levels showed that the electron spins were ordering themselves according to mathematical relationships in E8 symmetry.

Why do we experience the world as unfolding in time?  And why does it unfold toward the future rather than the past?  One hint is provided by entropy: eggs break (but never un-break), we grow older (but never younger), ice melts when we add it to a pot of boiling water (but the boiling water never gets hotter while the chunk of ice gets bigger).  Yet entropy itself requires an explanation because both entropic and anti-entropic behavior are compatible with the fundamental laws of physics.  One solution was first explained in detail by David Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University, in his book, Time and Chance (2001).  According to Albert, it is the big bang, which provides a low-entropy boundary condition, that explains the direction of time (and all of its associated puzzles).  Now, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology has taken up Albert’s idea in his new book, From Eternity to Here.  In a recent interview in Scientific American, Carroll claims “just about everything about the arrow of time—what we would think of as “how time works,” the fact that the past is set in stone while the future can still be altered—is all because of entropy.”  Carroll’s book is intended for a popular audience, and would be a worthwhile investment for any philosopher curious about physics-based approaches to the metaphysics of time.

Related Articles:

The Experience of Time and Change

By Barry Dainton , University of Liverpool
(Vol. 3, June 2008)
Philosophy Compass

Time Travel: Double Your Fun

By Frank Arntzenius , Rutgers University
(Vol. 1, October 2006)
Philosophy Compass

Tonight I listened to a Coast To Coast show that inspired me. If you’ve never heard of it, Coast To Coast is a late-night program composed of interviews with current writers of alternative information- nightly encounters that fulfill any secret hankering for conspiracy theory, paranormal activity, and Extraterrestrial encounters. I’ve heard the program described as “The End-Time Ministries.” It’s interesting listening, if you’re up for stuff that makes you reconsider convention. I’ve been listening for years. The famous Art Bell was the radio host at one time, a name that (in my book) is synonymous with the weird, wacky, the wuwu and the conspiratorial.  Nowadays George Noory is the host.

I was listening to yesterday’s episode with writer Jessica Maxwell. The part of her interview that really moved me was when she talked about having the opportunity to “dance” with Stephen Hawkings. She stayed in a hotel in India where a String Theory conference was being held that he was also attending. One evening she wandered into a ballroom, attracted to the Indian music being played. The room was filled with frenetically boogieing quantum physicist geeks, bouncing like strings of vibrating particles. Among them was Stephen Hawkings, spinning his wheelchair to the music. What woman could resist joining in that dance?

Was it enough for him to make the massive contribution to general relativity, quantum gravity, radiation and black holes? No, he also had to show us that no matter how bad things seem, you can still have fun. I mean, have you ever said no to dancing because your stomach hurt? Being almost completely paralyzed is a pretty good excuse for behaving like an anti-social wall flower. But not for Stephen Hawkings.

I am grateful to people like Stephen Hawkings, who despite challenges, obstacles, and even paralysis, say YES to life.

So many things that were previously ridiculed or fit only to be shown on “The Twilight Zone” are turning out to be actually true. Aliens, psychic ability and astrology, if not accepted, are now not totally discounted. Even Boris Johnson, on one for me, ecstatic day, announced he would not discount the existence of aliens! Personally, I have always believed that there is something out there, in fact, lots of things out there. I am a sucker for any scientific theory going, however far fetched, being so open to the far out, spacey, flaky possibilities, it just isn’t true. I have had my share of ridicule, believe me. Now my day has come.

I claim credit for having had the foresight to believe parallel universes existed long before everyone else.  On the other hand, honesty compels me to admit that when on April 1st,  GMTV announced the discovery of a pill that would make you lose tons of weight without diet or exercise, I also believed that. In science classes, my enthusiasm was unbounded.  My hand was always the first to shoot up when a question was asked, although usually it was with the wrong answer.                                                                       

M C Escher

Superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists realise that the three dimensions we thought described the universe are wrong. There are eleven dimensions. Scientists such as Dr. Michio Kaku from the US say that they now believe that our universe is one bubble amongst an infinite number of bubbles, wobbling through the eleventh dimension. Many theorists now believe that in this many-world “multiverse,” every time a new physical possibility is explored, like creating a past event that would change the present, the universe splits. This provides an infinite number of alternative outcomes – each one played out in its own universe.

Some of these bubbles might even contain another you, even several , each on another slightly different life path, because possibly you made more positive choices than you did in this universe.(this last bit is my hypothesis). Or maybe you made less positive choices and are going through the universe’s version of hell. Maybe one day when we have all chosen love over hate, unselfishness over selfishness, all the bubbles will merge, and we will achieve kensho.  We will be God.  Who knows?

 One day, scientists might blandly say they have discovered the afterlife, like “Oh yes, there is it!” Time travel through worm holes might eventually be possible.  The moral is never, ever laugh at any scientific theory, however far fetched.

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe. “
Ray Bradbury

Hyerspace.              Dr. Michio Kaku

Parallel Worlds.     Dr. Michio Kaku