The Larson Research Center

As I have already mentioned in a comment to the last entry, I received a lot of comments on the draft of the essay that was just submitted to the FQXi essay contest, “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”

Horace and his friends, as well as others, including George, reviewed the draft and made some very helpful comments on it. The trouble is I didn’t realize that they were in the comment format of MS Word and I didn’t realize that I had to turn that feature on in order to see them. As a result, I wasn’t able to take advantage of them.

That is too bad, because those comments would have improved the essay considerably. Therefore, I decided to go ahead and incorporate them into the essay, expanding it a little bit, and publish the expanded version on this site.

Here is a link to essay, entitled “What is the Point of Reality?”

I wish I could swap it out for the one I sent to FQXi, but oh well. It wouldn’t matter, even if it were perfect. They just aren’t prepared for Larson’s advanced ideas, yet.

Well, I did it. The essay I promised to write and submit to the FQXi Essay Contest was submitted yesterday, on my birthday! It’s entitled “What is the Point of Reality?” in answer to the contest question, “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”

My answer is that it is both, because the continuum can be digitized by the RST scalar “direction” reversals. One might think that would be an easy essay to write, but believe me, it wasn’t. I struggled with how to best communicate the idea in only 25,000 characters and nine pages with one inch margins.

It was tough, but I’m pleased to announce that I did it.

Hopefully, my readers will read it and let me know what they think. The ongoing discussion is taking place at the FQXi site as I write. There are a whole lot of essays there. Let’s see how this one stacks up.

I will be expanding on the essay on the LRC blogs. Maybe I’ll even make a YouTube video on the subject.

Last month, I got up in the morning with the intent to write more about how nature can be both continuous and discrete at the same time. I had intended on announcing the next logical step in the development of the new number line, which I have been explaining in the new math blog.

However, I began browsing the web before actually settling down to compose the entry, which is never a good thing to do, from a productivity standpoint, because it inevitably leads to some kind of diversion or another. This time was no exception. I found out that FQXI has announced a new contest.

It turns out that their foundational question for the new contest evokes the very subject of my intended entry : “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”

I think I will submit an entry entitled, “What is the Point of Reality?” In it, I will try to show how the definition of a physical point is at the root of most trouble with physics. From the impossible concept of the electron, to the enigma of the black hole theory, to the break-down of equations in the big bang, the challenge of coping with x0 = 1 and the 21/2, the incompatibility of the discrete and continuous, which nature integrates seamlessly, continues to plague mankind.

Wish me luck. I’ll need it!

Just before the turn of the Century, Steven Hawking had to admit that, what he had ventured to predict twenty years earlier, that the Legacy System of Physical Theory (LST) was on the verge of being able to explain all things physical, was a little premature. Now, more than ten years after that, he has suggested that the LST community has no choice but to give up altogether, in its quest for a unified physical theory.

Our argument has always been that the LST cannot get there from here, but we don’t need M theory to prove that. The LST theory of the electron will suffice. It is necessarily defined as a point particle, but since it must also carry a charge and quantum spin, this introduces an insurmountable contradiction, due to the impossibility of dividing anything by zero and defining the spin of nothing. Nevertheless, the LST has simply overlooked these impossible contradictions, until, after many generations and trillions of dollars have been spent, it has to admit utter failure.

Certainly, the new Reciprocal System of Physical Theory (RST) does not have all the answers either, but the fact that it is a new system of theory, the first since Newton’s, is universally welcome news. Indeed, the RST has come a long way towards producing a unified theory, considering the scant resources available to its researchers. Moreover, its simplicity is profoundly appealing, given the complexities and problems of the LST.

It’s important to note that, just as we can consider the LST to be a program of research built on Newton’s second law of motion, we can regard the RST to be a program of research based on the implications of Newton’s third law of motion, which is to say that there are two and only two “directions” in a given dimension, and, since only three dimensions have ever been observed in any given physical system, then it follows that all physical magnitudes must be derived from these three, dual, dimensions.

The genius of the RST is that it starts, not with the motion of pre-existent objects in a 3D frame of reference, as does the LST, but rather it begins with the progression of two reciprocal quantities that are as observable as are objects, but these quantities have no need for an external frame of reference to define them. Everything in the system comes from the relationship of these two quantities - and nothing else.

Of all the great philosophical strengths such a system offers, none is greater than this: The theories of the RST are deduced from its fundamental postulates, which conform to the “directional” and dimensional properties of numbers. Since all of the system’s physical magnitudes are generated by the fact that there are two “directions” in each of three dimensions, in each of its two, reciprocal, quantities, space and time, it corresponds perfectly to the possible combinations of the multi-dimensional numbers found in the tetraktys.

This leads to two reciprocal sectors in the mathematical/physical universe. In the first sector, we can write the set of multi-dimensional numbers in the tetraktys as,

s/t = 20/20, 21/20, 22/20, 23/20,

corresponding to the spatial geometry characterized by the two potential “directions” in the zero dimensions of a point, the two actual “directions” in the one dimension of a line, the four in the two dimensions of an area and the eight in the three dimensions of a volume.

The reciprocal of these multi-dimensional numbers constitutes the set of multi-dimensional numbers of the reciprocal tetraktys of the second sector,

s/t = 20/20, 20/21, 20/22, 20/23,

corresponding to the temporal “geometry” characterized by the two potential “directions” in the zero dimensions of a point, the two actual “directions” in the one dimension of a line, the four in the two dimensions of an area and the eight in the three dimensions of a volume. 

Of course, this is a fundamental and radical departure from the foundation of the LST, based on what we may be so bold to call the legacy system of mathematics (LSM). The LSM does not explicitly employ the principle of reciprocity inherent in the relationship of space and time, but instead substitutes the ad hoc invention of the square root of -1, together with the concept of rotation, to define the multi-dimensional numbers of the tetraktys.

This makes it necessary to define a reciprocal system of mathematics (RSM), based on the dual tetraktys just described. The RSM limits us to the three dimensions of the dual tetraktys, but it frees us from the dead-end trap of complex, quaternion and octonion numbers, based on ad hoc inventions of imaginary numbers. This is the dead-end that has led the LST community to its present impasse.

Since the scientist that now sits in Newton’s Chair admits that the great program of research initiated by Newton has irreconcilably lost its way in the labyrinth of “extra” dimensions, it’s time to look to a new program of research, one that lives within the observable limits of nature.   

A huge scientific/political scandal has come to light, with the leaking of the University of East Anglia’s depository of documents and correspondence.  The documents show criminal malfeasance on the part of UN global warming scientists, who shamelessly manipulated their data and coldly exerted their political influence on the scientific community, in order to perpetrate a climate change hoax upon the world.

The stunning revelations come just as the global elite are about to convene a meeting of scientists and global leaders in Copenhagen, Denmark, to establish the official world response to the cooked-up crisis, a fundamentally transforming remedy to be financed by an unprecedented system of regressive taxation levied upon the world, but especially upon the United States and United Kingdom populations.

It’s a scary thought, but most of the world is unaware of what is happening and its long-term consequences, a situation that parallels another famous meeting of scientists at Copenhagen in the early 20^th Century.

Although the latter meeting was not held in the shadow and context of white-collar crimes and scientific fraud, the imposition of a scientifically controversial point of view upon the world with lasting and transforming effects upon society was the same. The world would never be the same after the scientific interpretation of quantum mechanics was formed in Copenhagen.

The prospective irony is rich, but, hopefully, the current Copenhagen agenda will be derailed by the new revelations in time to prevent the incalculable social damage that is looming before us. Unfortunately, in the case of the last “Copenhagen interpretation” of reality, there were no last-minute discoveries to prevent the transformation of thought that would eventually lead to the trouble with physics that we find ourselves in today.

Nevertheless, it’s useful to look back to see if time has given us the necessary perspective to discern the mistakes that were made. Unlike the concocted global warming “crisis,” the “quantum” crisis was real. It was what the ancient Greeks might have called the “all is number” crisis. Their worldview that “all is number” was crushed by discovery of the fact that the square root of 2 is not a number. It was eventually replaced by the worldview that, except in the limit, there is no way to definitively describe segments of a continuous magnitude with a number. However, once again nature had a surprise in store for investigators. Even though the square root of 2 exists only as a ratio, not as a number, nature’s fundamental unit of energy is a number!

I certainly wouldn’t want to invite comparisons of Al Gore to Niels Bohr, but they each are identified as the leaders of their respective movements. In Bohr’s case, the cause, which he championed from Copenhagen, was something called “complementarity,” the idea that nature has a dual face. On one side, her constituents behave as continuous waves; On the other, they behave as discrete numbers. We can only observe one side, or the other, never both sides together, yet the reality is, insisted Bohr, they exist as both simultaneously, just as a coin has two faces.

In Gore’s case, it’s much the same, except he’s trying to convince us that the global elite are NOT two-faced, that they have only one, benevolent face, that there is no evil complement to the one face presented to the world, the face promising to save the world. However, the new discoveries unveil the hard-to-believe reality of yet another version of the Copenhagen principle of complementarity.

While the new discoveries at East Anglia show the evil face of Gore’s two-faced movement, you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media reports, whose elite corporate owners obviously have a vested interest in it. Likewise, you won’t hear much from the mainstream physics community on the new discoveries that reveal how to escape the trouble with physics that the Copenhagen interpretation, that all is not number, has foisted upon the world. What it boils down to in the end is this: Everyone must think through things for themselves. We cannot let the uncritical views, repeated over and over again by authority figures, define our worldview.

Reality may, or may not, have two faces. I, for one, think it does, but the crucial evidence to help us decide the truth behind the interpretations of these movements is to be found in their failures, not their successes. The failure of the green movement is a moral issue, not a scientific one. The failure of the theoretical physics movement is a mathematical one, not a moral one. However, when it comes to funding their causes, neither community is beyond attempting to bury the inconvenient truths.