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“….during the 1820s, when explaining magnetism, Michael Faraday inferred a field filling space and transmitting that force. Faraday conjectured that ultimately, all forces unified into one.

In the early 1870s, James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism as effects of an electromagnetic field whose third consequence was light, travelling at constant speed in a vacuum. The electromagnetic field theory contradicted predictions of Newton’s theory of motion, unless physical states of the luminiferous aether—presumed to fill all space whether within matter or in a vacuum and to manifest the electromagnetic field—aligned all phenomena and thereby held valid the Newtonian principle relativity or invariance.” (Wikipedia, Fundamental interaction)

In contrast, today’s physicists look at nature, the universe, the cosmos in a fundamentally more complex way. For them the world behaves very differently. It is made up of a large number of distinct and different entities or substances, at last count at least 61 “particles,” of what substance no one claims to know, along with multiple hypothetical others that have not been actually discovered but which must exist to explain the behavior left unexplained by the first sixty-one. These “fundamental particles” of some substance interact as the result of four “fundamental” forces in the classical, Newtonian, sense, expressed as “interactions” in the more modern terminology. The interactions operate differently depending on the scale of the investigation, that is, whether we are referring to the submicroscopic world of particles or the macroscopic world of cosmology and the interactions of stars, galaxies and the other unreachable entities.

Wikipedia has a chart of these interactions, reproduced below:

As one can see from the chart these have been precisely defined, their strength and basic connections measured or calculated, so someone, or many someones, have agreed that this is the way the world works, and that the missing parts and relationships just remain to be discovered. And there are missing and contradictory parts. For example, the greatest question of the whole of modern physics is how the first of the four, gravitation, relates to the others. And what is the origin, the causation of these four, that is, where did they come from? and why are there just four? and how is it that some work concurrently on more than one particle and some are only tied to a single one? And, my most important question, how, exactly have these forces’ existence, strength, behavior been determined at this level, where no one has actually seen a particle? How are these entities described? Well, there is a great deal of redundancy involved here. Let’s look at one or two. A proton, for example, is described as being made up of three quarks. A quark is described as being one of three constituent parts that make up a proton. That’s neat, but—what does it tell us about what a quark is, or a proton?

Basically, it appears that as soon as a “particle’ has been discovered, its place in the pantheon of particles is determined by the energy required to generate its appearance. It is then assigned a value based on that energy level and how it is deemed to fit in the “standard model” of the universe of small things, the hadrons and fermions of existence. If there appears to be no particle to explain a certain phenomenon, a new one is hypothesized to be the one that provides the explanation. Then enormous sums are allocated to “find” this imagined entity and a great hullabaloo arises if a new one appears, or is even thought to have appeared.

I have a colleague who is, to my mind, a strict reductionist, whose favorite question at this point is, “And where did that one come from?” or , “What came before that?” Fundamental questions, to be sure. Modern physics, in its “standard model” incarnation has no answers to these questions. OK, matter is made up of particles, 61 of them, count ’em. But what are the particles made of ? Well, “we don’t know yet,” or, “they just are, accept it.” And those little babies are held together by forces, four of them. And what causes there to be forces? Again, “we don’t know.” Still, whenever I have suggested that there might be gaps or contradictions in the standard models, a great outcry arises, “These are the most tested and confirmed models in scientific history! How can you question this?”

Is there a way out of this conflict? Is there a way to simplify these models? How can we give rest to William of Ockham, the first ambassador of parsimony, whose dictum is that the more simple model of science is more likely to be the most correct, who must be spinning in his grave even as we speak? I think there is. And we can start by setting the “standard models” aside for a moment and going back to Einstein’s first theory and linking it to Faraday’s and Maxwell’s insights.

When we link those together, it seems likely that before there was matter, there must have been energy. In no creation model is there ordinary matter without a source, with the exception, of course, of the various creation myths that preceded the advent of scientific enquiry. (and, of course, the big bang) The step following then becomes simple: we must assume that:

The basic, fundamental stuff of the universe is energy.

 Without energy, nothing would exist. This truism is manifested by the concepts of entropy, “heat death, ” and a multitude of similar physical “laws.” Einstein expressed this in his most brilliant conception as E= mc². In this equation, “E” is the measurable entity we call energy. “m” is the measurable entity we call matter. And “c” is the measured constant we call the speed of light. This equivalence of matter and energy is an accepted standard throughout most of the scientific world. Particle physicists express this principle in describing the “mass” of their tiny entities in the values of energy, in electron volts. Again, without a basic level of energy, nothing could exist. That energy, that basic stuff, is manifested to us as a turbulent but generally consistent electromagnetic field, its energy level hovering around a temperature of 2.72 degrees Kelvin (2.7° K.). To the professionals in the field, that number looks suspiciously like the measured temperature of the current “evidence” of the big bang, the CMBR. That is no coincidence. If there were no big bang, an idea that is slowly taking hold throughout the world of cosmology, then that observed value must belong to some other phenomenon. This is my candidate.

Are there other evidences of the existence of that field? Here are a few. 1) The limit on the velocity of light, c, and other EM radiation, from gamma rays up to long wave radio transmission, all requiring some medium in order to exist (The standard answer to this is simple denial “Electromagnetic radiation does not require a medium for its propagation.”; 2) The fact of the transmission of those phenomena through what is otherwise perceived as “the vacuum,” or “empty space.” 3) the observable fact of gravitational and magnetic attraction, and, in the case of magnetism, repulsion, invisible but clearly observable phenomena. I could cite others, like the curvature of light by gravitation, or by magnetic fields, called “gravitational lensing.” All of these , in the presently accepted models of physics and cosmology, the so-called “standard models,” have exceedingly complex, even contradictory explanations. The existence and universal presence of a field make all of these phenomena more simple and easy to explain.

A second justification for the presence of the field is that it makes clear that whatever was present at the beginning of what we see as our present universe is still here and observable today in and all around us. No hypothetical big bang, expansion, acceleration, element creation, even divine purpose, is needed to describe how it came to be and is in continuous creation as we speak. The evidence is all around (and in) us. All of the “standard models” require “singularities,” events that happened once but can never happen again, making them conveniently unavailable to observe or test, like the “virtual particles” modern physicists seem fond of, that must be there but don’t exist long enough to observe. Or entities that must be there but cannot be actually seen like black holes, neutron stars, Higgs bosons, waveforms.

The universe is simpler than we have been made to think. All of the 61+ “particles” and their anti- cousins are really just misperceived phantoms, “wrinkles in a mist.” Instead of 61+ fields, there is one, turbulent, subject to distortions and disruption, things we are familiar with in our oceans, our atmosphere, in the behavior of nearly all observed phenomena.

This model is also simpler in that its description does not require different, “extra” dimensions. These phantom entities are the result of the fantastic illusion that if something shows up in a mathematical equation, it must be a real, physical entity. A “dimension” is not a first-order point event but a second (or higher) order abstract descriptor. dimensions are conceptual entities we use to describe the things we observe in the real world. We use them to locate one thing in relation to another or to a reference point in “space.” And we use them to describe the size and form of things we have so located. “How many dimensions are there?” As many as we need for any particular descriptive task, but they are not mysterious forms out there in the mist demanding that we conform to their rules or laws.

Richard Feynman was correct. We have wrestled for close to 100 years with incomplete models of the structure and origin of the universe. Because there has been no way to resolve of their contradictions, we have begun to see it as an intractable problem. Several modern physicists have drifted off into poetry and philosophy, where the rigor of scientific investigation need not be applied. Speculations and hypotheticals have taken the place of logic and realism. A step back and a new look has become essential.

“Many—perhaps most—of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.

Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.”

—John R. Platt, Science,1964

Albert Einstein’s canonical 1916 paper titled “The Foundation of the Generalized Theory of Relativity” contained many implied assumptions. His concept of “spacetime” (Raumzeit in the original German) was based on an understanding among scientists that the terms “space,” “time,” and “dimensions” had a clearly understood meaning. They were primarily mathematical meanings, space being the hypothetical container of all physical things in the universe, time the measure of the duration or persistence of those things, and dimensions, the measurable qualities of space and time. Of course, no one had ever experienced space, in and of itself, it couldn’t be seen, felt, or tasted. Time could only be measured as whatever fraction one chose of certain regular variable of experience, passage of the sun across the heavens, the cycles of day and night, the seasons in certain parts of the world. And dimensions were how one located objects relative to some reference point, or determined their size and shape relative to other “things.” Again, no one had seen, tasted, felt, or perceived in any way any physical substance of space, time, or a dimension. They were seen as not measurable, not perceivable qualities of the universe.

So why did Einstein choose to use them to describe the workings of that special phenomenon we call gravity. We may never know, but one reason might be that they were conveniently available mathematically and had been used by other mathematicians to relate to actual physical entities, notably by Poincaré, and Minkowski. They ended up as fundamental assumptions in his mathematical theory of gravity, and were accepted as fundamental, with few, if any questions as real, physical entities with real, physical characteristics.

But just imagine how, if Einstein had made these assumptions clear at the beginning, if he had opened his paper with the following sentence, what might have been the intellectual consequences?

“Let us assume that the hypothetical entity we designate as “space” is, in and of itself, a real physical entity, and that it possesses three unique characteristics we will call spatial dimensions, themselves possessing real physical characteristics, designated as “up-down,”, “right-left”, and “to-from,” measuring its value in spatial units; and further, that the hypothetical entity we call “time” is a real physical entity, and that it possesses as a unique characteristic a fourth dimension, measuring its value in time units “forward and back.” If we accept these assumptions, then the source and origin of the phenomenon we call “gravity” can be explained as follows.”

On reading the full paper it is clear to the reader that these assumptions are implicit in the words that follow, else the published text would not have physical meaning and would constitute only a hypothetical exercise in mathematics. However, the text is explicit in asserting that it constitutes a generalization of the assertions of the prior work, Special Relativity (On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, 1905), in order to include gravity in its purview. Einstein was a consummate mathematician. His formulae are elegant, consistent, and complete, but because of their non-physical assumptions they fail to reflect a physical, even a logical, reality. Rather, they are derived from a geometry, not from observations of the physical world.

To understand the theory’s assertions in full it is necessary to define its terminology as clearly as possible. The two key questions of course are: What is space? Is it a true physical entity that we can identify, locate? Can it or portions of it be described as to its nature and composition? Or is it alternatively like other real things, a magnetic field, for instance, only describable and its existence inferred from, its effect on other entities? Can we measure its intensity, direction or substance? is there proof that it is “real,” either logical or mathematical?

And what is time? Is it a force, moving one direction? Is it malleable independently of objects, events, phenomena? Like the question concerning space, can we examine a portion of it and determine its physical characteristics? None of these questions have generated an unequivocal answer. “It’s just there, everybody knows that!” is a common answer. And “everybody knows what time is!”

The most generalizable definition of space seems to be that it is the hypothetical container of all of the identifiable entities contained in what we call the universe. Its physical characteristics are hard to define except that it is unmeasurable in its extent and unfathomable in its depth. Descriptions of “outer space” usually specify that it is essentially “empty” except for the identifiable heavenly bodies like stars, planets, galaxies, etc. and clouds or nearly invisible wisps of hydrogen gas, cosmic dust, or in the most extreme sense, something called “quantum fluctuations,” an unknown substance, that participates in also unknown behaviors and causations. It is also referenced as “the vacuum” with the admonition that it is not really the same as the technical definition of a vacuum, that is, a space within a container that has been mechanically evacuated of all air, etc. It is, in astronomy, most usually considered to be that empty space between the stars “out there.”

In recent years, based primarily on anomalous observations of the behaviors of planetary and galaxial movements, what has been called gravitational lensing and the like, and on calculations of the numbers and assumed mass of what we can actually see in the night sky, space is also thought to contain mysterious substances thought to play a part in these anomalies. These have been named “dark energy” and “dark matter” and their total contribution to the mass of the universe has been more or less precisely calculated. So, space is not just an empty container, not a true vacuum. But what exactly is it then? And how can we best understand it?

When Isaac Newton was developing his mathematical models of the behaviors of the planets, he found that solving the relative gravitational influence of three or more planetary bodies was extremely difficult using the mathematical tools of his time, so he conveniently chose to ignore the effect of the moon on the orbit of the earth around the sun to obtain a useful approximation. Later, when Albert Einstein offered an newer model of the structure of the universe, he assumed that empty space was, in fact, actually empty. While earlier scholars and cosmologists felt the need for space to be a substance, to account for the transmission of light, for example, Einstein’s mathematical model of the universe had no need of substance, so an early assumption of an all-pervasive “ether” could be left out of his equations. Even though he later conceded that there must be something filling his “space” for the things he said were happening there to actually exist, he never made allowance for them in his equations. On the other hand, he left in place the assumption that the hypothetical “space” itself had physical characteristics, that is, it could be stretched, curved, distorted, etc. in the neighborhood of massive objects like planets that Newton earlier had assumed were exerting a force of attraction on other nearby and distant bodies. This force was called gravity.

In Einstein’s new construction of the universe, all is contained in what he called a spacetime continuum. A continuum in mathematics is considered a smooth, unbroken entity without interruptions or breaks. In one definition, it expressed as: a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes may be quite distinct. In General Relativity’s continuum, there are no indicated or assumed limits. There exists an entire branch of mathematics for these entities called continuum mechanics.

To make his mathematics of the universe work, Einstein drew on the prior efforts of two other geniuses, Henri Poincaré and Hermann Minkowski who had developed systems that added a fourth variable, time, to the three accepted spatial dimensions. Adding time was important in describing systems in motion. But adding time was also problematical, because time, like space, was an entity that lacked real, physical attributes. It was not something you could see, taste, smell, touch. All it’s necessary attributes for a role in the physical world had to be arbitrarily added to it.

A very early writer on almost every subject, St. Augustine of Hippo, in the 5th century wrote, “I think I know what time is, until someone asks me to explain it. If nothing had ever occurred, the there would be no need for a concept of past time. If nothing were yet to occur, there would be no need for future time. If nothing were, there would be no need for present time.” And Newton said, “In another sense, time might be considered as simply duration.”

The concept of time is inextricably tied to the existence of “things,” their persistence, their duration. In the words of the joke, “Time is just one damn thing after another.” What time is not is a mysterious giant clockwork out among the stars measuring out our days.

So, Einstein’s physical universe, it’s observable behaviors, motions, forces had to be derived from those of two, until now, nonexistent entities, space. the hypothetical container, and time, the hypothetical measure of continued existence. Spacetime, is then a construct meld together by something called dimensions, but dimensions, in the real world, are simply systems of measurement, not physical entities in and of themselves.

So, if Einstein had made his assumptions explicit, instead of leaving the impression that, somehow, space and time were real entities, with physical characteristics enabling them to be bent, curved, compressed. extended, how would we today be explaining the orbits of the planets and stars, how would we be explaining the phenomena of gravitational lensing. Would we still be looking at Newton’s laws of motion? Or would we be seeking a new approach, looking at our last hundred years of observations and emerging patterns with different eyes, perhaps? Or would we have found a new paradigm, re-examining another concept to explain the speed of light, gravity, magnetism? Would there still be a search for the link between relativity and quantum mechanics, say, or would QM also be looking in other directions (It has it’s own contradictions to resolve, of course)?

Make no mistake, Albert Einstein was a true genius, in conceptual thinking, in mathematics. And he sensed that there was something missing in his theory. He hinted at that in his talk at Leyden in 1920, when he said , in effect, “the presence of an ether is essential for the theory of relativity to work..” So why do we still see “space” as empty? How do we explain how light and other electromagnetic phenomena are transmitted ? What is the reason light has a fixed speed limit? How can we speak to our friends instantly, so to speak, across the world? Surely there is a medium that bears those signals. General Relativity, that is, Einstein’s theory, has been useful, but why have we ignored its faulty assumptions? General Relativity is an elegant mathematical box. The corresponding logical box is, unfortunately, a poorly constructed container based on unprovable, unsupportable assumptions.

Space is not a thing. Time is not a thing. Dimensions are not things. They cannot be observed, manipulated, bent, curved, deflected, or managed in any way by human action or by cosmological or gravitational forces. They cannot be isolated in the laboratory, examined in the field, tested, or potentially disproven. Their existence or nonexistence cannot be objectively shown. And yet. . . . one of the principal “standard models” of physics and cosmology rests on the exactly opposite assumptions, that these hypothetical man-made concepts, measuring systems, imaginary constructs, are in fact, real things. I think 100 years is long enough to depend on this illusion.

A question in a theoretical physics forum on the web. “Are there any new models of the universe since the standard models arose in the last century?” No one knew of any except for those  that get called get called crackpot in these discussions. But some of them may not be as crazy as others.

Here is a start. First, abandon all presuppositions and start with observations. Einstein’s spacetime was a hypothetical structure setting itself up as a real entity. It led to multiple theoretical offshoots that simply complicated (overly so) all following theories. It was beautiful, and it felt right, but at it’s center was a mathematical assumption, that “spacetime” was a real physical entity that could be distorted, stretched, bent. something no one has still ever seen. And, of course, it didn’t say where all this might have come from.

Then came LeMaitre’s conjecture in 1927, “suppose this all started with a single event, a sudden creative expansion from a single point, maybe? That would explain the notion of an expanding universe, based on Hubble’s idea, and then we maybe could trace it backwards and maybe see when it might have happened.” Fred Hoyle pooh-poohed this and called it “a big bang.” But guess what, the name stuck. And it’s still around today. But there were still questions about it, like, it didn’t explain many of the observations of the astronomers, so a “bump” in the expansion was added, called “inflation.” No one could still suggest what might have started it either, so many ideas popped up, even a rationalization for the idea of something from nothing. Even the philosophers had a problem with that! So let’s set those models aside for a minute, and go back to starting with things we’ve actually observed.

Step 1) In 1964, two Bell Labs radio-astronomers went searching for distant evidence of objects giving of radio waves. Wilson and Penzias detected a background “noise” coming from all directions as they searched the heavens with their big horn. And guess what again, The experts exclaimed, “We must be seeing the echo of “the big bang. That just proves it happened!” And that stuck. They called it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, CMBR, for short, now shortened further to just CMB.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.^[

Since then that “background” has been confirmed multiple times. It’s a lot like that static you used to hear when you spun the radio dial between stations.. We can safely say we know it’s there. Let’s say that this “snapshot” is actually what they say, “the oldest light in our universe,” but let’s say that it’s not the echo of something like a big explosion, or the ripples from millions of novae exploding through the cosmos, What is everywhere is a field of background radiation, electromagnetic in nature, the original essence of the cosmos, that may have been there forever. Imagine it as an energy field manifesting itself as electromagnetic radiation, at an average temperature of 2.725° K. existing everywhere, unmeasurable, unfathomable, our primal preferred inertial frame of reference. That then generates the real question, “How did we get from there to here, from the shimmering darkness of this primal field to a universe bursting out of its bounds with seemingly solid masses of stars, galaxies, planets, different materials, life!”

Step 2) Then let’s accept that matter, as we call it, is energy transformed by some process or set of processes that we can see happening today in our local world. We know it works the other way, we’ve seen nuclear explosions. Some have felt them. Think E=mc². What might those assembly processes be? What could encourage these organized, coherent objects, events, phenomena to arise out of that shimmering darkness? Well, one might include the fine scale turbulence, that shimmer in the energy field itself, much like we see in our atmosphere and oceans, our local examples of turbulence, i.e. full of currents, stratifications, concentrations, dispersals. Think chaos theory. And just as in those examples, temporary reinforcements, reverberations and resonances can lead to temporary emergence of stable patterns, like whirlpools in water, typhoons in the atmosphere, sound patterns, music, down to dust devils in the desert. So can temporarily stable entities arise in the cosmos.

At first, these would be tiny and local but because we are talking about concentrations of energy, and we know that the intensity of “hot spots” or disturbances carry with them distortions of the medium around them, we can see that we’ve developed a more intense region surrounding and reinforcing the effect that started it all in the first place. Example: a hurricane starts as a small low pressure local storm, but its effect is to increase in size and intensity as it draws energy in toward it’s heart. And until some disruptive event occurs, like making landfall on a coast, it continues to grow and intensify in a rule-based form.

So now we have at least one, maybe more points of high energy and distortions in the region surrounding them, regions of higher energy that by their presence alone, encourage more energetic activity. And we know our hot spots are surrounded by an unlimited supply of energy, even if it’s only at 2.725° K.

Note that we said “temporarily stable” earlier. In cosmic terms, and at cosmic time scales, temporary can mean from a femtosecond up to billions of years, and we have local, contemporary evidence of both, just as we have local, contemporary evidence of the existence of similar entities.

Step 3) So what have we got to? A) a medium out of which orderly, perceptible entities can arise and become stable, even if only temporarily. B) high energy points of many sizes serving as focal points of high energy regional distortions of the underlying field. Now fit this model into Einstein’s General Relativity. Those regional distortions could easily be seen as the “curves of spacetime” that he imagined caused what we call gravity, except now they are manifestations of a real substance, an energy field, not a mathematical abstraction made up of two non-real hypotheticals. So suddenly we have physics, not just a mathematical abstraction.

And how do we get from gravity to magnetism? Well, we set some of those regions of high energy concentration to spinning. And this spinning further disturbs the field and from that disturbance arises the power of a magnetic field with its axis at its center giving it direction and polarity.

Does this give us a hint at possible explanations for some other mysteries? Well that field, that vast source of energy called in our ignorance “empty space” might just be what the mystical physicists have taken to calling “dark energy.” And those regions of distortions in the field might just be that other new favorite mystery “dark matter.” It’ s worth thinking about. Like, wouldn’t that behave just like gravity?

There’s more to come, of course. We need to get from little points of energy on up to stars, and galaxies, and ultimately, us. But we’ve got lots of other known mechanisms right here in the local real world that we can see as possibilities. There are phase transitions that work to make more stable forms, there are the mechanisms of rule based processes like Cellular Automata, Self-organizing systems, and Self-organizing Criticality. There’s fractal geometry to suggest some of the rules that the universe might be following, recursive geometries that demonstrate how the same simple rules can apply in both the micro- and macro- worlds. And if we give up on the unresolvable mysteries of relativity and quantum mechanics and substitute continuum mechanics; if, instead of quantum field theory with it’s dozens of interacting fields surrounding every “particle,” we think of one field, distorted locally by the presence of energy “hotspots;” if we think of the primal field as an elastic solid instead of a hornet’s nest of buzzing “particles,” we might find a route of inquiry leading to new insights as to how the real world works, and a real understanding of how the microworld relates to the macroworld. This is, of course, just a start.

There’s more. Chapter 2 is coming.

If you’re still interested, much of this is tied together in my books and the articles on my website. I invite you to take a look at them. And try to imagine the world in a different way.

Charles Scurlock June 10, 2016     www.enquiriesnw.com

A recent subject (question?) posted on a theoretical Physics forum asks, “What happens when one of a pair of entangled particles crosses an event-horizon?” This presumably simple question assumes agreement on a) what is an entangled particle?, b. what is an event-horizon?, etc., c)do any two physicists agree on those meanings?,  etc.  After first wondering what possible purpose the answer to such a question serves in the happenings of the real world, one realizes that it serves a real purpose in pointing out the problems the obscure languages of modern physics pose for the ordinary reader, you and me.

In talking about the concepts and issues we are concerned with here in the real world, Zone of Middle Dimensions, it is important that we make sure that we are speaking the same language. Language is, of course, a latecomer in the evolution of human thought. Up until about 100,000 years ago with the advent of homo sapiens sapiens the fossil evidence indicates that we did not even have the anatomical structures necessary for the rapid vocal interaction needed for the development of a complex spoken language. Certainly we had some sort of primitive symbolic communication, necessary for a developed social structure, for cooperation in the hunt, for interactive behavior in the cave or tribe, as early as homo erectus some 1.8 million years ago, but not the sophisticated and subtle systems necessary for the communication of concepts and ideas. Written language, a true form of symbolic communication, has only been with us for a very short time, since about 3400 B.C. The marks we see on this page, the way in which the ideas and concepts we are now passing between us, have been available only a very short time.

Now, of course, language governs all communications between individuals and groups. It is transmitter of knowledge between generations. But for language to do its job, even within just one of the many tribal, ethnic, national languages we use, there must be agreement on both its syntax and its meanings. A word used in one science or discipline develops meanings from its context. When used in another, it brings those earlier associations along with it. If we are not very careful, we may use a word to mean something that seems very clear to us but which carries associations that either muddy its meaning in another context or interfere with its carrying concepts or models we wish it to invoke.

In physics, astronomy, and cosmology, there are many such examples, the use of the word “particle” for one. I carried in my head for many years my 11th grade chemistry teacher’s assertion that an electron had no mass. It bothered me that such an important “particle”, one so important in our daily lives could be so insubstantial. We now are told that it presumably has a mass though that mass is very small. But “particle”, meaning “small part” in the language of classical physics, has become for physicists something which occupies a point in space, so small that it can only be detected by the track that it leaves behind, and perhaps by the mathematics that describes its behavior.

Physicists have identified many particles now, with unique and sometimes fanciful names, defined by mass, angle after a collision, spin, and the curvature of their tracks. There are others postulated to exist, not yet identified, but necessary to explain the existence or behavior of “known” ones. We publish papers, books, hold conferences to discuss their most obscure characteristics.

But pick up any book on particle physics, even in its more obscure versions such as “superstring theory” and you will find copious use of the term “discovery”. It is as if there has been the fortuitous opening of an obscure archaic volume, and there, in words of fire, perhaps, is the key to “Relativity”.

We might more appropriately, see these discoveries as “inventions”, for that is what they are. Einstein did not “discover” relativity, he created it as a model, a metaphor, of how the universe and its constituent parts might work. He created it in a true metaphorical language, mathematics, even though he may have seen it in his head as a conceptual model.

The value of such inventions is measured in terms of their level of completeness, and their testable and confirmable predictive power. They live and die based on these tests. But to call them “discoveries” imputes to them the sense that they must be eternal verities, found as if they were jewels pulled from the depths of the earth and destined to live and prevail forever. No true scientist believes that of these “discoveries” so let’s call them what they are. Still we can pick up even a skeptical book, as Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong”, with its scathing and convincing dismissal of superstring theory, and find every new equation in cosmological history described as a discovery.

We are also guilty, in many instanced, of what we might call the misuse of metaphor. A couple of examples come to mind. Edwin Hubble the astronomer, looking deeply into the far reaches of the universe in the 1920’s, deduced that distant galaxies were moving away from us. In his now famous red-shift observations, he also noted that the farthest distant ones were moving faster than those nearby. The proof of these observations convinced Einstein that his belief in a “flat” non-expanding geometry was false and led to the abandonment of the controversial cosmological constant in his equations. This observed expansion was accompanied by the observation that this expansion would appear the same from any point in the universe. But this expansion was not considered due to the outward motion of the galaxies themselves away from each other, but, out of deference to the Einsteinian entity of “spacetime”, was attributed to the expansion of space itself. The too simple analogy that was commonly used was that of a balloon on which the galaxies were represented as ink dots, which, as the balloon was blown up, appeared to be moving apart, but remained in place in relation to one another. (We now know from subsequent observations that this is not necessarily true, some irregular galactic motions have been determined.)

The analogy fails in two ways: first, it suggests space as a kind of curved ‘flatland’, when in fact, space as conceived then and now, must be what lies inside the balloon; second, it ignores the simple logical expression that if a equals b, and b equals c, then a must equal c. Movement apart is equal to movement apart.

Space, in all literature using relativistic terms, is always given the attributes of a substance. The literature gives it a structure, but only a mathematical structure. When reduced to diagrams or illustrations as having a flat, positively curved, or negatively curved nature, it is represented as a plane, a sphere, or a saddle, with the planets, stars, galaxies arrayed on its two-dimensional surface. It is no wonder that ordinary minds have trouble understanding its essence.

A similar problem occurs in explanations or representations of what is called the “big bang”, the supposed moment when everything began–from nothing. In attempts to make it either clearer or perhaps more dramatic we are asked to imagine that the universe has reached its limit and has begun to contract. Imagine, you are instructed, all of those planets, stars, galaxies headed back to their starting point, rushing ever faster, colliding, being crushed, subsumed, giving off enormous volumes of energy, ultimately grinding together in the true mother of all explosions, and then returning to nothing. It is reminiscent of the comedy routine of a few years ago of the two Las Vegas casinos competing furiously with each other with ever more extravagant entertainments until one advertises, “This Week; The Hydrogen Bomb; One performance only!”

What is left out of this metaphor is that, if there were such a beginning explosion, none of those massive constructs, those planets, stars, galaxies, would have already existed.

Let us now, here declare the First Law of Metaphor: “Metaphors of reality must obey the laws of reality!” (but within limits: nothing in this law shall be construed as to constrain poets).

Perhaps the most confounding element of our use of language is our confusion of levels of meaning. People, particularly politicians, sometimes married couples, find themselves at odds because they seem to be “talking past each other”. Alfred Korzybski, in Science and Sanity, lays out a system of “orders of abstraction” close adherence to which helps to avoid this difficulty. In Korzybski’s system a point-event constitutes a first-order abstraction, that is, the observation, the sensory perception. A statement about that point-event, its initial description, even an exclamation of pain if the point-event was touching a hot stove, constitutes a second-order abstraction; a statement about that exclamation, a third-order abstraction, and so on. It is easy to see how a dialogue where one party is discussing the event while the other is discussing the reaction(s) to the event can lead to a significant loss in the communication. Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, uses the term “logical type” in laying out a similar theory. Strict adherence to these principals is often lost both in scientific literature and in popular accounts of scientific breakthroughs and leads to more controversy and confusion than we normally expect from scientists.

(This post, with minor modifications, was first published in 2011, as Appendix B of my book, “the picnic at the edge of the universe.“)