Mandala: A Thing Of Beauty
by JoyI have mentioned in passing a background in physics, an interest in the many competing wannabe replacements for the good ol' Standard Model (and contestants for what qualifies as a 'Theory of Everything'), and a particular interest from investigations of the phenomenon of consciousness in an 8-dimensional model of reality both psychic and physical. As opposed to an 11, 22 or infinite dimensional reality per other theoretical models, that is.
ScienceDaily reports today that Mathematicians Map One Of The Most Complicated Structures, which is the symmetry Lie group E8. The project took an international team of 18 mathematicians 4 years working on separate portions of the calculation, and 77 hours of supercomputer time to put them all together. They had to 'map' the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object (in 248-dimensional E8) as representations in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries for 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. A rather impressive accomplishment.
I'd reproduce the computer generation of the Gosset polytope 421 drawn by Peter McMullen in the 1960s because it's so pretty, but it's right there on the ScienceDaily page, so do check it out for yourself!
March 19th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Wow, cool. But what does it all mean?
Comment by Bilbo — March 19, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
March 19th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Bilbo:
Um… Mathematics can be pretty? LOL! Gee, I sure don't know, Bilbo. I followed 8-dimensions in my years-long quest to see if science had anything approaching an explanation for a genuine (and legally adjudicated) Miracle of consciousness because it tended to explain more of what I'd witnessed and experienced than medical science or regular science would even try to explain.
There is some relevance to the issue of quantum gravity (and thus the true nature of gravity) via the mechanism proposed - vector alignment. Of course, 240 vectors per representation doesn't simplify anything per Occam, but then, neither do multiverses… §;o)
Physics can be weird. PS to whoever fixed my subscripts, thanks!
Comment by Joy — March 19, 2007 @ 6:58 pm
March 19th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Joy,
Thanks for the links. It will take me a while to digest it all (there is a lot there).
One of these days, more people in the telic thoughts blog are going to start noticing these juicy bits you have been dropping periodically. Here are some subject titles from the link you provided…
"Bio-systems as self-organizing quantum systems"
"Moment of consciousness as quantum jump between quantum histories."
"Information gain of conscious experience."
"Scalar wave pulses as producers of phase conjugate waves and time mirror mechanism"
I suppose "conscious" might be a compromise between "telic" and "intelligent".
When you start messing with holistic space/time with multiple dimensions then classical definitions start to lose relative meaning. I just don't see how a "designer" that has the ability to learn and/or adapt makes sense as a thought model for the kind of multidimensional "ID alternative" the link you provided implies.
The idea of having a purpose makes some sense (anthropic principle) . The "purpose" is to make the universe internally consistent in all dimensions, including time.
I will have to read up on how Pitkanen defines "conscious", but I could see it as something similar to a multi-dimsional Gaia.
For what it is worth, you have provided the most compelling proposal of any ID proponent I know of to date.
Posts like this and Retrocausality are, by far, better than the standard unknown-designer-did-it-using-unknown-methods PR talking points, IMHO.
Applauding Provoked Thinking
Comment by Thought Provoker — March 19, 2007 @ 10:42 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 10:12 am
TP:
Well, Matti's been working on this for 26 years, so there's literally tons of 'stuff' - and you just got the consciousness that fell quite naturally out of the 8-D physical model. I've been really trying to understand it for less than a decade, and have to admit the math is beyond me. Even though the "infinite primes" [P-Adic] appeals strongly to me, since I've never liked the whole renormalization cheat used in regular mathematical physics.
If eternity surrounds and infuses us at all times in all spaces (those danged infinities that keep showing up), then there's no really good reason not to deal with it as-is. As if… as if our reality falls naturally out of a greater reality that is right here right now, we just haven't the equipment to perceive it all.
That said, I am not totally in line with some of his interpretations. Matti is pretty Gaian in his derived belief. And while I acknowledge there is certainly likely to be ongoing and relatively 'aware' interconnection among all things - this falls right out of standard physics as well - I think there's even more going on. I hope not more dimensions, since 2 or 3 is practically impossible to plot (at least, before the project reported yesterday). Still, Matti's model is by far the most explanatory I've encountered for some of the phenomena I've seen/experienced. He isn't shy of addressing the anomalous, which puts him head and shoulders above those mainstreamers who simply deny that anomalies mean anything at all.
* Point of Fact: No ToE [Theory of Everything] lives up to the title that cannot account for the anomalies as well as the norm.
Plus, you've just gotta give him credit for sticking to his guns through what hasn't been an easy few decades. I admire that, and from working through trying to understand his model and its possible application to a genuine Miracle of consciousness, I like to think of him as a friend. Oh, and I'll give some credit to Sir Roger Penrose too, whose own model of consciousness - using the massless extremal but identified with gravitons in just 4 dimensions looked way too much like a rip-off - was footnoted with mention of Matti in his book. There may be something he recognizes to be more explanatory in 8-D than 4, but which conventional physics just isn't ready for due to the radically different mathematical approach.
Matti has published regularly on the NL preprint servers (and in some journals), so despite general derision for his more extreme extrapolations, many mathematical physicists have been aware of his model for years. Now that E8 has been mapped, that may start to change. It's certainly better than multiverses!
Comment by Joy — March 20, 2007 @ 10:12 am
March 20th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Joy, I have no intuitive sense of what this model means or how it explains what it's supposed to explain. If you can help me there, I'd thank you. In fact, I thank you anyway.
Regardless, I do have a question, which may apply to this model as to any other. What causes the model to be instantiated in reality? Or, as Hawking asked,
Oh, and one more… Why would a Godless universe have any interest in, or need of, being beautiful?
Comment by stunney — March 20, 2007 @ 12:55 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Joy,
I, also, wonder if you could translate this to sort of a "8-D for Dummies" kind of post. I also wonder how this model relates to theism. ???
Comment by bj — March 20, 2007 @ 1:56 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Hi Stunney,
You wrote…
At the risk of being too subtle, I find the following very beautiful…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Provoking Thought
Comment by Thought Provoker — March 20, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
stunney:
Last question first (for context)… I have said nothing about a "godless universe." I've just been talking about an 8-D reality, which I like better than an 11-D or a 22-D or an infinite-D universe. Because unless somebody got 2+2=5 somewhere back on the first blackboard (and that's unlikely), there are more than 3+1 dimensions in the totality of reality. It behooves us then to consider which qualitative properties apply to any/all of them.
"Beauty" really is in the eye of the beholder. For every one of the vast majority of human beings who consider symmetries to be beautiful, there's one or more who insist that they're boring beyond toleration. That it's the 'broken' symmetries that donate variety and interest and beauty to the world. And that view does have some considerable scientific merit.
If there is a god/God who broke the symmetries in order to give us this amazing universe in which to experience life and death and everything in between, then that's just what we've got. How nice that we're able to reason about it in such a way as to appreciate both the Perfect Symmetry which all that exists [imperfectly] reflects, and the broken symmetries that give us such a beautifully intelligible world.
What it's supposed to explain is reality. That different people perceive or intuit different totalities of reality is no surprise, so 'what' needs explaining - FAPP - will tend to be a bit different depending on who you talk to. All this sort of mathematically based extrapolation is questionable per 'what' it explains, but still you've got to admit that symmetrical equations are, at least for those who can appreciate them, beautiful. Why, that's often the sole criteria for scientific judgments about whose equations deserve the most attention!
Einstein, being an outsider, would never have gotten anywhere had his equations not been so darned pretty. The same is true of Max's multiverses, though Einstein's equations had more concrete applications (and potential testability). In such theoretics, the line between physics and metaphysics is rather indistinct.
Matti's equations make use of a whole new mathematics, like Newton used calculus nobody had ever heard of. Thus it's not likely that either Matti or I will ever see a consensus on its relative value for understanding reality. The "Manhattan-sized calculation" reported yesterday uses maths we're already comfortable with. A different approach could make it simpler, but only on the equation's expression end. The extrapolations would still be mind-boggling.
I'd say it's the range of phenomena that it can explain. Including things not yet explained by older approaches, even if experiments haven't yet been devised to test it directly. It's a process.
The Miracle I went looking for some scientific explanation for was way too 'real' on a mundane level for me to accept medical science's self-serving write-off to "Miracle." They dealt with it one-on-one like I did, so that assertion didn't explain anything at all - it just absolved the involved doctors from having to do what they could to save the life of their patient. I call this the "Miracle Defense," now precedent in the legal realm of medical malpractice. It asserts (and they won) that if there is no possible explanation or excuse for a patient to be alive, the doctor has no responsibility to do what they can to treat him/her.
Applications of this precedent are of course scary, and should NOT be allowed to stand. It means that if the EMT tells the ER doctor that the patient "should have died" in that accident, the doctor can legally refuse to treat broken bones, torn arteries, blocked airways, whatever - just let the patient die (especially if s/he is an organ donor).
But having spent our entire worldly worth getting it that far over seven years (along with a total of 7 regulatory and criminal complaints resulting in removal of license for 3 of 4 doctors involved), we could not afford to appeal. So I went back to school to see if there was reason to soundly reject the legal "finding of fact." That led me to Matti.
Matti's model does help me to understand several of the many Miraculous things I witnessed and experienced through the course of that ordeal. As I said, I don't buy his own subjective extrapolations, but that's not required. The model, given the theoretics and math behind it, is sound.
And in the end, I do not believe that even if there is an all-powerful creator god who designed all this for our experiential benefit (or his/her/its own), s/he/it/they could reasonably have expected us to seek and eventually discern its mechanics. To the physics/metaphysics line, at any rate. §;o)
Comment by Joy — March 20, 2007 @ 2:39 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Provoking Thought wrote:
It is.
But how does the fact that it, or anything else for that matter, is beautiful answer my question which (again) was:
Why would a Godless universe have any interest in, or need of, being beautiful?
I'm wondering if a possible answer you have in mind goes like this:
Mathematical reality necessarily exists, and necessarily informs and is reflected in any logically possible universe, and is by nature intrinsically beautiful.
To such an answer I would have essentially three further responses:
1. Why does mathematical reality necessitate the existence of any physical universe—why does it require a physical instantiation or image of itself at all? Is it not already self-sufficient and perfect, given that it possesses necessary existence?
2. For something to be beautiful may require a beholder of beauty. This may provide a reasonable answer to my questions in number 1, but at the price perhaps of revealing mathematical reality to be essentially an 'incomplete' type of reality.
3. The only mathematical reality we're familiar with is always encountered as the rational content of rational minds, and never as free-standing abstract entities. Moreover, we never encounter free-standing abstract entities as causally interacting with physical reality, but only through the mediation of rational minds. We're constantly familiar with rational minds having causal power. We may decide to design and build a bridge, say, using our power of mathematical reasoning in the process. All this suggests some kind of ontological mind-dependence is a necessary feature of, and condition on, mathematical reality having any 'impact' on any universe; which in turn suggests that mathematical reality is not truly primary or foundational in the ontological hierarchy, or 'great chain of being'.
Comment by stunney — March 20, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
bj:
I'm bound to just spread my own stupidity around due to my complete inability (or maybe my old-age laziness) to grok the mathematics involved. So I'll just give you my extrapolation. Matti's will of course be different, because he's filling different 'holes' in himself than I am.
I'd suggest that it's better to start with the physical TGD model if one hopes to grasp the use of p-adic primes to formalize the physics. But unless you're a lot smarter than me, you'd end up just as asea. I think Penrose has examined it fairly (and likes its sheer iconoclastic nature), but it might even be over his head. So he just took us in that direction because he has the clout, and leaves it to the future to double-or-more.
It is me who assigned the vector alignment peculiarities to the extremal. The best excuse (mathematically) for a spacetime that has more than three sheets (dimensions of space) through which what *is* manifests in time gets the additional 'steps' necessary to align vectors to the experiential 'reality' landscape - talking consciousness here, but Matti's got it formalized physically too.
I conceptualized the extremal as having a "hedgehog" vector because that's the only greater-than 1 alignment process I'd ever heard of. Though I admit that if I understood p-adic math better, it might apply to everything. In 'standard' physics the only theoretical particle that has a multi-stage alignment requirement is a monopole. But Penrose picks a graviton (which we'll also never see) and doesn't assign vector, while Matti just talks extremal and doesn't designate further (to something we who follow HEP might understand). Nobody's ever seen a monopole, and hardly anyone expects to ever see one. But the BB model does require their production prior to the existence of electromagnetism - another broken symmetry. Just an aside.
When I try to conceptualize Matti's "many-sheeted spacetime" through which the extremal moves in order to become 'real', I see steps in the vector alignment process. A hedgehog simply cannot align in one step, as other vectors can. Say, if your particle has a left-hand vector, it could realign (phase transition) to a right-hand environmental vector in one step. An analogy would be to electron shells in an atom. They 'jump' from one energy (vector alignment) level to the next, nothing in between. A one-step process.
A hedgehog has little 'vector arrows' pointing in every possible direction at once, in all applicable dimensions. Like tangent points on the surface of a sphere, if you drew a line to the center from that point, it's slightly differently oriented than the point next to it. So it takes more than one phase transition to line everything up to where it meshes with past/now [histories] vector and becomes objectively real. Each 'sheet' in the spacetime represents a progressive 'jump' toward reality, a phase transition in the vector of that extremal which is collapsing toward reality.
In my experience, reality needs more than one or two 'jumps'. And every additional 'jump' represents its own sub/super reality, with its own degrees of freedom (parameters). Such a multi-stage process allows for all sorts of weirdness, and weirdness is what we see (when we care to look). Again, the anomalous does happen. Any ToE that purports to explain reality must account for the anomalous. Or it simply cannot claim to explain reality.
That probably doesn't help, does it? §;o)
Comment by Joy — March 20, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Would this have anything to do with the "Monster" (A while back I read a book titled, "Symmetry and the Monster" by Mark Ronan, and was somewhat disappointed to find it was not about a mathematician on a romantic and dangerous quest.) Oh, and just yesterday I found the following article on the Internet:
"Prime Numbers Get Hitched" ( http://www.seedmagazine.com/ne... ) .
Interesting how prime numbers and quantum physics seem to be tied at the waist. Or not. (The previous is a subtle, phonetic, pun.)
Comment by Douglas — March 20, 2007 @ 6:56 pm
March 20th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Hi Stunney,
To a Mandelbrot link I provided, you wrote…
Yes, I find beauty in mathematical realities like Maxwell's equations
These equations describe, in detail, how alternating, collapsing electromagnetic fields could, in theory, result in the propagation of light.
In this universe, it appears that if things can happen, they do. The existence of light is ample evidence of this.
To me, science is accepting the reality as we preceive it in order to gain knowledge.
Now, I understand how others want to know the Truth (capital "T") behind our perceptions. Is there a prime mover? For that matter is reality really real?
These questions aren't new and if we review what others have figured out before us, we might save a little time. One of my favorite philosophers is one of the first (if not the first), Socrates. You see, we have it on good authority that no one was wiser than he (see Oracle at Delphi). I maintain that the oracle was as prophetic as it was accurate. No one has ever been wiser than Socrates and no one will ever be.
Socrates knew he didn't know the Truth.
The best we can ever hope for is to gain a little knowledge to get by in what we think is reality.
Provoking Thought
Comment by Thought Provoker — March 20, 2007 @ 9:30 pm
March 21st, 2007 at 11:11 am
stunney:
I'm not sure what you mean here by "abstract" (since no abstract product of mind exists as something made of matter unless the person constructs it), but there are mathematical constructs in the world. For instance, the Fibonacci sequence is present in the arrangement of flower petals and sunflower seeds and sea-critter shells and such. It's not a "Fibonacci sequence" until human eyes see it and human minds process what they're seeing, appreciate its formal beauty, and give it a name. But it's out there anyway.
It does exist independently in the world - though far as I know, only the living world. Birds must appreciate sunflower seeds as something 'beautiful' enough to draw them. Bees must consider the flower 'beautiful' enough to draw them. And female Nautilus must think that male's shell is particularly 'beautiful' too! Life seems to respond to mathematical beauty.
Thought Provoker:
I like science's take on how we are to approach the world, no matter how limited our tools and no matter how constrained our knowledge - FAPP. For All Practical Purposes. Because the 'true' Truth is that we do our living and dying in this world, regardless of whether or not it's fundamentally 'real' or just 'illusion'.
Everything - all the mental and physical tools we have to work with - purportedly serve the practical purposes of our successful participation in the world. Or, our relative ability to serve the 'Prime Directive' of life: Survive, Reproduce. Sure, humans have added lots of perks to that directive; health, wealth, social position, power over others, artistic ability, technical mastery, etc., etc.
One can believe absolutely in their heart-of-hearts that the entire exercise is one big Holodeck simulation. But if s/he actually behaves that way s/he won't last long in this world, and won't get to play the 'Prime Directive' game. That bus coming right for you is real enough to kill you if you don't get out of the way. That tree is real enough to get struck by lightning and transfer it to you while you're hiding from the rain beneath its branches. The food you eat is real enough to supply necessary nutrients so your body can keep going, so if you don't eat you will starve.
FAPP 'works' and is a reasonable approach to life and death on planet earth. Even if in the end it's just kindergarten for independent souls, even if there is nothing more. Even if we can never really KNOW that anything we think we know is actually big-t 'True'. It's good enough for gub'ment work… §;o)
Comment by Joy — March 21, 2007 @ 11:11 am
March 21st, 2007 at 11:34 am
Joy, thanks for your reply. It still is over my head, but I will persevere in trying to understand. I split the world into two groups, math and non-math people. The former is a small group. The latter is the great mass of humanity. I think the masses would benefit greatly is there was an effort to explain math-physics and cosmology to common folk. I would even support government funding for the effort.
Comment by bj — March 21, 2007 @ 11:34 am
March 21st, 2007 at 12:33 pm
bj:
Oh, this one's definitely difficult to understand! It's difficult even for advanced theoretical mathematicians, of which I am NOT one. So I had to try my best to understand it in 'layman's' terms too, and I'll always bless Matti for his patience in working with me over a period of years. It must have been totally frustrating for him!
However, WHAT I was trying to apply it to for my own purposes of understanding was not anything 'normal' or 'usual' in the general retinue of human experience. I was trying to understand a Miracle with some very spectacular manifestations. And I mean long-distance psychic entanglement, a uni-language speaking angel witnessed by a room full of people, specific talents beamed straight into actuality by the long-dead, near-death OOB in someone not dying… very sci-fi late-night movie stuff I got to witness, experience and live with every day and night for two and a half months of earth-time. Which, btw, is long enough for it to become fairly mundane! All but the blood, which I could never get used to and never want to get used to.
It's the "extra" degrees of freedom in Matti's extremal's collapse that allows for things this strange to happen in real life. And to describe this concept, you'd have to understand that relativistic quantum field theory maintains that ALL forces and interactions can be reduced to descriptions of physical particles - matter, even if it's just 'virtual' matter. It's just a way of understanding things, and none of these particles exist in reality unless we're smashing atoms, and atoms are just field phenomena too. At the crossover phase from 'virtual' to 'real' (classical) reality, the 'things' exist FAPP. Before that phase they're just theoretical.
And things theoretical exist only as thought-forms until they 'collapse' into classical reality. This is normally done by measurement, either by the researcher who decides to take a measurement (observer-dependent) or by the spacetime milieu itself (decoherence of superposition). In regular physics this is a fairly simple one-step process. It's in a superposition of probabilities ['virtual'], then it collapses to BE one thing or another in classical reality.
Some people believe this collapse never actually occurs - that whenever a classical state appears to us, its opposite probable state appears in some other universe. This is Schrodinger's poor cat, who is alive in this universe but dead in some other ['virtual'] universe. I don't believe in multiverses. I think reality is real enough FAPP to deal with as if it is in truth 'real'.
If symmetry-breaking does describe as well as can be described the actual manifestation of our universe from its beginning (from 'nothing'), there are several leftover mysteries. Like where the heck all those magnetic monopoles went. Magnetism is a force, and we are quite familiar with it in its bi-polar form. Yet according to The Model (which could of course be wrong, but probably not TOTALLY wrong), there should have been bosons - 'virtual' particles' of exchange for the force, produced when it split from whatever symmetry it split from.
A monopole is easy to describe, but difficult to conceptualize. It would be just one 'end' of the bipolar force we are familiar with, connected by what we call a "Dirac String" to some other reality where it's necessary other pole is located. It would be a particle with a disappearing 'tail', either attractive or repelling, but not both (as 'normal' magnetically charged constructs display in our reality). The string makes it unlike any other particle of force or matter, and it cannot actually manifest fully in this reality in a one-step phase alignment.
By trying to understand Matti's multi-stage alignment process, I conceptualized the monopole and its disappearing string. Such that as this extremal changes its phase - aligns its vector step-by-step - into manifestation here, it carried with it a direct connection to a whole other reality. Maybe even entire levels of other realities. And this is precisely what Matti tried so hard to explain to me - it's a multi-step process, and each step's degrees of freedom manifests the peculiarities of the 'other' reality in the environmental spacetime it's collapsing into.
[sigh] I know that's hard. I've been struggling with it for years and will probably never understand it well enough to explain it simply. Because I do have a background in nuclear and high energy physics [HEP], I am familiar with those concepts. So I can think in those terms. Sub-atomic physics is a very, very weird world. Where anything can happen, and sometimes does happen. The 'trick' is when such weirdness manifests in our own classical reality. THAT is the weirdest thing I ever saw or ever hope to see!
Comment by Joy — March 21, 2007 @ 12:33 pm
March 21st, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Joy:
WOW. Now this does get interesting for you have reported a "Manifestation" of some kind. Something out of the norm. For the rest of us, we have to decide what we think of these kinds of reports, which really get down to whether we trust the reporters. I, for one, accept your report. Which gets down the road to accepting the whole category in some way.
To take a turn, I have no trouble believing that Science has falsified Gen. 1-11 as a literal account, and then I like to say, the legends start. But, coming to the NT, things get a little different. I have trouble dismissing all the out of norm reports, and then there is the resurrection. I'm not trying to prove the literal belief system of the NT or any other religion, but these reports. They are hard to dismiss. You have related an event and your attempt to understand how this really happens. You are qualified to at least make the attempt. Most of us are not.
I wonder if religion is the common persons way of doing multi-dimensional physics.
Comment by bj — March 21, 2007 @ 12:59 pm
March 21st, 2007 at 2:21 pm
bj - Abject nay-sayers might have a point about 'altered states of reality' in this instance, were it not a fact that it wasn't just me, and that the situation continued for two and a half months, being during that time documented in minute detail via various medical tests including X-rays, MRIs, arteriograms, PT scans… you name it, they did it. As well as the later fact that this situation really did come to trial in District Court (for two solid weeks of testimony before a jury of 12), and a dozen 'scientific experts' (how 'expert' they really are is apparently a matter of how much they get paid to play the part) testified under oath that a genuine Miracle did in fact occur. They won - making this the only legally adjudicated Miracle on record, anywhere in the US.
If legality counts, no one on this forum or anywhere else in the US can claim as a matter of fact that Miracles don't happen. Because it has been legally established that they do. I already believed, because I was there, but there you have it.
I thought it was very interesting that in Sam Harris' latest anti-religious literary effort he gives a pass to the phenomenon of glossolalia - speaking in tongues. Of course he qualifies that to purported instances of "Demon Possession," and ignores the fact that this phenomenon is common among certain religious sects… happens every Sunday, all over the place.
A teaser - the 'angel' (what I call it, though I suppose someone else might consider it a devil) who spoke to a group of people in a hospital room in New Orleans in May of 1992 (and included a 72-year old priest from Ireland who had already called in Vatican investigators the week before) didn't speak any human language that anyone in the room recognized. And in the room were people who spoke or could recognize Asian languages from tribal Philippines to Sanskrit, Punjabi, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, all the Romances, Russian and several native languages north and south. Were it an actual human language, it probably would have tickled someone's grasp of roots.
But everyone in the room understood what was said. This is exactly the opposite of glossolalia in its usual forms, where some individual speaks a human language they never heard or knew. This was more the "Language of Languages," something that underlies the very capacity FOR language. Understood by all. Extremely strange, but then again, not so strange. As if there is a semantic hardwiring in human brains that underlies all human languages, and which all humans would innately understand AS language. Does that make sense?
Anyway, I was not content to accept a ruling of 'Miracle' and just thank God (or de debbil) for it, believing it needed no explanation. If there is a God, then He already knows me and wouldn't have put such a thing in my path without expecting me to go looking for better answers than self-serving (but blithely murderous) physicians could muster in their own defense against that charge. Heck, I wasn't ever even likely to buy a ruling from the Vatican on that (not being Catholic, and all).
There was no doubt in anyone's mind that it was indeed a Miraculous event, and there were literally more than a hundred different individuals exposed to it. Even more if you count the many prayer circles that were put into action the moment that word came, all over the world, from all traditions (even had some of the Bear tribe walking medicine wheels!). God may indeed work in mysterious ways. That's just the most likely reason someone like me would go after mysteries with a magnifying glass and maybe even an atom-smasher!
Any God worth the title would already know that about me. §;o)
Comment by Joy — March 21, 2007 @ 2:21 pm
March 21st, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Well, Joy,
Thank you for sharing this very personal and unusual time. I suppose we are all on a journey trying to find or connect to as much of the "real thing" as we can. I have been of that nature since a lad. Don't know why. I have recently come to lose confidence in the literal accounts of revealed religions, but the search continues. I do not believe that I have all the necessary equipment to continue the search without the help of others. Some might call this humility. I would call it acknowledged inadequacy. So, it's helpful to search and learn of other's experiences. I do believe it's possible to make judgements about the heart and humanity of others via Internet exchanges. It's not quite as personal as face to face, but the possibilities are far more comprehensive. Goodness, you can search the world.
I am coming to a confidence in the reality of "something other". I don't yet know what it is, perhaps never will, but it's, at least, rewarding to make some progress. Thanks.
Comment by bj — March 21, 2007 @ 2:42 pm
March 27th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Hello Joy,
Is there anything online on this? I tried to find something myself (eg, Google, Vatican website, case search, etc.) but came up empty. Amazing story btw, and thank you for sharing it.
Regards,
-Rob
Comment by Rob R. — March 27, 2007 @ 9:20 am
March 27th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Hi, Rob. We tried for awhile to put the important stuff online, but there's literally filing cabinets and boxes chock full to overflowing of motions, briefs, depositions, testimony, trial transcripts… and my scanner broke within a month. My sister and I went in person to the Courthouse when they claimed they'd "lost" the transcripts between judgment and the first appeal. We did find them (but only because I insisted I didn't drive 500 miles just so they could claim they "lost" it) - they'd shuffled it into 4 other cases' folders to thin ours and fatten theirs. It took 7 years to get to trial, and that included 4 judges who didn't want to hear it.
I'm guessing I'll have to write a book one of these days. Needs to happen, but I'm not looking forward to it… §;o)
Comment by Joy — March 27, 2007 @ 9:39 am
March 27th, 2007 at 10:08 am
If it's a miracle you want, here's one.
A while back I read a book entitled _The Great Beyond: Higher Dimensions, Parallel Universes, and The Extraordinary Search for a Theory of Everything_, by Paul Halpern.
On page 282, he quotes leading physicist Gary Gibbons talking about recently developed theories in string physics, known as Randall-Sundrum models of the universe:
"A single brane with an anti-deSitter background has potential difficulties with singularies. *Information can come from outside the universe*" [emphasis added].
Halpern continues:
"Gibbons is concerned that a Randall-Sundrum universe could subvert the law of cause and effect. Events could occur at any time with *origins beyond the space we see.* Virtually anything could pop out. A shark could suddenly materialize in one's swimming pool because of some strange interplay between the bulk and the brane. Our sense that we might someday understand the world in its entirety would become increasingly precarious." (Page 283, emphasis added)
Earlier, Halpern had described the R-S proposal as having "rocked the physics community like a new Beatles record. Overnight, scores of theorists began to dance to the new beat".
I had first heard about Randall-Sundrum models of the cosmos a year or two back. But these quotes from the book made me think, this is maybe how God interacts with the universe.
Information perhaps enters our universe from another dimension, and can have a physical manifestation, but whose source or orgin we can't detect because it's in a higher dimension to which this universe is stuck on like a membrane.
In these types of models, only closed strings, and in particular gravitons–the carrier particles for gravitational energy–can escape into the higher dimension, and their escaping, or 'leaking' out of the universe is hypothesized as the explanation for why gravitational forces are so hugely weaker than the other three forces of nature.
We see this when, for instance, a little bit of electrical static on a comb can be used to pick up pieces of paper, thus defeating the entire gravitational pull of the Earth. Gravitational energy, in short, can come into and out of our observable universe in the R-S models.
But since Energy and Mass are equivalent (by E=mc2), this has remarkable implications for what is physically possible. In particular, something that happens in our universe could have a source outside of our universe. The possibilities are endless.
I'm excited to see that Randall and Sundrum now show this is scientifically possible. It may explain what God's methodology is for working miracles, for example.
Ah, but they must be loonies, right? Ha! Anything but!
http://www.google.com/search?h...
And who are Randall and Sundrum anyway?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Fascinating interviews with Dr. Lisa Randall
http://www.sciencewatch.com/ju...
http://www.esi-topics.com/bran...
And a few words from Raman Sundrum:
http://dailyrevolution.org/fri...
Scientists are excited because it looks very much like they may have dicovered a fifth dimension - one more than the four we are familiar with. And it could be infinite, unlike the tiny extra space dimensions that have been proposed in the past.
"Incredibly, it could have gone completely unnoticed until now," says Raman Sundrum of Stanford University in California. Physicists take extra dimensions seriously because superstring theory, the best candidate for a "theory of everything", requires at least nine space dimensions.
"There are two ways the extra dimensions could conceal themselves from view," says Sundrum. "One is if they are rolled up far smaller than an atom. The other is if the Universe is confined to a kind of lower-dimensional island within higher-dimensional space." An infinitely thin two-dimensional piece of paper would form such an island within normal 3D space.
This latter possibility has now been explored by Sundrum and his colleague Lisa Randall of Princeton University, New Jersey. Remarkably, superstring theory requires lower-dimensional islands, or "branes". And in superstring theory, nature's three non-gravitational forces–the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces–can be naturally constrained to operate only within a brane. Gravity is a problem, however. "Gravity is intimately connected with the dynamics of space-time and so necessarily extends into all extra dimensions," says Sundrum.
Gravity from bodies such as the Sun should theoretically spread into this large extra space dimension, effectively diluting it within our Universe's brane. "It would weaken with distance far faster than the inverse-square law decline that we observe," says Sundrum.
But Sundrum and Randall have discovered this may not be so. "The key is the gravity of the brane itself, which is enormous," says Sundrum.
Gravity pulls on all sources of energy, including the energy contained in a gravitational field. "Consequently, the gravity of the brane pulls on the gravity of objects like the Sun, preventing it from extending very far beyond the brane," says Sundrum.
Crucially, with gravity confined to the brane, the force is undiluted and displays the familiar inverse-square law. And the mechanism for confining gravity works no matter how big the extra space dimension.
"What's so amazing is that the theory mimics familiar four-dimensional gravity so well that it would be very difficult to tell that there is an extra dimension," says Randall.
And then there's this article:
"Escaping to other dimensions", I don't know, where will it all end…er, literally, even?
Leaking Gravity May Explain Cosmic Puzzle
Science - Space.com
Sara Goudarzi
Special to SPACE.com
SPACE.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Scientists may not have to go over to the dark side to explain the fate of the universe.
The theory that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by mysterious "dark energy" is being challenged by New York University physicist Georgi Dvali. He thinks there's just a gravity leak….
Here's my thinking…
Since E=mc2, this is significant. Gravitational energy is, er, energy, hence, interchangeable with mass in principle. If energy can leave the universe, then so can mass. So if Jesus's resurrected body escaped through a wormhole, then that's one scientifically respectable way for God to have effected the Resurrection.
Comment by stunney — March 27, 2007 @ 10:08 am