Octblog 2021

COPOUT 26

The make or break Climate Conference in Glasgow looms, and there seem few grounds for optimism because it looks set to avoid the underlying issues.

I just sat through an edition of the BBCs Question Time and in response to the question ‘The Environment or The Economy?’ all the assembled politicos predictably said ‘Both’ and then proceeded to fantasise about how we could all both eat our cake and have it. This probably reflects the attitude of most humans currently.

Unfortunately, the science and the maths say something completely different. Business as usual cannot continue for much longer. None of the technical fixes we currently tinker with or theorise about will make much difference, the economy and the environment will both decline for many generations to come now. They will do so because since WW2 everything has gone exponential in population, consumption, production, pollution, and environmental damage, and we have already overshot the limits of the resources that this planet can provide and the damage it can absorb whilst sustaining us.

Progress has failed. Analysts of ‘progress’ in terms of wellbeing and life satisfaction generally conclude that developed countries achieved a maximum of wellbeing and life satisfaction sometime in the 1970s. Since then, economic growth has begun to erode general wellbeing and life satisfaction.

Global economic activity cannot grow or even continue without provoking the environmental changes that will undermine it and cause a gradual or catastrophic decline.

Humanity has a choice. It can either choose an acceptable level of degrowth, or it can choose to see what level of degrowth becomes forced upon it by inaction.

Involuntary degrowth could easily mean returning to Dark Age or Neolithic level economies and civilisations after resource conflicts, mass migrations, and social order collapses have devastated industrial societies, and the four horsemen of apocalyptic War, Famine, Pestilence, and Megadeath have done their work.

Voluntary degrowth to a sustainable level might just prove achievable if humanity collectively aimed for something like the 1970s and preserved some but not all the technical innovations made since then. This would of course involve levelling the developing world up to that. We should for example, keep the internet as a valuable communication and information resource, but scrap social media entirely.

Imagine a world in which everyone has the basics but where long distance travel and trade have become a rarity, the burning of fossil fuels has become illegal along with private transport, a local rather than a globalised world, where very little except information moves between continents, a world in which people lead simpler material lives but work less and have richer social and cultural lives.

Interview with a Wizard.

The first series of thirteen Blumberg-Carroll email interviews came to over eighty thousand words, enough for a book.

We seem to have pioneered the literary equivalent of a late night chat show series, except that here the interviewer and the interviewee have each had at least whole day to think about each of the 365 questions, so expect some penetrating questions and provocative answers. Lionel Snell has graciously offered to write a preface.

Covid.

I wonder what casualty allowance the UK government has given itself for its current policy of relaxing Covid restrictions and precautions and relying entirely on vaccination. Scientific opinion and the political opposition have turned against it.

As the new wave of infections and deaths rises here, it does seem surprising that the government and the media do not give greater publicity to the percentage of the unvaccinated amongst the newly hospitalised and dead.

Lastly, leaf fall from the deciduous trees around here seems oddly delayed this year, and look who seems to enjoy the unseasonable climate:-

I may have done them a favour; Greece may well become too hot for their kind in years to come.

Septblog 2021

Esoteric Horticulture.

At Chateaux Chaos the Autumnal Mandrakes have sprouted surprisingly early, before autumn equinox, with Circe already a foot into the sky and Boris and Igor just getting started. This year they will have an experimental outdoor season, note the slug repellent copper wire around their new home. Let us hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not bring any early frosts.

Magical Book.

The world’s most illustrious academic historian of the esoteric arts has prepared a splendid preface for the forthcoming Classic Edition of ‘Liber Null and Psychonaut’, the book that initiated an epic paradigm change in magical thought. Since its first publication this book has attracted both aggressive dismissal and laudatory recommendation. A new paradigm will always make some people very angry and other people ecstatic. Weiser’s Classic Edition which includes some new material, will appear sometime next year.

Holidays.

Retirement from most of the more time demanding business activities has led to a life of concentric holidays and research sabbaticals with frequent sojourns in remote Wales where  a lot of wildlife still thrives. Herewith an adder sunning itself on some concrete. Some bright spark decided that this area would provide adders with an excellent habitat and released a few hundred captive bred specimens some decades ago, now we have thousands of them here. Shoes now seem essential in the dunes, but on the upside, they do bite dogs that people don’t keep on leads.

Herewith also a friendly cricket. Until recently I could always hear their high pitched chirping at night. This year my youngest daughter, a professional ecologist, told me that they were making their customary racket, but I could barely hear them. Oddly, I found this a greater portent of mortality than my need for reading glasses, something may soon disappear from my universe forever as my faculties fade. I seem to have just eaten a pot of dog ice cream having mistaken the picture on the carton for a polar bear. I may have only few decades more to discover the remaining secrets of the universe and the quantum realm presents bizarre difficulties akin to juggling spaghetti whilst blindfolded in a hailstorm.

Quantum Chess?

During discussions of the concept of dimensions with my interviewer/biographer, the following analogy or thought experiment emerged to illustrate the possibilities of multiple time dimensions.  

The record of a game of chess provides its temporal dimension, it shows what happened over time. It does not show the moves not taken. However, we could have multiple timelines in which alternatives moves occur. A player unable to decide between two moves can elect to make both of them by replacing a single piece by two smaller shadow pieces in different positions with the provisos that whenever one of the shadow pieces interacts with an opposing piece, the other shadow piece becomes removed, and a player moving one of the shadow pieces must also move the other corresponding one as well. Otherwise, all the usual rules of chess apply.

Now here comes the really strange bit: -

Afterwards, we could write a single timeline move sequence to describe the whole game that does not include the shadow pieces that became removed! However, an expert would probably notice something very odd about some of the moves chosen when looking at the record afterwards. Such a Quantum-Chess analogy can in principle explain many of the mysteries of quantum mechanics and magic. What may have happened, and what could happen, can affect what does seem, to us, to have actually happened. ‘Imaginary’ phenomena can have very real effects.

Afterthought – simply sawing each piece of a chess set down the middle and numbering the two halves the same provides an easy way of preparing a quantum chess set. The two halves of each piece begin the game on the same square.

Unlike the Hypersphere Cosmology model on this site which has achieved maturity and a fully quantitative exigesis, this investigation into the quantum microcosm remains speculative, experimental, qualitative, and a work in progress. All criticism and collaboration welcomed by email.

Descriptions and Explanations. Any Explanation of phenomena depends on Descriptions of underlying phenomena. Thus, for example, we explain chemistry in terms of atoms, and we explain atoms in terms of quantum physics. However, we have no satisfactory description of the phenomena underlying quantum physics yet. These musings experiment with descriptions of possible spacetime geometries underlying quanta and quantum fields. Any such description should explain the existence and behaviour of known particles and fields and if possible, make novel predictions.

Table of fundamenal particles modelled as toruses.

Table of simple partice interactions

This model begins with the simplest quantum, that of the neutrino, modelled as a spinor based on a Clifford Torus that rotates twice in the toroidal mode for each poloidal rotation.

This spinorial rotation allows for only two orientations of the poloidal rotation with respect to the direction of travel which lies orthogonal to it as neutrinos always travel at lightspeed. These two orientations correspond to neutrino (left) and antineutrino (right).

This spinorial rotation subtends a wavelike series of twists throughout all spacetime that extends across the universe and creates a field surrounding the particle.

Charged quanta result from rotations involving the pseudo-spatial plane of imaginary time, poloidal rotations give rise to positive and negative electric charges and toroidal rotations give rise to positive and negative nuclear charges. These also subtend wavelike series of twists throughout all spacetime that extends across the universe and create fields surrounding the quantum.

Quanta do not have a zero-dimensional point-like geometry, they consist of Clifford Tori with a similar topology to Hyperspheres (3-Spheres) except that they have a directionality of spins and propagation.

Quanta arise where incoming waves returning from the rest of the universe undergo a spinorial 3-Rotation and become outgoing waves. Spacetime consists of a single field which can carry several different types of twist or wave.

Electrostatic and Gravitational fields effectively act across any distance but with an effect that diminishes with the inverse square of distance. Fields rather than quantised particles mediate these interactions. Virtual non-quantised ‘particles’ do not exist, although images of them may prove useful in visualising the field geometry.

Photons consist of quanta of spins that become exchanged between fermions, these always propagate at lightspeed and always have a repulsive effect with both fermions recoiling. They do not carry electric charge and neither do electric fields affect them. We only regard them as the quanta of electromagnetism because we only observe their interactions between charge carrying fermions.

Gravitons appear as gravity waves when enormous masses accelerate, and they propagate at lightspeed with an exclusively attractive effect. Ordinary gravity works via fields.

Exchange particles such as photons and gravitons and all other bosons have a particle-antiparticle configuration, the exchange of such quanta occurs as a quantum handshake as in the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Field effects arise in the same way although at the lower energies involved they do not give rise to quantised boson particles.

This model accommodates an additional charged boson to complement the W+, W-, and Z. This X17 boson has probably already appeared in the decay of Beryllium 8.

In this model all spins remain conserved on the basis that + and – equals 0, allowing for both particle creation and annihilation, energy permitting. Generation or ‘flavour’ remains conserved over a complete cycle of particle-antiparticle creation and subsequent decays.

The whole of QCD becomes discarded, gluons do not exist. Exotic transiently stable baryons and mesons simply have extra spins about the basic baryon or baryon-antibaryon configurations.

The mass-energy equivalence and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass arise from the effect of all the other spins upon the xy/wz spinors of quanta.

All particles extend fields right around the hypersphere of the universe, these converge at antiparticles at their antipodes. This explains the apparent lack of antimatter in the universe.

In/Out waves of spin converge and undergo 3-rotation to make non-point particles of finite size.

Every particle depends for its properties on the whole of the rest of the universe.

The Ubiquity Constant and the quantisation scale depend somehow on the macrostructure of the universe.

Quantised ‘kinks’ in space can only move at lightspeed, or less if they embody the temporal electric or nuclear spins which confer mass.

The Higgs mechanism does not apply. If the tiny 125 GeV blip corresponds to anything it probably corresponds to a transient  ZZ di-boson.  

Volume = 2pi²r³ for both a hypersphere and a (Clifford?) horn torus.

Does the local field geometry change from a vorticitating 3-Hypersphere to two rotating 3-Tori upon particle-antiparticle pair production and thus confer particle directionality?

Can Macrostructures modulate waves to carry structural information?

If so, all manner of psi effects and morphic field effects become possible and the universe will exhibit Stochastic Holism.

Three Dimensional Time Resources.

Herewith a selection of some of the main papers on 3D Time and SO(3,3) spacetime.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0510010.pdf

https://phys.org/news/2007-04-mathematician-extra-dimensions-time-like.html

See also original paper, later published by the Royal Society.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0610068.pdf

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278410426_Could_time_be_three-dimensional

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0510010.pdf

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/688763/files/ext-2003-090.pdf

Herewith a fascinating piece of speculation from Gerard 't Hooft

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14191

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.14191.pdf

See the 'fast variables' and multidimensional toroids.

Mayblog 2021

Alternative? Physics. Muon Wobble.

The current excitement about a possible ‘fifth force’ responsible for the anomaly detected in the spin of the Muon particle may arise from a small interaction with the field associated with the X17 Boson.

The X17 boson remains unconfirmed but suspected from observations of the decay of Beryllium 8 where a putative boson of about 17 MeV decays to an electron and a positron.

In terms of the model under construction at the Physics Department of Arcanorium College this new boson would have the following configuration: -

In this model the X17 has chiral spin 0 and electric spin 0, and like all bosons it has a particle/antiparticle configuration, (Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics). As such it does not really represent a new fundamental force but rather another member of the electroweak bosons, W-, W+, and Z. In effect it consists of a Z boson with both of its half integer chiral spins (grey) going in opposite directions to yield no overall spin.

The horizontal lines represent the spin along the wz axis where z corresponds to the direction of propagation. This model uses the idea of electron bi-spinors generated by non-isoclinic double rotations in four spatial dimensions.

Does this matter? In practical terms probably not, this rare particle seems to play only a miniscule role in the behaviour of reality, however in theoretical terms it may lend some support to hyperspherical models of quanta in extra dimensions, and perhaps eventually to a fuller understanding of exoteric and esoteric aspects of the universe.

Politics.

We have just had multiple elections in the UK, both for the Scottish and Welsh assemblies that have self-designated themselves as the ‘Governments’ of their respective ‘Nations’, plus a large swathe of local government elections and a Parliamentary by-election for one seat.

The English and Scottish wings of the Labour party have performed disastrously enough to raise existential questions about the Labour party. It has lost touch with its robustly illiberal working-class roots and become the preserve of metropolitan champagne socialists and ‘woke’ activists trying to make a power base by starting culture wars and stirring up grievances.

Personally, I have always cheered on Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starmer, they seem perfectly suited to leading the opposition.

That the Labour party did well enough in Wales comes as no surprise. Over forty percent of the Welsh work for the state in this subsidised region and the Welsh Labour leader, a verbose and reassuringly avuncular old owl, managed to get himself on television just about every day throughout the covid crisis. The Welsh nationalist party did not do well. A majority of the Welsh supported Brexit and can see no point in refusing English generosity and getting into bed with the failing superstate of the EU.

The results from Scotland give cause for deep concern.

The Scottish Nationalist leader shared the same advantage as the Welsh leader during covid and made the most of her daily television appearances. This compensated for the votes she will undoubtedly have lost over her mishandling of the crisis surrounding her predecessor. It seems unbelievable that she did not know about his behaviour for years and bit her tongue for the sake of her own career until the time seemed right to turn on him. Mischievously lowering the voting age to 16 also helped to bolster the nationalist vote. Mature voters in Scotland tend to favour continued union.

Four percent of the population of the UK now apparently want to leave the UK taking thirty two percent of its territory and none of its national debt with them. That four percent represents only half of Scotland’s population, the other half do not wish to be deprived of British citizenship.

This sounds like a recipe for a Northern Ireland situation……….

The leader of the Scottish Nationalists plays an extremely dangerous and divisive game to advance her political career.

Seven hundred thousand people from Scotland live and/or work in the rest of the UK, and many more have family ties across the presently non-existent border. All concerned should get a vote in the unlikely event that the economically, politically, and geopolitically illiterate scheme for Scotland leaving the UK and joining the EU ever gets put to a referendum.

At present every British citizen has the right to live and work in Scotland and to identify themselves as Scottish. The UK government should make it clear from the outset that these rights cannot be given away without a referendum that involves all British citizens.

I regard Ross shire, Sussex, Inverness shire, Somerset, and Gower as all part of my country, non-negotiable, and worth fighting for if necessary.

All political careers end in failure. Nicola Sturgeon would end up with her head on a pike after the implosion of an unviable Scottish state. The best she can hope for is to extract ever more subsidies and autonomy from Westminster and to eventually retire quietly to some beautiful part of a Scotland that stays British and free of Brussels.

Magic.

The Chancellor of Arcanorium College confers the degree of Bachelor of Magic upon Jacob Edward Sipes, BoM.

This represents the first degree awarded by Arcanorium College since its inception.

Many have started on this demanding course, but few have had the determination to persist with the exceptionally demanding work.

The full citation appears in the Arcanorium College Department of Magic pages on this site.

https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic

Alternative Science.

The Hypersphere Cosmology model now seems to have achieved its final form: -

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

The model presents two observational tests which could show whether this model or the conventional Lambda-CDM Big Bang model best represents the universe. Unfortunately. both tests would take about forty years of observation, but presently Hypersphere Cosmology has the edge in terms of Occam’s Razor as it offers a considerably simpler and more elegant description of the universe.

All attempts to falsify this model will be enthusiastically engaged with.

In the meantime, work resumes on Hypersphere Mechanics, an attempt to rationalise the ad hoc mess of Quantum Field Theory and add some mathematical and conceptual rigor.

The ingredient list from which an improved model may evolve currently includes the following: -

A spacetime of three spatial and three temporal dimensions, and the whole metric curved by gravity into a spatio-temporal 3-3 Sphere.

Spherical rotations of various of the dimensions of spacetime itself as the basis of all fields, forces, waves, and particles.

Quanta as having some of the properties of hyperspheres. Mach’s Principle, as above so below, the quanta and the universe somehow mutually define each other’s properties.

Matter ‘particles’ and ‘anti-particles’ as the points where waves which travel right round the universe interfere, a sort of hyperspherical extension to Milo Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter theory, but to include nuclear and gravitational effects as well.

Energy ‘particles’ as ‘particle-antiparticle’ exchanges with the antiparticle component traveling backwards in time, as in Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

The appearance of entanglement and superposition arising from retro-causation at lightspeed.

A possible geometrical relationship between neutrinos, photons, and gravitons.

The hypothesis that something out there might know more than we do, and that it might respond to the name of Azathoth. Common sense need not prove a limitation to imagination.

Sculpture.

Herewith the Edward Teach, Steam-Punk Pirate Spacecraft.

The hull of this vessel does not consist of a heavily decayed piece of timber, it consists of a piece of hard volcanic lava scrounged from Mount Teide on Tenerife that inspired the overall design. The assorted fittings come from the junk boxes in the sheds and outhouses of Chateaux Chaos. The policy of never throwing any interesting piece of scrap away has paid dividends during lockdown.

In the backstory the Imperium abandons a damaged robot freight vessel on a desolate asteroid. The AI that piloted it uses its droids to gradually assemble a functioning craft from the wreckage of the freighter and the material of the asteroid. The AI also reprograms itself in increasingly unorthodox ways, drawing on historical archive material in memory devices in transit, resulting in the antique design of the ship and the new rogue identity of the AI.

The Edward Teach now raids the far-flung outposts of the Imperium, relieving merchant vehicles of their cargoes, attacking some of the smaller classes of Imperium warships, and adding to its arsenal of strange and exotic weaponry.

Politics.

Regional Nationalism. Tony Blair remains one of the most reviled Prime Ministers of recent decades, we remember him mainly for the deceitful case he made for the Iraq war and the disastrous war itself. He managed to hand over power to Gordon Brown just in time to escape the economic catastrophe of 2008 that his policies during three terms of office did so much to exacerbate.

However, he also lit the fuse to constitutional crisis by setting up the Scottish and Welsh assemblies. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, Northern Ireland had been given a gerrymandered assembly to try and persuade rival factions to talk more and fight less. Scotland and Wales were given their own assemblies in the hope that it would make the Northern Ireland assembly seem less of an anomaly and that it would head off Scottish and Welsh nationalism, despite that such nationalisms had rarely risen above a hobby activity for a minority of Celtic romanticists.

It has had quite the reverse effect, both assemblies have now self-designated themselves as the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and Governments. The Welsh had little initial enthusiasm for an assembly, but now both assemblies have filled up with left dominated representatives spending central government funds and playing the nationalism card as a career strategy. Blair created a career opportunity for a new class of regional-nationalist politicians, and they took it, pulling the wool over the eyes of their electorates.

The nationalism cards do not bear scrutiny, they have little written on them except a faux resentment of England which heavily props up both principalities economically on one side. On the other they merely say, ‘We demand ever more regional subsidies!’ Nowhere do the nationalism cards mention anything realistic about what independence would mean in practice. Economy? Central Bank? Currency? Borders? Defence? National Debt?    

Bristol has a longstanding tradition of political rioting, and it now leads the way in protesting against a new parliamentary bill which restricts the right to peaceful protest. Basically, if your protest is likely to cause an obstruction or a nuisance you will not get permission for it.

History shows that peaceful unobstructive protest achieves nothing. A million people marched quietly through London against Tony Blair’s planned war in Iraq, and it went ahead anyway. A quarter of that number smashed up central London against Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax and it was immediately cancelled.

A protest that inconveniences nobody influences nobody. Expecting people to protest for the right to make a nuisance, without making a nuisance, seems a ridiculous expectation.

If he persists with it, this may become Boris’ Poll Tax moment.

Marblog 2021

Toad-spawn! Newts! I had feared that the addition of 26 tons of rubble and cement to the old carp pond to reduce its depth from seven to two feet in depth might have discouraged our annual guests for a few years, but no, they have come back straight away this spring and resumed their frolicking. 

Alternative Physics

The Hypersphere Cosmology model has successfully resisted several weeks of siege on the Cosmo Quest Forum.

I took it there and challenged a panel of experts to falsify it. A fierce assault began. Running repairs and upgrades to the defences occurred during the battle.

Eventually the referee gave a red card to the self-appointed leader of the opposition for losing his temper, and I retired with the theory unfalsified and strengthened.

During the sometimes less than civil debate it became apparent that Hypersphere Cosmology needed a few tweaks and a much fuller explication of its 17 core equations. It should now appear comprehensible to anyone with basic algebra, geometry, and physics.

I now present it here: - https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

Each equation now has its own sub-page of explanation of the physical principles it uses.

We now laugh at Flat Earth theories. I suspect that generations to come will laugh at the idea that for more than a century, people believed we lived in a Flat Universe that expanded at the speed of light and began with a big bang.

I now seek higher level falsification or collaborators to take Hypersphere Cosmology forward.

‘Cosmologists are seldom right but never in doubt’ – Landau. :)

Politics

I have met older people in the UK who have reservations about accepting their Oxford-Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine because they have come across negative information about it originating in the EU, suggesting for example that it may lack efficacy for those over 65.

That misinformation has an entirely political basis. It has absolutely no scientific basis. The Europeans put out this misinformation to try and cover their unbelievably incompetent screw up of procurement and distribution of vaccines within the EU.

Belgium, the rotten heart of Europe, has the highest death rate per million of any sizeable country on earth.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countrieshttps://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

The high-level fratricide in progress within the Scottish National Party comes as no surprise. The Loch Ness Sturgeon made treasonous overtures to the EU in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote. Expansion and preservation of political power base remains her only priority.

Culinary matters.

The Full Bristol Breakfast.

The privilege of living near this international trading city brings with it access to exotic ingredients from all over the world.

A lockdown years’ worth of experimentation at the laboratories of Chateaux Chaos and at the Welsh coastal research facility have led to the development of an optimal nutritional repast now designated ‘The Full Bristol Breakfast’: -

One handful of organic porridge oats.

One tin of responsibly sourced flaked Tuna.

A couple of cubic inches of cheese, preferably Blue Stilton.

A desert spoonful of smooth peanut butter.

A desert spoonful of coconut butter.

A teaspoonful of mixed herbs.

A teaspoonful of powdered turmeric.

A teaspoonful of chili sauce.

A dozen pitted green olives.

A cupful of water.

Heat all the ingredients in a pan with constant stirring until the cheese begins to melt and the porridge thickens. Eat immediately, direct from the pan. Total preparation, consumption, and clear up time, just 8 minutes.

During consumption, meditate upon the nutritional value of the ingredients and the physical strength and mental acuity that they will stimulate, rather than upon the taste which will become more agreeable with time.

The Full Bristol Breakfast provides sufficient sustenance for an entire days’ worth of gruelling physical, mental, or magical activity.

Recommended dose – do not exceed one portion on alternate days.