The Golden Spiral
Einstein showed that energy and matter are the same universal substance, simply vibrating at different frequencies. The Universe is energy, and this energy is contantly changing forms dependent upon its frequency. I am exploring a possible model that would explain how this energy moves at an atomic level, before it stretches out to encompass the universe.
Scientists believe cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is the oldest light in the Universe. NASA’s satellite – the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) – was sent up to measure the light that they believe was left over from the Big Bang. Their calculations suppose that with the expansion and cooling of the Universe, the light from the Big Bang has now been stretched to longer wavelengths in the microwave region. These wavelengths are in the range of millimetres. The COBE satellite carried instruments to measure wavelengths in this region. But I wonder, if we are looking for light left over from the Big Bang, should we be looking for wavelengths that are bigger than millimetres? Perhaps we should be looking for wavelengths that are much, much bigger.
Try and imagine you are standing on the steps of an immense spiral staircase. You look down over the edge and the stairs spiral down in ever decreasing circles. As your eyes wander over each step, you notice that they become smaller and smaller. The stairwell appears to stretch for miles and miles. At the very bottom is a zero-point singularity which is too far away for you to see. Now hold onto the handrail because it’s going to feel a little uncomfortable – the entire staircase is now revolving, and it’s moving at the at the speed of light. It might start to feel like you are staring down the barrel of an elaborate Archimedes screw. For a point of reference we’ll say that from where you stand, it turns at one revolution per second, or 1 Hertz (Hz) – which just so happens to be the frequency of the average human heart (one beat per second). What you are about to see is how energy moves at different frequencies in the Universe.
Where you are the staircase rotates at a steady pace. One full cycle of the staircase is a representation of a wavelength. When you look down you see that the steps at the bottom are spinning so fast they appear only as a seething, vibrating mass. This is on account of the steps being so atomically small, they are able to turn in a very small area. The stairs are also revolving very, very fast at this level. Each cycle happens extremely fast and very frequent, so we could say that they have a high frequency. This energy, which has extremely small wavelengths, and very high frequencies, takes on the appearance of something solid. It is at the bottom of our stairwell we find energy takes on the form of matter.
Moving up from the bottom we start to notice that even though the steps are still incredibly small, we can count the amount of times they complete a turn. So emerging from our model are the first forms of electromagnetic radiation. Gamma rays have the highest frequency, and the shortest wavelengths of less than about ten trillionths of a meter. Continuing our journey up, the spins are becoming less frequent, and the steps are gradually becoming bigger and bigger. The energy is being driven at a lower frequency, and the wavelengths are growing longer. We watch as the energy transforms from gamma rays into x-rays, and then into ultra-violet (UV). With the next form the energy manifests as something we are all familiar with – visible light. This rainbow of colours are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths between 400 and 700 billionths of a meter. Its frequency ranges between 430,000 – 750, 000 gigahertz – and so it’s still incredibly fast. One gigahertz is a wave of energy revolving 1,000,000,000 times per second.
Let us pause for a moment and reflect on something which is missing, or rather, that which is absent from the visible spectrum – the colour black. Black is the absence of any light. But throughout this model it has always been present, it’s just that the colour black is more conspicuous by its absence as we enter the visible spectrum. Is it possible that a black entity accompanies the spiral staircase throughout its journey? For most certainly, a spiral staircase has to encircle around something. So it appears the black space of our stairwell has some type of influence over everything else. Surely if there was no darkness, then there could be no such thing as light. If we were able to follow the darkness all the way to the bottom, would it, or would it not, emerge unchanging from the zero-point singularity? Food for thought perhaps because we really must continue our journey up.
The lower frequencies of the red light in the spectrum merge into the infrared, and as the steps grow bigger, we see the wavelengths of the energy become larger. The energy changes into microwaves. Microwaves are electromagnetic waves with wavelengths ranging from 1mm to 1m, or frequencies between 300 GHz to 0.3 GHz. So even though the energy turns with much less frequency than that of matter, or gamma rays – there’s an incredible amount of usable energy there. I mean, we can even cook a Pot Noodle with microwaves. Where you are revolving at 1Hz, you can imagine that these energies are still a long way off, and unfathomably small. The cycles at which the staircase turn appear to slow down because the steps grow further apart, and the lower frequencies now become recognisable as radiowaves.
Very High Frequency (VHF) is something we are all familiar with on the dial of our radio. The energy is now spinning in cycles that range from 300 megahertz (MHz) to 30 MHz. To try and maintain some sort of perspective, one megahertz is one million cycles per second. The wavelengths have now grown to a size which range from 1 to 10 meters. In other words, a turn of the archimedes screw at this level, revolves at a circumference of 10 meters. The energy now moves through all the radiowave frequencies until we reach the extreme of those that we able to measure – the aptly titled – extremely low frequencies (ELF). The energy at this level performs a cycle upto 3 times a second (3Hz) and has a wavelength that spans 100, 000 kms. So suddenly you are aware of your position on the spiral staircase as it stretches far out into space, thousands and thousands of kilometres wide. This would still all be happening below you, mind. From the position where you are observing this scenario at one hertz, it takes light (travelling at the speed of light) to perform one revolution, and that would be somewhere in the region of 300,000 kms. For a simple comparison, the moon is something like 300,000 kms away from the Earth. As you look up over your head, the staircase looms on ever larger, and wider, until it fills millions and millions of miles. As long as the energy keeps moving there really is no limit to the size of its wavelength. It’s also interesting to note that the energy is constant throughout its entire span of the spiral – it only changes frequency.
According to Stephen Hawking, the observable Universe spans a million million million million miles across. That’s a one followed by 24 zeros. If I was looking for something left over from the Big Bang, then that would be the size of the baby I would be looking for. This new model also raises some pretty interesting questions about how we observe energy. If the speed of light is not a constant, but is something which is inferred by the observer’s rate of perception, what possibilities lie in-wait as we explore the energy of the golden spiral?
I would like to thank the following sites for their help, and boundless insights:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/electromagintro.html
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/esaSC/SEMB3AR1VED_index_0.html
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2324/stories/20061215001308100.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_frequency
http://www.kyes.com/antenna/dipole.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray
Have We Found The Philosopher’s Stone?
Young children are thought to have a faster rate of perception due to a higher metabolic rate. This is perhaps due to a ravenous brain which needs lots of energy to develop in a procees known as competitive plasticity. In researching these stress disorders, one might expect to find a high metabolic rate was also associated with them, but this however, is not quite the case. What has turned up has been far more intriguing. A theme that runs throughout all these disorders, is a problem with the inner ear, also known as the vestibular system. Vestibular disorders are already officially recognised as being associated with stress disorders, and below I have included a few examples:
“Vestibular (inner ear) disorders can cause dizziness, vertigo, imbalance,hearing changes, nausea, fatigue, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and other symptoms, with potentially devastating effects on a person’s day-to-day functioning, ability to work, relationships with family and friends, and quality of life.http://www.vestibular.org/”
“Vestibular deficits and increased neuro-hypersensitivities (sensory overload disorder) follow a variety of neuro-pathological changes in the brain, including, migraine, autism, ADHD, post TBI, hydrocephalus, PTSD, and others.” http://www.diaceph.com/NeuroCompensStudy.htm
“A total of 82 schizophrenic patients participated in this study from Takeda Hospital in Sapporo And Jimmiekai Hospital in Nishinomiya. As the results of this study, 72 out of 82 patients show the abnormal degree of vestibular reactivity, which indicates highly possible involvement of vestibular system in schizophrenia. ” http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/repository/80070363.pdf
The vestibular system’s association with stress disorders perhaps signifies it is part of a survival mechanism designed to get an animal out of sudden danger. A neat trick of nature is to speed up the rate of perception, so that reality ‘slows down’, and in so doing, it gives an animal time to think about its escape plan. War veterans often speak of a similar experience at times when their lives are in jeopardy. Is the emergence of a stress disorder where the vestibular system fails to de-activate, or slow down, once a danger has passed?
Kids with ADHD use a trick to stimulate the vestibular system ( and speeding up the rate of perception), by becoming more active. I’ll quote from an article by The Spectrum Center in Bethesda MD, a treatment centre for children with ADHD: “…Problems arise with ADHD where the vestibular system of the inner ear…..is unable to provide the brain with the sensory stimulation it needs in order to function optimally. In response, the body finds other ways of stimulating the vestible and brain, such as constant body movement. This response would be diagnosed as hyperactivity.” http://spectrumcenter.net/addadhd.html Quite bizarrely, there’s an example in nature where this behaviour is also mirrored – the territorial displays of the anole lizard.
The vestibular system is important in maintaining balance or equilibrium. There are two otolithic organs of the vestible – the utricle and the saccule. They translate head movements into neural impulses which the brain can interpret. The utricle largely registers accelerations on the horizontal plane, while the saccule is sensitive to linear translations of the head, specifically movements up and down (think about our head-banging lizard). When the head moves vertically, the sensory cells of the saccule are disturbed and the neurons connected to them begin transmitting impulses to the brain. Does the rate of these impulses have anything to do the brain’s regulation of the rate of perception? Do we now have a pin-point specific area to which the rate of perception can be tweeked, and in the case of stress disorders, can it be there’s a way to slow it back down to normal.
For those us that are interested in the mystical, the word for otolith is derived from the Greek oto – meaning ‘ear’, and lithos – meaning ‘stone’, or ‘earstone’. If we are able to manipulate the rate of perception and bend the rules of time, we have a very realistic opportunity to create the elixir of life. Is the otolith the well sought after Philosopher’s Stone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher
I would like to thank all my sources, and a further mention for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system
http://www.dizziness-and-balance.com/disorders/bppv/otoliths.html
Did Buddha Believe In God?
Did Buddha believe in God – the very same one in-fact which Christians, Muslims, and Judaists pray to for forgiveness (or plead with when the car won’t start)? This question is not as outrageous as it at first appears, and especially not after the true nature of God is revealed. Unfortunately for religion, it cannot show us the true nature of God, and unfortunately for us, this is something which we have to discover for ourselves. Buddha understood that a belief system hinders the path of self discovery, so he designed a philosophy which was not encumbered by one. The funny thing is, once we have learnt to let go of all our beliefs we eventually end up confirming the existence of God and its true nature, but now it is neither tied up nor weighed down by the ideals which we once imposed upon it.
Buddhist teachings do not deny(or confirm) the existence of God, but instead focus on emptiness. Everything else outside this emptiness is a mind created illusion. “Form is empty; emptiness is form,” is a famous Buddhist mantra which illustrates that the Universe lacks inherent existence, and that it does not exist from its own side as ‘Universe’. Essentially nothing would exist if you were not there to observe it.
The Zen school of Buddhism understands the overwhelming implications of the role of consciousness in our lives. Nothing would or could exist without consciousness. Consciousness is revealed as the Universe itself, and that this is the true nature of God. Zen Buddhists continue to dismiss the need for a belief in God, and exchange it for a more zealous relationship in the form of Divine Union or Samadhi. This is probably a good idea in comparison to other religous institutions which behold the importance of God, but fail to understand what it is. Religions define God as the ‘Three O’s’: Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent; and about the only thing which can live up to this definition is the Universe itself. Maybe it’s about time all religions gave up their incessant need to believe in God, and tried to develop a better understanding instead.
One Billion Heartbeats
What becomes of time as we grow older? I remember playing as a child in those long summers away from school and I think of how the time stretched over a day and became almost infinite. It seemed like a lifetime before we were back at school in the autumn. Now in my late thirties I am reflecting on the experience of how time behaves in my everyday life, and I compare it to the way I felt about time as a child. Time has most certainly become more fleeting. There is no more staring at the clock in the classroom, and wishing those minutes away, and if anything now, I am pleading for that second-hand to stop. Hours fly past into a day, days blend into months, and before you know it, it’s that bloody time of year again.
With new scientic models de-bunking the Theory of Relativity, and proofs that space-time does not exist, we are beginning to learn new lessons about the experience of time. So why does the experience of time feel so different as we grow older? It could be an illusion drawn from a nostalgia of days past, where life was perhaps more free and weightless, and the days only dragged because we were wishing them to go faster. Or can it be because as we grow older our experience of time accelerates due to biological, and neurological reasons?
In general all amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles have roughly a billion heart beats per lifetime. A tiny mouse has a maximum life of about 3 years while an elephant could live to 70, but they shall both experience a billion heart beats. Now that we have thrown all ideas of time out of the window, it would start to appear that the mouse and the elephant have both the exact same experience of a lifetime. Time is not relevant to the speed of light – time is relevant to each living creatures’ own personal experience. Time no longer hangs on the wall of the Universe, it is intertwined with the metabolic rate and every beat of the heart. I found this article of particular interest: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/09/invariant_ratio.php
So how is the metabolic rate applicable to a child’s experience of time, and that of a fully grown adult? The average heart rate for a healthy adult at rest is 60-100 beats per minute (bpm), while a child’s is around 100-130 bpm. In some cases, this could mean the child’s heart rate being twice that of an adult’s. This increased metabolic rate leads to a faster rate of perception. Increasing the rate of perception would be a bit like changing your dial-up internet connection to broadband – you would be recieving information at a much greater speed. If this was taking place in the mind, you would have a much greater scope, and far more depth, of what action takes place in one given moment of time, and creates the illusion that reality is being played in slow-motion (but only when reflected upon, and compared to a relatively ‘normal’ rate of perception).
Infants and growing children have higher metabolic rates than adults because of growth hormones, and also, perhaps more importantly, the growing brain is devouring lots of energy during its development. The brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy. At the age of 3, a young child’s brain is super-dense with over 1,000 trillion synapses, all competing for nourishment. It’s not until children near adolescence, that the ‘shedding’ of excess brain cells (neurons) moves into high gear, and eventually there is a loss of about 50% of the synapses. Before the shedding takes place though, the neurons all have to be fed. This greater demand for energy has to be supplied by a faster metabolic rate.
As we become adults, the brain becomes increasingly efficient, in a process known as competitive plasticity, and our metabolic rate slows down. With a reduction in the metabolic rate, there is a knock-on effect on how fast we percieve the world. The broadband service has been pulled, and we’re back using dial-up, less information is being recieved, a moment contains less depth, and reality takes on the appearance it is moving faster. But there are times in our adult lives where we can re-experience a taste of what a faster rate of perception meant in our childhoods.
One trick of nature is to engage a startle response if an animal suddenly thinks it’s in danger. Adrenal hormones get the heart pumping faster, and the brain thinking faster. The startle response is bending the rules of perception, so that a window appears where the animal gets more time to think about its next course of action – fight, take flight or freeze. It’s like pressing slow-motion on your video recorder. Time distortion under stress is often reported by war veterans, where everything happens in slow motion. This example is taken from law enforcement:
‘Kim remembers that steamy September night in 1979 as if it were yesterday. She had a split second to react before the gunman blasted her from an open window over her head. ‘When you think you’re going to die’, she says ‘your brain works so fast that everything else seems to be in slow motion.’ (Wozencraft 1990)
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:GZ-d3MZI9YkJ:www.mit.ucf.edu/TimePercept/Hancock_Weaver_2005.pdf+dynamic+slow-motion+time+stress&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=uk
There are plenty of stories where people have experienced this stretching of time, at a moment there was imminent danger. If time is an intrapersonal experience that can be manipulated by nature, is it then possible that mankind can harness this ability to enhance our lives? It could be a basis for showing us how to slow down the experience of time by increasing the rate of perception. If this was made possible without the need of increasing the metabolic rate (so that our lifespan does not become as short as the mouse) – are we looking at a real contender for the elixir of life?
I would also thank, and mention the following sites for their insights:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha
Shore, R. (1997) ‘What have we learned?’ in ‘Rethinking the brain …
Just A Second
It’s funny. So far I’ve only managed to say time does not exist, but I still pursue measuring the speed of light in seconds. When I have done so, I am imagining seconds as the gentle tick-tocking of a clock, ( http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XNwhwwuRnB0&NR=1) whose second hand is turned by each conscious thought. Every ….1 conscious….2 thought….3 becomes…..4 a ….5 segment…6 of…..7 time….8. I am still holding on to the idea that a variable time can be relevant to a variable rate of perception. The more I am absorbed in the theory, the more I am letting go of my previous conceptions of time. There really is no such thing as time and it becomes impossible to apply it to this new model. I popped over to Wiki to try and understand what is meant by a ‘second’:
“Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as…the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.[1]
This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero). The ground state is defined at zero magnetic field. The second thus defined is equivalent to the ephemeris second, which was based on astronomical measurements.The international standard symbol for a second is s[2] (see ISO 31-1)” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second
“How does it all work?
Cesium is evaporated at the cesium source to form a beam of well-separated cesium atoms that travel without collisions at about 250 m/s, through a vacuum maintained by the vacuum pump.
Simple electronics counts the output cycles of the quartz oscillator, and issues a pulse every 10 million cycles – exactly 1 second apart.”
http://inms-ienm.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/faq_time_e.html#Q10
The cesium atom is not travelling at 250 m/s though, it is my rate of perception which is implying that it’s travelling at 250 m/s. If I was to observe this beam of cesium atoms, where my rate of perception was twice as fast as normal – the speed at which the atoms travel would appear to slow down to 125 m/s (with-in my experience of time). The output cycles of the quartz oscillator would slow down, and the pulse which is issued at every 10 million cycles, now appears to take twice as long – count it ..1…2. It becomes more apparent that distance is nothing more than a product of time, and time a product of distance. The atomic clock is nothing more than an overly dramatic way of measuring the distance travelled by neurons in the brain, and the speed with which those signals are processed.
Time and space are meaningless. How on earth are we going to try and quantify the rate of perception where neither time or space exist? Time is an intrapersonal experience. Have you found how time flies when you are having fun, and how it slows down when you are bored? When we are active we are using more energy. Does our metabolic rate define the experience of time?
Hertz (Hz) is a measure of frequency, informally defined as the number of cycles occuring per second. A clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz. What is very interesting is that this frequency is the same for the heart rate of a healthy adult at rest – 60 beats per minute, or one beat per second -1 Hz. Now that we can throw away our clocks, will the human race be coming home to the heart at last?
Time Is On Our Side
Let’s imagine the scene where I am about to try and bring my sandal down on the head of that pesky mosquito. In the room we have set-up two digital cameras (don’t worry, nothing sordid’s going on). One of the camera’s has a shutter speed which opens and closes in seconds, while the other camera’s using a shutter speed which is a thousand times faster and operates in milliseconds. By the time I have raised and lowered my hand, the mosquito has made good its’ escape. It’s as if the little brute saw me coming a mile-off, so let’s see if by playing back the two films that were taken, we might catch a better idea of what’s happening from the perspective of the mosquito.
Each camera has an LCD display which will play-back the film at the rate of one exposure per second. We’ll start with the film taken where the shutter speed plodded and took a second to open and close. It shows me with my hand in the air, now it’s halfway down and then it’s ..SLAM… 4 seconds and it’s all over. Next we play the film where the shutter speed was in milliseconds. Okay, so my hands in the air…… still in the air….. I count to 200 and it’s barely budged an inch. I’ve got time to make a cup of tea, pop to the shops, and watch a bit of telly because this film is 1000 times as long as the previous one – it would take over an hour to watch it.
What the shutter speed is inferring as it opens and closes, is my rate of perception – or rather the speed at which neurons open and close circuits in the brain. The rate of perception is how long it takes the brain to process the outside world into information the mind can understand. This process in the brain is dictated by signals carried by neurons. If you reduce the distance travelled by these signals by half, you effectively double the speed at which the brain understands the outside world. Try to imagine that our blood-sucking fiend, on account of its very small size and very simple brain, is able to percieve reality much faster than I can – my vengeful sandal would appear like it was moving in slow motion. No wonder it felt like the mosquito was blowing raspberries at me.
Okay. Now for the biggy. What does this mean for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? Is it wrong? For his calculations Einstein required a measuring stick which was unchanging and invariable, and one which would remain as a reliable benchmark for any observer regardless of their position in space. It was something which needed to comply with both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Einstein’s genius came in choosing the speed of light as that benchmark. Scientists now understand that Einstein fell into the trap of believing the speed of light is constant and independent of an observer, where in-fact, the speed of light is actually a variable that is wholly dependent upon an observer.
According to Einstein the speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 km/s. It takes light travelling from the Sun, 9 minutes to reach our planet. Imagine then that we have two observers watching the night-sky from my backyard. In this experiment we are going to turn on a torch from the position of the Sun, 150 million kilometres away, and then we shall ask both our observers to make their own steady, ticking head-count to imitate a clock (1…2…3…4…) – and to count the time it takes for the light travel to Earth. One of the observers I shall take into my laboratory (think Weird Science), and shrink to a size where the distance travelled by signals in his brain are halved. We are effectively accelerating his brain’s shutter speed to being twice as fast as normal, so that the brain is able to communicate with itself at a speed which is twice that of ours, and his mind will produce twice the amount of conscious thoughts.
This difference in the rate of perception would become much more apparent once we hear each observers’ head-count – the observer we shrank will make a count that is twice the speed of ours. When we add up the seconds counted by this tiny little man, it reaches a figure that is no longer 9 minutes but nearer 18 minutes! Our dwindled chum has experienced the speed of light as 150,000 km/s – half its normal speed. This demonstrates that the speed of light is not a constant, and that the speed of light is dependent upon the rate of experience. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has been proven wrong. There’s no such thing as space-time. The Universe has now been deflated from the four-dimensional space that we thought was there, and is now presented in its true nature – zero point energy. The balloon has well and truly burst.
Time is thus revealed as this incredible intrapersonal experience. Every living thing on Earth is revealed as its very own clock. The ticking hands of the clock of the Universe no longer exist, and on a very real and fundamental level, all we have is ‘now’. In each and every single of one those moments which we so often overlook and discard, there is the potential of infinite possibilities.
Will scientists now be able to merge all the forces in the Universe with gravity into a Theory of Everything? Probably. But perhaps this is more of an opportunity for each and every one of us who live on this planet, to finally understand how important our own place is in the grand scheme of the Universe. For if you, as an indivual, were not here to make the simple act of observation – time and space would not even exist.
I would like to thank these sites for aiding my research, and they are well worth a look if you get time….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_synapse
http://www.astronomynotes.com/relativity/s2.htm
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/510
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/scientists-show-time-and-space-do-not-exist
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/submm/CMB1.html
The Last Stoic 
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