© Copyright Edward R. Close, 2022
SEVEN: LIGHT AND MULTI-DIMENSIONAL
HOLISTIC REALITY
“Our minds are finite, and yet even
in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are
infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that
infinitude.” - Alfred North Whitehead
During my early years as an undergraduate, even though I was
majoring in physics with a minor in mathematics, I was also very much interested
in symbolic logic, linguistics, philosophy, metaphysics, and parapsychology. As
a result, I did some extra-curricular research into the writings of Alfred North
Whitehead, and what I found had a profound influence on me. In the previous post,
I commented on the theory of types found in Principia Mathematica the best-known
work of Whitehead and his most famous student, Bertrand Russell, and identified
paradox as the fourth, and in my opinion, the most important type of
statement relative to the advancement of our understanding of reality.
Toward the end of my undergraduate years, I found myself
rejecting the materialistic views of Russell and gravitating toward Whitehead’s
way of thinking about metaphysics. Reading Whitehead’s works: Process and
Reality, The concept of Nature, and Science and the Modern World,
I realized, among other things, that most people studying science and
mathematics are oblivious to what their own metaphysical assumptions are. I
realized that a scientist who does not know what the metaphysical assumptions of
science are, is like a ship without a rudder, and science with a confused
metaphysical foundation is going to be fragmented and bogged down in endless
confusion.
I think the failure to see the logical and mathematical indicators
of extra dimensions is what led Russell, and most rationalists of the twentieth
century into the unfortunate consciousness-stifling dead-end of materialism. It
is understandable that this would happen. Materialism is the “low-hanging fruit”
of natural science. Recognizing consciousness as a fundamental aspect of
reality makes the task of grasping the nature of reality more difficult, but
ultimately, much more satisfying. The ways we deceive ourselves are many and
subtle, but the most insidious is by separating subject from object, mind from
matter, consciousness from reality.
In this post, I want to elaborate on the theme of the previous
six posts: The fact that pure mathematics, natural science, and human consciousness
are all just different aspects of the same thing; and that is, that, as human
beings, we are manifestations of reality seeking to experience itself at the
interface between the quantized physical universe and the infinitely continuous
substrate of Cosmic Consciousness. As finite conscious beings, we stand on the
threshold of infinity. Summarizing the last post: Real paradox is the fourth
type of statement, the logical equivalent of the third root of unity, i.e., the
imaginary number, and the doorway to consciousness expansion that brings us to
the Threshold of the fourth state of consciousness.
Since consciousness expansion is a real experience that
cannot be described in the finite words of any language, we have to rely on analogies,
which are never perfect. I have used the phenomena of the origination and
propagation of light to illustrate this point because it is the best analogy we
have. Light is, in a very real sense, the very fabric of reality, expanding, as
it does, from the smallest quantum to infinity. It is the most viable and
available link between consciousness and physical reality.
An important key to understanding the nature of reality is recognizing
the relationship of finite dimensionality to infinity. Applications of the CoDD
reveal that everything in existence expands in very different ways into the geometrically
consecutive extensions of three, six, and nine dimensions. We have to start our
analysis of the expanding universe with three dimensions, not zero, one, or two,
because there is no such thing as a singularity, and no such things as scalar
and planar objects or entities in quantized reality. Points, lines, and planes do
not exist in quantized reality. They are projections of the infinite continuity
of mind, the first level of consciousness. All objects of manifest reality are at
least 3-D volumetric, so physical reality starts with three dimensions, not
zero, one or two. Once this fact is grasped, many things begin to become much clearer.
With the importance of dimensionality in mind, let’s have a
look at another historical paradox involving light from distant stars, known as
Olbers’ paradox, named
after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840). This
paradox arose from the fact that the blackness of empty space conflicted with
the assumption of most astronomers at that time that the universe extended to infinity.
If the universe were infinite, Olbers reasoned, there would be an infinite
number of stars, and any line of sight would end on the surface of a star causing
the night sky to blaze with light. But this reasonable conclusion is contradicted
by the darkness seen between stars that can be observed every night.
Unlike Niels Bohr, most scientists don’t like paradoxes,
and do their best to explain them away within the comfort of their existing
belief systems, not realizing that real paradoxes that arise in any finite
system of thought cannot be resolved within that system. In this case, and in
general, the finite system of thought embraced by most mainstream scientists,
is built on the metaphysical foundation of sand known as materialism, or
physicalism. If scientists are successful in explaining away a contradiction,
then the paradox wasn’t a real paradox as defined in the last post, but just a
misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of some part of the established paradigm.
Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the linear relationship between red shift and
distance expanded our awareness of reality. Here is the standard explanation,
accepted by the majority of astronomers and astrophysicists as the resolution
of Olbers’ paradox:
“The darkness of the night sky is explained by the
expansion of spacetime, which lengthens the [wavelength of] light originating
from the Big Bang to microwave levels via a process known as red shift;
this microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer than those
of visible light and so appears dark to the naked eye. Other
explanations for the paradox have been offered, but none have wide acceptance
in cosmology.”
At first glance, this seems like the perfect resolution of
Olbers’ paradox. It even appears to fit the pattern of the expansion of reality
and consciousness about which I’ve been talking. But there’s a problem. It
falls right back into the paradox of the red shift exposed in the last post. It
assumes that the red shift is lengthening of wavelength due to a doppler effect,
which would violate the physical conservation of energy law, and it fails to
include the relativistic shortening of wavelength with motion that would happen
in an expanding universe.
I think another analogy might help here. Olber’s paradox and
its solution may be analogous to the flat-Earth paradox arising from the fact that
we can see in a straight line all the way to the craters of the moon, even when
the moon is on the horizon, and yet we cannot see a ship on the ocean a mere fifty
miles away. The disappearing ship paradox is resolved quickly by realizing that
the surface of the Earth is the curve of a three-dimensional object, not a two
dimensional one. Similarly, perhaps, we cannot see stars beyond those about 13.8
billion light years away, not because light waves are stretched by the doppler
effect, but because the universe is a multi-dimensional object with more
dimensions than our physical senses are able to detect directly.
When we go back to the threshold of infinity, we see that
this paradox is in fact caused by the arbitrary separation of matter from mind.
To see why, let’s look at the process of observing light from distant stars
more closely again. We assume that this light that we are observing is a form
of energy originating on the surface of a star near the edge of the visible universe
ten or twelve billion years ago, that it has traveled an unbelievably great
distance, finally to be captured in our telescope, to be magnified and directed
onto a photographic plate, so we can look at the results with eyes that have
not existed for even a blink in the age of the universe. What’s wrong with this
picture?
To begin with, light is not a particle or wave travelling
through space as we have assumed. Light is a local phenomenon. What we are
studying, is the local movement of an electric field, whose movement excites a magnetic
field, whose movement in turn, excites a local electric field ahead of the
magnetic field, etc. This is why light always has the same velocity for every observer.
Every observer is measuring the wavelengths and movements of dynamic local phenomenological
events in his or her own inertial reference frame. Conclusions about what may
or may not have happened billions of years ago are indirect deductions about
details of events distant in spacetime, based on assumptions that, as it turns
out, are not true.
On the frontier of the four-dimensional reality model of general
relativity, Einstein, in the last year of his life, concluded that space and
time, separately, or combined dimensionally as spacetime, both measures of
extent, have no existence of their own. And John Archibald Wheeler, in my
opinion Einstein’s most brilliant student, who designed the delayed-choice
experiment, pointed out that actions that we perform in the present, when
dealing with light from distant stars, can change what we are able to say about
the past. Both of these observations by Einstein and Wheeler are confirmed by
applications of the CoDD to the red shift and Olbers’ paradoxes.
Next, we must realize that experimental conditions, specifically
in the case at hand, the telescope, the photographic plate, and all of the
circumstances of human observation and measurement, are set up by a conscious
being seeking to extend our limited physical senses. While the intent is to try
to reveal more of the detail of reality that are hidden from us by the
reduction valves of our physical senses, the result actually makes our already
indirect perception of the phenomenon called light even more indirect. Finally,
we must realize that the reductionist approach to the analysis of light assumes
that light is a feature of reality that can be considered separate and
independent of everything else, when, in fact it is not. Application of the
principles of TDVP and the CoDD highlights electromagnetic radiation as the
fundamental link between consciousness and the physical universe. We need to
rectify the mistake of natural philosophy and science pointed out by Alfred
North Whitehead, when he said:
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic
literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.'
There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms
of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
It is also important at this point to bring in a concept
that had a profound impact on Albert Einstein’s development of the theory of
relativity. That concept is known as Mach’s Principle. It can be stated as
follows:
There must be a
general law of relativity that relates the motion of the distant stars to the
local inertial reference frame of the conscious observer. In other words, local
physical laws are directly related to, and determined by the large-scale
structure of the universe. – Ernst Mach
The equations of general relativity represent Einstein’s best
efforts to formulate the general law that Mach referred to, connecting localized
physical laws to the motion of distant stars through “the electrodynamics of
moving objects”. I want to show in these posts that Einstein’s focus on the
role of light was correct, but that his work was not finished when he passed to
the other side. Furthermore, the way to do it is to expand the model of reality
from the four-dimensional model of general relativity to a multi-dimensional
model of nine finite dimensions.
Electromagnetic radiation is, in fact, the unique, most
important aspect of the essential substance of reality that links mass, energy,
and consciousness. I will have much more to say about this later, but for now, let’s
turn back to the analysis of light from distant stars and the interesting paradoxes
it presents to the current mainstream scientific paradigm.
The alternating vibration of electric and magnetic fields of
starlight is magnified by the telescope and projected on a photographic plate
that has a coating of material that changes color when impacted by the energy
of the light. Some of the light is also split into different wavelengths by refraction
so the individual wavelengths that make up the spectral signature of the star
can be identified. Finally, a conscious observer interprets these secondary and
tertiary phenomena as evidence of non-local activities that may have happened
billions of years ago. But some of the conclusions may be incorrect because of
the assumption that something called spacetime exists apart from the object of
observation and the observer. As pointed out above, spacetime is not
independent of the other elements of the experiment and the way the experiment
is set up may affect what we conclude about what may have happened billions of
years ago.
As explained in the previous post, assuming that the red
shift is a doppler lengthening of light waves violates the law of conservation
of energy. Instead, the red shift appears to be caused by the acceleration of
the expansion of the physical universe. But what if, similar to the way the
illusion of a flat Earth is resolved with the expansion of our awareness to
include an additional dimension, the red shift and Olbers’ paradoxes are also resolved
by expanding our awareness into dimensional domains beyond the four dimensions
of spacetime? In fact, this is exactly what application of CoDD strongly suggests.
Before we delve into this, I think it will be helpful to clarify what
dimensions are and how they relate to reality in general, and these paradoxes
in particular. I like to call this subject dimensionometry, but, because this
post is already too long, I am going to pause here and discuss dimensionometry
is some detail in the next post.
-
ERC 1/24/2022
