Resonance and Mysticism
Victoria, March 28, 2002
http://www.goodshare.org/resonest.htm
You want to ‘see something’ really ‘mystic’ that is supported by real-life experience and by mathematics and the relativity principle of physics?
This was first shared with me (I couldn’t understand it at the time) by a gifted mathematician and good friend, Manus Foster (he had come to geophysics from the residue of the ‘Manhattan’ project group), … who told me that there was this profound and kind of ‘mystical’ thing that was implicit in Gabor’s 1944 ‘Theory of Communications’. Manus said it was in the ‘frequency doubling’ aspect and how you could double the frequency and work something out and then come out of that doubling and lo and behold, it all fit together, … (the solution in one domain which happened to be a more convenient domain to solve the problem in, being directly applicable to the harder domain where the problem was based).
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. But I could see he was convinced and he copied Gabor’s paper for me, saying ‘hang on to this for a decade or so and you will be able to dig out what’s in there by and by’. Manus had cancer and knew he was going to die (he took his own life in 1985) and at his wake, carefully planned by Manus along with his departure from this world, … as I drank, watched the belly dancers and danced the Greek circle dance, I continued to ask myself ‘what the hell is in that Gabor paper?’.
Over the years, the mystic contents have seemed to slowly ‘resolve’ from out the veils of multi-layered relativity. I can the ‘naked form’ of it with you now, and I have no doubt that the folds and crevices of this form will continue to resolve in my explorations of it.
This mystical thing is what we are calling ‘inclusionality’ and it is extremely counter-intuitive to us who have been grounded in rationality (western man is ‘grounded’ in rationality and ‘versed’ in inclusionality while the native American is ‘grounded’ in inclusionality and ‘versed’ in rationality).
If you could strap on wings like a goose, … what would you say to someone proposing; ‘Why don’t we all fly in the shape of a great big delta-wing that includes all of us, … and the delta-wing will lift us up and take us to our destination farther and faster and more easily (with less energy) than we could ever get there on our own.’
You would say that they were nuts, right, … that there is ‘no free lunch’, that the ‘sum of the parts’ must prevail and thus the big delta ‘V’ wing flapping in the horizontal plane would boil down to being some sort of composite ‘sum’ of our individual little plane delta wings flapping in the vertical plane.
Every day, in the way we organize and manage and do politics etc., we are reaffirming our faith in the ‘dynamical independence’ of the individual which implies that we must ‘perfect the behaviour of the individual’ (person, organization, nation etc.) on the path to improving the sum of our causal results. There is no free lunch in the ‘causal’ model, … what goes in must come out, not more, not less.
But there is this niggling problem, … what about the vortex within the vortex kind of dynamical geometries?, … what about the local current that whirls within the Gulf Stream, … is it ‘getting a free ride’, by pushing off from the enveloping Gulf Stream dynamic? It certainly seems to be. So, can it be that even ‘inanimate nature’ can form an over-nesting dynamic to carry us farther, faster with greater energy economy? Can it be that collaborating water molecules are smarter about such things than human beings? And what about the slime-mold on the dank floor of the forest? … i.e;
“For most of their four day life-spans, these amoebas live as single-celled animals, ... hunting for bacteria, ... an amoeba's major problem is is limited mobility, ... at full speed it covers about half an inch in 24 hours, ... and it can quickly consumes all the available bacteria within its very limited reach, ... it then excretes a hormone-like substance which sends out chemical pulses roughly eight minutes apart, ... a 'chemical distress signal', ... the amoebas sense the chemical signals with special receptors which stud the outer surface of their cell membranes and respond by moving towards the source and emitting their own chemical signals, ... drawn towards the densest chemical concentrations, as many as 100,000 amoebas stream toward each other until their minute bodies merge into a single gelatinous mass --- slime mold, ... barely visible to the naked eye, this cigar-shaped collection of cells wiggles across the dank forest floor this time in search of light and heat, ... upon finding a 'suitable' spot, some of the cells extend downward, forming a hollow shaft, ... most of the amoebas then flow up through the shaft, coming to rest inside a bulbous tip called the fruiting body, .. inside this tiny bud, each amoeba encases itself in a tough cellulose spore, ... when the fruiting body is eaten by a worm or bird, its spores are carried off to places far beyond the oozing range of a single amoeba."
100,000 foot-slogging passagers, tired of their slow speed, build a highspeed bus that will them all farther and faster and with less expenditure of energy. What is the bus made from? …. why, it is made out of pure immaterial dynamical relationships, … space-time phase relationships as in Gabor’s information theory.
So it seems as if one can stop being an independent pedestrian and start dancing with your friends and while you are all dancing and having fun, … you are being magically transported to new and exciting vistas that you could never have gotten to on your own and you’re having so much fun its as if time is standing still!
Sounds like a story told by that mystical evolutionary biologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, … where;
“The Energy of Cosmogenesis
is
Creative
Creativity
Creatively
Creating
the
Cosmic Dance
into the
NOT YET.
(Larry Hein, S. J. , July 1, 1998)
How many western scientific thinkers will we get to sign up to participate in the ‘big delta wing’ or the ‘big bus’, … the dynamical community-transport that forms out of nothing more than our relative motions but that takes us places we could never get to on our ‘own’, and takes us there more swiftly and energy-efficiently.
Come to think of it, … isn’t this co-produced community bus model a general model, … a model for living in the world dynamic? So how many western scientific thinkers will we get to join this inclusional world where you can travel farther, faster, cheaper as long as you keep dancing and having fun together?
So what did Gabor’s information theory paper actually do?
What it did was to formulate the basic elements of informational ‘signal’ in a stand-alone ‘phase relationship’ manner, as a complex entity; psi(t) = s(t) + j*s~(t) where s~(t) is the Hilbert transform of s(t) and this, in the terms of seismology is the function that gives back the ‘reflections of s(t) in itself’ or the ‘ghosting function’ as it is called in the vernacular of geophysics. The bottom line is that the complex signal ‘psi’ (t) is built up from stand-alone elements that are no longer dependent upon ‘time’ (‘t’) as s(t) is, but achieve their stand-aloneness not by their dependence upon positioning within an absolute frame filled with emptiness or their dependence upon positioning along an absolute frame-line enveloped in emptiness, … but by relative referencing to the aspect of themselves that is reflecting back to them from their enveloping space; i.e. how other time-pixels (or ‘pixies’?) see them. This enables the building of a dynamical model from the center outwards (i.e. in a frameless context) as where each pixel or logon (which is not discrete because each logon depends upon its neighbours for definition and that goes on and on and on) is like a little ‘phase-ducer’ that dances in a certain way depending on how its neighbours are dancing. Thus, the ‘dancing’ of the group is the reference ground that the dancing individual pushes off from, … as in the case of the vortex included within the Gulf Stream and the flapping of the goose’s wing within the big delta geese-wing.
This, of course, is in accord with the ‘principle of relativity’ and it suggests that the ultimate source of inertial traction for the system is the traction of space itself (i.e. energy transformation, the classic case is the particle – wave duality of light.).
The method of engaging with the traction of space appears to be ‘induction’ or ‘resonance-based phase coupling’ as in the case of the solar system and the geese etc.
This then leads to the ‘frequency-doubling’ effect spoken of by Manus. If we look at it in terms of relative wavelength which is where the notion of ‘pitch’ first came from, as this snippet from an early essay recounts;
“The
approximation or generalization of space as euclidian dropped out some rather
important stuff; i.e. 'harmony' or the wave aspect of nature . Harmonic
content was fundamental to the Heraclitean view, as it was to Pythagorus.
Pythagorus, purportedly guided by the Orphic cosmogenies and some ancient books
coming from farther east had, through the concept of 'harmonia' succeeded in
linking the rational abstraction to both the senses and the 'spirit'. As
Frankfort et al put it [in ‘The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man’],
while Heraclitus was content to include the hidden 'attunement', ... "the
Pythagoreans were anxious to determine it quantitatively'. The starting point
for their enterprise was a remarkable discovery by Pythagoras. Measuring the
lengths of the string of the lyre between the places where the four principal
notes of the Greek scale were sounded, he found that they had the proportion
6:8:12. This harmonic proportion contains the octave (12:6), the fifth (12:8)
and the fourth (8:6). If we attempt to regard the discovery naively, we shall
admit that it is astonishing. It correlates musical harmonies, which belong
to the world of the spirit no less than to that of sensual perception , with
the precise abstractions of the numerical ratios."”
Now, the question arises as to whether harmony is ‘inclusional’ or ‘exclusional’ (the ‘sum of the mutually exclusive parts’) as follows; if a shorter wavelength nests within a longer wavelength, does the longer wavelength ‘carry’ the shorter wavelength or vice versa, or how indeed do the two wavelengths ‘come together’ (no fair doing it on a ‘flatspace’ digital oscilloscope which has the logic of linear superposition (‘mutual exclusion’) embodied in it by man). Does the wavelength of the ‘independent’ goose-flapping simply ‘add together’ to produce the longer wavelength ‘envelope’ of the big delta wing? That is, is the overall dynamical behaviour the sum of the individual behaviours?
Now, as you think of this, are you thinking in terms of ‘wavelength’ on a flat-space oscilloscope? Or are you thinking of ‘wavelength’ in terms of the diameter of a pulsating bubble with the goose at its center? …i.e. are you thinking of wavelength in terms of its mathematical abstraction in ‘flat space’ or are you thinking of wavelength in terms of the reality of our experience? Because, in the reality of our experience, the wing-flapping of the geese is not happening ‘in empty space’ but within the ‘commons’ of the enveloping fluid ‘air-flow’, and fluid-flow responds differently to the relative actions of different folks and their different strokes.
If one ignored the standard aeronautical engineering theory of the Venturi principle and Bernouilli’s principle which deal with ‘lift’ (the linear up-and-down forces and linear velocities and kinetic energies of the Euclidian space-framed world), and started from first principles, how might one describe the ‘harmonics’ based physics of the flight of the goose/geese?.
How about the following;
The goose moves through the atmosphere like the shrimp moves through the ocean; i.e. the constituent pushes out symmetrically so as to load the enveloping medium with potential energy (e.g. elastic compression), then it relaxes into an asymmetrical position so it is ‘squeezed out’ of the dynamical volume it just produced in the direction it wants to go, and so on and so forth. The goose and shrimp are ‘pushing off’ from the energy-conversion dynamic they co-create. I. use ‘co-‘ here to signify that the characteristic way the environmental dynamic converts energy makes it behave like an inertial traction-giving ‘substance’. But that just gives me a linear push off as if the ‘force’ behind the bird was ‘pushing it’ (in a linear fashion), … but the fact is the bird can steer out of that traction it has co-created in a broad range of azimuths, thus we cannot think of the outer-inner imbalance in pressure as a ‘causal source’ of the bird’s motion. Instead we can think of the bird as using the inductive pull of its enveloping space as giving the bird opportunity to go in the direction it prefers. This variable mix of kinetic plus potential energy thus acts like a substance in itself, as indicated in this excerpt from an older essay;
* * *
Einstein and
Infeld, in 'The Evolution of Physics' say; "Two expressions for energy
occur in the mathematical description, each of which changes, although the sum
does not vary. It is thus possible to introduce mathematically and rigorously
the concepts of potential energy, depending on position, and kinetic energy,
depending on velocity. The introduction of the two names is, of course,
arbitrary and justified only by convenience. The sum of the two quantities
remains unchanged, and is called a constant of motion. The total energy, kinetic
plus potential, is like a substance." The authors go on to observe;
"Our world is not Euclidian. The geometrical nature of our world is shaped
by masses and their velocities." . . . "It [relativity] forces us to
analyze the role played by geometry in the description of the physical
world."
What is implied
here, and what is captured in Gabor's information theory, is that the [compressional]
wave information (inner-outer dynamical energy transformation) cannot be
captured in the standard split-apart space-framing convention of Euclidian space
and absolute time, and one has to resort to the transcendently more
comprehensive space framing of a spherical space-time continuum.
* * *
The above inner-outer harmony based model of the flight of the goose/geese could explain a lot of continuing contention about the flight of winged creatures of the following type, re the flying ability or non-flying ability of the Pterodactyl as excerpted from ‘How Big, Could They Fly?’ [2];
“… But in
1972 the first of a spectacular series of finds suggested that we must
drastically rethink our ideas on the maximum size permissible in flying
vertebrates. In the summer a then graduate student in Geological Sciences at the
University of Texas, Douglas A. Lawson, made a discovery in Big Bend National
Park that electrified scientists and non-scientists alike. What Lawson found
were the fragmentary fossilized remains of a wing belonging to the largest of
all flying creatures. After removing the broken and fragile pieces from the
sandstone that surrounded them, about 200 fragments of petrified bone, ranging
in size from that of a fist to that of a postage stamp were tediously fitted
back together by the staff at the Texas Memorial Museum's Vertebrate
Paleontology Laboratory. By 1975, studies of the specimen by Lawson and his
supervisor, Wann Langston, Jr. Had determined that the animal, a 65 million year
old pterodactyl from the Age of Dinosaurs, had a wing spread of over 40 feet,
greater than a 4-place Cessna airplane or an F-18 fighter. It was about twice as
large as the biggest pterodactyl known up to that time. Interestingly, Lawson
found the remains in deposits that were non-marine; the ancient entombing
sediments are thought to have been made instead by floodplain silting. The
immense size of the Big Bend pterosaurs, offically named Quetzalcoatlus
northropi, but known affectionately in the palaeontological world as
'747s' or 'Jumbos', may be gauged by setting one of the Texas upper arm bones
alongside that of a Pteranodon: the 'Jumbo' humerus is fully twice the length of
Pteranodon's. Lawson's computer estimated wingspan for this living glider is
over fifty feet It is no surprise,
says Lawson announcing the animal in Science in 1975, that the definitive
remains of this creature were found in Texas.
Unlike Pteranodon,
these creatures were found in rocks that were formed 250 miles inland of the
Cretaceous coastline. The lack of even lake deposits in the vicinity militates
against these particular pterosaurs having been fishers. Lawson suggests that
they were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on the rotting mounds of flesh
left after the dismembering of a dinosaur carcass. Perhaps, like vultures and
condors, these pterosaurs hung in the air over the corpse waiting their turn.
Having alighted on the carcass, their toothless beaks would have restricted them
to feeding upon the soft, pulpy internal organs. How they could have taken to
the air after gorging themselves is something of a puzzle. Wings of such an
extraordinary size could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded.
Since the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves they must
have taken off vertically. Pigeons are only able to take-off vertically by
reclining their bodies and clapping the wings in front of them; as flappers, the
Texas pterosaurs would have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body
enough to allow each of the 24-foot wings to clear the ground The main
objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate musculature for such an
operation. Is the only solution to suppose that, with wings fully extended and
elevators raised, they were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If
Lawson is correct and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders another problem
is envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of dinosaurs. The ungainly
Brobdignagian pterosaurs were vulnerable to attack when grounded, so how did
they escape the formidable dinosaurs? Left at the mercy of wind currents,
take-off would have been a chancy business. Lawson's exotic pterosaurs raise
some intriguing questions. Only continued research will provide the answers.
Note that Desmond
mentions a number of ancillary problems, any of which would throw doubt on the
pterosaur's ability to exist as mentioned, and neglects the biggest question of
all: the calculations which say 50 lbs are max have not been shown to be in
error; we have simply discovered larger creatures. Much larger. This is what is
called a dilemma.
Now we come to
what Robert T. Bakker has to say about the Texas Pterosaurs ("The Dinosaur
heresies", Zebra Books, pp 290-291:
"Immediately
after their paper came out in Science, Wann Langston and his students were
attacked by aeronautical engineers who simply could not believe that the big
Bend dragon had a wingspan of forty feet or more. Such dimensions broke all the
rules of flight engineering; a creature that large would have broken its arm
bones if it tried to fly... Under this hail of disbelief, Langston and his crew
backed off somewhat. Since the complete wing bones hadn't been discovered, it
was possible to reconstruct the Big Bend Pterodactyl [pterosaur] with wings much
shorter than fifty feet."
The original
reconstruction had put wingspan for the pterosaur at over 60'. Bakker goes on to
say that he believes the pterosaurs really were that big and that they
simply flew despite our not comprehending how, i.e. that the
problem is ours. He does not give a solution as to what we're looking at
the wrong way.
* * *
Our experience tells us that
birds do not always slip out of a tree and get into flight by falling into a
gravity-pulled glide, nor do they always accelerate across a pond like the duck
or a seaplane and depend upon their velocity relative to the air to create
Venturi lift according to Bernouilli’s principle (regions of high relative
velocity associate with low relative pressure). Our experience suggests that they can squeeze
themselves up out of the space they are in by the way they use their form to
load up space with potential energy and harvest the collapse of this potential
in the manner they want (Imagine trying to capture a bird by cupping one’s
hands in to trap him in the horizontal direction; i.e. he rises up like a
hovercraft). This conversion of outer-inner energy to translational kinetic
energy (e.g. forward and/or upward) is not simply a ‘thrusting’ of the
airflow produced by the bird’s kinetics, … it is instead the result of
managing the resonance between the shape of the bird’s dynamic and the shape
of the enveloping environmental dynamic. It
is like the motorcyclist who lets his turbulent enveloping space be sucked into
the co-created sweetspot in the enveloping slipstream of the semi-trailer; i.e.
the bird co-creates a sweetspot that lifts him up into it in the manner that
‘the organisms of the rainforest creates their own sweetspot climatic effect
that pulls them up into it. Newtonian
physics cannot use ‘space’ as a ‘dynamical fulcrum’ but relativity can
and does since the constituent dynamic is seen as simultaneously referencing to
the enveloping environmental dynamic.
Ok, now we are coming close to seeing, in a new light, what is going on in Gabor’s example, in his 1944 ‘Theory of Communications’ paper, where he asks us to think about playing a tune on the piano and then playing it again one octave higher at half the pace, … both ‘pitch’ and ‘pace’ implying ‘frequency’ but where the combination of simultaneously doubling the pitch and compensating by halving the ‘pace’ does not yield the same result (note that the pitch of the piano is intrinsic in the stretched string and thus a space-time relationships while the pace of the play was according to ‘our watch’ or ‘absolute time’ detached from space).
If we ‘scale-up’ our bird by nesting individual-birds within the flock-bird, we scale up the wavelength of the pulsating bubble. If the ‘time-based frequency’ remains the same in flaps per second, the ‘stride-forward’ of the flock-bird will be proportional to its length (the wavelength) so the composite flock-bird ‘stride-forward’ will be increased (note that only a portion of the interfering flapping energy will move into the ‘longer-wavelength flock-flap’).
So, the bird moves by steering itself out of the traction provided by its energy converting dynamic, and the flock emulates a big bird and does the same. The ‘something for nothing’ comes from the form (wavelength) of the dynamic relative to the elastic characteristics (molecular dynamical form) of the enveloping environmental dynamic (i.e. the air is really an environmental dynamic since it gets its elasticity from the molecular level community constituent dynamics; i.e. from the energy conversion traction etc).
Is there anything that can be stated in more simple terms about conversion from outer-inner-dynamics to translational dynamics?
Let’s go back to what Frankfort et al said about the Pythagoreans;
"the
Pythagoreans were anxious to determine it [‘harmonia’] quantitatively'. The
starting point for their enterprise was a remarkable discovery by Pythagoras.
Measuring the lengths of the string of the lyre between the places where the
four principal notes of the Greek scale were sounded, he found that they had the
proportion 6:8:12. This harmonic proportion contains the octave (12:6), the
fifth (12:8) and the fourth (8:6). If we attempt to regard the discovery
naively, we shall admit that it is astonishing. It correlates musical
harmonies, which belong to the world of the spirit no less than to that of
sensual perception , with the precise abstractions of the numerical
ratios."”
[Note: interestingly, Newton’s private notes indicated that his ‘inverse square law of gravity force’ was drawn from this work of the Pythagoreans [1] and it is Newtonian physics that the aeronautical engineers are using.]
The numerical ratios, do not, meanwhile, give us the rules for how harmonies ‘come together’ (the rules of addition for harmonies, if you like). Since harmony is a volumetric phenomenon, I cannot get the answer to that by doing standard additions and superpositions on a flat sheet of paper on an oscilloscope. And as Gabor pointed out, Fourier Analysis simply takes the signal apart and puts it back together again in a linear sense.
We can see a basic ‘systems inquiry’ problem in mainstream science that derives from everything being ‘flattened out’ or ‘linearized’ by excluding the reality that the activity of the constituents is ‘enclosed’ by space that is an active environmental dynamic rather than ‘empty space’. As systems science authority Russell Ackoff points out;
“Perhaps even more revealing of the
environment-free orientation of Machine-Age science is the nature of the place
in which its inquiry [is] usually conducted, the laboratory. A laboratory
is a place so constructed as to facilitate exclusion of the environment.
It is a place in which the effect of one variable on another can be studied
without the intervention of the environment."
But the environment; i.e. ‘space’ or the enveloping environmental dynamic is a participant in dynamical phenomena according to our experience and according to the principle of relativity.
Gabor’s theory of communications which is based on frame-independent ‘logons’ or ‘phase-cells in space’ gives us the opportunity to address the participative role of space since it ‘starts from space’ rather than things. Mainstream science, however, persists in starting from a rigid frame and empty space based description of things in terms of the position of their mass distribution and its time-based translational (kinetic) motion.
So, what it would make sense to do is to do an experiment without the rigid frame, empty space and time-based motion impositions, that could look at little pulsating bubbles nesting within larger pulsating bubbles and study ‘how they come together’.
Sounds a bit like ‘wave propagation’, right?
And maybe the geese just did this experiment for us, as they were making no assumptions as to rigid frames and empty space and time-based movements.
And what did they find? They found that they could ‘push off’ from the enveloping environmental dynamic, … the community dynamic of the air molecules. They could push off individual or as a group, and the manner of pushing off was not really a ‘linear push’ as in a vector diagram but more like an inductive sucking as when a molecule is sucked into a potential energy well in a crystal structure or as when a car is sucked into an opportunity-hole that forms out of the relative motion of a group of cars. One can’t model this in terms of vector diagrams and translational motion because there is no ‘rigid frame’ in effect to map the points on the locus of the curves; i.e. the reference frame for the motion is the continually transforming shape of space (potential energy distribution) that forms out of the relative motion of the constituents (the constituents themselves emerging from the molecular community dynamic that is the reference frame for the constituent molecular dynamics.). In this model, all motion is induced by the enveloping constituency dynamic in a nested fashion with the energy transformations of ‘outer’ space at ‘one end’ and the energy transformations of ‘inner space’ at the other end; i.e. in the manner of vortices within vortices or in the manner of plate tectonics or in the manner of the spherical renewal of the medicine wheel of the native American tradition. [i.e. the medicine wheel has four wrap-around compass directions signifying the four winds, the spirit, body, mind and emotions, the four colours of man etc., and the center represents the source of emergent renewal. ]
This relativistic view of the world dynamic in which space has traction via potential-kinetic energy-transformation and inductive coupling (resonance) offers a self-consistent, viable alternative to modeling the world dynamic, as mainstream science does, in the purely kinetic terms of the ‘assertive time-based actions and transactions of material causal agents in empty Euclidian space’. What’s more, this energy transformation-rooted model provides an opportunity to explain many things that the mainstream Euclidian ‘materialist’ model cannot, such as the ‘flight of Quetzalcoatlus northropi’(the Texas pterosaur).
So, to simplify the above discussion, … given that space has a participating role in dynamics such as flight, … space can act as a mediator by means of its energy transformation geometry. For example, we could imagine the geometry around the geese as looking like a big potential energy well that was squeezing along horizontally and within it, it had a sweet spot potential well for each goose to occupy. We can compare this to the well-designed ship moving along through the hydrodynamical containment of the ocean in such a way that the dynamical disturbance it is making is inductively phase coupled to the opening-up dynamic of the enveloping water. The inductive aspect is the same as for the geese, although the geese take advantage of this resonant coupling in a nested fashion. This type of design is trial and error because it depends on the simultaneous coupling between the enveloping environmental dynamic and the included constituent dynamic and this is subject to the vagaries of weather, temperament of the constituents (in the case of geese), and their interactions etc. The geese are of course designing ‘their hull’ on-the-fly and their ‘dynamical hull’ emulates the same squeeze in-and-out motion that they themselves use as a propellant.
The picture here is as in wave propagation. In a seismic wave, one converts some chemical energy (or uses an underwater electrical discharge etc.) to cause a ‘bubble’ where there is a resonant pulsating involving the conversion of potential to kinetic energy. For example, the bubble from a ‘sparker’ device generates a spectrum of energy in the pulsating bubble from about 5 Hz to several hundred Hz. This energy transformation ‘pushes off’ from itself, … or is ‘sucked out’ in all directions and propagates according in a manner that is characterized in ‘the wave equation’. There is no reason why this propagation cannot be seen in terms of a traveling distribution of potential energy wells, nor is there any reason why a collection of ‘continuing sources’ of wave disturbance could not ‘shape’ their enveloping energy dynamic so that they would be ‘carried along’ in a wing-shaped potential well that was squeezing itself forward (or inductively pulling itself forward).
If we say that the potential energy wells are continually forming and reforming in space to produce this ‘bus’, then the ‘bus’ is no ‘thing’ but simply resonant dynamical relationships. Similarly, we could say that passenger on the bus is a ‘bus’ relative to his constituents (molecules or etc.), and so-on and so-forth. What makes the ‘goose’ special to us is that its size and dynamical form are similar to ours. The ‘V’ formation is very malleable and comes together and recedes more often than we would normally ascribe to a ‘living organism’.
In other words, we could classify the ‘systems’ in space on the basis of their resonant energy-transformation geometries, in which case the ‘flock’ would be a mother system and the inclusionally nesting ‘geese’ would be seen as supportive ‘buses’ that would periodically disperse to replenish their biochemical energy supplies and subsequently re-form. In such a classification, nothing would be excluded, not even minerals, and there would be no hard line between ‘living and dead’ since ‘space’ and its resonant energy dynamics would be the ‘living container’ that included everything, without exception.
In any case, Gabor’s information theory allows us to build our models up from the center outwards via ‘logons’ which are like little ‘phase-ducers’ that can dance together without having to pay allegiance to descriptions based on an absolute containing-frame. Thus the geese can co-create the greater resonance-based life-form of ‘flock’ that envelopes and includes them in a dynamical energy sense, similar to the evolution of prokaryote to eukaryote. ‘Community’ seen in this sense is a life-form as described in Camelot, … something greater than the individual constituent (outlives the constituent) that at the same time includes the individual constituent. Again, we can see analogues to the molecules that migrate through the potential energy wells in our bodies, replacing most of our body material every few weeks. The molecules themselves do not have to be seen as having persisting identities but can also be seen as being continually restored since the ultimate base for everything is energy-transformation.
General relativity theory does, in effect, hypothesize that the ultimate substrate of the world dynamic is energy transformation. Our traditional descriptions, however, have been in terms of ‘material objects’ and their ‘kinetics’. If we revert to energy transformation, this leads fairly naturally and directly, as suggested above, to the substrate of energy-transformation based, inductively coupled wavefield dynamics, and to a completely general way of describing our reality as perceived through our experience, including in the description, but not depending on (i.e. transcending), materiality.
Even if one finds it too difficult psychologically, to abandon the material base (there is no reason to abandon it, … but there is every reason to beware of its limitations and the social dysfunction that such unawareness or ignorance induces), the energy-transformation based model ‘goes farther’ in explaining complex natural phenomena in a manner that is consistent with our ‘experience - the sole source of truth’ (Poincaré).
So this business of the big wavelengths carrying the little wavelengths included within them in the energy-flow, … in the manner of big bubbles carrying little bubbles within them or big vortices carrying little vortices within them, conflicts with the modeling of the world dynamic in terms of the actions and transactions of ‘independent’ material agents. If the agents are ‘independent’, how can it be that the ‘big delta wing’ of the geese’s ‘V’ formation carries the individual geese within it?
While there is no problem in explaining this if one accepts the principle of relativity which leads to the wave view of things, …this is not generally done and there are a mass of exceptions that have invited tailor-made local refinements to the ‘standard’ theory.
The acoustic waves that are propagated by an array of small speakers are not ‘additive’ as the signal coming into them would be additive on the oscilloscope. The speaker dynamics disturb the air around them and the air dynamic around them disturbs the speaker dynamics. For example, the speakers at the edge are not effected the same way the speakers in the middle of the array are. It would appear as if the dynamic of the constituent speaker ‘pushes off’ from the enveloping array dynamic. This means that the signal from the constituent speaker is a kind of ‘passenger’ riding the bus that is helping to co-produce, a bus that has a far better long amplitude (bass) response than is given by the sum of the bass responses of the individual speakers.
Science has set aside so many ‘special cases’ such as this, categorizing them under a variety of terms such as ‘complex systems’, ‘emergent behaviour’, ‘chaos’, ‘non-linear dynamical systems’, ‘self-organized criticality’ etc. that declare them to be beyond the scope of the standard scientific model; i.e. where we see things in terms of ‘the assertive actions and transactions of ‘independent’ material agents’. There are so many ‘exceptions’ that one would think that science would be getting concerned about the integrity of this standard scientific model and seriously investigating alternatives such as ‘inclusionality’.
As has already been mentioned, however, the experimental approach wherein the current theory is validated by replication of experimental results is done under controlled conditions such that the influence of the enveloping environmental dynamic can be eliminated by the experimental process. For example, in an experiment to validate Newton’s law of gravity, we could drop objects of different weights from a tower. In order to validate the law, we would make the experiment simple and repeat it to ‘cancel out’ the ‘random’ effects of air turbulence etc. (i.e. forcibly eliminate ‘the participation of space’). We would definitely not drop a complex geometric cluster of objects that might give strange results due to the fluid dynamics of the air mediating amongst the objects as they fell. Besides, Newton’s laws are formulated in such a way as to never have to deal with the dynamics of more than two bodies mutually influencing each other’s motion.
But nature does experiments on its own and in the case of avalanches and sedimentary deposition, we see the same counter-intuitive effect where the constituents do not appear to be ‘independent’ but seem to co-create their own energy-transformation wave-based ‘bus’ to ride on. The following discussion of ‘Pattern Formation in Granular Flows’ is a case in point;
“One of the
fascinating puzzles in pattern formation of granular materials--- with important
industrial applications--- is the tendency of grains differing in size, density
or surface properties to segregate. For example, shaking a container filled with
two types of grains of different sizes leads not to mixing---as in liquids---but
to segregation, with the large grains on the top of the container and the small
grains on the bottom, an effect known as the ``Brazil nut effect''. Segregation
can also be obtained in the absence of any periodic oscillation by simply
pouring a mixture of grains of different sizes onto a pile. One experimental
set-up, which has attracted much recent attention, consists of a quasi-two
dimensional cell or vertical Hele-Shaw cell where a mixture of grains is
constantly poured next to one end of the cell. When a mixture of small and large
grains is poured into the cell, a pile builds up and the small grains are
observed to segregate near the top of the pile and the large ones near the
bottom of the pile This segregation is due to the different grain sizes, because
large grains roll down more easily on top of small grains than small grains on
top of large grains.
The
understanding of layering in sandstone is not the only practical reason. In a
recent ``News & Views'' article in Nature, J. Fineberg described the
relevance of segregation in avalanches to a phenomenon which is quite dramatic.
Namely that in an avalanche of rock from a height of a thousand meters, the flow
after the avalanche can be as much as ten times bigger. The flow can be
dramatic--- e.g., the flow from one particular such rock slide that took place
in Frank, Alberta, Canada in 1903 actually wiped out the town which was quite a
distance away---over 4 km--- from the mountain that initiated the avalanche. The
mechanism of this long-runout rock slides has been the subject of much
speculation. Possible explanations include a segregation of small particle at
the bottom of the flow which acts as a ball-bearing mechanism, or an acoustic
fluidization of a narrow zone beneath the flow. However, so far, there
is no conclusive evidence to understand this phenomenon, which we believe is
closely related to the avalanche dynamics we see in our experiments and
models.” http://lisgi1.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~makse/granular.html
The interesting point here in the long-runout slides is that while the different sizes segregate during the flow and allow the constituents to go farther and faster with less expenditure of energy, they travel together in a phase-coupled manner; i.e. the components of the aggregate do not simply ‘fall out’ as a function of fineness. So the term ‘acoustic fluidization’ in itself is not bad. Meanwhile, this ‘process’ (which is described in ‘arm-waving terms’) is now being used to ‘explain’ all kinds of departures from the normal theory in soil mechanics, e.g;
“Of the postulated mechanisms
by which this ephemeral fluidization [associated with impact crater formation]
may occur, one of the more plausible is Acoustic Fluidization. Coined by it´s
propounder (Melosh, 1979), the physical basis for this phenomenon is that
acoustic vibrations within a granular material could become violent enough to
temporarily relieve the overburden pressure and, therefore, abrogate the
internal frictional resistance of the material. Consequently, the theory
predicts that if driving stresses are high enough and acoustic vibrations in the
medium are strong enough the granular material will flow as though it were a
fluid. A material which behaves both as a solid at low stresses and at high
stresses flows like a fluid is known as a Bingham fluid. Other examples of such
materials are paint, lava and clay slurries.” http://www.ese.ic.ac.uk/general.php?GenID=97
And so it goes, … all kinds of phenomena that are beyond the descriptive capacities of the ‘standard empty-space theory’ hence the invention of tailored ‘epicycle’ theory fixes to keep the old standard alive. This is enough to drive anyone who has been looking for a foundational revision to the standard theory crazy. That is, why not make ‘acoustic fluidization’ the general case? We could of course, also call it ‘outer-inner resonance’.
Breathe
and relax here, …
Manus Foster’s suggestion that there was something profound and even mystical in the implications of Gabor’s Communications theory seems to have emerged from this ‘something-for-nothing’ where the constituents, by dancing ‘resonantly’ and having fun together, co-create a magic carpet that transports them to exciting places. Starting off with Gabor’s ‘phase-ducers’, … we can take on the perceptual vantage-space (‘vantage-point’ doesn’t fit too well here) of the ‘enveloping space side’ of the outer-inner co-resonant energy partnership. Kind of like the ‘Vagina Monologues’ (or ‘Vagina Overlogue’).
Our experience would say, … ‘why not consider perceiving the world dynamic in terms of the relative dynamics amongst the constituents?’, … since it seems to give so many more insights as to how complex situations develop the way they do? But our tradition rejects this proposition because, while it may be more consistent with our experiencing of the natural world, … it is less consistent with the way the social world works.
The social world, dominated by western thought, has evolved by anthropocentric incest, as is implicit in G. K. Chesterton’s; "We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty." and David Abram’s (‘The Spell of the Sensuous’) comment; "Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still 'need' that which is other than ourselves and our own creations."
So what would happen if ‘Johnny Goose’, attended a western school?
* * *
Teacher: Johnny, I’m not sure what school you attended last, but here we teach the truth and the truth is that each of us is born equal in the eyes of God and our ‘independence’ is a God-given gift.
Johnny: But teacher, … is it not true that each of us is born into unique circumstances, …circumstances that may be enveloped with unequal access to the corridors of opportunity-to-act?, … and that our assertive actions relative to others must cultivate the balanced opening-up of opportunity for our fellows, … so that the waves we make in our asserting ‘couple resonantly’ with the waves induced in the opening up of opportunity?
Teacher: Johnny, … what have you been smoking? We don’t do that at Isaacson High. You must clear your head of these strange ideas. We cultivate strong and capable individuals here. Those who work hard and cultivate and perfect their skills can compete more effectively and thus rise to the top, both in the academic phase of their development and on into their careers in the workplace. God helps those who help themselves.
Johnny: But the flock, … er, … the community is a greater dynamic than the individual’s dynamic, is it not? And our individual dynamic must be in the service of co-producing a strong and healthy community dynamic on a sustained and balanced basis, … is it not so?
Teacher: Johnny, … It is by the grace of the most strong and capable in our community that our community is as healthy as it is. Competition at the level of the individual produces strong individuals and this is the underpinning of successful organizations and successful communities. Competition at the level of organizations and communities produces strong organizations and communities and this is the underpinning of a successful nation. The team is only as good as its weakest player, that’s why we must continually develop our strongest players and weed out the ‘less performant’, to perfect our teams and make them failsafe as they compete.
Johnny: But what about resilience? We all fall down from time to time and sometimes we are distracted, perhaps in our caring for others, and sometimes we trip, … besides, by helping others we liberate ourselves. And when we put ourselves in the service of sustaining resonance in our assertive actions relative to the way we open up opportunity for each other, … we can go farther and faster together in a more fun and less energy-expending way.
Teacher: Johnny, this school has a long and respected tradition to uphold. It’s graduates have gone on to become some of the most highly respected and highly rewarded leaders in our community and in our nation. We can teach you too, how to make the most of yourself in this respect, but I can tell you right now, that if you continue to cling to putting this ‘resonant coupling’ with others into a primacy over individual achievement, … you will be the only one doing it, and it will not be helping your grades, … thus this ‘resonance’ will not even be a possibility and if you don’t look out for yourself, ‘your goose will be cooked’.
* * *
Breathe and relax here, …
Sensitive people such as ‘Johnny Goose’ may find themselves immersed in an environment where everything is brilliant and reflects the best standards of the culture, … where the eyes and tongues and physical beauty sparkles and charms, and where love and warmth, while plentiful, is given out of respect and empathy for one’s immediate fellows that have similarly achieved in the highly competitive cultural environment.
That is, love and respect are shared in the manner of the community of plantation owners where sharing is primarily amongst those enduring the same competitive ‘leadership’ struggles rather than with the ‘less performant’, … the ‘slag’ squeezed aside by the noble art of ‘rising to the competitive challenge’, such as slaves imported from Africa. The same geometry is visible in the modern world in terms of those rising up in the competitive ‘knowledge economy’ and the reciprocal squeezing aside of the ‘less performant’, a subtle enslavement wherein the physical energy-flow of the ‘less performant’ is tapped through a fatter straw by the ‘performant’ economic masters.
But beneath his culture conditioned awareness, it may sink into the mind of the sensitive observer that his ‘empathic-within-the-stratum’ fellows see ‘the team’ in terms of a collective of exceptional individuals whose in-their-own-right efforts have given them the positioning they now enjoy, rather than in the broader context that they are immersed in an environmental dynamic that has been co-produced by a larger enveloping constituency (i.e. how one fares in the competition at the stratum level of the plantation owner family members is not simply due to the efforts of these individuals, … but rides upon the continued contributions of enveloping others; e.g. the slaves and the creatures of forest and soil who must also be sustained for the elevated position one currently enjoys to be sustained). When the ‘successful individual’ leaves his place of work, he may walk past the ‘less-successful’, … the labourers, street people and others who he sees as having been unfortunate due to God’s tossing of the dice, in not being as gifted as he has been, in looks, in basic aptitudes and skills and in strength of character. He will not see that all of these people are included within the common enveloping codynamic that is sustaining the energized space-niche in which he is being transported. He is not ‘independent’, but is a net consumer of energy whose energizing draws from the energies of enveloping others through the mediating role of the community dynamic.
If he, at some level, senses the emptiness in the space between these ‘independent achievers’ within which he is immersed, … when the deeper consciousness of his ‘self’ looks into levels of knowing beneath the limits of awareness of his rational self or ‘ego’ and sees that ‘all that glitters is not ‘resonance’, but is instead the glitter of mutually respectful perfectionism (i.e; as hobos are wont to say; ‘in the melting pot of community, those on the bottom burn while the scum rises to the top’), …he may, like the cartoon character who screeches to a halt but doesn’t quite stop on the right side of the cliff edge, … find himself suspended in ‘empty space’ and drop into a deep hole.
If the fall comes in the form of a ‘psychotic episode’, the recovery program will likely involve engaging with empathic others who have experienced similar ‘falls’, their engagement giving rise to an environment where the ‘resonance’ of the ‘flock’ can be strongly felt. Since such ‘resonance’ is invisible and is not addressed in the western scientific paradigm, credit for the recovery of the individual will be given to the individual-in-his-own-right (the same over-simplified view espoused by a recovering plantation owner, wherein one ignores that one’s energy empowering one’s recovery and/or success is necessarily drawn from the enveloping community-space. Can the successful debutante daughter of a plantation owner truly credit ‘herself’ for her success? What if there were no slaves and therefore no plantations and therefore no debutante opportunities for the daughters of plantation owners?).
So the individual who ‘falls’ as a result of being immersed in a community where everyone believes they are ‘independent’, rather than enjoying what their ancestors and enveloping others are making possible, if he does not have the awareness that ‘Johnny Goose’ has, … will believe, as he recovers, that it is ‘him’ who is doing the healing rather than the community-constituent codynamic that he is immersed in and drawing energy from. When he ‘feels better’, if he returns to the ‘glitter’ of the perfectionist culture, he may once again unwittingly undergo progressive starvation of the soul by being deprived of the resonance his sensitive disposition finds indispensable.
Re-grounding in the wake of psychosis, in the relativistic model, must come in terms of being able to restore-at-will the outer-inner resonance of the continuing ‘now’ in the manner of ‘Johnny Goose’ In the conventional models of mainstream science, re-grounding is instead encouraged on the basis of setting future goals for independent assertive achievements, … an approach that purports each ‘success’ to be the sole causal result of the individual’s in-his-own-right assertive action, … and thus has the individual ignore the enveloping community space he draws his energy from, … a continuing dynamic energy-enriched by his ancestors and by the overall relative dynamic of the current and prior constituents.
It is useful to note that while Johnny Goose has the energy-sharing ethic of Chief Maquinna of the Nootka’s. That is, the geese see the community dynamic as an energy store that they resonantly deposit into and withdraw from in such a manner that the community dynamic sustains a healthy energy-flow based resonance. In the perfectionist, individualist community, … one ‘banks’ whatever energy one can acquire to support the move up to the next level on the relentless ‘drive to the top’. What Maquinna said when first hearing about the white man’s ‘banking’ strategy was; “"we have no such bank; when we have plenty of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people, and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel good. Our way of giving is our bank."
The
point is that the individual in the native tradition does not seek to draw
energy from others so as to ‘climb to the top’, … but, like Johnny Goose,
seeks to nurture the resonant ‘now’ of community so that the harmony deepens
and richens. Those in the
native community who can induce deep-resonance in the continuing ‘now’ of
community are hailed by their fellows as ‘special’ and respected as
‘elders’ and ‘shamans’ and ‘musicians’ and ‘craftsmen’ on the
basis of the feelings that their ‘art’ and ‘way’ induces in those around
them. Their investment in
community-constituent resonance is the magic carpet that elevates them in the
esteem of the community. They do not seek this elevation in-its-own-right.
To assertively plan for, and ‘climb’ the ‘ladder of success’ is
far from being raised up on the tide of esteem from one’s fellows by one’s
commitment to deepen and enrich the resonance of the commons of the
‘continuing now’. By
deliberately planning an assault on the summit, …one demeans the ‘continuing
now’. Is the dream of being
lifted up by the resonance of the ‘now’ that one is helping to induce, a
lesser dream than the dream of ‘assertively scaling the heights’ of social
status? While the former does
not sacrifice the quality of the commons of ‘now’ but orients to its
enhancement, … the latter not only ignores it, but by ignoring it, necessarily
infuses dissonance and dysfunction into it.
So, the re-grounding of those recovering from psychosis, by the method of planning an assault on the successful levels of society, the much-respected levels of ‘normalcy’, ..reaches back from the future transactions he is planning and graps the ‘self’, one’s current way of being and makes of ‘it’ a puppet of future rewards and recognition (i.e. an ‘ego’). This type of re-grounding, unlike the re-grounding of the goose, forces the individual to sacrifice his ‘resonant now’ by turning his back on it as he attends instead to building towards the attainment of the multiple things he ‘hopes to achieve’ in the future, detaching himself from his enveloping life by placing his life and happiness somewhere ‘over the horizon’, … something he must ‘pay his dues’ in order to get to, … exposing him to a life characterized by John Lennon’s ‘Life is something that happens to you while you are busy making other plans’. The corollary is that ‘community life’ is something that is emerging from the interference while everyone is busy making other plans.
Instead of this ‘now’- eschewing, ‘resonance’-demeaning, normalcy-obsessing assault-on-the-future constituting a ‘re-grounding’ of the ‘self’, it is a recipe for a recurrence of the psychopathology and/or a continuing program of medication to suppress one’s innate need for the ‘resonant now’ of living, …the medication dulling the natural sensibilities, enabling one to function in the same ‘detached-individual’ mode as the perfection-seekers in the society one is immersed in. More than this, a constituency that orients to their own lifetime achievements while turning their backs on the resonant quality of the continuously evolving 'now', the 'health' of the dynamical vessel of 'community', is hardly one that would have the welfare of future generations modulate their current actions, as in the native tradition. The alternative to this environmentally and socially dysfunctional re-grounding and the natural approach for the sensitive individual is to re-develop one’s networks of association in a non-superficial environment that is rich in down-to-earth community-constituent resonance and to carry this ‘resonant now’ re-grounding with one as one moves back into the old stomping grounds, thus equipping one’s ‘self’ with a new resilience that, at the same time, induces a more caring society wherever one goes, without the exposure to being drained by energy-sucking environments due to one’s unawareness.
To share in direct statements the gist of the above would require one to speak of an ‘invisible field’ that was ‘really’ responsible for doing things rather than the causal transactions that we credit per the standard theory. This model would have one say that in some communities (teams, families etc.) this field can be ‘resonant’ while in others it can be unbalanced, as in teams where the individuals considered themselves to be exceptional on an independent basis and who are, in effect ‘energy-thieves’ riding along in potential energy-sources (upwellings) forming from the energy-flows of others as in the case of arrogant freeway drivers whose insensitive actions are compensated by everyone else. In such cases, the arrogant ones complement each other on their fine driving skills and accident-free records in spite of pushing the envelope and going beyond where ‘their less-gifted fellows’ were able to go. Such a scenario is akin to declaring that the Indian was no match for the superior courage and strength of the white man during the Indian wars, when the truth of the matter was more like the following;
"The Europeans claimed to destroy heathens in order to keep the faith of their own traditions, but their forked tongue does not mention that their desire was to take the ancestral lands from the Natchez. The River Nation failed because it was dedicated to peace, not war. It was a culture where men of high standing came down the cultural ladder to help the poorer classes rise to greatness; not in the interest of conquest, rather to pursue a world pleasing to the eye of the Great Spirit." (from the tradition of the Natchez) http://members.aol.com/chimney97a/private/natchez1.htm
The casualty figures that were massively in favour of the white man relative to the redman were this way because of the redman’s culture being a culture that was committed to finding peace. The same difference in outlook pervades most aspects of society; i.e. there are many on the freeway who would rather accommodate the bold actions of others than resist, … perhaps because they have children in the car. In the domain of education, there are many whose emotional makeup would have them ‘lose’ rather than ‘win’ at the expense of others. So what does this say about attributing ‘winning the competition’ as being solely determined by the assertive actions of the individual acting-in-his-own-right? Do the plantation owner and his family (or the ‘today’s version’, the corporate chief and his family) really maintain their status and position as a result of their own independent assertive actions, or is it instead because the slaves (working people) are willing to let their energy-flows sustain the privileged living dynamics of their ‘owners’ (managers)? As historians note, the indigenous people of the Americas could at any time in the early history of colonization, have risen up and massacred the colonials as they themselves were being massacred, but their actions were coming from a peace-pursuing cultural ethic (amongst all constituents and creatures in nature) and their warlike acts were thus confined to defensive actions rather than to genocidal war in the manner of their ‘white brothers’, … since their native myth and medicine wheels spoke of the ‘four colours of the brotherhood of man’ and the need for unity (in contrast to the cultural outlook of white Europeans who saw their ‘red brothers’ not as ‘brothers’ but as devil-possessed heathens and savages, as underscored by the Papal Bull ‘Inter Caetera’ of 1493). [i.e. from the indigenous peoples press; “The Bull "Inter Caetera," established Christian dominion and subjugation of non-Christian peoples and their lands. It has yet to be revoked.”]
Through the highly aware senses of ‘Johnny Goose’, one can see the background ‘energy field’ with its pockets of energy-sourcing (outwelling) and energy sinks (inwelling) relative to the dynamics of the constituents. In a perfectionist community where everyone believes that their success is solely determined by their individual ‘independent’ actions in-their-own-right, there is no ‘pooling’ of energy to keep the fires of the ‘resonant now’ of community alive. Instead, the belief is that all energy is by the ‘transactions’ that one engages in and that the ‘space’ of community is empty and non-participating. For someone who intuitively believes that the space of community is alive with the opportunity-giving of others including one’s ancestors and the fellow creatures and constituents of the world, this starkness wherein the only energy is ‘me’- energy is impossible for the sensitive being to live with (sanely).
So the ‘mysticism’ in this nested-harmonics view of nature associates with this ‘invisible energy-flow-field’ that ‘really’ explains (i.e. explains at greater depth) how things work and how this enveloping field is unbalanced in the presence of the team of independent experts and assertive leaders, yet resonant within the subcultures of psychiatric hospitals, friendly freeway drivers and in flocks of geese etc. Who amongst the influential experts and leaders in our society who assume that their success has accrued from their ‘assertive actions-in-their-own-right’ is likely to buy this?
Breathe and relax here, …
…. Breathe and relax, …
* * *
[1] excerpt from: How
'Science and Rationality' Kill Exceptional Teams
[The following excerpts
portrays Newton as one who believed in a ‘bottom-up’ causal model for
‘progress’ or ‘refinement’ in scientific thinking, … as indicated in
his statement ‘If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood
on the shoulders of giants.’ That
is, the notion is one of linear progression and refinement rather that
inclusional transcendence wherein one brings a multitude of real and imaginary
experiences into connection in the mind, … creating an over-nesting conceptual
landscape that includes the prior thinking in the same manner that the
geographical landscape seen from a helicopter includes the landscape one saw
from the hilltop, and one can then understand how one was limited by being able
to look out from that point while unable to see the landscape that included
oneself looking out at it.
The first excerpt shows how
Newton ‘kluged’ his historical data in theology, and the second shows how he
built upon the foundational ideas of the ancients in the domain of physical
laws.]
…
meanwhile, newton was trying to recast all of history into the
'assertive-over-inductive' mode, as the following citation from 'Let Newton Be'
(a 300 year commemorative on newton);
"Voltaire had claimed
the same intellectual qualities we so much admire and find awe-inspiring in the
Principia are equally reflected in his theological and biblical work. Recent
historical researches do not confirm that judgement. In his 'Isaac Newton,
historian' (1963), Frank Manuel showed that much of Newton's biblical work was
focused on the study of the ancient Near East, in order to demonstrate that
biblical prophecy could retrospectively be seen to have predicted the future
course of history in minute detail. Newton wished to make Israel the fountain of
all the knowledge and wisdom that had flowed to the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.
In order to do so he was forced to twist astronomical and other evidence in a
very arbitrary way. When compared with the sophisticated historical and
philological methods developed for the study of the Bible by the Catholic
scholars of his own time, Newton's work seems dated and mediocre --- as Voltaire
must have recognized."
...apparently, these ...
"same intellectual qualities we so much admire and find awe-inspiring in
the Principia", the qualities of assertive 'authority' over inductive
'love' continue to dominate our scientific thinking to the point that the
'gatekeepers' of our scientific worldview will not even allow them to be
published in the official media. judging by your comments on your home page, you
seem to have run into this gatekeeper's rejection as well.
…
excerpt from:
Geometry and Culture: 'Burying The Hatchet'
It's worth noting here that
much of what was known in the time of Pythagorus and before has been falsely
attributed to the later works of Newton and others. In the 300 year
commemorative of Newton's Principia (July 5, 1686), "Let Newton
Be" (Oxford University Press, 1988), the writer researchers review
Newton's access to 'the wisdom of the ancients'. This access included the
knowledge that "Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes or Mercury, had been a
'believer' in the Copernican system', while Pythagorus and Plato had 'observed
the gravitation of all bodies towards all'. In addition, "Gregory came into
possession of a set of 15 folio sheets in which Newton assembled a formidable
array of classical authorities to support key propositions of the 'Principia'.
In logical sequence, they showed these ancients as having held that;
o The Moon was like another
Earth, and itself like other celestial bodies; therefore, the planets and their
satellites were heavymasses of the same substance as the Earth.
o Bodies in the solar system
exercised a mutual gravitation that extended to all other systems (each fixed
star being the centre of a gravitational system of planets), that force itself
extending indefinitely in all directions.
o All matter was made of
atoms, and they were hard, solid, and immutable; gravity accrued to both atoms
and to the bodies they composed; gravity was proportional to the quantity of
matter in every body.
o The proportion in which
gravitational power decreased with distance was analogous to the law governing
tension and pitch in a string instrument, and was concealed in the ancient
concept of the 'harmony of the spheres'.
o The cause of gravity was
explained in the 'mystical philosophy' of the ancients by their supreme
divinity, Pan, playing on his pipe --- that is, by the direct exercise of God's
divine power in all bodies whatsoever."
The Pythagorean item on
string tension and pitch was particularly noteworthy (Pythagorus had, by hanging
weights on strings, essentially determined the inverse square relationship which
applied to the 'harmony of the spheres' in that a quadrupling of the weight
(tension) was required to double the frequency of oscillation). The notion of
harmony, omitted in the Parmenidian view of space and time which we in the west
inherited and included in the Heraclitean view of space-time flow along with the
idea of the hidden pervasiveness of harmony in nature inherited by the east,
Celts, Native Americans etc. comes back to us again in modern physics, i.e.
"Since the Pythagoreans taught that the order of notes of a vibrating
string pervades the whole universe, they would have been moved to learn, two
thousand years later, of the work of Nambu (the theory of strings also contained
contributions from Leonard Susskind at Yeshiva University and H. Neilson of the
Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen), who was able to show that the hadrons, or
strongly interacting particles, are also quantum manifestations of this
Pythagorean ideal."
[2] Excerpt from ‘How
Big, Could They Fly?’ at
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/giantbirds2.html
…
A book of interest is Adrian Desmond's "The
Hot Blooded Dinosaurs." Desmond has a good deal to say about the
pteranodon, the 40 - 50 lb pterosaur which scientists used to believe was
the largest creature which ever flew:
"Pteranodon had lost its
teeth, tail and some flight musculature, and its rear legs had become spindly.
It was, however, in the actual bones that the greatest reduction of weight was
achieved. The wing bones, backbone and hind limbs were tubular, like the
supporting struts of an aircraft, which allows for strength yet cuts down on
weight. In Pteranodon these bones, although up to an inch in diameter, were no
more than cylindrical air spaces bounded by an outer bony casing no thicker than
a piece of card. Barnum Brown of the American Museum reported an armbone
fragment of an unknown species of pterosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas
in which 'the culmination of the pterosaur... the acme of light construction'
was achieved. Here, the trend had continued so far that the bone wall of the
cylinder was an unbelievable one-fiftieth of an inch thick Inside the tubes bony
crosswise struts no thicker than pins helped to strengthen the structure,
another innovation in aircraft design anticipated by the Mezosozoic
pterosaurs."
"The combination of
great size and negligible weight must necessarily have resulted in some
fragility. It is easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting
the gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous. How could the creature
have alighted without shattering all of its bones? How could it have taken off
in the first place? It was obviously unable to flap twelve-foot wings strung
between straw-thin tubes. Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by
running and flapping before they can take off and others have to produce a wing
beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise. To achieve hovering with a
twenty-three foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 lbs of flight
muscles as efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its
musculature to about 8 lbs, so it is inconceivable that Pteranodon could have
taken off actively."
"Pteranodon, then, was
not a flapping creature, it had neither the muscles nor the resistance to the
resulting stress. Its long, thin albatross-like wings betray it as a glider, the
most advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced. With a weight of only 40
lbs the wing loading was only one pound per square foot. This gave it a slower
sinking speed than even a man-made glider, where the wings have to sustain a
weight of at least 4 lbs per square foot. The ratio of wing area to total weight
in Pteranodon is only surpassed in some of the insects. Pteranodon was
constructed as a glider, with the breastbone, shoulder girdle and backbone
welded into a box-like rigid fuselage, able to absorb the strain from the giant
wings. The low weight combined with an enormous wing span meant that Pteranodon
could glide at ultra-low speeds without fear of stalling. Cherrie Bramwell of
Reading University has calculated that it could remain aloft at only 15 m.p.h.
So take-off would have been relatively easy. All Pteranodon needed was a breeze
of 15 m.p.h. when it would face the wind, stretch its wings and be lifted into
the air like a piece of paper. No effort at all would have been required. Again,
if it was forced to land on the sea, it had only to extend its wings to catch
the wind in order to raise itself gently out of the water. It seems strange that
an animal that had gone to such great lengths to reduce its weight to a minimum
should have evolved an elongated bony crest on its skull."
Desmond has mentioned some of
the problems which even the pteranodon faced at fifty lbs or so; no possibility
of flapping the wings for instance. The giant Teratorn finds of Argentina were NOT
known when the book was written... they came out in the eighties in issues of
Science Magazine and other places. The Teratorn was a 160 - 200 lb eagle or
condor like creature with a wingspan of over twenty-five feet, a modern bird
whose existence involved flapping wings, aerial maneuver etc. How so? There are
a couple of other problems which Desmond does not mention, including the fact
that life for a pure glider would be almost impossible in the real world, and
that some limited flying ability would be necessary for any aerial creature.
Living totally at the mercy of the winds, a creature might never get back home
to its nest and children given the first contrary wind.
There is one other problem.
Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus operandi for the pteranodon, i.e. that
it had a throat pouch like a pelican, has been found with fish fossils
indicating a pelican-like existence, soaring over the waves and snapping up fish
without landing. That should indicate that, peculiarly amongst all of the
creatures of the earth, the pteranodon should have been practically IMMUNE from
the great extinctions of past ages as oceans were always there and fish always
there.
Back to Adrian Desmond for
more on size as related to pterosaurs:
"It would be a grave
understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed,
there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever
could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a
flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a
flapper and to hold and manoeuvre them in a glider), but power is supplied by
muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure."
"The larger a flyer
becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own
power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit
the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested
that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 lbs:
Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx
were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals."
Notice that the calculations
mentioned say about 50 pounds is max for either a flier or a glider, and that
experience from our present world absolutely coincides with this and, in fact,
don't go quite that high; the biggest flying creatures which we actually see are
albatrosses, geese etc. at around 30 - 35 pounds.
But in 1972 the first of a
spectacular series of finds suggested that we must drastically rethink our ideas
on the maximum size permissible in flying vertebrates.
[excerpt continues in body of
essay above]