Blog (242)
Higgs?
So Peter Higgs (along with Belgian Francois Englert) gets a Nobel Prize for predicting the Higgs Boson. At least dear old Peter Higgs will probably have passed away by the time the Higgs Mechanism becomes discarded as yet another blind alley in the annals of theoretical physics.
This prize for the Higgs really goes as a consolation prize to the LHC effort at CERN, the largest and most expensive instrument ever made by humanity, which has so far failed to find anything to significantly advance our knowledge.
The expense, the hype, and the self justificatory overstatement of results have reached epic, indeed almost Euroscale dimensions.
The Higgs mechanism was devised initially to explain the unexpectedly high masses of the W and Z bosons and was then extended to explain the origin of mass itself.
However as the theoretical Higgs field does not couple to the gluons (or whatever) that give things like protons and neutrons about 99% of their mass then it doesn’t explain a lot really, it creates a bigger problem than it solves.
If the particles which supposedly do couple to the Higgs field all have different coupling constants which the theory cannot predict, then the theory has no predictive power.
If the General Relativistic equivalence of the gravitational and inertial components of mass holds, and it seems to hold to a very large number of decimal places, then plainly the Higgs Mechanism seems in conflict with it.
The astonishingly weak and elusive 125GeV signal from the LHC could arise from any number of things, it seems highly premature to ascribe it to the particle manifestation of a field which supposedly gives some but not all other particles a mass, particularly as we already have an excellent and unfalsified description of mass as spacetime curvature in General Relativity.
I guess that the masses of the W and Z bosons have rather high values because they constitute rather ‘awkward’ or ‘stressed’ arrangements of spacetime, and I suspect that this has something to do with various types of spin arrangement in extra temporal dimensions.
I shall most certainly not eat the relevant pages of The Octavo until I see better evidence for the Higgs Mechanism!
Euroshambles
The EU has taken its first Political Prisoners, elected Greek politicians from the Golden Dawn party.
(Incidentally there seems no connection whatever between the Greek Golden Dawn and the old British esoteric order of the same name.)
No matter how distasteful we may find the opinions of the far right Greek Golden Dawn we must accept that their views arise in direct reaction to the economic and migration policies of the EU which have royally stuffed the Greeks.
Theoretically the EU would supposedly bring nothing but economic benefit and harmony. In practise it has brought the exact opposite.
The Greeks should have quit the EU when the latrine first intersected with the windmill back in 2008.
In fact all counties except Germany should quit the EU, only they profit from it by using a currency grossly undervalued for their economy.
The freedom to form anything other than an 'approved' political party will eventually disappear if the faceless bureaucrats of the EU have their way.
AC Yr 8
Arcanorium College, the world's foremost Cyber-Academy for the magical arts, begins its eighth glorious year on September 30th, 2013.
Semester 1 will include:
Chaos Monasticism by Nikki Wyrd, a chance to sharpen up your magical practise.
A Knights of Chaos campaign by the Knights and Dames of Chaos, to attempt to remedy various serious global problems by direct acts of sorcery.
This may appear demented, yet we have achieved some remarkable successes in our previous three campaigns. Volunteers may join us initialy as Squires; the Marshals, Knights, and Dames of the order will provide instruction in the construction and use of wands, sigils, and servitors.
Arcanorium College also celebrates its eighth year with the launch of its Batchelor of Magic Degree course. The BM Degree course includes wide ranging study, the submission of dissertations and creative projects, and project leadership work.
Bits
Just a few odds and ends that have caught my attention this last week or so: -
The mandrakes I unearthed about 2 months ago, these ones
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=133
have all produced little white and purple sprouts at the top after their visit to the Midsummer Druidry Grove and a rest on my altar, it seems a rather odd thing for them to do in September, my Royal Horticultural Society consultant recommends repotting them now, any further suggestions?
Herman van Rompuy, the nonentity holding the apparent presidency of the euro-shambles has asked the EU Audit Commission not to make the appalling inadequacies of EU accounting so public because it may lead to further erosion of confidence in the EU.
The EU stands underpinned by a malignant but bumbling synarchist conspiracy between elements of the European political class and big business. Any notion of government by the people and for the people never entered into their calculations, and it seems they cannot even do their calculations anyway. To hell with the whole rotten enterprise.
It looks like we will have to wait till 2015 for the LHC to fire up again and attempt to confirm the discovery of the ‘Higgs Boson’. I doubt very much that the weak signal obtained around 125 GeV represents a particle from a field that gives many other particles their mass, I just don’t buy the Higgs Mechanism. GR explains mass more elegantly.
The new particle may consist of something like this in HD8 notation:-
Spin Colour Electrocharge* Generation
+1 +1 +3 +3?
-1 -1 -3 -2?
In other words, something like a spin zero meson, but one whose particle and antiparticle components cannot exist separately because their internal colour plus electrocharges do not add up to 3 or 0. Such a meson like particle does however obey this condition overall, perhaps conferring fleeting stability, and it could break up into virtually anything, as observed.
(* Electrocharge 3 = the charge on the electron, a more useful notation methinks.)
I note that this paper of a year ago has now achieved over 40,000 hits:-
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=104&Itemid=137
That seems to have put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Pete.
A Fistful of Wands
A Fistful of Wands.
To celebrate the completion of the Esotericon text I took the three wands used in the creation of the Elemental, Planetary and Stellar Grimoires out for a photoshot in the gardens. Whilst the temple at Chateaux Chaos contains a fine selection of staff length wands for all purposes these pocket wands have proved particularly portable and versatile.
Matt Kabryn, the artist who creates the accompanying Portals deck, and the illustrations and the general presentation of EPOCH, the forthcoming Esotericon and Portals of Chaos, will visit from NZ soon and we shall finalise the whole thing for publication, hopefully towards the end of this year. Just a few images await completion now.
This epic project has taken about 3 years, thousands of email exchanges between the planets antipodes and the resources of a department of Arcanorium College.
Part of the text concerns the replacement of the PPM (Platonic-Pagan-Monotheist) esoteric metaphysical paradigm which has dominated the last two millennia with a QNP (Quantum-Neo-Pagan) esoteric metaphysical paradigm.
Theoretically this QNP paradigm could lead to a rapprochement between religion and science and between one religion and another, but only if both science and religion abandoned some of their more grandiose and unfulfilled conceits and pretentions.
EPOCH will probably appear in electronic and perhaps i-phone app form in due course, but we have concentrated on creating it as a physical book and as a work of art, for we have only limited confidence in the ability of our civilisation to sustain electronic media for the next half century…………….
….............you might like to have a look at this, or perhaps you wouldn’t………
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7459/pdf/499401a.pdf
Because of human induced global warming the methane may soon start bubbling up from Antarctica in earnest causing planetary climatic catastrophe.
Forget about fracking or any other form of fossil fuel use, we should have shut down the oil and coal and gas industries and stopped burning the stuff completely by about yesterday.
Mandrakes & Time
Herewith a clutch of Mandrakes grown in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos. A colleague from Greece, the wizard Xarisal, sent some seeds, two of which we germinated and which grew well but without flowering for the first year, however in this their second year they produced some leaves and then shed them so we unearthed the roots and dried them. Rather oddly 2 seed have produced 3 roots.
They have come at a useful time as my daughters and their friends approach the age at which reproduction becomes a consideration. We used to have a dried mandrake on a thong which we lent out to friends who hoped to become pregnant, it seemed to work astonishingly well but it got lent on subsequently and somehow lost. These days with late pregnancies, sometimes after many years on oral contraceptives, fertility can present a problem, but with a mandrake root around the lady’s neck things seemed to progress sort of ‘first shot first cycle’.
Maybe the mandragorine alkaloids diffuse into the skin, or maybe it works by suggestion, or maybe it works by magic, it certainly seems worth a try before IVF.
________________________
As a follow up to the previous post, have a look at this book: -
Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe .Lee Smolin
So far I’ve only had time for the reviews.
Time doesn’t really exist for physicists who believe in determinism because the past and future remain singular and fixed. Only the second law of thermodynamics suggests some sort of time going in one direction, all other physical laws and equations seem completely time symmetric.
In recent conjurations Yog-Sothoth and Hastur have intimated that Entropy does not in itself lead to the reality of time, but Probability does. As space consists of a volume with some places in it unoccupied by particles, so does time consist of a volume with places in it where some particulate events don’t happen.
Addendum in response to enquiry: Cogitating still upon the above, perhaps this may clarify: -
We get used to the idea of some parts of space not containing particles, but what about some parts of the VOLUME of time not containing particles/events either, ie stuff that didn't happen, we need some stuff not to happen to allow probability, however the whole volume of space and the whole volume of time lie full of wave functions perhaps?
Instruments & Review
Herewith the Necronomicom Wand and Pentachoron instruments used to earth the forthcoming Chaos Necronomicon section of EPOCH, the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos.
The Wand consists of a length of 45 thousand year old Kauri wood from New Zealand, despite its antiquity it worked fairly easily, the geological processes which preserved it simply slowly dried it out, without fossilisation.
For practical work with the Necronomicon the magician will need to fashion such instruments, however very ancient timber does not form a necessary requirement, a prototype fashioned in a modern piece of Ash wood served well enough for most of the work, however as extra sigils came through an upgrade to a Mk2 as shown seemed essential and the surprise gift of a length of Kauri from a fellow wizard in NZ provided an unmissable opportunity.
A red glass sphere works well enough for the Pentachoron, translucent rubies of such size rarely occur in nature.
-----------------------------------
Book Review
Farewell to Reality –How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth. Author: Jim Baggott. Pub: Constable and Roberts £12.99 paperback.
Anyone handing out research grants and anyone reading or writing about the bleeding edge of cosmology or particle physics should read this book. Theoretical physics has got itself into a frightful mess by using exotic maths to develop ideas about speculative physical principles that we have very little hope of ever testing, and which despite the lack of any experimental or observational evidence get presented more or less as ‘facts’ on which to build further theoretical edifices.
Supersymmetry, String Theory, and Brane-Theory have all failed to deliver testable predictions. The Higgs Mechanism remains highly questionable, if every class of particle couples to the Higgs field with a different and unpredictable value then it doesn’t really explain anything.
None of the attempts to forge a quantum gravity theory have yielded anything of use.
The Cosmic Inflation required to prop up the Big Bang Hypothesis has incalculably weird consequences and no comprehensible mechanism behind it, and the subsidiary patches to BB of dark energy and dark matter seem to exist nowhere except as corrections to previous assumptions.
Multiverse theory in which black holes supposedly spawn new universes with different physical constants remains untestable In Principle and exists only because we haven’t found any constraints on the existing physical constants here and our physics breaks down inside black holes, if they exist, which by no means remains certain.
Baggott does not go quite as far as questioning BB itself, but to rescue physics from fruitless mathematically hypercharged metaphysics we probably need to question that assumption also, particularly as some contradicting evidence exists. Baggott mentions Pratchett’s Discworld in passing and quips that his novels will probably outlast many cosmological theories currently regarded more or less as facts.
Arcanorium College
Arcanorium College, the Worlds Premier Cyberspace Academy for the Magical Artes, Proudly Presents: -
For Semester 6 beginning on June 24th.
Nikki Wyrd, Transmogrification
Andriehvitimus, An introduction to Energy work/magic
The college has undergone a major transmogrification itself; extensive cyber-building works have completely redesigned the place and provided some new facilities, you may experience a glitch or two as we add the final touches.
Gallimaufry
UPDATE 24th April 2014.The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos has landed!
http://www.arcanoriumcollege.com/shop/
Epoch nears completion. It will likely consist of The Portals of Chaos, comprising a deck of about 55 book size cards designed primarily as altarpieces for Evocation and Invocation, but applicable to divination if desired, plus the Esotericon, a book with probably the following texts and b/w copies of the Portals images for ready reference. Parts of it may also appear as an i-phone app for those who like techno-stuff. For those who don't we have kept the equations down to just a single linear one, and expressed some of the more challenging magical concepts in words, pictures, and diagrams alone.
The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos. by Peter Carroll and Matt Kabryn.
Contents, Dedications, Prologue.
Ch 1 Introduction to The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos.
Magic over the Aeons, Elemental, Planetary, & Stellar Magic.
Ch 2 The Portals of Chaos Deck.
Tarot History. The uses of the Portals Deck.
The Esotericon Tree, Chaobala.
Ch 3 Elemental and Elementary Magic. The 1st Grimoire.
The Realm of the Elements and a Basic Magical Primer.
Baphomet.
Ch 4 Theometry & Aeonics.
A History of the Gods and Paradigm Shifts.
Ch 5 Planetary Magic.The 2nd Grimoire.
The Planetary and Bi-Planetary God-Forms.
Ch 6 Cosmology.
Strange Physics Interlude 1. Alien Life & The Perfect Cosmological Principle.
Ch 7 Omnality.
Strange Physics Interlude 2. Quantum Omnality in a Non-Local Universe.
Ch 8 Stellar Magic.The 3rd Grimoire.
Stellar Metaphysics. Necronomicon Prologue. Necronomicon Commentary. The Necronomicon.
Appendices.
1) Alien Elements.
2) The Joy of Texts. A humorous poem by Ronald Hutton. A sort of banishing by laughter.
Afterword, Glossary, References, Index.
_____________
And on a lighter note, Toadmass update; my naturalist friends inform me that most of the inhabitants of my pond at châteaux chaos look like toadpoles. As their grazing clears the depths it becomes apparent we may have in excess of 20,000 this year. If significant numbers make it to adulthood and they decide to act in concert and jump a car I guess they could squash it between them.
Arcanorium College currently undergoes a substantial rebuilding program which will add many new facilities for Staff and Alumni, details of Semester 6 to follow in the next post here.
400ppm
A month on from Frogmass (see http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=120 ) and an estimated 10,000+ tadpoles now cruise my pond, grazing on the algae, plus the first of the newts have shown up. Just how many frogs will result from all this I don't know but I guestimate 10 with luck. Each year we see about 8 dragonfly larvae clamber up the reeds in autumn and hatch out of their armor and take wing. The voracious larvae probably account for hundreds of tadpoles each. I don't know which gives me the most joy, the sight of a majestic dragonfly perched on a pole in the sunlight regarding me through its thousand faceted alien eyes, or the surprised and slightly affronted look of a frog disturbed buy the repositioning of a flowerpot.
How many Frogs do we consider a Dragonfly worth?
Milder winters and duller summers in these parts of late may have done something to halt the decline of amphibians but any further lurches of climate bode ill, agricultural yields have fallen worldwide.
Atmospheric CO2 has now just passed the 400ppm mark, at a run, with every indication that environmental catastrophe rather than collective restraint will eventually halt the rise.
How many humans and how much consumerism do we consider the entire planet worth?
More...
Screw the EU
Screw the EU
UKIP have made a good showing at the local council elections in the UK. Nobody really wants UKIP local councillors as such; they just want to show the depth of their distaste for excessive immigration and the EU in general. It seems likely that at next years elections for the sham ‘European Parliament’ UKIP will take the majority of UK seats in an historic two fingered ‘Up Yours!’ to Brussels.
After that we will have a UK General Election in which either UKIP or a Conservative party that has adopted a lot of UKIP’s policies will play a strong hand.
So just what does the pro-EU constituency really consist of?
Firstly ‘The Political Class’ itself, it means a gravy train for an ever increasing number of unelected, and unaccountable, and unsackable politicians and bureaucrats as it consists of a Synarchy rather than a Democracy. Failed or retiring politicians dream of sinecures in the EU.
Secondly ‘Big Business’. The regulatory culture of the EU makes life hell for small and medium sized businesses. This suits big businesses fine because they can afford to set up entire departments to deal with the mountains of paperwork and regulation and it seems a small price for them to pay to have competition from medium and small companies eliminated.
Every other constituency seems to hate the EU. Even those who used to vaguely suppose the EU embodied some laudable sort of ‘internationalist principle’ can now see the ugly realities that result from trying to shoehorn different cultures and different economies into a corrupt Synarchist Federation by stealth.
The economic case for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU seems either neutral or positive although big business screams otherwise. Britain runs a trade deficit with the EU; there seems no reason why the EU should cease to trade with Britain, EU countries trade with many countries beyond the EU. Britain’s trade with the rest of the world would undoubtedly improve if freed from regulatory burdens.
The Scottish Nationalist’s position seems particularly daft; they seem to want to quit a British Union that’s prepared to devolve ever more powers to them in favour of a European Union that seeks to remove ever more powers from them.
Apophenia and Entropy
I've been asked for a few more words about the Apophenia course just beginning on www.arcanoriumcollege.com which you can join anytime this week, so here goes: -
Apophenia means seeing connections between things that most people don't. Thus it can lead to genius or lunacy or both, for the hidden connections may prove true, (for a given value of truth), and/or useful in art, or science, or magic, or if they prove too outlandish they may just create conspiracy theories and religions and other nonsensical merchandise.
Magicians have used apophenia inducing techniques such as sortilege or kabala or the ars cobinatoria of Ramon Lull for many centuries on a rather ad-hoc basis, however in 2005 the attempt by some magicians to directly evoke the phenomenon of apophenia resulted in the surprising Phenomenisation of Apophenia Herself as an Actual Goddess, a sister to the recently revived Eris apparently.
Magicians have the technology and they can call up servitors, daemons, and gods if they want to, and sometimes by accident.
Since then, The Muse of Peculiar Connections has given us more hints on how to invoke Her and to portray Her, and a multitude of strange and unexpected inspirations and ideas. We celebrate her eighth birthday on May 26th and in the run up to that we shall attempt to expand upon her Invocation by practical magic and see what She evokes in us.
------------------------
And another thing, have you noticed a certain amount of excitement on the physics pages about The 'Causal Entropic Principle'? 
This somewhat speculative idea suggests (I think) that a system will tend to try and maximise the entropy it can produce in the future over its entire possible path rather than just go for maximising entropy as quickly as possible. In some simple models and experiments this seems to happen. Speculation runs rife that this mechanism could possibly account for the existence of err, life, intelligence, the universe and everything. Calling it 'causal' thus seems a bit odd for it implies that a system can 'know' something about its own future possibilities, or at least get some sort of retro-causal feedback from them.
Semester 5
St George’s Day again and hardly anyone notices, we gave the world Newton, Darwin, and Democracy, plus nearly all of its games and sports, but now British Identity seems to mean little more than A Glorious Past and No Future. The EU State Religion of Political Correctness becomes increasingly enshrined in law and hence as morality, because most people sheepishly believe as commanded. Thus any discussion of why British Identity has no future becomes both futile and illegal. Nevertheless even some economists begin to wonder now if this pocket handkerchief of an island can accomodate any more people on it.
Despite a posh education, neither of my kids seems to know the first thing about the history of this sceptered isle. Well I suppose even if we have lost pre-eminence in just about everything else, Britain still punches well above its weight in Hollywood, dodgy financial services, arms manufacture, and of course Wizardry, Magic and Esoterics, although having said that I’m delighted to invite an American colleague to lecture in our next Semester on Arcanorium: -
Semester 5 Arcanorium College. http://www.arcanoriumcollege.com/
Semester 5. 29th April - 7th June
Fra. Alloy. Into the Dreamlands: Lovecraftian Sleep & Dream Work
Pete. Apophenia 2: Theory and Practise.
Alloy’s Summary: A course on how to explore the Lovecraftian Dreamlands and Mythos Dream Magic. Class will include a variety of techniques for controlling and using the Dreamlands symbol set for dream/sleep and dream-related magic. A familiarity (ideally, fluency) in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is STRONGLY recommended (links to free versions of all of the reading are available under the College of Mythos Studies sub-forum).
Week One: Dream Journals Week
Two & Three: The Map & The Journey
Week Four: Enemies & Allies – Obtaining Servitors, Wards, and Guides
Week Five: The Work of the Silver Key – Rituals in Dreamspace
Week Six: Great Cthulhu -The Sleeping God
My Summary: As Apophenia's Eighth Birthday falls within this Semester on May 26th I intend to provide an opportunity for participants to do an Apophenia working for inspiration and genius in chosen personal projects, an opportunity to debate the text of the Apophenion book, and also to hold a birthday celebration for the muse Herself.
__________________
Plus my Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos have now come out as e-books in Italian thanks to the magnificent translation work of a certain bilingual Arcanorian, so it has received expert translation. Unfortunately I cannot read this beautiful language but I may well try singing a few of my rituals in err, sort of ‘Opera Mode’. (In Private!)
Judgement Day
Judgement Day, a review, but first its Frogmass!
Spring officially began this last weekend by Chaoist reckoning, for that’s when the pond at Chateaux Chaos filled with frogs. We have about 50 this year for the start of a 24/7 two week non-stop party and shagfest. The ‘music’ gets rather loud in the evenings. They have come in a variety of colours from whitish-yellow through greens and browns to a few that look a bit burgundy.
Let us hope we don’t get a late freeze, the climate seems oddly disturbed; we have just had the coldest Easter in a very long while.
The Science of Discworld 4, Judgement Day, has just appeared, I love this book although I suspect many liberal arts based Pratchett fans may find the extended science sections from Prof Ian Stewart (Maths and Physics) and Dr Jack Cohen (Biology) a bit of a challenge. Pratchett himself weaves an amusingly quirky tale that basically allows the two scientists to let rip with some of the more extraordinary recent developments in our understanding of reality, and an exploration of their strange philosophical implications.
I note with pleasure that the Big Bang hypothesis and the Higgs Boson get treated with a robust scepticism, as do many topics in cosmology and quantum physics. I began to wonder if the morphic fields of The Apophenion and The Octavo have found some resonance in the memesphere.