A MAGICAL MEMORY TRIP

A MAGICAL MEMORY TRIP

Today, I want to invite you to go with me on a magical trip via a ‘memory experiment’ inspired by Einstein’s famous gedankenexperiments (thought experiments). Only, if I succeed, it will be a gedankenexperiment on steroids! To prepare for our magical memory trip, I want you to think back to your childhood and imaginative stories you’ve heard, like: Tom Thumb, Alice in Wonderland, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Tom Thumb is a character of English folklore. The History of Tom Thumb was published in 1621, and was the first fairy tale printed in English. Tom is the size of his father's thumb, and his adventures include being swallowed by a cow, tangling with giants, and becoming a favorite of King Arthur. It is believed to have been written by a Londoner named Richard Johnson in 1621. This story may have been inspired by a real diminutive person. Tattershall, a village in Lincolnshire, England, claims to be the location of the home and grave of Tom Thumb.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written by English mathematician Charles Dodgson in 1865 under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. We all remember how a little girl named Alice falls into a rabbit hole, and enters a world inhabited by many strange creatures like the Mad Hatter (a rabbit), the Cheshire cat, and the Queen of Hearts. The story allows the mathematician Dodgson to present interesting logical conundrums that make the story as popular with adults as with children.

The 1957 movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man starts out on a warm summer day with Scott Carey casually sunbathing on his yacht. A radioactive cloud envelops Scott, and a bit later, he begins to notice alarming changes. Within a few days, he loses weight, his clothes won't fit, and he slowly grows smaller and smaller. Doctors are at a loss to stop his shrinking. As he shrinks to the size of Tom Thumb, Scott gets unwanted media attention, and he has to deal with life-threatening situations like the family cat eyeing him as a snack, and a spider that, as he shrinks, appears to him to be the size of a bear. But he survives and continues to shrink away into seeming nothingness. His last words are worth reading. Here they are:

"I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens...the universe...worlds beyond number...God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimensions. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, and becoming nothing. My fears melted away, and in their place came...acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation - it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I STILL EXIST!"

“To God, there is no zero.” In fact, Max Planck’s discovery that we live in a quantized universe, attests to the actual truth of this statement. In reality, there is no zero, only finite quanta, no absolute beginning or end, and there is no such thing as nothing. We have proved this mathematically and dimensionally with the Calculus of Distinctions. See the post of Feb. 6, 2016: http://www.erclosetphysics.com/search?q=TRUE+units+mathematics.

Are these stories pure fantasy, as most people believe, or do they reflect a deeper reality, vaguely remembered?  Before we start on our trip, let me share with you some very real experiences of mine. I have vivid memories from the age of eight or nine months. I thought everyone did, so I had no idea that there was anything unusual about it until much later in life. I have shared some of these early memories and how they were verified as real memories with a few others, but for now, let me skip ahead to the time when I was eight years of age.

One afternoon, as a sixth-grader sitting at my desk in my classroom, while I was looking at the teacher, suddenly, her face began to expand in my field of vision, and it continued to expand until it seemed to fill all space. I could see the pores of her skin as if I were looking at her through a magnifying glass. Then, just as suddenly, her face receded away into the distance, exactly as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, until her head looked almost as small as a grain of sand.

Also, about the same time, occasionally, I would unexpectedly experience greatly heightened tactile and auditory senses. Lying in my bed waiting to go to sleep, my senses would become so acute that I would avoid moving because the rustling of the sheets sounded like a crashing landslide. Lying still, I could hear my father’s watch ticking in another part of the house, and by focusing, I could hear the music of a marching band. This was before the invention of television, but I had built a crystal radio set when I was seven, so I was familiar with the idea of ‘tuning in’ to different frequencies, and I learned to focus on other sounds in the ‘ether’; so I would often go to sleep listening to strains of classical music, which I believed was being played somewhere.

I told my father about these experiences, and he advised me not to worry. He said it was a by-product of rapid growth, and that he had had similar experiences as a boy. So I accepted the experiences as normal and actually learned to enjoy them.

Much later in life, I studied comparative religion and many mystical traditions. I found that in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist mystical teachings, some of the spiritual experiences marking the progress of a spiritual seeker is the ability to make things appear larger or smaller than they normally appear through the physical senses. Buddhism, for example, specifically lists this as one of the nine main siddhis (powers or accomplishments) on the path to enlightenment:

MADALASA VIDYA (Sanskrit: correct knowledge)

A being reaching this level of enlightenment becomes capable of increasing or decreasing the size of his/her body.

Anima Siddhi - The ability to decrease the size of one's body and become as small as the smallest particle.

Mahima Siddhi - The ability to increase the size of one's body, ultimately enveloping the universe.

I must add that the experiences I described above were spontaneous, and mostly beyond my control. But, is it possible that such experiences reflect a deeper reality? Or are they no more than fantasies? Before you dismiss them out of hand, suppose there is a way to test and verify such experiences. I believe there is, because I have verified things I learned in an expanded state of consciousness, things of which I had no previous knowledge. But that’s another story.

For now, let’s go on a gedanken trip together, first shrinking our perceptions to the size of the quantum world. You can think of it as imagination if you like, but what I propose is imagination guided by logic and scientific knowledge. If, by doing this, we can arrive at conclusions and understandings, and even obtain exact measurable and computable values that can be checked against known facts and scientific data, we will have proved that experiences like mine and perhaps those in the imaginative stories above are not pure fantasy, but actually reflect a reality beyond the world normally revealed by our physical senses, most of the time beyond our reach, but somehow vaguely remembered.

So come with me now, to the world of Tom Thumb, Alice, Scott Carey, and beyond: First, let’s shrink our immediate awareness from the perceptions of our earthly environment to organic and inorganic structures, to molecules, to atoms, to protons and neutrons, and finally to electrons and quarks, on the scale of the quantum world, to see things about a trillion times smaller than the smallest dot we can observe with our eyes. What will we find there? Then let’s zoom back up and pass the scale of our ordinary everyday experience, gradually encompassing the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and on, to the very edges of the visible universe! We will be able to see how the world of our everyday experience is only the tip of the iceberg of reality, and how it is supported and sustained by a deeper quantum reality, suspended in a cosmological infinity that is unfathomable as long as we are limited to our finite physical bodies.

I’m not suggesting that your physical body will shrink like the fictional Scott Carey. But I am asking you to consider the possibility that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. My experiences involved the shrinking and expanding of my consciousness, not my physical body. The teacher and my classmates would have noticed that! But my point of view changed drastically. Suppose the energy of consciousness is imprisoned in physical forms by our choice, and we become so engrossed and identified with our physical bodies that we forget our true nature. What if our true nature is spiritual, and the physical senses are outward manifestations of a deeper ability to be consciously aware. Suppose we can shift our point of view, focusing inward and downward until the smallest quantum of physical reality appears to be a spinning ball of energy about the size of a softball. I see that ball of energy as a distinct ball of fire, rapidly spinning directly in front of me. Having distinguished it from myself and everything else, I am able to see how it combines with other balls of energy to form the atoms of physical reality. I am not the only one to ever think this way. An Oxford philosophy don and electronics engineer thought very deeply about how the logic of perceptions. He wrote:

 “A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart.”- G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, A Note on the Mathematical Approach, page v. The Julian Press, 1977.

George Spencer Brown suggests that when we separate anything from everything else by drawing a distinction, we create a world of perception. A distinction is anything that is perceived, in any way, as distinct and separate from everything else. The first distinction of which we are consciously aware is the distinction of self from other. Without that, no perception is possible. But with that, we then find, in a universe where all things seem possible, there are actually logical laws governing what forms are possible. This is demonstrated in Brown’s Laws of Form: Reality has a natural logical structure that is inescapable. To see how this comes about, let’s look, from our shrunken state, at the very smallest physical distinction, the elementary particle called the electron. Why does it appear to be a spinning ball of fire? Symmetry is natural for an isolated object, because without the influence of other distinct objects there is nothing to prevent perfect symmetry. In the absence of anything else physical, the electron spins symmetrically.

It appears to be roiling, as if it is spinning in many different directions at the same time! As I watch it spin, I wonder: why is it spinning? We don’t seem to see anything like that in our everyday world. Oh, wait! The Earth is spinning on its axis, the moon is spinning around the Earth, and they go on spinning around the sun, and the solar system is in an arm of a spiraling galaxy. Everything is spinning! But why? And why is this super-small object spinning so fast? As a physicist, I can propose hypotheses that may answer this question, but theory must be tempered with experience and empirical data.

A little history of particle physics will help us to understand this: Physicists have known for a long time that a moving charged particle generates a magnetic field. Electric motors and generators work because of this fact. In 1922, two German physicists, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach, working at the University of Hamburg, conducted a series of experiments designed to measure the magnetic fields produced by electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. They were surprised to find that the electrons themselves were spinning very rapidly, producing magnetic fields independent of those produced by their orbital motions. They also found that the surfaces of charged particles would have to be spinning faster than the speed of light in order to produce the magnetic moments they were measuring. This, plus the fact that spin, a measure of energy (angular momentum), like everything else at the quantum scale, is quantized, led physicists to believe that there was no way to explain quantum phenomena in everyday terms that relate to rotation of large objects. This is one reason that physicists, for almost 100 years, have been declaring that quantum physics is weird.

We find that the relativistic limit on spin in three dimensions actually defines the size of the smallest possible quantum, linking relativity and quantum mechanics. These spinning elementary particles are vortices connecting the three dimensions of space to six additional dimensions.

Physicists recognize that spin is a very real physical property, playing an important role in the structure of atoms and molecules, with significance in chemistry and solid-state physics. Spin is important in all interactions among subatomic particles, in the high-energy particle beams of the LHC, in low-temperature fluids, and in solar winds. Most physical processes, from the quantum scale to the galactic scale, depend on the interactions of subatomic particles regulated by the relative directions and rates of spin of those particles.

According to Victor J. Stenger, professor of physics at the University of Hawaii:

"Spin is the total angular momentum, or intrinsic angular momentum, of a body. The spins of elementary particles are analogous to the spins of macroscopic bodies. In fact, the spin of a planet is the sum of the spins and the orbital angular momenta of all its elementary particles. So are the spins of other composite objects such as atoms, atomic nuclei and protons (which are made of quarks).

"At our current level of understanding, the elementary particles are quarks, leptons (such as the electron) and bosons (such as the photon). These particles are all imagined as point-like, so you might wonder how they can have spins. A simple answer might be, perhaps they are composite, too. But deep theoretical reasons having to do with the rotational symmetry of nature lead to the existence of spins for elementary objects and to their quantization.

"Spin has served as the prototype for other, even more abstract notions that seem to have the mathematical properties of angular momentum … quarks are paired as isospin 'up' and 'down,' which are the names given to the two quarks that make up ordinary matter. The rotational symmetry of space and time is generalized to include symmetries in more abstract 'inner' dimensions, with the result that much of the complex structure of the micro-world can be seen as resulting from symmetry breaking, connecting profoundly to ideas describing the spontaneous formation of structure in the macro-world.”

From the viewpoint of the quantum scale, what we will see supports Professor Stenger’s description of spin; with a few important exceptions. As he suggests, from the quantum point of view, elementary particles like quarks do have additional features, they are not dimensionless points; they are composed of units of mass, energy, and as we have discovered, something else, which is not directly measurable as mass or energy, but does affect the total angular momentum of spinning objects, from electrons to galaxies. We have called this something else 'gimmel'. 

Elementary particles like electrons and quarks can only be treated as point-like in the current paradigm because of their extreme smallness relative to our ability to measure them from the macro-scale, and because the idea of a dimensionless particle is supported by the erroneous assumption of Newtonian calculus that physical variables can approach zero indefinitely closely.

The terms ‘symmetry breaking and spontaneous formation of structure’ have become ingrained in the jargon of physicists, but they are actually just verbal representations of what mainstream particle physicists see as arbitrary randomness in the formation of sub-atomic structure and other physical processes. Finally, we see that Professor Stenger’s allusion to “inner dimensions” is inaccurate. There are additional dimensions, but they are not “inner’ dimensions. Let me explain:

When we are successful in shifting our point of view, as happened in my spontaneous expansions of consciousness when I was a sixth grader, we are freed of the limitations of the physical body. What we see from that broader point of view, is that the additional dimensions required to explain quantum reality are not folded or curled up, as some physicists have imagined, and they are not the inner dimensions (actually pseudo dimensions) of matrices describing differential equations, they are extensions of the invariant relationships of the three dimensions we are aware of through the limited senses of the physical body. Just like one and two-dimensional domains are embedded within the three–dimensional domain, the three-dimensional domain is embedded in a fourth dimension (the first dimension of time) and so on. Pure mathematical number theory supports exactly nine finite dimensions embedded in an infinite substrate. The infinite substrate, encompassing all possible universes, connects the receding quantum realm with the expanding multiverses available to the three dimensions of consciousness in the three dimensions of time.

This is difficult to envision while confined to the physical body and its limited senses, but it provides the basis for explanations of a number of conundrums that have plagued physical science since the time of Einstein and Bohr. Application of dimensional mathematics from this point of view explains how and why quarks combine in threes to form the protons and neutrons of ordinary physical reality, why fermions have ½ intrinsic spin, and why there is a stable, life supporting universe, - why there is something rather than nothing. Also, the mathematics of nine finite dimensions shows that there is no arbitrary randomness in the formation of atomic structure. The universe is well-ordered, and it is accurately described by the Calculus of Distinctions, Dimensional Extrapolation and the Conveyance Equation. The mathematical proofs we’ve developed are beyond the scope of this discussion, but you can go to the post referenced earlier, 

http://www.erclosetphysics.com/search?q=TRUE+units+mathematics. You can also go to http://iqnexus.org/mag.htm, a link to the IQNexus Journal, where you’ll find Vol. 8, No. 3, published September 01, 2016, that has the mathematical details, and Vol. 8, No. 4, published December 01, 2016 with Q&A discussions of TDVP.