Blog
- Details
- Hits: 11167
Forthcoming Book. Interview with a Wizard – Ian Blumberg interviews Peter J Carroll with 365 questions.
This book covers just about everything from anthropology to xenobiology, taking extensive detours through chaos magic, the ice war, sex magic, biography, extreme travel, the knights of chaos, conventional and alternative physics, and an extraordinary lifetime of unusual ideas and experiences. A substantial appendix also presents hypersphere cosmology both in an easily visualisable and understandable form, and with its full mathematics.
Mandrake of Oxford will let us know when it comes out.
Meanwhile in the USA, Weisers have scheduled the release of the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut for May.
Chaos Wokeism.
Chaos Magic began amongst the occultists of the tail end of the Hippy subculture of the Baby Boomer generation. The Punks and the Goths soon embraced it. Then the Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, Thelemites, Darksiders, Satanists, Thule-ists, and Ultra-Rightists all took inspirations from it. Now things seem to have come full circle with the advent of Chaos-Wokeism as exemplified by the recent works of Professor Patricia MacCormack – a Chaos Magician who embraces full spectrum radical socio-political-sexual-ecological philosophy with gothic panache. Try googling her.
The Eight-Rayed Snowflake of Chaos rises!
You know that you have created a technology and a paradigm shift rather than a cult or a religion when so many diverse rebel subcultures adopt ideas and practices from its toolkit.
Entropy. Further cosmological musings.
Most physicists believe that the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, must apply to the entire universe. As they interpret most of the processes going on in the universe as entropy increasing processes they figure that if the universe began with some sort of expansion from a big bang, then it must have increased its entropy continuously since then and that it will end in a state of complete entropy, the so called heat-death of the universe.
Hypersphere Cosmology models the universe as a vorticitating hypersphere, finite and unbounded in both space and time, that does not expand. This hyperspherical universe has spatial and temporal horizons but no beginning or ending in space or time for observers within it. Thus, the overall entropy of the universe should remain constant despite local fluctuations and its obvious tendency to increase hereabouts where we live at the expense of a burning star.
Several processes maintain this cosmic equilibrium: -
1) Proton to Neutron conversion via the weak force interaction. Inside stars, gravity effectively forces Electrons to combine with Protons creating Neutrons. Protons then combine with Neutrons and other Protons to create elements heavier than hydrogen. Up to the creation of Iron nuclei, this process liberates energy in the form of photons and neutrinos. The creation of elements heavier than Iron during the gravitational collapse of heavy stars stores energy in the newly created elements themselves.
2) The gravitational collapse of very heavy stars can result in the creation of neutron-only matter or ‘neutronium’ and/or further collapse to form black holes containing hyperspheres vorticitating at lightspeed.
3) Neutron to Proton conversion via the weak force interaction. Free Neutrons quickly decay back into Protons and Electrons emitting energy and antineutrinos in the process. Bound Neutrons in heavier elements do so more slowly in radioactive decay.
4) Stars can explode in various ways and return matter to space. According to Hypersphere Cosmology, the hyperspheres inside of black holes return matter and energy to space not only by Hawking Radiation but more so by the overspin effect of the cosmic hypersphere on their lightspeed vorticitation.
Just which of the above general processes above increases entropy and which of them decreases it, remains an open question.
Every major process in the universe seems reversible given enough time. Energy moves back and forth between Kinetic and Gravitational manifestations and between its manifestations as Proton-Electron pairs and Neutrons.
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction.
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Book Review.
‘The Weirdest People in the World’, by (Professor) Joseph Henrich.
This book first came out in 2020 and somehow slipped under my radar, now it has appeared as a thick Penguin paperback. I found it fascinating and deeply thought provoking.
In Liber Kaos I outlined the Aeonic progression that appears to have occurred from Animism and Shamanism to Paganism to Monotheism and then to Atheism. Henrich draws upon a wealth of anthropological, historical, and sociological data to show precisely how this progression occurred.
Many modern Neo-Pagans and Magicians find monotheism unattractive and wonder how Christianity managed to supplant Animisms and Paganisms almost everywhere in the world that it encountered them, and how it won the Cultural Darwinism race. Henrich shows precisely how it did this, and how Christianity inadvertently eventually shot itself in the foot in the process and opened the door to Atheism.
The western church expanded extraordinary efforts in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages to break the hold of extended family clans and tribes on society. It did this because it wanted the church itself to supplant the social dominance of such clans and tribes and it gradually acquired immense influence, power, and wealth by doing so. To accomplish this the church campaigned with extraordinary aggressiveness against anyone marrying any person with whom they had any family relationship. First cousin marriage became ferociously anathemised and at times nobody could marry anyone related even to the seventh degree. Divorce, monogamy, remarriage, adoption, and the whole concept of illegitimacy and inheritance became very hotly contested issues. This caused many hereditary wealth and power structures to eventually fail and many inheritances to fall to the church. Before the Reformation, the church owned one third of all land in England.
The roots of Christian restrictions on sexual activity all derive from this period. The doctrines of hell and damnation grew largely to reenforce such restrictions.
Within centuries this caused a massive shift in the psychology of the west. It stimulated individualism and voluntary association as it eroded traditional loyalties to extended family clans and tribes. The growth of Individualism eventually spawned Protestant Christianity, mass literacy, and the Industrial Revolution and a European continent full of WEIRD people. Gradually the Weird new individualism began to erode the power of the religion that had birthed it.
WEIRD because as it began in western Europe, most of the original weirds were White, and they became Educated, Individualistic, Rich (by historical comparison), and Democratic by inclination due to their rejection of hereditary and clannish authority. WEIRD because very few people had thought outside the box of extended family clan for the whole of human history.
Weird ways of thought and life have become exported to many parts of the world over the last few centuries, often by imperial force and missionary work, but sometimes they became adopted to force modernisation, as in Japan. In China, Mao’s cultural revolution primarily sought to destroy ancestral family clan structures and the way of thinking that went with it.
Weird and non-weird peoples usually have great difficulty understanding or even tolerating each other’s strange seeming loyalties, religions, gods, moralities, laws, and sexual and social mores.
I have always felt a distrust of the sociological and psychological maxim that ‘People Are The Same Everywhere’. It certainly didn’t gel with my experiences of world travel. Henrich’s book shows how cultural evolution can make such a massive difference to the way people think and behave that it almost seems to change what we think of as their ‘human nature’.
A very illustrious historian of my acquaintance cautions against reading too much into such an overarching big idea hypothesis which may depend on highly selective evidence, and which has yet to make much academic impact, but I found it a very thought provoking read.
- Details
- Hits: 8585
Weird Physics.
It may take a year or more before possibly decisive cosmological data comes back from the James Webb space telescope, in the meantime back to the problems at the other end of the scale in the quantum realm: -
Three Dimensional Time?
For many years I have suspected that three-dimensional reversible time can explain the phenomena of indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, the various characteristics of the quanta in quantum physics, and the phenomena of retroactive enchantment and probabilistic divination in magic.
Yet a problem has always remained, how can a spacetime that appears to us as having one temporal and three spatial dimensions conceal two extra ‘time-like’ dimensions - an additional plane of time that acts like a sort of ‘hidden space’?
Perhaps the answer lies here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/343-quantum-principle-of-relativity
If so, then it does not involve any wild new speculative physics but merely a reconsideration of already known physics that physicists generally agreed to ignore, namely the superluminal solutions of Special Relativity and the advanced wave solutions of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism.
Politics and Covid.
The people elected Trump and Boris to do similar things: -
To reverse the Economic Decadence that Globalisation has caused in their First World countries through the unrestricted movement of capital and migrants, which has led to diminishing prospects for the indigenous lower and lower middle orders of their societies.
To reverse Social Decadence by reigning back the political correctness, wokeism, multiculturalism and identity politics that the political left has adopted in both countries since largely abandoning class based politics.
The people knew full well that only roguish rule-breaking characters could achieve either of these objectives and they duly elected a pair of rogues.
Covid then intervened, and the conservative-libertarian roguish instincts of both Trump and Boris led to different outcomes. Trump tried to tough out covid and it cost him his second term, even though his other policies showed strong signs of rebalancing the distorted American economy which underlies America’s social conflicts and culture wars. Boris bulldozed through the mess created by the barely decisive Brexit vote and created a viable route forward. Then he took a bold gamble on covid vaccination as his instinct to tough it out no longer seemed a viable option. As a result, Britain will likely become the first country to waive the covid restrictions that Boris so reluctantly imposed on other people.
‘Rules are for the obedience fools and the guidance of the wise’ as the old RAF saying goes.
Although fatality numbers may seem high, the number of covid Deaths per Million in the UK seems moderate by international comparison, for a nation with an old and ridiculously overcrowded population and a non-authoritarian state: -
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
I do hope that Boris manages to tough out the current media-provoked leadership challenge. Let only those without sin cast the first stone. Let’s face it, during lockdowns most people did whatever they thought they could get away with at their own discretion.
Let us hope that the economic damage of covid does not hamper the rebalancing or ‘levelling up’ of the British economy that Boris intends.
Games, Life, and Magic.
If I had to describe The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos in a few words I’d call it a game plan for a magical life. It consists of a series of psycho-mythological maps of reality, a kabala upgraded to the post-Neoplatonist esoterics of the Pandaemonaeon.
Fair Warning: -
The last few remaining copies of the first edition will soon undergo a substantial price increase to finally amortise the huge costs of printing and sales of this two kilogram package of an outsize hardcover full colour triple Grimoire and its accompanying deck of altar sized cards. Yes, the artist and I did rather overdo the design specifications and the print bill became enormous, but we made it for posterity and priced it for cost recovery only.
Lockdown provoked a few conceptual breakthroughs in boardgame design. Frontier Space War has evolved into a game so richly complex that you can play it against yourself to create a story, because, unlike chess, by the time you have examined the strategic, logistical, and tactical situation on one side of the board you will have forgotten most of the initiatives you cooked up whilst playing a turn on the other side of the board, The latest version appears here: - https://www.specularium.org/games/item/344-frontier-space-war-4
The Human’s spacecraft consist of nuts and bolts, screws and masonry fittings, and plumbing spares. The Human’s surface units were scrounged from Risk 2210 AD. The Alien’s ships consist of nuts and bolts and Milliput, and their scorpion surface units consist of woodscrews, wire and sealant/glue teased out to give an organometallic-biomorphic effect.
Life itself often seems best regarded as a game played against oneself, or between one’s selves.
- Details
- Hits: 8532
Winter Solstice 2021 Blog.
Seasonal Greetings.
Herewith from the halls of Chateaux Chaos the goddess Apophenia atop the festive tree.
Cosmology News
The James Webb Space Telescope should soon set off to take station 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth at a Lagrange point between Earth and Sun. It has cost about twice as much as the large Hadron Collider. I profoundly hope that it launches successfully and deploys its delicate structures as planned, as we do not currently have the ability to fly out and fix it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
I entertain high hopes that observations made by this telescope will lead to the demise of the Big-Bang expanding universe LCDM theory, and the triumph of Hypersphere Cosmology.
The JWST will take long hard looks at galaxies near to the limits of observation because the older Hubble telescope unexpectedly found a vast number of galaxies with many that looked far too well developed to fit into the official Big Bang story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLA0817g
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the universe always remains roughly isotropic and homogenous at all points of space and time. We should find galaxies at all stages of their circular evolution and recycling in every observable region of spacetime.
The universe is closed according to Hypersphere Cosmology, its own gravity curves it back in on itself. That same curvature creates redshift and the illusion of expansion through lensing.
Several other ‘Crises in Cosmology’ already threaten the official Big Bang model; attempts to pin down the apparent expansion rate, the so called Hubble Constant, give inexplicably different results. A recent study of the cosmic lensing of the microwave background radiation strongly indicates a closed (hyperspherical) universe.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02087
Quantum News.
With the Hypersphere Cosmology thesis now seemingly complete and awaiting confirmation or falsification, attention returns to Quantum Ontology, what the heck really goes on in the quantum realm that appears to underlie reality?
We have no shortage of Quantum Epistemology; we have the mathematically baroque description of Quantum Field Theory which gives precise predictions in some areas but only probabilistic ones in other areas. It gives very little that we can readily re-express in images or words. Thus, we have a growing suite of Interpretations about what the current mathematical epistemology could mean for the ontological structure of reality – what really exists or how does it do what it does.
We seem in a situation similar to that of the medieval alchemists struggling to understand what happens when we start experimenting with metallurgy and heating and mixing and separating substances, we have developed a very complicated set of rules of thumb but not yet any understanding of the underlying reality (in this case of atoms) which can explain the chemistry involved more clearly than ideas about green and red dragons, peacocks of antimony and phlogiston.
The current suite of Interpretations includes a rich menagerie of weirdness from the many-worlds interpretation, through pilot-wave theory, to reversible-time transactional interpretations, to interpretations with any number of extra spatial and temporal dimensions, to the alternately zen-like inscrutability, agnosticism, or cosmic nihilism of the Copenhagen Interpretation which eschews any interpretation, either because we currently cannot do so definitively, or because either no underlying reality exists, or because it cannot exist in any form that we could possibly understand.
I had wondered if my speculations on quanta as fast rotating multidimensional spinorial toroids seemed an intuitive leap too far but published it here on 2nd June anyway.
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Now I notice that the illustrious Gerard 't Hooft published something which seems to explore a similar line of speculation on 29th July.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14191
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.14191.pdf
See Gerhard’s discussion of 'fast variables' and multidimensional toroids.
If god does not play Dice, perhaps she plays Roulette instead, but so fast that we cannot see it.
Azathoth seems subtle, yet more indifferent than malicious.
Magical News.
With the revisions to Liber Null and Psychonaut complete, and with the Occultaris provisionally tucked in as a 20-odd page appendix to Interview with a Wizard, work has begun on a revision of Liber Kaos for a classic edition. This will entail a few upgrades to the opening science sections where science has caught up with magic in the interim. The closing chapters which deal with the contentious matters of grades, hierarchies, temples, and orders, will receive the benefits of a lifetimes experience and some wry observations about what achievements and disasters can result from them.
And in summary of 2021…….
On the downsides, most of the powerful players copped out of their responsibilities at COP26 and kicked the can down the road. The anthropogenic climate crisis visibly worsened as did the conflicts which it creates. The globalisation of just about everything has brought with it not only creative chaos but also a seemingly uncontrollable surge in entropy. In terms of biological cultures or thermodynamics, the prospects for our current forms of overpopulated overconsuming civilisation do not look promising.
On the upsides, the pandemic has put the Scottish Independence fantasy on hold, where more careful reflection upon its multiple fallacies quietly erodes it. The same goes for anti-Brexit sentiment, the EU has responded poorly to covid, Belgium, the rotten heart of the EU, has some of the worst pandemic figures on the planet.
The pandemic has brought home to many just who and what matters to them. Introverts with a rich inner life have generally fared better than the extroverts that our culture and media favours. For many of them lockdown has proved an annus mirabilis in terms of the appreciation and production of ideas, literature, art, and science. Lockdown economics has demonstrated that we could in principle, and with a bit of redistribution, easily thrive on a lot less work and consumption.
All the best for 2022, Choyofaque, Stokastikos, Pete.
- Details
- Hits: 8022
DecBlog 2021
Rebel Physics.
Hypersphere Cosmology has finally defeated LCDM Big-Bang Cosmology!
The universe has always existed, and it always will. Merry Christmas.
The final battle recently occurred on a cosmology forum where HC took the last remaining bastion of LCDM by accounting for the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in terms of its own model.
Herewith the plan of attack used: -
Herewith the tactics in full: https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/340-the-cmbr
The fighting was brief and bitter this time, the losers ended up cancelling and no-platforming the victor.
It all had the flavour of an atheist demonstrating the non-existence of god to a theological college.
Japanese Chaoism.
I have almost no idea what sort of Chaos Magic goes on in Japan, apparently my works have appeared in translation there, but language difficulties prove a barrier to communication. Nevertheless, a group over there sent me this delightful artefact: -
It’s a magic scrying mirror that resumes both late medieval grimoire symbolism and the alphabet of desire as given in Liber Null & Psychonaut.
21st Century Catastrophe.
I’ve had a fair bit of feedback about King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man lyrics from the previous blog: -
"Poets' starving children bleed"
There's a 2-minute clip here that predicts one nasty future consequence I haven't seen described before:
https://twitter.com/ExtinctionR/status/1464494350419709953
"Blood rack barbed wire"
This report finds that the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are spending, on average, 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as they are on climate finance. This figure is as high as 15 times as much for the worst offenders.
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/global-climate-wall
I suspect that most national leaderships in powerful nations must have already calculated that in the absence of sufficient international action, national preservation takes precedence and that their populations will back them on this.
Finally, a Poem. In celebration of HC CMBR victory.
The Starlit Sky
Away from the glare of our burning cities
The sky at night looks black as pitch betwixt the stars
Olbers said that cannot be
In a universe of infinity
Yet look again with a microwave eye
And it’s all aglow betwixt the stars
Is this the relic of a mighty blast
From distant aeons in the past
Or does the light from here
Go round a cosmic hypersphere
Coming back a little tired and cold
After all, it’s very old.
- Details
- Hits: 7808
Novblog 2021
Remembrance Day. In the UK, on this eleventh day of the eleventh month we traditionally stand for two minutes silence at the eleventh hour, to remember those fallen in war. This began after WW1, ‘The war to end all wars’, which somehow ushered in a century of wars instead. It seems also a time to reflect on future conflicts that now seem inevitable.
COP26 has predictably ended with universal agreement that Something Must Be Done, but that nobody needs to oblige themselves to do anything they really don’t want to.
I'm getting the feeling that, historically, COP26 will mark the beginning of serious universal appreciation of the problems but that insufficient action will follow until the problems worsen and the costs of inaction by the big players start to hideously outweigh the costs of radical action even in the short term. That seems normal for Homo Sapiens.
Our species suffers from the morality paradox. Telling others what to do and then not doing it yourself usually proves the best course of action.
I think we can now confidently make three predictions about the coming decades; global temperatures will rise well past 20C, human-made catastrophes and wars will multiply hugely in frequency, and by mid to late century, world human population will have decreased markedly from current levels. Mind the cull.
As I listened to the results of COP26, a friend put on an old prophetic 1969 King Crimson track.
Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Ansible?
Perhaps worth a try, the Elder Gods may well maintain Cosmic Indifferentism, but some lesser aliens might reply.
See here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/338-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser-ansible
Distraction Hobbies.
Lithonian Space Navy.
The shipyards of Lithonia have closed for the winter along with our holiday lodge but working in them has provided a stimulating distraction from reading and writing during the social isolations and lockdowns of covid.
An arms race with surrounding planetary civilisations has led to the development and deployment of new classes of Lithonian warship.
Herewith the LSN Flagship Draconia and two escorting SMVs, stealth missile vessels.
The Draconia has a standard silicate hull hewn from the rocks of the metal poor beach world of Lithonia and it carries an array of long and short range weaponry forged from scavenged coat hooks, dismantled electric razors, metal scraps, and vape accessories.
The SMVs have tougher hulls selected from huge unworked slabs of seaworn vesicated basalt and they rely on speed, stealth, and rock armour to close with opposing vessels.
I can foresee a sprawling boardgame evolving out of all this in the fullness of time, it will probably require a fair area of the beach to lay it all out on.
I used to make ships from plastic kits over half a century ago but always found it more interesting to discard the instructions and create something new. Now I eschew plastic altogether and take inspiration from whatever more durable junk comes to hand and eye. Having enjoyed the first one, I figured that I may as well start on my second childhood early.
Herewith the fleet so far.
