First of all, it may be a human injunction to impose beginnings and endings on the universe because we see lives and actions as having beginnings in time and an end in linear-following the event-time. When evolution by natural selection was proposed in 1859, it wasn’t widely accepted (though, reading it today, its arguments are as sound as those of Euclid.) The problem with this is that it does, again to man, diminish the spectacle that is man to more of the result of a cumulative process having taken place over millions of years, branching out into ever inclusive groups as one goes back in time…
This was part of what troubled people about Darwin’s idea; there was no clear or evident ‘beginning’ of man. It wasn’t that simple; the ‘beginning’ of the human race was an offshoot of yet another progenitor species, which itself had ancestors that were no longer a part of the same species. It is a comfort to have mathematical precision in the determination of beginnings and endings.
When it comes to the origins of the universe, and of the human species, those who doubt scientific explanations will often regress to an unknown impetus; by impetus I mean when, in an argument over the creation of the universe, one can claim, somewhat without embarrassment, that God did it one day for the hell of it. Children, and scientists who are children, have always had the impudence to ask, ‘Well then, what created God?’ This is a universal question and I’d be willing to wager that almost every man and woman of faith has encountered this objection. This question, to put it better. So, I have taken this question as a beginning to what I consider to be an infinite regress; if the universe goes back to the big bang–what came before that? If (as I postulate) universes replicate through the passing of information, much in the same way that species’ do, then what came before the first progenitor universe?
This line of questioning began when I first started studying physics. My education, since childhood, has not been compulsory; the community school to which I dutifully went never placed much emphasis on cultivation beyond what we learned in the arts, and religion and philosophy were not taught at my high school. My education, I’m proud to say, has been more of a challenge to myself, by myself, than it has been anything else.
When I began my education, I started with theology and then progressed in the logical manner, going to a deeper subset each time I believed I had accrued enough information on the prior discipline. From religion to philosophy to psychology to biology to genetics to chemistry to, finally, what we’re here to talk about today: physics (another regress would take one to mathematics and, beyond that, I suppose there’s voodoo.)
I regret that I had to come through a ten year period of intervening study, because I’ve found physics to tap into areas more awe-inspiring and wonderful than the surahs of the Quran, the wisdom of the Dhammapada; the philosophy of Chuang Tzu and the Tao; more intriguing than the demented ravings of the suffering children in Freud’s The Wolfman and Other Cases, more fascinating than the germ-line replicator existing as immortal information being passed from one generation to the next; more lofty than the speculations and musings of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Heideggar.
As invaluable as this education has been, it exists now as a backdrop, or moreover a means of enrichment, to contemplation of physical character and law. This is legitimate and necessary training, but it took a long time and spending all of one’s money on books leads one to spend a lot of time with oneself. ‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,’ I remember reading, in Hamlet, and I have always thought, since I read Memoirs of my Nervous Illness by Daniel P. Schreber, that the speculative hypotheses of madmen come nearer to the mark of touching the nerve-endings of the transcendent. (For curious readers, this is an obscure and much discussed book in the field of psychology and I would not hasten to recommend it for the serious student.)
When I began studying physics, I began with Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Galileo–and I got an excellent series of lectures at Cal-Tech which amounted to an introductory college course. I finished that and went through a series of books on relativity and Maxwell’s equations and studied quantum theory. After a few years, the infinite regress began to take on another layer of meaning. If the universe had a beginning, what came before that? If there was a God, what created God? What distinguished these questions was that I began to think in terms of physics; if there was a God, was God made of atoms? Then, what were the atoms made of? Then I learned of the inner-atomic model; the nucleus, the electron. What are these made of? Then I learned of the quarks and their various flavors. Then, if these are the most fundamental elements that constitute matter, what are they made of? What made them?
We can go through the infinite regress philosophically. One would like to see harmony in nature, and mathematics, and in the rules that govern nature. This is not a necessity, but it is always a plus to find a particular theory to be harmonious or particularly sublime in its execution and particulars. Quantum mechanics is a messy affair, excepting Paul Dirac’s mathematics, but the field equations of relativity are, to myself and probably millions of physicists and mathematicians, inherently beautiful. Beautiful in the same sense as Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Rembrandt’s portraits, and Arabian and Byzantine sculpture and architecture.
Theologically, one could conceive of a meta consciousness, a guide that put the laws of universe in motion with a benevolent, if not arbitrary hand, who sits outside of time in repose while our squabbles over the finer points of morality due little to appease our maker and even less to appease those who so fiercely argue the minute points of holy scripture.
Psychologically, I think it is a comforting idea that there’s a presence, a ‘father’ or a ‘mother’ being that looks over us. I believe that this yearning comes from, where else, our early childhood, when we lay in the dark and imagined what might be watching us. It wouldn’t be a stretch, I think, to propose that the myths of the ancient mythmakers and theologians spring from the need to cull the frightened child of all the eyes watching from the dark. To presuppose a kindly hand, or an unkindly hand which exists in the Pentateuch of Moses, is a comforting, if disturbing, thought. This can, on the surface of it, give life an illusory meaning and imbue one’s actions with sanctity. This impulse has been perverted almost universally, because psychologically the need for agreement or consent is not only very strong, it’s almost a necessity. In every discipline of scholarly attention there is fierce argumentation over the ‘finer points’ – the particulars.
From a biological standpoint, one can begin with humans and regress, by varying degrees through time and through geological distribution, arrive at biogenesis, the beginnings of life on Earth, from homo sapiens to the eukaryotic cell to the prokaryotes, from prokaryotes to the carbon atom. There is even a regress within this school of thought; panspermia, it is thought, could be an explanation for the forming of the first amino acids and proteins in that primeval soup. Panspermia is the theory that some collision or artifact, a comet or meteor or space debris, brought the water molecule to Earth; this is not a farfetched theory in a sense, considering the distance of the sun from the Earth and the frozen water–the ice–that makes up meteorites. A meteorite crashing into silent Earth, carrying h20 within its frozen shell, could have given rise to water, and water to life, life to oxygen, oxygen to life dependent on oxygen.
Once you go through the infinite regress in genetics, you get back to the beginning of life on Earth and you find yourself in the realm of chemistry. The current theory is that under certain conditions, under ultraviolet light, mixtures of certain molecules will combine to form amino acids and proteins, which are the building blocks for biological organisms much in the same manner that atoms are the building blocks of matter. The theory that regresses from chemistry is, of course, physics. So, when we regress in physics, where do we go?
Molecular clouds of dust, vast, light years across, are thought to have formed the Earth, forming it from dead stars; as the clouds contract they heat up and begin to accumulate other particles and elements. It was discovered by a joking astronaut that in zero gravity molecules of table salt and coffee would clump together and form larger molecules. This ‘discovery’ leads to the scientific deduction that particles in space.
First of all, physics is not a philosophy. There are philosophical implications in physics, just like in anything else, but the theory of the interaction between light and matter (electrodynamics) is not a philosophical interpretation of the world. It is a mathematical model of the way photons interact with other surfaces (such as mirrors, partially reflecting surfaces, etc) and the numbers behind it. It can be a matter of philosophy when you debate the nature of light (particle or wave, since it can behave and be observed acting as either) but you can’t debate percentages. If five out of twenty people die in a group, the percentage is twenty five. Why they died can be debated, how they died. But five is twenty five percent of twenty in a codified numerical system. Debating a percentage is like debating whether or not what you call a rock is called a rock. You can do it, but it’s still stupid.
You can philosophize about why, but physics, the kind of physics that is taught in schools, is most importantly about how. The philosophical interpretation behind quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics can take place outside of doing the actual work. Unlike art, though it can be artistic, the rules of physics aren’t created; they are discovered. If Albert Einstein hadn’t discovered relativity (the general theory) then surely someone else would have discovered it by now. That person might not have acquired the fame that Einstein gained, but they’d have the same degree of importance.
Scientists, I think, can be illuminating even when they’re wrong. This is especially true in physics, because what we’re speculating about is the nature of reality. We can explain the why in terms of how, by theorizing. Theorizing and philosophizing are not the same thing, but they can sound a lot alike. What I mean by ‘speculative’ in the title for this series of essays is this: ‘I’m working without the mathematical apparatus capable of codifying what I’m suggesting.’ Or alternately, ‘I have yet to develop the mathematics to describe what I’m talking about.’
In physics, when I go through the infinite regress, to take it to its logical conclusion, I arrive at energy. And, arriving at energy, one has to assume that either there has always been energy, or at one point in a past too far removed to even calculate, energy ‘came into’ existence. This violates the law against imposing human criteria on what is not human, but from a human perspective, as I’ve said, we look for beginnings and endings and the concept of something without beginning or end. When I regress, I come to the conceptualization of what I call the Omnisphere.
The Omnisphere is non-space, a wholly separate continuum wherein separate photospheres (propagative universes) exist by extensions between one another, independent of one another, un-ending in the sense that the Earth is both finite but without edge, of elongated, conical shape. The energy within the omnisphere applies torque and angular momentum on the photospheres. Photospheres exist like this within the non-space of the omnisphere as elongated extensions of accumulated matter, light, and other elements involved in the transition into the photosphere. The omnisphere is devoid of characterization as it is both between photospheres and void of matter and, for the most part, devoid of particles. This dimension exists between photospheres as I exist between you. There could be nothing between us, except for space, and this principle is true in the omnisphere and as a rope can be tied to me and at a distance to you, a tunnel, with specific properties (determined by angular momentum) exist between photospheres after the first fluctuation of light and energy into what would become, after the accumulations and mutations of properties encountered as photospheres evolve and develop, a galaxy of determinate shape, calculable based on the mathematical formula of the golden ratio; this explains the shape of galaxies as spirals. Galaxies that are not spirals are transitions of the limited variety. We’ll discuss this in the limit theory of photospheric transition.
Energy is the only recognizable force existent in the omnisphere, and it exists, and exerts force on the rotating, self-contained photospheres within it. It is not that difficult to trace the origin of galaxies, atoms, or gravitation, but the infinite regress, in my mind, ends with energy. In coming up with a model to demonstrate these origins, as I will detail later on, the infinite regress ends with energy. Energy can be conserved, released, generated, but never destroyed.
The first fluctuation into dimensional space was akin to a first ‘big bang’ but, as nothing existed but energy within the omnisphere, and nothing existed between the omnisphere and the first photosphere until the acquisition of mass in a spatial plane where dimensions can be assessed. The ‘big bang’ is the result of the corrosion of energy leaving physical impressions which defines the reason why space time is curved. When the momentum of this energy reaches the speed of light, a sort of ‘hole’ is torn, or produced, and the product is the singularity, through which the first tunnel, between the omnisphere and first photosphere, bridged together. This event is established between the first photosphere acquires mass and spatial dimensions, along with an event mass assignment, a rate-of-passage (time) constant.The waves of energy
It could be that the result of the dimension, separate from ours and un-quantifiable, is part of the same non-event mass structure between forming photospheres and therefore the production of a non-event mass, and the absence of dimension and quantifiability, is an iteration of the omnisphere, existing between photospheres during moments of transition. A singularity, before its acquisition of mass, is, like the omnisphere, devoid of dimension, though after it acquires mass through the E=mc2 equation, and a new photospheric transition takes place, the singularity. The subsequent ‘link’ between one photosphere to another is a transition conduit whereby one photosphere links to another already existent photosphere and forms a connection, subjected to eventual entropy, that gradually dissolves, separating the photospheres from one another. Once the tunnel between them dissolves (or evaporates as radiation) the photospheres become singular and without boundary.
Energy at the speed of light manifests as mass. This is derived from the most famous equation of all time (E=mc2) and it is the mechanism behind the fusion that takes place when a sun comes to light. When hydrogen atoms move at the speed of light, the force that naturally repels them is overcome and they collide and in collision form a new element, helium. There will be more about this in the section on the genealogy of particles. The first iteration of a photosphere, taken to its logical conclusion, is the first instance at which energy, acquired enough force (for lack of a better word) to ‘fuse’–this type of fusion is the creation of a superattractive graviton which, as a singularity, is without mass. If the omnisphere is the origin of energy, that energy, by some interaction, transferred light into what had become a gravity well, at the center of which was the mass-less singularity. When the speed of light is broken in the inverse direction of its propagation, a singularity is created; this is the operative principle behind the transition of photospheres. The graviton at the bottom of the well, at infinite density, attracts particles of light, themselves made out of what would become, by the ‘breaking’ of the graviton once formed, the three families of particles: the leptons, fermions, and hadrons. It is my belief that the particles of light were generated by the interaction between fluctuations of energy and once this light is bent in infinitely curved spacetime, it ‘breaks’ the graviton, which, when broken, creates a tunnel from one photosphere to the next. The intrinsic constituents of the graviton, when split, descend into the propagated photosphere as atoms in different configurations. I will go into this further in original iteration of a photosphere was a photosphere in the limited transition formulation: – (c2) = S.
brandon the writer | author & staff writer for sir swag 