LET THERE BE LIGHT

 

© Copyright Edward R. Close, 2022

SEVEN: LIGHT AND MULTI-DIMENSIONAL HOLISTIC REALITY

“Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.” - Alfred North Whitehead

During my early years as an undergraduate, even though I was majoring in physics with a minor in mathematics, I was also very much interested in symbolic logic, linguistics, philosophy, metaphysics, and parapsychology. As a result, I did some extra-curricular research into the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, and what I found had a profound influence on me. In the previous post, I commented on the theory of types found in Principia Mathematica the best-known work of Whitehead and his most famous student, Bertrand Russell, and identified paradox as the fourth, and in my opinion, the most important type of statement relative to the advancement of our understanding of reality.

Toward the end of my undergraduate years, I found myself rejecting the materialistic views of Russell and gravitating toward Whitehead’s way of thinking about metaphysics. Reading Whitehead’s works: Process and Reality, The concept of Nature, and Science and the Modern World, I realized, among other things, that most people studying science and mathematics are oblivious to what their own metaphysical assumptions are. I realized that a scientist who does not know what the metaphysical assumptions of science are, is like a ship without a rudder, and science with a confused metaphysical foundation is going to be fragmented and bogged down in endless confusion.

I think the failure to see the logical and mathematical indicators of extra dimensions is what led Russell, and most rationalists of the twentieth century into the unfortunate consciousness-stifling dead-end of materialism. It is understandable that this would happen. Materialism is the “low-hanging fruit” of natural science. Recognizing consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality makes the task of grasping the nature of reality more difficult, but ultimately, much more satisfying. The ways we deceive ourselves are many and subtle, but the most insidious is by separating subject from object, mind from matter, consciousness from reality.

In this post, I want to elaborate on the theme of the previous six posts: The fact that pure mathematics, natural science, and human consciousness are all just different aspects of the same thing; and that is, that, as human beings, we are manifestations of reality seeking to experience itself at the interface between the quantized physical universe and the infinitely continuous substrate of Cosmic Consciousness. As finite conscious beings, we stand on the threshold of infinity. Summarizing the last post: Real paradox is the fourth type of statement, the logical equivalent of the third root of unity, i.e., the imaginary number, and the doorway to consciousness expansion that brings us to the Threshold of the fourth state of consciousness.

Since consciousness expansion is a real experience that cannot be described in the finite words of any language, we have to rely on analogies, which are never perfect. I have used the phenomena of the origination and propagation of light to illustrate this point because it is the best analogy we have. Light is, in a very real sense, the very fabric of reality, expanding, as it does, from the smallest quantum to infinity. It is the most viable and available link between consciousness and physical reality.

An important key to understanding the nature of reality is recognizing the relationship of finite dimensionality to infinity. Applications of the CoDD reveal that everything in existence expands in very different ways into the geometrically consecutive extensions of three, six, and nine dimensions. We have to start our analysis of the expanding universe with three dimensions, not zero, one, or two, because there is no such thing as a singularity, and no such things as scalar and planar objects or entities in quantized reality. Points, lines, and planes do not exist in quantized reality. They are projections of the infinite continuity of mind, the first level of consciousness. All objects of manifest reality are at least 3-D volumetric, so physical reality starts with three dimensions, not zero, one or two. Once this fact is grasped, many things begin to become much clearer.

With the importance of dimensionality in mind, let’s have a look at another historical paradox involving light from distant stars, known as Olbers’ paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840). This paradox arose from the fact that the blackness of empty space conflicted with the assumption of most astronomers at that time that the universe extended to infinity. If the universe were infinite, Olbers reasoned, there would be an infinite number of stars, and any line of sight would end on the surface of a star causing the night sky to blaze with light. But this reasonable conclusion is contradicted by the darkness seen between stars that can be observed every night.

Unlike Niels Bohr, most scientists don’t like paradoxes, and do their best to explain them away within the comfort of their existing belief systems, not realizing that real paradoxes that arise in any finite system of thought cannot be resolved within that system. In this case, and in general, the finite system of thought embraced by most mainstream scientists, is built on the metaphysical foundation of sand known as materialism, or physicalism. If scientists are successful in explaining away a contradiction, then the paradox wasn’t a real paradox as defined in the last post, but just a misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of some part of the established paradigm. Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the linear relationship between red shift and distance expanded our awareness of reality. Here is the standard explanation, accepted by the majority of astronomers and astrophysicists as the resolution of Olbers’ paradox:

“The darkness of the night sky is explained by the expansion of spacetime, which lengthens the [wavelength of] light originating from the Big Bang to microwave levels via a process known as red shift; this microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer than those of visible light and so appears dark to the naked eye. Other explanations for the paradox have been offered, but none have wide acceptance in cosmology.”

At first glance, this seems like the perfect resolution of Olbers’ paradox. It even appears to fit the pattern of the expansion of reality and consciousness about which I’ve been talking. But there’s a problem. It falls right back into the paradox of the red shift exposed in the last post. It assumes that the red shift is lengthening of wavelength due to a doppler effect, which would violate the physical conservation of energy law, and it fails to include the relativistic shortening of wavelength with motion that would happen in an expanding universe.

I think another analogy might help here. Olber’s paradox and its solution may be analogous to the flat-Earth paradox arising from the fact that we can see in a straight line all the way to the craters of the moon, even when the moon is on the horizon, and yet we cannot see a ship on the ocean a mere fifty miles away. The disappearing ship paradox is resolved quickly by realizing that the surface of the Earth is the curve of a three-dimensional object, not a two dimensional one. Similarly, perhaps, we cannot see stars beyond those about 13.8 billion light years away, not because light waves are stretched by the doppler effect, but because the universe is a multi-dimensional object with more dimensions than our physical senses are able to detect directly.

When we go back to the threshold of infinity, we see that this paradox is in fact caused by the arbitrary separation of matter from mind. To see why, let’s look at the process of observing light from distant stars more closely again. We assume that this light that we are observing is a form of energy originating on the surface of a star near the edge of the visible universe ten or twelve billion years ago, that it has traveled an unbelievably great distance, finally to be captured in our telescope, to be magnified and directed onto a photographic plate, so we can look at the results with eyes that have not existed for even a blink in the age of the universe. What’s wrong with this picture?

To begin with, light is not a particle or wave travelling through space as we have assumed. Light is a local phenomenon. What we are studying, is the local movement of an electric field, whose movement excites a magnetic field, whose movement in turn, excites a local electric field ahead of the magnetic field, etc. This is why light always has the same velocity for every observer. Every observer is measuring the wavelengths and movements of dynamic local phenomenological events in his or her own inertial reference frame. Conclusions about what may or may not have happened billions of years ago are indirect deductions about details of events distant in spacetime, based on assumptions that, as it turns out, are not true.

On the frontier of the four-dimensional reality model of general relativity, Einstein, in the last year of his life, concluded that space and time, separately, or combined dimensionally as spacetime, both measures of extent, have no existence of their own. And John Archibald Wheeler, in my opinion Einstein’s most brilliant student, who designed the delayed-choice experiment, pointed out that actions that we perform in the present, when dealing with light from distant stars, can change what we are able to say about the past. Both of these observations by Einstein and Wheeler are confirmed by applications of the CoDD to the red shift and Olbers’ paradoxes.

Next, we must realize that experimental conditions, specifically in the case at hand, the telescope, the photographic plate, and all of the circumstances of human observation and measurement, are set up by a conscious being seeking to extend our limited physical senses. While the intent is to try to reveal more of the detail of reality that are hidden from us by the reduction valves of our physical senses, the result actually makes our already indirect perception of the phenomenon called light even more indirect. Finally, we must realize that the reductionist approach to the analysis of light assumes that light is a feature of reality that can be considered separate and independent of everything else, when, in fact it is not. Application of the principles of TDVP and the CoDD highlights electromagnetic radiation as the fundamental link between consciousness and the physical universe. We need to rectify the mistake of natural philosophy and science pointed out by Alfred North Whitehead, when he said:

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”

 

It is also important at this point to bring in a concept that had a profound impact on Albert Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity. That concept is known as Mach’s Principle. It can be stated as follows:

There must be a general law of relativity that relates the motion of the distant stars to the local inertial reference frame of the conscious observer. In other words, local physical laws are directly related to, and determined by the large-scale structure of the universe. – Ernst Mach

 

The equations of general relativity represent Einstein’s best efforts to formulate the general law that Mach referred to, connecting localized physical laws to the motion of distant stars through “the electrodynamics of moving objects”. I want to show in these posts that Einstein’s focus on the role of light was correct, but that his work was not finished when he passed to the other side. Furthermore, the way to do it is to expand the model of reality from the four-dimensional model of general relativity to a multi-dimensional model of nine finite dimensions.

 

Electromagnetic radiation is, in fact, the unique, most important aspect of the essential substance of reality that links mass, energy, and consciousness. I will have much more to say about this later, but for now, let’s turn back to the analysis of light from distant stars and the interesting paradoxes it presents to the current mainstream scientific paradigm.

The alternating vibration of electric and magnetic fields of starlight is magnified by the telescope and projected on a photographic plate that has a coating of material that changes color when impacted by the energy of the light. Some of the light is also split into different wavelengths by refraction so the individual wavelengths that make up the spectral signature of the star can be identified. Finally, a conscious observer interprets these secondary and tertiary phenomena as evidence of non-local activities that may have happened billions of years ago. But some of the conclusions may be incorrect because of the assumption that something called spacetime exists apart from the object of observation and the observer. As pointed out above, spacetime is not independent of the other elements of the experiment and the way the experiment is set up may affect what we conclude about what may have happened billions of years ago.

As explained in the previous post, assuming that the red shift is a doppler lengthening of light waves violates the law of conservation of energy. Instead, the red shift appears to be caused by the acceleration of the expansion of the physical universe. But what if, similar to the way the illusion of a flat Earth is resolved with the expansion of our awareness to include an additional dimension, the red shift and Olbers’ paradoxes are also resolved by expanding our awareness into dimensional domains beyond the four dimensions of spacetime? In fact, this is exactly what application of CoDD strongly suggests. Before we delve into this, I think it will be helpful to clarify what dimensions are and how they relate to reality in general, and these paradoxes in particular. I like to call this subject dimensionometry, but, because this post is already too long, I am going to pause here and discuss dimensionometry is some detail in the next post.

-         ERC 1/24/2022