TIME IS NOT WHAT WE THINK IT IS

 ERC 2010

TIME, THE STUBBORNLY PERSISTENT ILLUSION

AFFLICTING CONSCIOUS BEINGS

© Copyright July 2022, Edward R Close

Introduction

These posts reflect the results of my on-going efforts, for about 70 years now, to understand the true nature of reality. These efforts were prompted by an experience I had at the age of fifteen, an experience that set me on a path of science, education, and self-study. After many years, when Dr. Vernon Neppe, MD, PhD, and I first met in person in this life, in Amsterdam in 2010, we were both professionals who had been successful in different fields of science for many years. We discovered that we had reached similar conclusions about the nature of reality, despite the differences in our cultural and educational backgrounds, so we  joined forces to combine and advance our work, and together we developed the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), a model of reality based on our independent research and the work of several notable scientists of the past, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck, who were instrumental in the last major paradigm shift, a shift in the understanding of the nature of matter, space, and time that prepared the way for a more comprehensive shift to the science of the future which will include the reality of consciousness and Spirit.

Together, we have made an astounding number of discoveries, but by far the most important finding of TDVP was the discovery of gimmel, the third form of volumetric reality which proved to be the organizing non-physical component of atomic structure without which there simply would be no physical universe.

We discovered gimmel while applying the quantum calculus I had developed using normalized data for the electron and quarks from the Large Hadron Collider to define natural quantum equivalence units. When the quantum calculus I developed in 1986, called the calculus of dimensional distinctions (CoDD) was used to analyze the structure of the most stable known physical object in the universe, the proton, the non-physical component of objective reality was discovered.

 

In this series of posts, I am identifying the assumptions that need to be more accurately defined in order to expand the logical system of scientific analysis to include the non-physical aspects of phenomena experienced by conscious beings, and, last but not least, to resolve the “Mind of God” paradox revealed in the last post. This paradox arises from the proof that infinity is necessarily incomplete. In the last post, I explained that the Mind of God paradox results from certain erroneous assumptions about infinity and time. The assumptions associated with the concept of infinity were explored using set theory, and in this post, I will focus on the assumptions associated with the concept of time.

 

The Cultural Aversion to Mathematical Logic, A Brief Lament

Before getting into the details of the assumptions underlying our illusions about time, as revealed by the logic of relativity, quantum physics, and the Triadic Dimensional Vortical Paradigm (TDVP), please permit me the luxury of briefly calling your attention to the recent historical trend toward a pandemic of public disinterest in mathematical logic. I find this cultural aversion, which is especially prevalent in the United States of America, regrettable, and lamentable because it has the potential of completely destroying Western Civilization by devaluing the critical thinking skills that were preserved from times of higher mental and spiritual virtue in the distant past by a handful of philosophers of natural science.

 

We live in an era of explosive mass media sound bites that have short-circuited critical thinking to the extent that the mere mention of the word ‘mathematics’ or ‘logic’ causes the average American to quickly turn away and look for an easily accessible shiny object promising immediate gratification. During my lifetime, (I started public school in St. Louis Missouri in 1940) I have seen the attitude of American public education change from one of honoring intellectual achievement to one of promoting dull mediocrity. As a result, mathematics has become confused with the simple repetitive operations that computers can be programmed to do, and the elegance of pure reason is in danger of being lost to the average person, allowing self-serving individuals in our government and educational institutions to promote a false intellectual elitism that does nothing but divide the citizens of our county and promote class warfare.

 

OK. Now I will get off my soapbox. But I hope that this brief rant will encourage readers to pause and think about some basic concepts of mathematical logic as they apply to consciousness and the conceptual models of reality that we are discussing. Here are some thoughts along that line:

 

·         Scientific paradigms are systems of logic designed to model reality, the ultimate system of mathematical logic.

·         No model of reality is a theory of everything unless it includes consciousness because consciousness is a major part of reality.

·         The system of mathematical logic underlying reality has the same mathematical structure as the logic of consciousness.

·         Only a conscious mind can create a logical model of the way consciousness experiences reality because only consciousness can experience itself as part of reality. Therefore, the reality that we experience is a product of a conscious mind.

 

Time is a very subtle part of the consciousness we experience directly, so let’s have a look at what Einstein actually said about time:

 

“We (physicists) know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”

“When you think about it, time is an arbitrary construct”

“Time and space are modes by which we think

and not conditions in which we live”

“Time and space are not conditions of existence,

spacetime is a model for thinking”

– Albert Einstein

 

Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Assumptions about Space-time

Albert Einstein spoke about time on many occasions, and his quotes seem to bounce back and forth in one’s mind like the endless reflections of a rainbow around a bright light in a house of mirrors. They reflect the illusions of both time and space because together, as spacetime, they form the 4-D conceptual domain known as Minkowski space. They also allow us to have a peek at Einstein’s state of mind when the quotes were uttered or written. By the end of his life, Albert Einstein had begun to recognize the foreshadowing of the next great paradigm shift away from simple materialism, looming as the result of the acceptance of the counter-intuitive discoveries of quantum physics and relativity, but he would not abandon the convictions of a deterministic physicist. His clinging to a physicalist mind set is revealed in statements like:

 

“The physicist seeks to reduce colors & tones to vibrations, …thought and pain to nerve processes, in such a way that the psychical element as such is eliminated from the causal nexus of existence, and thus nowhere occurs [in the physicist’s model of reality] as an independent link in the causal associations. It is no doubt this attitude, which considers the comprehension of all relations by the exclusive use of only ‘space-like’ [and by extension, ‘time-like’] concepts as being possible in principle, [to represent] what is at the present time, understood by the term ‘materialism’ since ‘matter’ has lost its role as a fundamental concept.”

A mind like Einstein’s, much like science itself, evolves over time, and, I know that, like many other thinkers and writers, I tend to pick the quotes, as much as possible, that coincide with what I believe – and/or know. I also believe that the last insight he had about this subject and took the trouble to write down and publish, is likely to be the best one. In the 5^th and final appendix to the 15^th and last edition of his classic book; Relativity the Special and the General Theory, a Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand, on June 9^th, 1952, less than three years before he passed on to the other side of the one-way mirror of consciousness, he wrote:

 

“It is characteristic of Newtonian physics that it has to ascribe independent and real existence to space and time as well as to matter, for in Newton’s law of motion the idea of acceleration appears. But in this theory, acceleration can only denote ‘acceleration with respect to space.’ Newton’s space must thus be thought of as ‘at rest’, or at least as ‘unaccelerated’, in order that one can consider the acceleration, which appears in the law of motion, as being a magnitude with any meaning. Much the same holds with time, which of course likewise enters into the concept of acceleration.”

 

I recommend reading Appendix V, the final addition to Einstein’s “clear explanation that anyone can understand” in its entirety for yourself, if possible, because it gives you, in Albert Einstein’s own words (translated from the original German, the native language in which his thoughts were formed), about as clear a picture as you will find of his thoughts about some of the most important concepts behind the theory of relativity. In that appendix, titled “Relativity and the Problem of Space”, Einstein articulates the reasoning that leads to a very important view of space and time that I want to emphasize and elaborate in the context of the analysis we initiated in the last post.

 

In this last footnote to his explanation of relativity, he concludes that, unlike objects with measurable amounts of mass and energy, space and time cannot “claim any independent existence of their own”. This is a very important factor in determining how we can proceed to complete our analysis in the effort to resolve the mind of God paradox because it means that the assumptions underlying the notions of time and space, key elements in the concepts of acceleration, relative motion, and sequential events, cannot be represented as sets, or elements of sets of existing objects in the same way the assumptions about infinity were in the last post. We must, therefore, find a different way to analyze the assumptions that have created the current wide-spread persistent illusion of time.

 

In addition to the quotes above, a few more quotes may help to clarify the logic of the axiomatic assumptions that need to be corrected to resolve the mind of God paradox and provide the basis of the shift to a new, more comprehensive phenomenology that is provided by the TDVP model. (Phenomenology is the study of consciousness and the experience of reality.) Einstein made no claim to be the first to see a problem with assuming that space, and by extension, time, possess the same level of objectivity ascribed to matter and energy:

 

“Time and again since remotest times, philosophers have resisted such a presumption. Descartes argued somewhat along these lines: space is identical with extension, but extension is connected with bodies; thus, there is no space without bodies and hence no such thing as empty space. … The weakness of this argument lies in what follows. It is certainly true that the concept of extension owes its origin to our experiences… But from this it cannot be concluded that the concept of extension may not be justified in cases which have not themselves given rise to the formation of this concept. Such an enlargement of concepts can be justified indirectly by empirical results. The assertion that extension is confined to bodies is therefore of itself certainly unfounded. We shall see later [in this appendix], however, that the general theory of relativity confirms Descartes’ conception in a roundabout way. … The psychological origin of the concept of space, or of the necessity for it, is far from being so obvious as it may appear to be… The idea of space, however, is suggested by certain primitive experiences.”

 

He goes on to provide an example of the “primitive experience” in the awareness of physical objects placed in boxes. Such an experiences gives rise to the concept of space as something fundamental but does not prove that “empty space” would not still exist if neither objects, nor boxes, nor any kind of containers existed. The reader may have already realized that the boxes and objects example he describes is equivalent to a set theory conceptualization, even though Einstein does not identify it as such. In the set theory language of the last post, one would argue that, if there were no objects, and no sets of objects, finite, or infinite, then a null, or empty set would have no meaning. On the other hand, because there is no way to test this empirically, the argument does not prove conclusively that there would be no space or time without the existence of matter and energy. (This weakness also applies to the argument about infinity in the last post.)   

 

Next, he explains how the principals of relativity, i.e., “no preferred reference frame and constant light speed”, in the special theory of relativity - which deals with uniform unaccelerated relative motion - eliminates the psychologically intuitive concepts of universal spacetime and simultaneous events, consistent with Lorentz’s work and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Then he discusses the details showing how the general theory of relativity does, indeed confirm Descartes’ logical leap to the conclusion that there is no such thing as “empty space”, and consequently no such thing as spacetime without material events. It can be summed up this way:

 

Physical objects are not in spacetime, but physical objects are spatially and temporally extended. In this way, the concepts of ‘empty space’ and time without events lose their meaning.

 

Next, I want to show how the conclusions of Planck and Einstein about the quantized and relativistic nature of matter-energy and space-time, combined with the potential resolution of the mind of God paradox from the last post, require fundamental changes in our basic intuitive assumptions about time.

 

Recall that Max Planck, said “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.” And Einstein agreed with Planck. He said it this way: “Space and time can claim no existence of their own. … What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to a point of visibility. There is no matter.”  

 

However, input data in the form of electro-chemical impulses that the physical sense organs deliver to the brain through the neurological networks existing in our bodies for the conscious mind to process and store as mental images, lead us to assume things about processes that we can’t see because of the extremely small-scale size of quantum phenomena. We think that objective reality is made up of matter and energy interacting dynamically in space and time. The a priori assumptions that support the concept of the existence of an external objective reality are the assumptions that matter, energy, space, and time are actual existing things that make up objective reality. Einstein and Planck are telling us that this is not true.

 

Our assumptions seem to be verified by the fact that we can measure matter as mass, energy as force, space as volumetric dimensions, and time as duration of physical events, all of which we perceive through the senses. But this handy verification is clearly circular reasoning because our proof of the existence of physical objects depends upon the existence of physical objects, and proof of the existence of time as an objective reality, depends on the existence of mass-energy events that depend upon the existence of time!

 

Reality and The Role of Intuitive Assumptions

Our intuitive assumptions about infinity and time play a powerful role in the shaping of our beliefs about reality and even affect how we live our lives. Given that reality is what really exists, it should be obvious that when assumptions behind our beliefs are at odds with reality, many problems will arise because erroneous beliefs lead to mis-guided, ineffective, and possibly even destructive self-detrimental actions. In the last post and in this one, we have identified the a priori assumptions underlying beliefs about infinity and time that are held by most people, and we have seen how they are in conflict with the realities that are revealed by empirical investigation and logical analysis. The task now is to put what we have found out about infinity and time into the proper perspective related to what actually exists as objective reality, into practical application.

 

The universe is remarkably complex and stable, exhibiting numerous precise cyclical patterns that recur without beginning or end for as far as we can see or detect by logical extension, into the distant past and foreseeable future, despite the experimentally documented entropic decay of complex atomic, molecular, and macro structures with the passage of time. The universe appears to be expanding into an endless, perhaps even an infinite extension, toward the most distant visible objects, the enormous brightly burning stars called quasars. Because the contents of the dimensions of reality are quantized, we have been able to push our investigation, conceptually at least, down to the smallest quantum, and to trace the remarkable complexity and stability we perceive all the way down to the most stable physical object in the universe, the proton.

 

We found the proton to be a combination of three rapidly spinning objects called quarks, only one of which, the up quark, even begins to approach the stability of the proton. It is only gimmel, which occurs in measurable quantum equivalence units of volume, but with no mass or energy, that gives the proton additional mass and amazing stability. The fact that the total angular momentum of the three quarks is conserved and increased significantly in a mathematically predictable way in the proton, raises the question of why elementary objects like electrons and quarks are spinning relative to all observers at such high rates of rotation in the first place; an important question that no current theory other than TDVP, attempts to answer.

 

The answer turns out to be relatively simple, requiring nothing more complex than Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every force in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Elementary objects at the quantum level are spinning because the force expanding the universe evokes an equal and opposite reaction, which is the sum total of the inertia created by the spinning of localized vortexes (called elementary particles) in the fabric of reality. OK, I can hear someone saying: but now you have to answer an even deeper question: Why is the universe expanding? A flippant answer might be: “Because empty space sucks!” But we’ve just been explaining that there’s no such thing as empty space! - I can imagine Niels Bohr jumping up and down, dropping his pipe, and spilling his box of matches all over the floor in excitement and anticipation of the progress we are about make!

 

This paradox cannot be resolved quite as easily as the Mind of God paradox because it involves expanding the axiomatic basis of the scientific model of reality to the point where we can understand why the speed of light is the upper limit of relative motion, how one can perceive the extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time, and why time and space, like mass and energy, must also be quantized. I also want to get into how consciousness expansion related to this new understanding of time leads to an interesting practical application. But, since this post is already somewhat long, I will stop here and continue with this train of thought in the next post.

 

ERC – 7/16/2022

WHAT IS LIFE?

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

We are living at an extremely exciting time! Science is finally beginning to escape the confining box of materialism! Check out the work of Dr. Gary Schwartz of the university of Arizona and the founding members of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. Their work is amplified with my quantum calculus, the Neppe-Close consciousness-based paradigm shift TDVP, and the discovery of Gimmel, the non-physical part of reality. If this isn’t exciting, then you haven’t yet understood what is happening. It is the advent of a major scientific paradigm shift!

According to the current scientific paradigm, life is nothing more than an accident resulting from a big explosion that happened about 13.8 billion years ago - an epiphenomenon of physical evolution. From a purely intellectual point of view, it would be nice if that were true. It would make things really simple: You are born, you struggle through the pleasures and pains of life, you die. End of story. That way, it would make little or no difference what you did or didn’t do during your individual lifetime. Your life, pleasures and pains, accomplishments and failures, good fortune and bad, triumphs, and defeats would all be, as Bertrand Russell famously said, doomed to disappear in the great heat death of the universe. But, of course, it really isn’t that simple.

Let’s look a little more closely at the origin of Russell’s statement. It is based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which was just being formulated as the basis of scientific materialism during his lifetime.  It says: “Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased. In the limit, i.e. for reversible processes, the sum of the entropies remains unchanged.” For those not familiar with the physics word “entropy”: It is a negative term meaning disorder, or lack of meaningful structure.

To explain the second law in terms that anyone can understand: If I lose my grip and drop my coffee cup onto a concrete floor, a natural process occurs: it shatters into hundreds of pieces, flying in all directions. The ordered, meaningful structure (the cup) becomes disorder (the pieces). We never see this reversed in a natural process. For example, no one has ever seen an old, neglected run-down house reverse its natural process of decay and revert to its once beautiful newly constructed state without the input of a lot of intelligently directed material, energy, and time! And that’s the point: The natural decay of finite physical structures can only be reversed by input from a source external to the structure.

If reality were finite, the second law of thermodynamics would always apply, and Bertrand Russell would be right: the physical universe, without any input from an external source, would eventually “run down”, reaching the equilibrium of maximum entropy, i.e., total disorder. In addition, if the universe originated in the explosion of an extremely hot, extremely dense concentration of matter, as the current scientific paradigm hypothesizes, then it would be flying apart like the bits and pieces of the coffee cup.

In an ever-expanding universe, also hypothesized by current mainstream science, none of the pieces would ever encounter each other, because they are forever flying apart; and even if they did, the second law would assure that any momentary accidental structure would rapidly decay, lacking any outside intervention. So, why is it that we have a physical universe? As Leibniz said: The most important question, the question that science should answer first, is why is there something rather than nothing? It turns out that the answer is simple: Reality is not finite. Any spiritually conscious person knows this. Every new-born child knows this. But it is hidden from the mainstream scientist by his inability to see outside the box of materialism.

The truth of the infinity of reality is not revealed by our finite physical senses. We are only capable of seeing a finite portion of reality through our physical senses, so the universe appears to be finite. In fact, it is not. Also, it is the nature of scientists and philosophers to further obfuscate the truth by inventing new words and pretending that they represent a new understanding of reality better than the old words. So yesterday’s materialism has become today’s scientific physicalism. But a handful of dirt is still a handful of dirt regardless of what you call it!

Even biologists, psychologists, and others who study consciousness, easily fall into this intellectual trap, because they admire the simplicity and clarity of the materialistic sciences like physics and chemistry. And they think that if they can invent a word for something, then they actually know what it is! They fail to realize that there is not a scientist alive who knows what gravity is, why one compound has all the distinct qualities it does, what light is, or why we experience things the way we do, never mind what life and consciousness are!

The discovery of Gimmel changes all this! If you haven’t read some of the hundreds of papers, and two or three books written by Dr. Vernon Neppe and this author, you may not be familiar with the term “Gimmel”. Like all the words in any language, it hides more than it reveals, but it is our attempt to provide a name for the third form of reality. The axiomatic basis of the belief system of our current mainstream science recognizes only mass, energy, space, and time as the basic measurable parameters of reality. The discovery of Gimmel, the third measurable substance of reality in addition to mass and energy, adds consciousness to the equations of science.

The existence of Gimmel is not a philosophical or scientific hypothesis. It is a mathematically and physically demonstrable fact of nature. It is not something that I and/or Dr. Neppe invented. I happen to be the one who made the discovery sometime in 2011, and I have been amazed ever since by the way it explains so many things that are either poorly explained, or simply ignored by mainstream science. I am happily grateful to God or, if you prefer, the universe, to have been the one to discover Gimmel, the measurable non-physical part of reality. Not that anyone else could not have discovered it, they could have, because it is there, just like the sun is there. Of course it is not as obvious as the sun, but never-the-less, it is just as real.

Bottom line: Gimmel is the up-until-now mysterious something that makes the difference between existence and non-existence, converts physical energy to life force, enlivens inert matter, and produces conscious organic life forms!

The development and application of a quantum calculus was necessary for the discovery to happen, but the precise demonstration of the existence of Gimmel can be understood by anyone with a rudimentary understanding of math and physics. Dr. Neppe and I have made peer-reviewed scientific papers available to the scientific community, and I am currently preparing a series of online courses to make the discovery available to everyone. It will begin with basic concepts, and proceed in short logical steps to the demonstration of the proof of discovery. The series of online courses will become available through the Academia Ars Moriendi, an organization promoting the enjoyment of the reality of life and death, founded by Grig Oprea in Europe. Stay tuned!

ERC – 21^st of June 2020

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE AS A LOGICAL SYSTEM

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE AS A LOGICAL SYSTEM

MATHEMATICS AND THE UNIVERSE

I have argued in these posts that mathematics is far more than a tool invented by human beings for solving problems that can be translated into numbers; that in fact, the logical structure of mathematics is a reflection of the logical structure of the universe. If I am right, mathematical theorems, like the Pythagorean Theorem, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Gӧdel’s Incompleteness Theorems embody deep facts about reality and the universe. In this post, I will demonstrate this with an example: the history of our knowledge about the universe.

Gӧdel’s Incompleteness Theorems prove that no logical system is ever complete. The universe, which I believe is the ultimate logical system, is the ultimate example. The observable physical universe appears to be expanding away from us at a rate that is always greater than our ability to observe it. During my lifetime, astronomers’ estimates of the size of the universe have been revised upward a number of times. I remember headlines like: “Astronomers say the universe is twice as large as we thought it was!” And: “The size of the universe is three times as great as previously estimated.” And, on it went. In 1928, an astronomer from Iowa, Edwin Hubble, discovered that the red shift in light from distant stars increased with the distance to the star, indicating that the universe might be expanding.

EDWIN HUBBLE AND THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

Hubble reasoned that an expanding universe, if it started expanding from a point at some time in the past, the size of the universe would depend upon the length of time back to the ‘big bang’ beginning. Using the best estimate of distance at the time, which was based on how the brightness of a certain well-known type of star varies with distance, he estimated the size of the universe. His estimate of the age of the universe, however, was less that the carbon-dated age of the oldest rocks on the Earth! Obviously, something was wrong.

Only 8 years after his epic discovery of the red shift, Hubble had doubts that the universe was actually expanding. He was quoted in a Time Magazine article, dated December 14, 1936 saying:

“To assume that the shifts really indicate receding velocity forces one to adopt a very curious model of the universe …The model is closed and very small – a large fraction of it can be observed with existing telescopes – and is packed with matter to the very threshold of perception … In short, the necessary adjustments and compensations suggest that the [expanding universe] model may be a forced interpretation of the data.”

But, in spite of Hubble’s misgivings about the expanding universe theory, the big bang theory is generally accepted as fact by mainstream astronomy and current data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the universe is 10 times greater than Hubble estimated in 1936. In just 80 years, our best estimate of the size of the universe has increased ten-fold.

UNIVERSAL EXPANSION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The current Hubble Telescope data also indicate that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing, and the red-shift in the light from sources at the edge of the visible universe indicates that they are flying away with velocities approaching the speed of light. This begs the question: If the universe is expanding at light speed, is it not effectively infinite?

In the last post, we saw that the discovery of non-physical gimmel as a real part of the stable structure of space-time consciousness reality, leads to the following conclusion: Recognition of the role of consciousness as the organizing factor of physical reality, if we take any point in the nine-dimensional domain containing the physical universe as the space-time point of origin of the universe as we know it, we find that Hydrogen, Deuterium and Helium atoms had to already exist then and there, and this means that, as indicated by the calculus of distinctions, the expanding universe is a perceptual reality, measurable in 3S-1T, but it is ultimately an illusion. 

This illusion we call the physical universe is completely consistent with the hypothesis that the universe exists as a logical system subject to Gӧdel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

THE BIG BANG MYTH . . . EXPLODED!

WAS THERE A BIG BANG?

Was there actually a big bang? In a word: NO. In the so-called ‘big bang theory’ of the current widely accepted paradigmatic model, the origin event was neither big, nor a bang. It was exceedingly small relative to the size of today’s universe, certainly smaller than a hydrogen atom, a proton, or an up-quark. So one might call it a sub-quark spark! Also, there could be no ‘bang’, since there was no medium through which sound waves could travel, and, presumably, no ear to hear it.

The acceptance of the idea of a big bang expanding universe stems from astronomer Edwin Hubble’s discovery of red shifts in the wave lengths of light coming from distant stars; the farther away the star, the greater the shift; suggesting an expanding universe. It was just one easy step of logic (as it turns out, an incorrect step) to run the clock backward to a smaller and smaller universe, all the way to a ‘singularity’, a point that must have ‘exploded’ into the 13.7 billion year old expanding universe we appear to have today.

Why do I say that this simple concept, which quickly caught on in the imagination of the general public, is incorrect? Because it didn’t take physicists and cosmologists long to discover that there was a problem with it. Calculating the age of the universe based on the current expansion rate, they found an impossible contradiction: Some stars were older than the universe! This would indicate that the big bang explosion was not the beginning of the universe. MIT theoretical physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth solved the problem by proposing that there was a period of rapid expansion, or inflation in the beginning, during which the universe expanded at a rate much faster than the speed of light. That works. I’ve done the calculations myself, verifying it from more than one perspective. That makes it very convincing.

The drive-by thinker might say: ‘O.K., what was there before the big-bang expanding universe?’ smugly thinking he had posed a mind-blowing question. The answer, however, is quite simple: There was nothing! If there was a ‘big bang’ (sub-quark spark) matter, energy, time and space all originated there. The question of what existed before the origin event, whatever it was, is a meaningless question leading to an ‘infinite regress’, the mother of all contradictions. End of story!

Well, no, not quite. The flaw in this reasoning is the assumption that there could be nothing rather than something. The Calculus of Distinctions reveals something quite amazing: If mass and energy are quantized, as Planck discovered they are, there is either something or nothing, not both! I think we’ll all agree that there is something. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it. Therefore, there is no such thing as nothing. This is consistent with one of the most basic and well-known laws of physics: the conservation of mass and energy. The substance of reality is neither created nor destroyed. There is no absolute beginning or end, only change. Even if all the mass and energy in the universe eventually spreads out to the bland state of maximum entropy, something still exists.

But, wait! The ‘big bang’ (sub-quark spark) theory says nothing existed before the explosive event creating the physical universe! But there’s no such thing as nothing. What does this mean? It means that there never actually was a big bang. The big-bang-expanding universe is an illusion; a very persistent one, that looks the same from any point in the universe, but nevertheless, an illusion!

Incidentally, I applied the Calculus of Distinctions to the big bang theory in 1989 and reached this same conclusion. I published the details in my second book “Infinite Continuity” in 1990.

Reference: E.R. Close, 1990, Infinite Continuity, Part III Section 1.4, pp. 127 – 138.

Watch for new videos  with and without detailed math, explaining the Close-Neppe Theory of everything.