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Yes, I know I promised you a post on The Cosmic Wavefunction and Consciousness. That’ll be along shortly. But there’s another story pressing me for it to be told: the story of my personal journey that led to my discovery of all the information I’m sharing with you on this channel.
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Ok, time for a frank confession: for me, the starting point, over 26 years ago, for this journey of discovery wasn’t Relativity at all. At that time Relativity and the speed of light weren’t an issue to me, I happily accepted that it was all exactly as described in all the text books.
No, the thing that got me started on this whole fascinating adventure was the issue of time itself. Relativity told me that time effects were the consequence of moving steadily in a direction perpendicular to the three spatial directions - in a fourth dimension, the time dimension.
This was ok, but I could see that something more was needed. My involvement as a software specialist and research team leader in a major European R&D (research and development) project, developing 3G cellphone technology, had got me interested in electromagnetic wave theory, and from there into Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. I was puzzled by various aspects of those waves which seemed to be lacking any sort of explanation, but more generally I was intrigued by the mystery of time.
It seemed to me that just moving in a certain direction, whatever dimension it was in, wouldn’t produce the changes attributed to time in every material object - and more than that, across the face of the whole physical cosmos. I couldn’t see why that would be so, and none of the texts I read on Relativity made any effort to explain why that would be so; it appeared that nobody else felt any explanation was required - which to me seemed like a gaping hole in the science.
In my walks on Dartmoor I watched streams and rivers coursing through the landscape, changing that landscape by their actions as well as forming small eddies that cycled around in the water’s flow. It came to me that there must be some sort of similar flow, on a much smaller and a much larger scale, passing through, around and between all the physical objects in the cosmos, effecting change in all those objects, and their interelationships, as it did so.
I labelled that flow Tauflux, and began to look for clues and/or rules as to its exact nature and behaviour. From those Dartmoor streams I observed that water flow was generally out in the open, but could sometimes disappear underground and then unexpectedly pop up somewhere else - on occasions with an appreciable time delay. It made perfect sense to me that an energetic flow of this sort could indeed carry information from one object to another, near or far, as well as working changes in every one of those objects that it circulated around in. Radioactive decay, for example, had to be some sort of stochastic process brought about by energy flowing around within the structure of an unstable atomic nucleus.
I must be rather slow. It was some time before it dawned on me that this Tauflux was nothing more or less than light itself, across the full range of frequencies including those not visible to our eyes. This realisation was reinforced by the fact that, in all the equations of Relativity, elements of time are multiplied by c (light speed), showing that time effectively travels at the speed of light. Bit of a no-brainer, really.
[It was only later that it also occurred to me that the factor i, the square root of minus one, which accompanies the time term in every Relativity equation, similarly carries an important message. That factor marks time as an imaginary quantity, in the strictly mathematical sense: in Relativity time is looked at in a back-to-front way, almost in an Alice-through-the-looking-glass way. This indicates that in Relativity theory time is seen back-to-front, or maybe I should say inside-out: rather than objects moving through time, as viewed in Relativity, time is actually moving through those objects - through everything in the cosmos.]
So I reached the realisation that effects of time are carried between particles/objects, and implemented within those entities, by waves of time-varying electromagnetic energy - photons. It took a further intellectual leap, though - for me, at least - to cotton on to the fact that light not only circulates within every material particle or object, it actually forms those same entities. This was brought home to me firstly by studying the numerous research studies that show light transmuting into matter and vice versa, as well as of course that unforgettable mass-energy relationship: E = mc squared. It was soon after this that I found info on the Breit-Wheeler Process, which passed from hypothetical to actual in 1997 when scientists at SLAC, the Stanford US National Accelerator Laboratory converted pure light into matter-antimatter pairs in a series of steps; the icing was put on the cake in 2021 by scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory, who achieved single-step conversion of pairs of photons into pairs of particles.
Further confirmation of this remarkable relationship between light and matter (i.e. matter is light, circulating locally almost at a point) came about through a process of logical reasoning followed up with some high-school level maths. The logical reasoning told me that if this was so then it would have a significant impact on relationships between objects in motion compared to static objects; the maths told me that indeed, results generally attributed to Special Relativity (without any explainable underlying cause) drop out as a natural consequence of this light-based understanding of the structure of matter - what I now refer to as the spun light structure of material particles. The perceived invariance of the speed of light relative to all inertial states of motion (that’s constant velocity, no gravitational influence); the actual slowing down of time for objects in motion (generally referred to as time dilation); even the Lorentz Transformation, which defines times, distances etc as perceived from differing states of motion. That famous E=mc squared drops out with almost no maths!
[I should add that I had some highly reputable companions on this exciting journey: my invesigations brought me into contact with work by more than a dozen Nobel laureates, all of which supported the new perspective I was uncovering.]
One thing that took me a while to get my head around was the reciprocity, the symmetry, of transformations between one state of motion and another. This new view of time and material structure brought with it the awareness that there is one unique state of absolute rest in the cosmos, with all other states of motion being measurable from that unique reference state - a concept that’s denied by Special Relativity, which sees all inertial states of motion as equivalent.
[In passing, it’s worth noting that one of those Nobel laureates, George Smoot, who mapped the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation has on the website detailing his historic undertaking the observation that “This would seem to violate the postulates of Galilean and Special Relativity but there is a preferred frame in which the expansion of the Universe looks most simple” (my emphasis).]
Wasn’t there a problem here? The Lorentz Transformation makes no distinction between a state of motion and a state of rest - it just depends on your viewpoint - whereas the spun light understanding sees a clear difference between the universal rest state and every other state of motion. How could the latter, then, give a symmetric transformation between that rest state and a state of motion?
For a time I lived with the idea that the notion of a symmetric Lorentz Transform was an error, one that wouldn’t show up except to an observer or measuring device which was moving at near-light-speed. But this didn’t seem right: not least, differentiation of distance with respect to time in the Lorentz Transformation gives the same speed, for a static object as viewed by a moving observer, as the speed of the moving observer themself but in the opposite direction - which did indeed give symmetry.
Then I made an astounding discovery. If we analyse a static scenario as perceived by a moving observer in terms of distances and times - including their perception that light is actually moving relative to them at speed c in all directions - astonishingly, those distances and times are indeed subject to exactly the same transformation as for a static observer viewing a moving scenario. The Lorentz Transformation is totally symmetric, in terms of perceptual experience of static and moving observer.
From this base I’ve explored the various different phenomena and research findings that are conventionally attributed to Special Relativity. Without exception I’ve found that they are all explained by this new understanding of material particle formation. That understanding includes, of course, the objective fact that time (in the form of waveform electromagnetic energy flows) moves more slowly around those particle structures: time dilation, as explained in my post Relativity? What Relativity?; also the objective fact identified independently by three different scientists contemporary with Einstein, as well as being incorporated by Einstein himself as part of his theory: matter contracts in the direction of motion when moving at speed. Taken together with these two objective realities, all perceived ‘relativistic’ effects are found to be observer effects resulting from being in a state of motion - equally applicable to human observers, measuring devices, or simply inanimate objects which are subject to those effects.
Over the years I’ve analysed in depth such esoteric effects as transverse (aka second order) doppler shift, time dilation in relativistic muons, and invariance of apparent rest mass of particles in motion subject to Compton scattering (despite the true energy content, and hence mass, of any particle increasing with its speed of motion). All of these analyses are included in my book Atoms of Light and The Relativity Myth.
Also included in that book are copies of my two papers published in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal: Elementary Sub-Atomic Particles: the earliest adaptive systems and Cosmic System Dynamics: a cyberneticist’s perspective on gravitation. The first of these details my primary findings on Special Relativity, the second gives an insight into how spun-light particle structure leads to effects attributed to General Relativity, including notably gravitation.
Finally, as documented in my Substack post on Quantum Randomness, this particle structure fully explains that effect, conventionally regarded as being plucked out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. As I demonstrate, that randomness is not a magic trick (as many would have us believe) but rather a natural consequence of the essence of material structure.
All that’s needed now is for science to pick up this concept and run with it. Who knows where it may take us?
Next up
So yes, next up is The Cosmic Wavefunction and Consciousness: Time to address the elephant in the room.
In the meantime, be sure to check out Transfinite Mind for a wealth of free resources, including non-technical articles and presentations, as well as books to suit every level of scientific (or non-scientific) background.
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Be with you again shortly!