TWELVE: ANALYSIS OF THE OBVIOUS
Copyright 2022, Edward R. Close, PhD
“It requires a very
unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” -
Alfred North Whitehead (a quote worth repeating)
Max Planck: An
Exceptional Mind Questions the Obvious
What could be more obvious than visible light? It
illuminates our reality, bouncing off of everything we see. What is more basic?
Matter, perhaps? In 1874, a very gifted young man named Max Karl Ernst Ludwig
Planck, entering the University of Munich at the age of 16, sought some
guidance about what to do with his life. He was interested in music,
mathematics, and physics. A well-meaning professor of physics at the university
advised him against pursuing a career in physics. The reason Professor Phillip
von Jolly gave for his advice was simple: “In this field,” he declared “almost everything has
already been discovered; all that remains is to fill in a few insignificant
gaps.”
Despite
this discouraging advice, Max Planck decided to pursue a career in physics.
In an essay, A Scientific Autobiography, published in
1948, Planck wrote:
“My original
decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery…
of the far from obvious fact that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the
laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about
us; that therefore, by pure reasoning, man can gain insight into the mechanism
of the latter. In this connection, it is of paramount importance that the
outside world is something independent
from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this
absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.”
I agree with this Platonic view of reality. A similar discovery
early in my life also inspired me to embark on the study of mathematics and
physics, but my discovery included a deeper fact, also far from obvious, that underlies
the coinciding laws Max Planck described in the statement above, the fact that
consciousness is a primary aspect of reality. That realization is the most
basic axiom upon which transcendental physics and TDVP are founded. It can be
stated as follows:
The laws governing the internal
structure of finite consciousness and the external structures of objective reality
coincide with the laws of primary logic governing finite reality existing within
the infinitely continuous field of Primary Consciousness.
Discovery of these laws is the goal of science, and the
expansion of finite consciousness to experience the logical structures of
infinite reality is the purpose of life. Recognition of these facts gives value
and meaning to all physical, intellectual, and spiritual existence.
Planck was fascinated by the elegance and predictive power
of the basic laws of physics that were known at that time, including laws governing
the motion of solid objects (Newton’s laws of motion) and the laws governing
the motion of energy, like Boltzmann’s constant and the laws of thermodynamics.
His conviction that the laws governing the internal logic of human reasoning actually
coincide with the laws governing the external world inspired him to look for clues
to additional absolutes hidden in plain sight in experimental data. He knew
that such absolutes would resolve conflicts between incomplete scientific
formulations that worked for some dynamic relationships between matter and
energy, but not for others.
Planck found one such clue in a fact that was obvious to anyone
who had ever watched a blacksmith work with heated metal. The color of the glow
of heated metal changes from black to red, and red to white, as the metal is
heated to higher and higher temperatures. Wilhelm Wein’s law relating the frequency
of emitted light to the temperature of heated metals worked well for high frequencies
but failed at lower frequencies. Because of this, other physicists had proposed
laws governing specific portions of the energy spectrum. In an intuitive leap,
Planck wrote a simple equation combing equations that worked for low
frequencies with Wien’s law for high frequencies. It proved to be so accurate
at predicting experimental results, that it was quickly accepted and became
known as Planck’s law.
A lesser scientist would have rested on his laurels and
basked in the success of having a “law” bearing his name. But Planck, like
Plato, knew that the laws of nature reside in the absolute realm of the perfect
logic of mind and matter, and that a true law could be validated by derivation
from first principles. So, he set about the task of deriving the new law from first
principles underlying the laws of thermodynamics.
Validation of Planck’s law, combined with the experimental
verification of Einstein’s theory of relativity almost two decades later, led
to proof of the quantum equivalence of mass and energy. It is safe to say that Planck’s
findings undoubtedly surprised professor von Jolly. Not only had “almost
everything” in physics NOT “already been discovered”, in fact, scientists had
not even suspected that something so fundamental was still waiting to be
discovered. To be fair, Professor von Jolly is not the only
scientist who has made the mistake of thinking that science can explain everything.
There are a number of examples of this unwarranted confidence in materialistic
determinism, but I will mention only two very prominent examples here.
In 1814, Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace, impressed
with the successes of the calculus introduced by Newton and Leibniz just 100
years before, said: “We
may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the
cause of its future.” He believed that the initial conditions of
the universe would soon be known, and that a single formula would be derived to
describe the
physical existence and movement of everything from the most “massive object to
the tiniest object in the universe”, so that, in his words,
“nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be known”.
The second, a more recent example of this unverified
confidence in physical science can be found in the writings of the late theoretical
physicist Stephen Hawking. In his first book written for the general public, A
Brief History of Time, published in 1988, Professor Hawking predicted that we
would have a complete theory of everything by the year 2000, or soon thereafter. He boldly declared that the long-coveted
theory of everything “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then,”
he said, “we should know the mind of God.” And he also reiterated his belief
that he had proved that the universe originated in the explosion of a
mathematical singularity, i.e., a dimensionless point more than 13 billion
years ago.
A Brief History
Prior to writing for
the general public, Professor Hawking had achieved a remarkable amount of
recognition and acclaim in the mainstream scientific community, despite the
fact that he was horribly afflicted with a rare, early-onset, slowly
progressing, lethal form of amyotrophic lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as
Lou Gehrig’s disease. Much of his well-justified acclaim resulted from the
extension of the central concept of his doctoral thesis, which was application of
the mathematical singularity theorem to physical cosmology.
In an essay
co-authored with Sir Roger Penrose In 1970, Hawking published his proof. He
declared that, if the general theory of relativity is a valid model of the universe,
then the entire universe must have originated from the sudden explosion of an
infinitely dense mathematical singularity. Even though I
disagreed with many of Hawking’s assumptions and conclusions, because of his
confident belief that a theory of everything was just around the corner, in
1989 (coincidentally the year I received my doctorate) I sent him a
pre-publication copy of the manuscript of my second book, Infinite
Continuity, respectfully asking for peer-review comments.
Who was I to imagine that a famous scientist like
Stephen Hawking would actually bother to read something from someone he had
never heard of? I would not have been surprised if the manuscript had been returned
unopened, but I reasoned that he might be intrigued by some of the results I had
obtained by applying the calculus of distinctions to the Hubble redshift, and
the big-bang expanding-universe model of physical reality, revealing logical
paradoxes in the mainstream theory known as the standard model of particle physics.
I was familiar with the Hawking-Penrose proof and had
read A Brief History of Time from cover to cover before I sent my
Infinite Continuity manuscript to Professor Hawking, so I knew there were
several things in the manuscript that he would be likely to disagree with very strongly.
For example, I disputed the very idea that a physical “theory of everything”
was possible, based on Kurt Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness theorems, and
based on the universal law of conservation of mass and energy, I concluded that
there was, and could be, no absolute beginning of, or end to physical reality.
After about two months, Professor Hawking returned my
manuscript with a brief note saying that he was too busy to do a thorough
review of it, but he made one short comment, proving that he had at least
scanned it. He said: “I can’t imagine three-dimensional time.” A few months
later, in a public lecture, he mentioned that someone had suggested to him that
time might be three-dimensional; and in his writings and lectures published since
A brief History of Time, he publicly revised his claim that we would
soon have a complete theory of everything. He also said: “It may be a mistake
to talk about a beginning or end of the universe”. The reasons he gave for revising
the bold predictions and conclusions stated in his first popular book were the
same reasons I had outlined in Infinite Continuity.
Did exposure to my ideas have anything to do with
Professor Hawking’s about-face on these basic issues? Maybe. I don’t know. But,
while I still disagree with some of his assumptions, especially his self-proclaimed
atheistic metaphysical position, I respect and admire him because of the
intellectual honesty and integrity he exhibited by reconsidering the evidence
and revising the very ideas that had brought him fame and fortune. That is the undeniable
hallmark of a real scientist.
The
Analysis of the Obvious
So, why have I spent time and space here sharing my
thoughts about Max Planck and Stephen Hawking? Because sometimes the obvious is
not obvious at all until the accumulated complexities built on unwarranted
assumptions are cleared away. In Part Ten of this series, we saw that the seemingly
reasonable assumption that spacetime is infinitely divisible leads to
paradoxical results. This unwarranted assumption is corrected with the establishment
of the CoDD, TRUE quantum units based on the mass and volume of the free
electron, and the principle of quantum equivalence. Validated by rigorous
mathematical proof and statistical analysis of data from numerous meticulous
Large Hadron Collider experiments, the principle of quantum equivalence applies
to all measurements of the basic variable parameters of physical reality, namely
time, space, energy, and mass.
In plain English: All of the dimensions of the
stable structures of the physical universe are quantized at an unimaginably
small scale. This means that at the very smallest scale possible, all
measurements are whole-number multiples of the most basic units possible. Those
units are the triadic rotational units of equivalence (TRUE). Because of this, descriptions
of reality in the arithmetic, algebra, and calculus of the CoDD are in the form
of multi-dimensional Diophantine equations.
Diophantine equations are equations whose variables
and solutions are limited to integers, in this case, whole-number multiples of
TRUE (3-D quantum units based on the rest mass and volume of the free electron).
These equations are called “Diophantine” in honor of Diophantus of Alexandria,
who wrote about them around 250 A.D. (More about this later.)
The beauty of the TDVP quantum calculus is the way
it enables us to identify and clear away the clutter of the misleading
conceptual debris of things that actually do not exist in reality, like
dimensionless points, one- and two- dimensional objects, and massless
particles. By doing so, we become able to have a clearer, more direct awareness
of quantum phenomena that cannot be accessed through the limited functioning of
the physical senses and their technological enhancements.
Max Planck and Stephen Hawking were knocking on the
doors of the absolute truths that Diophantus and Plato hypothesized about 2000
years ago; but they were focusing on the opposite ends of the scale of physical
measurement. Planck’s work has extended human awareness down to the smallest possible
physical reality at the quantum scale, while Hawking’s work attempts to expand consciousness
all the way to the greatest possible physical extent, the cosmological edge of the expanding universe.
What does all this have to do with analysis of the
obvious and the goals of this series of posts? I’m glad you asked. The
remarkable discoveries of these two brilliant scientists prove that we can investigate
aspects of reality that exist beyond the range of ordinary observation and
measurement. The threshold leading to expanded states of consciousness, mentioned
in earlier posts and publications, invites us to take the next step, which is
investigation of non-physical phenomena. Like the infinitesimally small, the
cosmologically large, and consciousness itself, the non-physical part of
reality becomes obvious once you are aware that it exists; but, due to our
habitual identification with our physical bodies and incomplete conceptual
models of reality created from the limited data provided by our physical
senses, it is hidden in plain sight.
It is one thing for me to tell you that the analytical
methods of the TDVP have proved that the physical universe is only a small fraction
of a much larger reality consisting of higher-order non-physical dimensional
domains that shape and sustain everything, and that as human beings, we are
capable of gradually expanding our consciousness to become aware of it and interact
with it, and quite another thing for you to experience it for yourself. It is
my intention in these posts to peel back at least a small corner of the façade
of materialism covering the true nature of reality and suggest ways that you may
be able to experience more of the depth and elegant beauty of the non-physical aspect
of reality for yourself. One way to do this is to share some of my own firsthand
experiences of OBEs, NDEs, consciousness expansions, and time travel, in
addition to providing the paradigm shifting results of TDVP TRUE analysis.
Expanding the
Boundaries of Science
It was final exam week at the end of the first
semester of my second year as an undergraduate physics/math student. I was
making the rounds of my final exams with a full schedule of classes in physics,
mathematics, German, and logic. I wanted to finish each exam quickly, in order to
have as much time as possible to shift my focus to the subject matter of the next
exam. When I sat down to take the thermodynamics final, I was shocked, along
with everyone else in the class, to see that the whole exam consisted of just
one sentence written in large block letters on the blackboard. It said, “Derive
the Laws of Thermodynamics from first principles using the finite difference
method.”
This was a closed-book exam, so we were not allowed
to use reference books or notes, students were separated by the distance of at
least one unoccupied desk, and the exam was closely monitored by the professor and
his assistants. The purpose of exams in math and physics in those days before
the internet was to find out if you knew the course material, not to see if you
knew how to look things up. Professors in the math and physics departments
seemed to be competing to see whose classes could be the most difficult, and this
was before hand-held calculators were available and a long time before i-pads
and smart phones. We were allowed to use slide rules, but I preferred to do calculations
by hand, especially on exams, to avoid misplacing decimal points and to make
sure I understood the logic of the process. Final exams were stressful. We knew
that our scores could count for up to 50% of our grade for the semester.
I knew that the first law was the conservation of
energy law, the second law stated that the entropy (disorder) of an isolated
system increases in natural processes, and the third law said that entropy
approaches zero at the temperature of absolute zero. I also knew that these
laws were expressed in terms of infinitesimal differences, and that the finite
difference method involved approximating derivatives using Taylor series
expansions. but I didn’t have a clue about how to derive the laws of
thermodynamics from first principles using the finite difference method. So, after
a few minutes of panic, I composed myself and simply wrote “I give up!” on a
single sheet of paper, folded the paper, signed my name on the outside, and
dropped it into the final exam basket at the front of the room on my way out.
The laws of thermodynamics arise from some “obvious”
things about physical reality, like 1) You can’t make something out of nothing,
2) things generally deteriorate over time, and 3) nothing moves at absolute
zero. When I thought about the statement on the blackboard, I had nothing.
So, instead of sweating for an hour, trying to make something out of nothing, I
decided that I should conserve my negative entropy and seek thermal equilibrium
by moving on to my next exam.
The next day, on my way to the calculus final, I ran
into one of my classmates who was also a physics major.
“What in the world did you do on that Thermo exam?” He
asked.
“Not much.” I answered - I didn’t want to tell him
what I actually wrote on my exam paper! “What did you do?”
“I wrote down everything I could remember about
conservation of energy and entropy from the lectures and the reading assignments,
but I don’t recall anything about finite difference derivations. - I don’t
think I did very well!”
“You and me, both!” I thought, as I hurried on to
the calculus exam.
After the semester break, students were crowded
around bulletin boards all across campus looking to see if their final exam
scores had been posted. On the lists posted in the physics department, under
Thermodynamics, I was surprised to see an A after my name!
“That’s got to be a mistake!” I thought. I had an A
going into the finals with a 98% average on tests and homework, but the average
of 98 and zero is 49, eleven points below a passing grade. I was hoping to see
a D, which would indicate that I would be allowed to do extra work to raise the
grade and avoid the embarrassment of having an F on my record. By what miracle
did I get an A for the semester?
Dr. Harley Rutledge was a “new” PhD, just out of
Graduate school, teaching undergrad physics for the first time that year. When
he saw the response (or lack thereof) on the exam papers, he realized that he
had given an exam problem that would have been challenging for senior physics
students, to a class with only first and second-year undergrad students who had
not yet had an advanced course in vector analysis or matrix algebra. On the
first day of the second semester, Dr. Rutledge apologized to the class, explaining
why he had thrown the final exam out. The entire class breathed a collective sigh
of relief.
Connections:
The miracle of existence is gradually revealed in
the resolutions of paradoxes. The deeper the paradox, the more miraculous the
resolution, and the more obvious the truth that is revealed will be. The miracle
of consciousness is the greatest paradox of all, and the central paradox of
consciousness is the co-existence within it of both isolation and unity, separation
and oneness, the co-existence of the finite and the infinite. The deepest
connections are hidden beneath the noise of daily life, but opportunities for
re-connection with the realities of consciousness are there, if you are alert. During
the twelve years we called 1955 – 1967, I connected with a number of remarkable
people who helped me to expand my consciousness by awakening memories of the
past and the future. Harley D. Rutledge was one of those people.
When my Central Methodist College roommate and I
began investigating psychic phenomena in 1956, Dr. Rutledge was one of the two
professors on campus who supported us. After witnessing one of our experiments,
he made a physics lab available to us after hours and on weekends, and he
interpreted some very cryptic messages we had received, ostensibly from the
consciousness of Albert Einstein, who had died in 1955. Descriptions and
symbols that were completely meaningless to us, were immediately recognized by
Dr. Rutledge as specific notations in the advanced language of theoretical
physics consistent with the work Albert Einstein was doing during the last year
of his life.
My roommate and partner in the “psychic science”
experiments, David M. Stewart, and I were honor students, but in the middle of
the first semester of our third year, we did the unthinkable, we dropped out. Before
we left Central to embark on a very different chapter of our lives, I stopped by
Dr. Rutledge’s office to tell him goodbye. He knew that I was dropping out of
college to pursue more metaphysical truths, but the last thing he said to me
was “Good luck Ed! I think you will probably find what you are looking for out
there, but because you are a natural-born physicist, I predict that you will
return!” He was right.
My roommate and I both returned after a few years. We
married two brilliant women. David, who had been a philosophy/English major planning
to be a Methodist minister, earned a doctorate in geophysics from the
University of Missouri, went on to medical school, and eventually earned an ND,
and became known internationally as the polymath founder of two very successful
health-care organizations. And, yes, he also became an ordained Methodist
minister.
I, on the other hand, after completing my
physics/math degree at Central, went on to pursue a master’s degree in
theoretical physics at the University of Missouri, to teach mathematics, become
a computer programmer, systems analyst, hydrogeologist, certified environmental
professional, and registered PE. I eventually earned my PhD in environmental
engineering with course work in several universities, including UCLA, UC Davis,
Pacific Western University, and Johns Hopkins University.
In February and March of 1973, there was a spate of
UFO sightings in the San Francois Mountains of Southeast Missouri, not far from
the valley where I was born. Strange colored lights, moving in unusual ways through
the hills around the town of Piedmont Missouri and nearby Clearwater Lake were
reported by dozens of people, including the Piedmont High School basketball coach,
high school students, credible adults, local woodsmen, and farmers. Some of the
people reporting UFO sightings were interviewed on the local radio station, and
within a short time, even while the UFO activity was still being reported every
night, the story was picked up by the national news media.
In 1973, Dr. Rutledge was Chairman of the Physics
Department at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau Missouri on
the Mississippi River, about 75 miles east of Piedmont. A couple of his
colleagues made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that maybe Dr. Rutledge should
investigate the UFO sightings in Piedmont. He laughed and responded: “I
wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole!”. Dr. Rutledge was at the height of
his academic career. As a tenured professor at the largest university in
Southeast Missouri, Chairman of the Physics Department, and President of the
Missouri Academy of Science, he knew that getting involved in a UFO flap could
damage his reputation as a scientist and jeopardize his career. But less than
two weeks later, something changed his mind.
What changed his mind was his natural curiosity, the
same curiosity that he exhibited during the first year of his teaching career
at Central Methodist College in 1956, in relation to the experiments in
parapsychology that my roommate and I were conducting. Citing curiosity as “the
hallmark of all scientists”, in the report of his investigation of the Piedmont
UFO phenomena, published in 1981, he said: “My own curiosity about UFOs dated from
the early fifties when I read a couple of books by Major Donald Keyhoe: Flying
Saucers From Outer Space (1953) and The Flying Saucers Are Real
(1960).”
I did find what I was looking for, and I did return
to Central to finish my degree in physics and math, and in 1981, my career brought
me back to Southeast Missouri, and in the Summer of 1982, I enrolled in classes
at Southeast Missouri State University to update my teaching credentials. When
I learned that Dr. Rutledge was Chairman of the Physics Department there, I
couldn’t wait to visit with him. When I walked into his office at the
university - unannounced - between classes, even though it had been 25 years
since we had seen each other, he jumped up from his desk, called me by name,
and greeted me like an old friend! We both had classes we had to attend to that
day, so that meeting was brief, but a few days later, we met again and talked much
longer. After reminiscing about the “old days” at Central, he told me about the
Piedmont investigation, and many things that had happened since the
investigation.
We were both
recently published authors, so, after the visit we exchanged books. His book
was Project Identification: The first
Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena,
Prentice-Hall, 1981 (ISBN 0-13-730713-6). The book tells the story of the
Piedmont UFO flap and documents the 21-month-long investigation that Dr.
Rutledge and a team of professors and students from the university planned and carried
out using the most sophisticated equipment available at that time. They
collected a lot of very intriguing data, including a number of photographs and
recordings of moving UFOs taken from multiple locations with cameras and
recorders anchored in place to avoid the shaky images and recordings of
hand-held equipment. Knowing the exact distances between the equipment
locations, they were able to determine the size of some the UFOs and exactly how
far away from the cameras they were by triangulation.
Project
Identification consists of 265 pages of description
and narrative plus 16 pages of photographs with 36 photos, and numerous
drawings and tables. When I saw the photographs of one UFO taken from two
different locations at the same time, the difference between the photos
suggested to me that I was looking at two-dimensional images of a phenomenon that
actually existed in a multi-dimensional domain at least six dimensions. After
reading the book, I realized that Dr. Rutledge had related more information
about his experiences with the UFOs to me during our meetings than exists in
the book. It was quite evident to me that this investigation had had a profound
effect on Dr. Rutledge. This was also reflected in a talk he presented at the
MUFON symposium in Michigan in1986: Project Identification: Thirteen
Years and One-Hundred and Sixty Sightings Later.
The following description of Project Identification is
from Wikipedia ( Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harley_Rutledge&oldid=993620430 (accessed March 4, 2022):
Challenged to explain sightings of
unidentified lights and luminous phenomena in the sky around Piedmont,
Missouri, Rutledge decided to subject these reports to scientific analysis. He
put together a team of observers with training in the physical sciences,
including a large array of equipment: RF spectrum analyzers, Quasar telescopes.
low-high frequency audio detectors, electromagnetic frequency analyzer,
cameras, and a galvanometer to measure variations in the Earth's gravitational
field.
The resulting Project
Identification commenced in April 1973, logging several hundred hours of
observation time. This was the first UFO
scientific field study, able to
monitor the phenomena in real-time, enabling Rutledge to calculate the objects'
actual speed, course, position, distance, and size.
Observation of the unclouded night
sky often revealed "pseudostars" - stationary lights camouflaged by
familiar constellations. Some objects appeared to mimic the appearance of known
aircraft; others violated the laws of physics. The most startling
discovery was that on at least 32 recorded occasions, the movement of the
lights synchronized with actions of the observers. They appeared to respond to
a light being switched on and off, and to verbal or radio messages. The
final results of this project were documented in the 1981 book, Project
Identification: The first Scientific Study of UFO Phenomena.
Dr. Harley Rutledge was born January
10, 1926, in Omaha Nebraska, and left his physical body on June 5. 2006, at the
age of 80 years, in Cape Girardeau Missouri. My autographed copy of Project
Identification, with a personal note dated July 12. 1982, has a special
place in my library, and Dr. Harley Rutledge, a friend who contributed significantly
to who and what I am, holds a special place in my memory, and in my heart.
In the next installment of this
series, I intend to continue connecting the dots related to the evolution of
Transcendental Physics and TDVP, resulting from consciousness-expanding experiences
and encounters with the people of many lives, past, present, and future.
ERC- 3/04/2022
