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.
