WEAK FORCE
Matter Antimatter Annihilation
THE WEAK FORCE AS ANIMA MUNDI
An Imaginal Exploration of Nature’s Life-Promoting Fine Tuning
By Iona Miller, 2012
"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity." --Plotinus
We determine the strength of the weak nuclear force which holds the lattices of the elementary particles together. We also determine the strength of the strong nuclear force which emanates from the sides of the nuclear lattices and binds one nucleon to another nucleon. The strong force is the sum of the unsaturated weak forces at the surface of the lattices. The strong force is then about 106 times stronger than the weak force between two lattice points. --E.L. Koschmiederm, Weak nuclear forces cause the strong nuclear force, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.1849.pdf
An Imaginal Exploration of Nature’s Life-Promoting Fine Tuning
By Iona Miller, 2012
"The last stage is reached when, in the highest tension and concentration, beholding in silence and utter forgetfulness of all things, it [the soul] is able as it were to lose itself. Then it may see God, the fountain of life, the source of being, the origin of all good, the root of the soul. In that moment it enjoys the highest indescribable bliss; it is as it were swallowed up of divinity, bathed in the light of eternity." --Plotinus
We determine the strength of the weak nuclear force which holds the lattices of the elementary particles together. We also determine the strength of the strong nuclear force which emanates from the sides of the nuclear lattices and binds one nucleon to another nucleon. The strong force is the sum of the unsaturated weak forces at the surface of the lattices. The strong force is then about 106 times stronger than the weak force between two lattice points. --E.L. Koschmiederm, Weak nuclear forces cause the strong nuclear force, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.1849.pdf
The Quantum Space Phase Transitions for Particles and Force Fields
Ding-Yu Chung and Volodymir Krasnoholovets†
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-06-14.PDF
We introduce a phenomenological formalism in which the space structure is treated in terms of attachment space and detachment space. Attachment space attaches to an object, while detachment space detaches from the object. The combination of these spaces results in three quantum space phases: binary partition space, miscible space and binary lattice space. Binary lattice space consists of repetitive units of alternative attachment space and detachment space. In miscible space, attachment space is miscible to detachment space, and there is no separation between attachment space and detachment spaces. In binary partition space, detachment space and attachment space are in two separate continuous regions. The transition from wavefunction to the collapse of wavefuction under interference becomes the quantum space phase transition from binary lattice space to miscible space. At extremely conditions, the gauge boson
force field undergoes a quantum space phase transition to a “hedge boson force field”, consisting of a “vacuum” core surrounded by a hedge boson shell, like a bubble with boundary.
Ding-Yu Chung and Volodymir Krasnoholovets†
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-06-14.PDF
We introduce a phenomenological formalism in which the space structure is treated in terms of attachment space and detachment space. Attachment space attaches to an object, while detachment space detaches from the object. The combination of these spaces results in three quantum space phases: binary partition space, miscible space and binary lattice space. Binary lattice space consists of repetitive units of alternative attachment space and detachment space. In miscible space, attachment space is miscible to detachment space, and there is no separation between attachment space and detachment spaces. In binary partition space, detachment space and attachment space are in two separate continuous regions. The transition from wavefunction to the collapse of wavefuction under interference becomes the quantum space phase transition from binary lattice space to miscible space. At extremely conditions, the gauge boson
force field undergoes a quantum space phase transition to a “hedge boson force field”, consisting of a “vacuum” core surrounded by a hedge boson shell, like a bubble with boundary.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0110/0110159.pdf
The vacuum interpretation of quantum mechanics and the vacuum universe
Ding-Yu Chung
In this paper, quantum mechanics is interpreted by the adjacent vacuum that behaves as a virtual particle. Matter absorbs and emits its adjacent vacuum, constituting the formations of particle and wave. As described in the vacuum universe model, the adjacent vacuum is derived from the pre-inflationary universe in which the pre-adjacent vacuum is absorbed by the pre-matter. This absorbed pre-adjacent vacuum is emitted to become the added space for the inflation in the inflationary universe whose space-time is separated from the pre-inflationary universe. This added space is the adjacent vacuum. The absorption of the adjacent vacuum as the added space results in the adjacent zero space (no space), Quantum mechanics is the interaction between matter and the three different types of vacuum: the adjacent vacuum, the adjacent zero space, and the empty space. The absorption of the adjacent vacuum results in the empty space superimposed with the adjacent zero space, confining the matter in the form of particle. When the absorbed vacuum is emitted, the adjacent vacuum can be anywhere instantly in the empty space superimposed with the adjacent zero space where any point can be the starting point (zero point) of space-time. Consequently, the matter that expands into the adjacent vacuum has the probability to be anywhere instantly in the form of wavefunction. In the vacuum
universe model, the universe not only gains its existence from the vacuum but also fattens itself with the vacuum. During the inflation, the adjacent vacuum as the added space also generates the periodic table of elementary particles to account for all elementary particles and their masses in a good agreement with the observed values. The universe ends with the return of the adjacent vacuum to the pre-inflationary universe, and it is subsequently absorbed to start another new inflationary universe. The universe is an endless fattening free lunch.
The vacuum interpretation of quantum mechanics and the vacuum universe
Ding-Yu Chung
In this paper, quantum mechanics is interpreted by the adjacent vacuum that behaves as a virtual particle. Matter absorbs and emits its adjacent vacuum, constituting the formations of particle and wave. As described in the vacuum universe model, the adjacent vacuum is derived from the pre-inflationary universe in which the pre-adjacent vacuum is absorbed by the pre-matter. This absorbed pre-adjacent vacuum is emitted to become the added space for the inflation in the inflationary universe whose space-time is separated from the pre-inflationary universe. This added space is the adjacent vacuum. The absorption of the adjacent vacuum as the added space results in the adjacent zero space (no space), Quantum mechanics is the interaction between matter and the three different types of vacuum: the adjacent vacuum, the adjacent zero space, and the empty space. The absorption of the adjacent vacuum results in the empty space superimposed with the adjacent zero space, confining the matter in the form of particle. When the absorbed vacuum is emitted, the adjacent vacuum can be anywhere instantly in the empty space superimposed with the adjacent zero space where any point can be the starting point (zero point) of space-time. Consequently, the matter that expands into the adjacent vacuum has the probability to be anywhere instantly in the form of wavefunction. In the vacuum
universe model, the universe not only gains its existence from the vacuum but also fattens itself with the vacuum. During the inflation, the adjacent vacuum as the added space also generates the periodic table of elementary particles to account for all elementary particles and their masses in a good agreement with the observed values. The universe ends with the return of the adjacent vacuum to the pre-inflationary universe, and it is subsequently absorbed to start another new inflationary universe. The universe is an endless fattening free lunch.
ABSTRACT: In quantum physics, there is no unambiguous description of consciousness and its role in the continuous creation and sustaining of matter. If it plays a fundamental role in existence we must look for it at the very root of all evolutionary processes in the fundamental forces of our universe which lead to the conditions that facilitate life as a potentially universal process. One such candidate for nature's fine-tuning system is the weak force, whose descriptors echo the traits of the pre-scientific and alchemical notion of the Anima Mundi, or World Soul, an embodiment of intrinsic vital connections among all life.
The Jungian and archetypal worldview still recognizes such a living force within, attributing its life-sustaining energies to soul and the depth-dimension of our imaginal and perceptual experience. An enriching non-literal interpretation of such phenomenology may still be more than metaphorical. Anima mundi, by any other name such as "weak force", only needs to be a tiny fraction of one of the myriad feedback loops to be the deciding difference due to the delicately balanced state that potentiates and fosters universal life, potentially originating in space (Hoyle, Wickramasinghe). In this sense she (embodied as the Weak Force and Weak Emergence) makes the Sun shine, creates water, and the "Goldilocks" zone of human habitation.
Agents of Chaos: Is the observed strength of the weak force vital for the emergence of observers? Emergence is a possible order arising from chaos. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. In weak emergence, the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents. This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
Causing systems to differentiate, weak emergence is the root of higher-order complexity, coalescing novel, coherent structures. Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them, potentially including self-reflection. Humans become self-conscious and track their own evolution. Heeding the "inner voice" of the Anima mundi, can applied emergence help us work with the dynamics of emergent complexity to realize our intentions as life-serving outcomes?
KEYWORDS: weak force, anima mundi, Jung, weak emergence, microbes, quantum information, hierarchy problem, Higgs field, renormalization, evolvability, anthropic principle, chirality, electroweak theory
The Jungian and archetypal worldview still recognizes such a living force within, attributing its life-sustaining energies to soul and the depth-dimension of our imaginal and perceptual experience. An enriching non-literal interpretation of such phenomenology may still be more than metaphorical. Anima mundi, by any other name such as "weak force", only needs to be a tiny fraction of one of the myriad feedback loops to be the deciding difference due to the delicately balanced state that potentiates and fosters universal life, potentially originating in space (Hoyle, Wickramasinghe). In this sense she (embodied as the Weak Force and Weak Emergence) makes the Sun shine, creates water, and the "Goldilocks" zone of human habitation.
Agents of Chaos: Is the observed strength of the weak force vital for the emergence of observers? Emergence is a possible order arising from chaos. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. In weak emergence, the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents. This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
Causing systems to differentiate, weak emergence is the root of higher-order complexity, coalescing novel, coherent structures. Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them, potentially including self-reflection. Humans become self-conscious and track their own evolution. Heeding the "inner voice" of the Anima mundi, can applied emergence help us work with the dynamics of emergent complexity to realize our intentions as life-serving outcomes?
KEYWORDS: weak force, anima mundi, Jung, weak emergence, microbes, quantum information, hierarchy problem, Higgs field, renormalization, evolvability, anthropic principle, chirality, electroweak theory
The imagination acts in a similar manner in the soul, and calls forms of life into existence. The spirit is the master, imagination the tool, and the body is the sculptural material. --Paracelsus
[The World Soul] “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” –Giordano Bruno.
If medieval theology had removed God to a wholly transcendent sphere, to the Renaissance Platonists nature was permeated by life, divinity, and numinous mystery, a vital expression of the World Soul and the living powers of creation. In the words of Richard Tarnas, “The garden of the world was again enchanted, with magical powers and transcendent meaning implicit in every part of nature.” --David Fideler
INTRODUCTION
Our universe is a profound symphony of the forces of nature that govern its unfolding. Throughout history, mythic and imaginal descriptions of the forces of nature preceded more scientific models of reality. Even such scientific models retain their metaphorical nature and applications which enrich our perceptions of our place in the Universe. Corollary concepts bridge the soul and the material universe.
The Hierarchy Problem describes the vast discrepancy between aspects of gravity and the weak nuclear force, which has to do with the size of the non-zero Higgs field. The hierarchy problem is a result of the calculated effective rest mass of the electron being skewed by omission of half of the Dirac equation.
An analogous philosophical problem comes from thinking a transcendent divinity was the source of all creation, and humanity lived in exile from heaven in a state of sin. This doctrine created a split between matter and spirit, causing the world of nature to be seen as separate from its creator and humanity. Such a hierarchical worldview is a collective loss of soul.
Culture can be defined as the work of soul-making. Returning soul to the world not only attends to the world, it offers more opportunity to engage in the work of soul ourselves.
The World Soul is not a fixed or defined substance, but a living substance made out of the hopes, dreams, and deepest imaginings of humanity and of all creation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation. This is the home of creation’s collective memories and the myths of humanity. What we used to describe in myths, we now explain in theories, which also retain their symbolic aspect.
A 2012 Gallup poll, described and critiqued in Metanexus, skews results by limiting options:
Here is how the question and choices currently are posed, with the 2012 percentages of Americans voicing each position represented in parentheses:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?
1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process. (32 percent)
2. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process. (15 percent)
3. God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. (46 percent)
All three options confuse mythic (meaningful) religious language with factual (measurable) scientific language. Sadly, for many people in America, such confusion is the norm—and priests and pastors in the pulpit are offering little help in sorting things out.
Even so, a growing number of thoughtful Americans have moved beyond the entrenched science vs. religion conflict. We go by many names and we find our homes both within and outside of church communities: religious naturalists, new theists, religious humanists, evolutionary humanists, emergentists. For us, we cannot say yes to any of the options Gallup offers.
It is thus time to evolve the Gallup poll on evolution. Simply add a fourth choice:
4. Human beings emerged naturally from a long process of physical and biological creativity that can be spoken of religiously as "God's creation" or scientifically as "evolution."
This proposed choice would enable a respondent to express a view of human origins fully grounded in mainstream science, while bridging to the mythic, interpretive language of religious tradition.
Joseph Campbell, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Huston Smith, Robert Bellah, Michael Shermer, Robert Wright, Pascal Boyer, and other scholars of comparative religion and evolutionary psychology remind us that we cannot understand religions and religious differences if we don't understand how the human mind instinctually and unconsciously relationalizes, or personifies, reality. More, there is no need for Americans today to give up the relational, to forgo meaningful connection and traditional language, even when we move beyond the supernatural belief systems of our ancestors. (Metanexus)
The Light of Being & Natural Wisdom
Jung suggested that the alchemists understood that there is a connection between the anima mundi and the soul or creative Source. The source of the wisdom and knowledge of the all-pervading essence of the anima mundi was “the innermost and most secret numinosum of man.” (Collected Works, vol. 14, para. 372.)
With the lumen naturae we can once again learn how to unlock the secrets of nature, so that we no longer have to attack and destroy the natural world in order to survive. To the archetypal psychologist the world, too, is a patient in need of therapeutic attention. When our fantasy of the world deprives it of personality and soul, we tend to treat this "inanimate" world badly.
The world soul (Greek: ψυχή κόσμου, Latin: Anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection, a vital force, between all living things. The World Soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions. The soul of the world in Platonism is the supposed spirit that permeates and animates all material nature. The "Soul of the World," is the same as Alaya of the Northern Buddhists; the divine Essence which pervades, permeates, animates, and informs all things, from the smallest atom of matter to man and god.
Anima mundi is the creative mystery of phenomenological resonance. In philosophy, anima mundi is a term denoting a universal spirit or soul that functions as an organizing principle. This divine spark in matter is the essence within creation, guiding the unfolding of life and the cosmos. Perhaps the secret of the Universe is simply that it is alive.
Is the quantum superposition of "quantum information" alive in some sense, animating reality? If “universal consciousness” informs matter as QM suggests, all forces must in some way express that consciousness in dynamic action. Anima Mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different points of view, different narratives. The material world is not set apart from ourselves. Quantum physics has revealed a fluid and unpredictable world, in which consciousness and matter are not separate—whether a photon of light behaves as a particle or wave depends upon the consciousness of the observer.
Creative Potential
We can explore the imaginal aspects of matter and fundamental forces, but not at the expense of our intellectual vision, or understanding of quantum and celestial mechanics. Antimatter may be the missing ingredient in our understanding of the Big Picture. Jung’s anima, a unifying panpsychic life-principle, could be applied to all lifeforms and it would be indistinguishable from the weak nuclear force which, like the anima, always adjusts its emanation so as to preserve life.
A double-slit optical system tests the possible role of consciousness in the collapse of the quantum wavefunction. The results appear to be consistent with a consciousness-related interpretation of the quantum measurement problem. (Radin et al, 2012)
The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics, and is also very important in chemistry. The mass of an electron is significantly less (at least 3 times less) than the mass of a proton or a neutron.
How electrons (mass, charge and spin) move in certain structures can be described by relativistic quantum physics, modeling them as if they have no mass at all. The electron mass is known to be sensitive to local fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and undergoes a small shift in a thermal field.
When an electron moves to a lower orbit it gives off excess energy and finds itself in its 'desired' location. It does not physically travel from one shell to another. It disappears from one location and appears at the other location.
Likewise in the mindscape, the expulsion or rejection of the imagination or many possibilities leads to a new perspective from a new narrower location in the mindscape. If the mind is not happy with many possibilities it can only find happiness with fewer possibilities.
But in the model nothing has moved other than the perspective, which is to say mind. The facts (if there be any) remained the same but the mind narrowed the possibilities or un-factual via focus. Focus moves the mind into a range of narrower possibilities. Focus appears to be like an electron moving to lower and lower orbits in the shell. The desire to reduce the virtual possibilities leads to physical collapse of the realities.
In the mindscape, the expulsion or rejection of the imagination or many possibilities leads to a new perspective from a new narrower location in the mindscape. If the mind is not happy with many possibilities it can only find happiness with fewer possibilities. Perhaps the particle waits for observation because the potential for observation provides the path of least resistance to the future.
If Anima Mundi is the essence of our being, what would we do without her? Clavelli and White explore such a possibility through modeling a weakless universe:
“The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws given that life exists on at least one planet. Recently it has been proposed that a universe without weak interactions, but with other parameters suitably tuned can nevertheless allow life to develop. If a universe with such different physics from ours can generate life, the scope of the anthropic principle is reduced. We point out, however, that on closer examination the proposed “weakless" universe strongly inhibits the development of life in several different ways. One of the most critical barriers is that a weakless universe is unlikely to produce enough oxygen to support life. Since oxygen is an essential element in both water, the universal solvent needed for life, and in each of the four bases forming the DNA code for known living beings, we strongly question the hypothesis that a universe without weak interactions could generate life.”
A force is that which causes mass to accelerate. There are four forces in the universe:
1) The gravitational force causes mass to attract other mass. It is weak but works over great distances.
2) The electromagnetic force exerts influence over charged particles in an electromagnetic field. Like charges repel, different charges attract. It is stronger than the gravitational force but works over much shorter distances.
3) The strong force is the strongest of all forces but only works over very, very tiny distances. It holds the nucleus together.
4) The weak force is...um...er, what?
It is a force that acts on particles which carry weak charge, which is more or less half of all particles. Although it is stronger than gravity, the weak force is only effective at very short distances (10-18 m). Technically, it is one of the strongest forces, but because the particles involved are so big, their travel is limited to the short distance The force carriers (which are called W and Z bosons) are very massive, meaning the force is very short range. It's essentially zero outside atomic nuclei, which is why we never notice it in ordinary life. Neutrinos interact only through weak forces (and gravity) - that's why they're so hard to detect.
The weak force, as one of these four fundamental forces of Nature, underlies some forms of radioactivity and certain interactions between subatomic particles. This is a fundamental interaction between elementary particles that is several orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic interaction. A force between elementary particles causes certain processes that take place with low probability. It is dependent on a particle's electrical charge and weak isospin. This fundamental force of nature underlies some forms of radioactivity, governs the decay of unstable subatomic particles such as mesons, and initiates the nuclear fusion reaction that fuels the Sun and stars.
In equilibrium, there is zero net force by definition, but (balanced) forces may be present. The strong and weak forces act only at very short distances. The strong force is by far the strongest of the forces, followed by the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and finally the extremely feeble gravitational force. Like the Electromagnetic & Strong forces, the Weak force is also mediated by “force carriers”.
How strong is the weak force? When we say that the weak force is weak, it's because two particles that can only interact weakly with each other are, in fact, very unlikely to interact at all. The effectiveness of the weak force is confined to a distance range of 10 −17 metre, about 1 percent of the diameter of a typical atomic nucleus. The muon is the key to the strength of the weak force.
The weak force is responsible for radioactive decay and neutrino interactions. During beta decay a neutron disappears, replaced by a proton, an electron and a neutrino (anti-electron). A down quark disappears and an up quark is produced. The up quark eventually turns into the electron and neutrino. Although we hardly encounter processes governed by the weak force in our everyday life, it is still of crucial importance to life in all potential manifestations.
One of the main breakthroughs in our understanding of the subatomic world in the 1970s was the proof that the weak interaction and the electromagnetic interaction -- another of the four fundamental forces -- are, in fact, two aspects of one and the same interaction. It is called the electroweak interaction and its strength is determined by three parameters, the Fermi constant being one of them.
Hierarchy problems are related to fine-tuning problems and problems of naturalness.
Studying the renormalization in hierarchy problems is difficult, because such quantum corrections are usually power-law divergent, which means that the shortest-distance physics are most important. Because we do not know the precise details of the shortest-distance theory of physics (quantum gravity), we cannot even address how this delicate cancellation between two large terms occurs. Therefore, researchers postulate new physical phenomena that resolve hierarchy problems without fine tuning (renormalization).
This has led to the search for the elusive Higgs particle, which models the subtle force that gives energy the resistence it needs to precipitate matter. So far, Higg’s mass cannot be calculated.
In particle physics, the most important hierarchy problem is the question that asks why the weak force is 1032 times stronger than gravity. Both of these forces involve constants of nature, Fermi's constant for the weak force and Newton's constant for gravity. Furthermore if the Standard Model is used to calculate the quantum corrections to Fermi's constant, it appears that Fermi's constant is unnaturally large and should be closer to Newton's constant, unless there is a delicate cancellation between the bare value of Fermi's constant and the quantum corrections to it.
Cancellation of the Higgs boson quadratic mass renormalization between fermionic top quark loop and scalar stop squark tadpole Feynman diagrams in a supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model.
More technically, the question is why the Higgs boson is so much lighter than the Planck mass (or the grand unification energy, or a heavy neutrino mass scale): one would expect that the large quantum contributions to the square of the Higgs boson mass would inevitably make the mass huge, comparable to the scale at which new physics appears, unless there is an incredible fine-tuning cancellation between the quadratic radiative corrections and the bare mass. (Wiki, Hierarchy Problem)
Anima Mundi & Panspermia
John Gribbin and Martin Rees (1989) point out that the so-called “weak force” that governs radioactive decay must be extremely fine-tuned in order for stars to shed matter in great quantities during supernova explosions. Our bodies are composed of elements that were forged in the interior of stars and then released in supernova explosions. Even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic distance scale.
We can summarize *the presently accepted view of the origin of life in three stages: the cosmic stage; the prebiotic chemical stage; and the biological stage. The cosmic stage concerns itself with the early history of the universe where the electroweak made a phase transition into two forces, electromagnetic and weak, 10 ~12 sees after the universe was born. The temperature was then 250 GeV and the carriers of the neutral weak force - the ZQ particle - acquired mass. In the matrix of embedded hierarchies, amplification of this electroweak advantage over the course of time by repetetive steps converted the 20 amino acids which make up proteins. (Salam)
In 2012 researchers announced the universe is potentially teeming with life. Life and (near-life) in the form of bacteria and viruses (together called microbes) pervade the universe in the interior of comets, meteorites and clouds of interstellar dust. Humans have nearly 60 bacteria species in their guts, harmful and beneficial. We have 10 times the number of bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, and 100 times bacterial genes than our own. So we are pretty much walking bacteria farms.
The human body contains about 100 trillion cells, but only maybe one in 10 of those cells is actually — human. The rest are from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. Scientists identified some 10,000 species of microbes, including many never seen before, according to the first wave of results, which are being published in 16 papers in the journals Nature and PLoS. Those 10,000 or so species have more than 8 million genes, which is more than 300 times the number of human genes. (Ackerman)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/13/154913334/finally-a-map-of-all-the-microbes-on-your-body
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ultimate-social-network-bacteria-protects-health
Before Chandra Wickremesinghe scientists thought that huge obscuring clouds in deep space like the horse head nebula were made up of ice particles. But his untiring research showed the particles were mainly made of carbon- a form of a substance that was connected with life- a freeze dried dormant bacteria. Wickramasinghe calls them our genetic ancestors or cosmic ancestry. Thus, the science of astrobiology was born.
According to William Lane Craig (Strobel 2000, p. 77), P. C. W. Davies concluded that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for the formation of stars is a one followed by at least a thousand billion billion zeroes. Davies also estimated that if the strength of gravity or of the weak force were changed by only one part in a ten followed by a hundred zeroes, life could never have developed (ibid.). ...fine tuning is distributed across enormous ranges makes it even more amazing that they should be found in just the right proportions.
Discovery of microbes in space has shifted theories of the "seeds of life" origin on Earth to the well-accepted idea that organic polymers in space are abundant and may be necessary for life. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were orginally ridiculed for detecting dried, frozen bacteria in interstellar space, but it remains plausible that extraterrestrial microorganisms have continued to reach the surface during the entire existence of the planet Earth. The same effect might seed other planets with universal lifeforms. Wickramasinghe even contends microorganisms from the upper cloud layers of Venus may have been driven to Earth by the solar winds during the 2012 transit of Venus. (Jayawardhana)
Habitable planets may be in orbit around billions of stars in the Milky Way, a long-term study has suggested. Astronomers came to this stunning conclusion after a six-year star survey which suggests planets on which humans could live are commonplace in our galaxy. Scientists estimate as many as 10 billion stars in the Milky Way may host planets in the habitable - or 'Goldilocks' - zone. (Allen)
All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’. A wrong-handed amino acid disrupts the stabilizing α-helix in proteins. DNA could not be stabilized in a helix if even a single wrong-handed monomer were present, so it could not form long chains. This means it could not store much information, so it could not support life.
When primitive organisms completed their experiments with direct interaction with electromagnetism (photosynthesis) they moved on to EMs closest sibling, the weak nuclear force, which resulted (in the present majority view) in homochirality - (nominally ) right-handed DNA from left-handed amino acids - a direct interaction with weak force was evolutionarily successful.
β-decay is one form of radioactive decay, and it is governed by the weak force. This force has a slight handedness, called parity violation, so some theorists thought β-decay could account for the chirality in living organisms. However, the weak force is aptly named—the effect is minuscule—a long way from producing the required 100 % homochirality. Prebiotic conditions may or may not have favored asymmetric β-radiolysis as the selector of the exclusive signature of optical activity in living nature.’
The beginning of life remains nature’s greatest mystery. We still do not know what distinguishes organic from inorganic matter. The nature of matter is informed by the Weak Force of physics and the genius of Creation. The domain of Anima Mundi is not limited to Earth but extends from the subquantal domain to that of astrophysics, as an essential component and dynamic of all matter.
Every major scientific breakthrough in the history of the human race has a correlation in the human Soul. To make hidden things that are invisible appear and to manifest is the power of the imagination and the will. There is no greater power in man than these two combined forces. Imagination is the power to create images; it is the active evocation of inner images. This is an authentic feat of thought and idea, and this is how inventions are realized, and how all works of art, music, science and all great things are created.
By imagination the alchemist does not mean the spinning of aimless or groundless fantasies. He or she does not just play with its objects but tries to grasp the inner facts and tries to see them in images true to their nature. This activity is an opus, a work, and it is an art and a development.
The alchemist Ruland says that imagination is the star in man. The term Astrum is a term invented by Paracelsus. He said that the power to visualize belonged to something astral in man. He meant that it belonged to an intellect above the lower material man and that it was a divine intelligence belonging to the spiritual man, something like the quintessence in man. It is the mediator between man and the divine. Imagination is a concentrated psychophysical extract of the life forces.
Man has a visible and invisible workshop. The visible one is his body, the invisible one his imagination. The imagination is a sun in the soul of man acting in its own sphere, as the sun in our system acts on the earth. Wherever the latter shines, germs planted in the soil grow and vegetation springs up.
Quantum physics suggests consciousness is connected to matter at the quantum level. However, we are still unaware how to describe the nature of such universal consciousness, much less its interaction with matter, other than through the observations of the Standard Model.
Jung’s anima is a sort of constrained version of a similar but universal "force". The World Soul has agents, those who will heed Her voice and bring forth, synchronistically, knowledge that is important to the world at a particular time in history. Simultaneously, because of the principle of correspondence, this knowledge has corollary relevance for the human Soul. As above, so below.
"...It turns out that this “electron mass” hierarchy problem is exactly analogous to what is more commonly known as The Hierarchy Problem. This is the question of why the Higgs mass is so small...." It is because Dirac’s negative mass is ignored; weak force is all tangled up with Higgs blunting effect.
Independent researcher, K. Thomas didn’t intend to solve the hierarchy problem. He was looking for a gauge for determining the strength of the {outrageously misnamed) weak force. The relative strengths of electromagnetism, weak force, and gravity is the gauge. Right now, the weak force is unusually strong (that’s the basis of the hierarchy problem) and that presages problems re: species survival.
In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, some believe that the fact is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.
Yet, resonance energy transfer (RET)-Induced intermolecular pairing force is a tunable weak interaction. Passive and active tunable control of interactions enables phase transitions and switchable functionality. Dipoles and liquid crystals are tunable with magnetic fields and resonance. Energy transfer systems are characterized by tunability. Biological organisms ranging from bacteria to humans are assumed to be continuously tunable through choice.
Some structures are more suitable for self-organization. Such evolutionary adaptability (or evolvability) can itself evolve through variation and selection. Organizations that are complex in terms of numbers of components and interactions are more likely to meet peak-climbing conditions, but less likely to meet stability conditions. Biological structures that are characterized by a high degree of component redundancy and multiple weak interactions satisfy these conflicting pressures. Functional redundancy appears in many forms in biological systems.
Weak interactions are another form of redundancy, but one that occurs at the interconnection level. A weak interaction has a small informational effect. Redundancy through multiple weak interactions allows a system to have many components and interactions (and therefore a high degree of genetic control) while limiting the impact of any particular component or interaction. A system with weak interactions is highly controllable at the genetic level, and suggests why weak interactions are a key component of many evolvable structures seen in biology. The benefit of weak interactions can also be seen in the context of enhancing evolvability in non-biological systems.
"Weak interactions occur extensively in regulatory pathways. Regulatory pathways, in turn, are thought to have been of considerable importance to the evolution of complex multi-cellular organisms [Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998]. Examples of multiple weak interactions are the calcium ions whose concentration controls the secretion of neurotransmitters in the brain; and the interactions between the binding site, enzymes, enhancers, and control signals that lead to the formation of a transcription complex in eukaryotes. In each of these cases it is the net effect of all of the interactions that controls the activation level. Because of this, the strength of activation can be varied gradually through the addition and removal of components and interactions, and can respond flexibly to new sources of regulation. The effect of redundancy is to increase the tunability of evolution such that most mutations lead to small or neutral changes to an organism's fitness."
"Evolvability is the relative capacity for organismal lineages to become better adapted to their environment as a consequence of natural selection acting upon essentially random genetic variation. Biological systems are believed to be organised in a way that promotes evolvability. Important sources of evolvability include redundancy, compartmentalisation, exploratory mechanisms, and epigenetic and ecological processes. Redundancy in particular is though to support neutral evolution: a conceptually powerful mode of evolutionary exploration. Whilst it is not known how these sources of evolvability evolved, it has been speculated that this is due both to re-use of mechanisms evolved for other purposes and to lineage selection. "(Lones)
DISCUSSION
At the birth of our very tiny universe we would have seen the emergence of a glorious, symmetrical transition of physics. This was followed by the separation of the strong nuclear force from the unified electro-weak forcel. This led to an inflationary state where the universe expanded from infinitesimal size (.0000000000000000000000000000001 cm) to about the size of a marble or larger in a very small fraction of time – far less than a single second. The separation of the weak force from the electromagnetic force was a phase transition leading to the emergence of quarks, and then to hydrogen and helium nuclei. From them came stars which produced the other elements.
Weak nuclear forces are responsible for radioactivity and also for exhibiting some peculiar symmetry features not seen with the other forces. In contrast to electromagnetic and strong forces, the strength of the weak force is different for particles and anti-particles (Charge Violation), for a scattering process and its mirror image (Parity Violation), and for a scattering process and the time reversal of that scattering process (Time Violation).
The weak force drives radioactive decays that:
Clavelli and White conclude tenatively that a weakless universe would not be likely to support life but that much more work would have to be done to know for sure. They are solid on pro-life side but are very mainstream and are not intelligent designers or creationists.
“If there are many hospitable alternative universes, the anthropic principle based on observer selection would no longer be a useful guide to understanding the properties of our world except for the smallness of the cosmological constant. Faced with a plethora of life supporting alternative universes, the string landscape ideas would also lose whatever predictive power they might have unless the weakless universe or other alternatives could be shown not to be among the local minima of string theory. Obviously, however, much further theoretical analysis would be necessary to confirm
that a universe without weak interactions would, indeed, allow the evolution of life. The nuclear reactions proposed by the authors of ref. [1] as an alternate mechanism for stellarnucleosynthesis would need to be studied in greater detail. In addition to such open questions, however, we have proposed that a serious problem in a weakless universe from the point of view of generating life is the difficulty of distributing oxygen through the universe in anywhere near the required abundance. Such a universe would be extremely deficient in oxygen and life would, in effect, have been frustrated at an early stage. Our observations reduce the probability of generating life.”
The Weak Force
The strength of the weak force between interacting quarks and leptons can be characterized by their weak charge (distinct from their electric charge). The weak charges of quarks and leptons are comparable to their electromagnetic charges, a manifestation of how electromagnetism and the weak force are components of a unified electroweak force.
It is termed weak because its typical field strength is several orders of magnitude less than that of both electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force. Most particles will decay by a weak interaction over time. It has one unique property – namely quark flavor changing – that does not occur in any other interaction. In addition, it also breaks parity-symmetry and CP-symmetry. Quark flavor changing allows for quarks to swap their 'flavor', one of six, for another.
Weak interactions are most noticeable when particles undergo beta decay, and in the production of deuterium and then helium from hydrogen that powers the sun's thermonuclear process. Such decay also makes radiocarbon dating possible, as carbon-14 decays through the weak interaction to nitrogen-14. It can also create radioluminescence, commonly used in tritium illumination, and in the related field of betavoltaics. It is responsible for the radioactive decay of subatomic particles and initiates the process known as hydrogen fusion in stars. Weak interactions affect all known fermions; that is, particles whose spin (a property of all particles) is a half-integer.
The weak nuclear force controls the speed of nuclear reactions in the sun. "It is just weak enough so that the hydrogen in the sun burns at a slow and steady rate," explains physicist Freeman Dyson. Many other examples could be given to show how our life depends on the delicately balanced laws and conditions found in the universe. Science writer Professor Paul Davies compared these universal laws and conditions to a set of knobs and stated: "It seems as if the different knobs have to be fine-tuned to enormous precision if the universe is to be such that life will flourish." (Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler)
Thomas speculates that the weak force self adjusts - in various epochs - to maintain conditions for life potential. Just possibly, distress or other strong signals from living things could be a tiny part of the feedback loop. The “screams of the damned” could be any non-zero feedback, no matter how small. He admits, naturally, that can’t be proven yet and doesn’t need to be; it’s a plausible consequence of solving hierarchy.
The hypothesis is that the weak force consistently acts to push things toward an environment that life can survive in. Maybe all those bacteria, bugs, toads and everything are affecting it by psychokinesis, he boldly suggests.
IF the universe really is teeming with life as some recent evidence suggests, you could take Jung’s anima and apply it to all genders and all lifeforms and it would be indisinguishable from the weak nuclear force which, like the anima, always adjusts its emanation so as to preserve life.
The weak force has the following effects:
Thomas suggests a vase analogy using facts as established by orthodoxy:
The non-zero Higgs field has a size of about 250 GeV, and that gives us the W and Z particles with masses of about 100 GeV. But it turns out that quantum mechanics would lead us to expect that this size of a Higgs field is unstable, something like (warning: imperfect analogy ahead) a vase balanced precariously on the edge of a table. With the physics we know about so far, the tendency of quantum mechanics to jostle — those quantum fluctuations I’ve mentioned elsewhere — would seem to imply that there are two natural values for the Higgs field — in analogy to the two natural places for the vase, firmly placed on the table or smashed on the floor. Naively, the Higgs field should either be zero, or it should be as big as the Planck Energy, 10,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than it is observed to be. Why is it at a value that is non-zero and tiny, a value that seems, at least naively, so unnatural? (Of Particular Significance. Prof Strassler of Rutgers University)
This is the hierarchy problem.
CONCLUSIONS
Anima mundi only needs to be a tiny tiny fraction of one of the myriad feedback loops to be the deciding difference due to the unbelievably delicately balanced state of the vase-- which should be crashed by random quantum fluctuations - but never is. And that solves the hierarchy problem retroactively.
Thomas also contends - from other valid data- that the "vote" from biological signals is THE DECIDING VOTE, but that is impossible to explain in brief --AND DOESNT NEED TO BE. The deciding “bio vote” is NOT IM-POSSIBLE. That’s all that needs to be shown, the rest being detail work, rather than conceptual.
Electroweak Theory
The Standard Model of particle physics describes the electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction as two different aspects of a single electroweak interaction, the theory of which was developed around 1968 by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. They were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. The Higgs mechanism provides an explanation for the presence of three massive gauge bosons (the three carriers of the weak interaction) and the massless photon of the electromagnetic interaction.
According to the electroweak theory, at very high energies, the universe has four massless gauge boson fields similar to the photon and a complex scalar Higgs field doublet. However, at low energies, gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken down to the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism (one of the Higgs fields acquires a vacuum expectation value). This symmetry breaking would produce three massless bosons, but they become integrated by three photon-like fields (through the Higgs mechanism) giving them mass. These three fields become the W+, W−and Z bosons of the weak interaction, while the fourth gauge field which remains massless is the photon of electromagnetism.
Although this theory has made a number of predictions, including a prediction of the masses of the Z and W bosons before their discovery, the Higgs boson itself has never been observed. Producing Higgs bosons is a major goal of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
"...[R]elative to the characteristic strength of weak interactions, which set the energy scale of modern-day particle physics..."
"WHICH SET THE ENERGY SCALE", (hint,hint). Yet, the weak force "gets no respect" and that’s why the weapons makers (physicists) keep missing the boat.
[raw
effective rest mass problem is not only analogous but actually PART of hierarchy problem
matt strassler had 2 versions of hierarchy problem explanation. one had vase analogy, one didnt
feynman kicked the can down the road by making the inaccuracies of classical and QM cancell exactly at electron mass
he fouled the time assymmetry of weak force the same way (nonreversible time needed for a record or history which could become hologram_) feynman cheerfully volunteered that he got the nobel prize fpr cheap magic tricks - but what he did was deemed necessary at the time the weak force is only about 80 years old - theorized by fermi and follow up has been slowed by lack of money due to lack of weapons applications and also because the lumpy rug of QM was caused mainly by difficulties in dealing with weak force - absent GRAVITY! - which QM ignores for simplicity but which cant be ignored in the case of weak force which is long range by proxy; it bends-the-beam of its sibling on either side (gravity and EM)
weak force is always attended by its own gravity and modulates EM
there is no question fermi feynman scwinger gell-man et al were aware of all this but it was too much to manage at the time - they had to come upo with a somewhat finished product first
at the solvay conference , einstein was politely informed that he was an out-of-touch has-been (1927)
for that reason he quit wrestling with the non-infinite lifetime of electron and left it for QM which states explicirly that the universe is falling apart and may have already collapsed -----ONLY because they cant believe the vase stays balanced on the catastrophic edge --- "but, still it".. stays]
the only practical way to exploit weak-tronics is to start with the MAGNETIC ISOTOPE OF MAGNESIUM (mg25) and its relation to variable beta decay. the larson idea of LENR's is a good example of what weak-tronics might do , IF we live in a universe where weak-tronics is POSSIBLE. Last years (2011) probe for the Higgs boson at LHC appears to be permissive for weak-tronics, putting the minimum energy for excitation of the fifth dimension (the vacuum) at about 4 TEV, down from 20TEV, but still higher than the 1 TEV predicted by some influential theorists (lisa randall et al).
I was holding out for my long time prediction of 19.5 GEV for the higgs resonance but 125GEV will do....and besides, i hadnt considered the possibility of the requirement of a shadow higgs (mostly because i considered the dominant heavy higgs theories to be ridiculous) in the 5th dimension/mirror universe/ adjacent vacuum to accompany the symmetry restoring right-handed weak force (or its equivilant).A higgs fragment at 19.5 means the vacuum is unstable and the universe could already be self destructing (hawking). i never worried about that because the universe has been here a very long time and cannot self destruct. NEVERTHELESS, a shadow higgs at 19.5 and a weak-force related higgs fragment at 125 would bode well for the future of our species, and a shadow higgs WAS discovered by CMS and it WAS significant (Ellis et al) but was dismissed -for now- by an accounting trick which is too complicated to get into here.
to comprehend the implications its necessary to consider the origin of "spin" and why that just about mandates a 5d (expandable to 11d) KK type universe with gravity - considered as an accelleration rather than a true "force" - as the unifying force.
5d origin of spin
john ellis (in link you sent) is the gut who organized the polite protest against the stashing away of the 19.5 FEV particle by CMS (CMS was the only LHC facility outfitted to detect it at the time.
"... agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" said British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."
"everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,"---A. Einstein
spin on spin:
Particles should be considered pointlike charges (therefore spherical when they escape from the intersection of 5d and 4d which confines them and PRODUCES THEM. (DEATHNIUM TRAP OR "HOLE")
In escaping, they twist off a little space that sticks to them and they gain spin by the poles of their helical (twisting or spinning) polarization. (seen head on this is circular or non-polarized) this will be enlarged upon momentarily.
the point (ho-ho) now is that the formation of a particle exactly recapitulates the formation of the universe
(spherical) from the pointlike big-bang and , in the electrons case produces a particle very much like a miniature universe - with the same lifetime, as well., so electrons are a little bit special, that way.
what particle gets formed depends entirely on the energy available at the particular 4d/5d jubction (the angle of the geometric contact)
we are taught that QM is perfectly reversible and that geometric space can be formed by matter. ergo :MATTER CAN BE CREATED BY "GEOMETRY" (NAKED SPACE, NOT SPACETIME)
Fractal fans and holographers may see significance here . sure, but it absolutely must NOT be overdrawn. (see a. einstein quote above)
There is no difference whatsoever between a massless particle , like the photon, and a wave. they are exactly the same thing. the distinction was originally due to the scale of our measuring tools; if you were a giant, you would insist a LF radio wave is a particle. Its about the same with debroglie waves but all these are very short - too short to measure easily in early 1900's. the earth is a wave- particle but the wavelength is way in the hard gamma ray range so , you might as well consider it a particle. hard gamma rays are too hard to do anything WITH.
everything does try to be round. the reason is economy, minimalization, most volume per unit of surface material.
nobody ever considers that the unique quality of pi is that it is NORMAL as are its roots and exponents. yes, its the same NORMAL as in RENORMALIZATION. the old idea of atoms being little solar systems and of charged particles being pointlike is passe but not at all invalid. theQM<QED<QCD way is a tiny bit more precise in practice but that tiny bit never makes any significant difference.
you can balance roots of pi against the (integers only!) PERIODIC TABLE and cancel out the infinities.
the reciprocal of the fourth root of pi is 1.33-something, which is where 4d meets 5d and relates to the only stable isotope of cesium.
an 11d noncompact kaluza klein built this way relates to and describes the most ancient and primitive form of esp. and it fills in the oddments of the nature of matter that QM cant reach.
its all little round things if you chose to look at it that way. the only proscription is you cant change formats in mid-solution; that produces a big mess.
Weak Emergence: Absolute Existence Becoming Experience
Is the observed strength of the weak force vital for the emergence of observers? Emergence is a possible order arising from chaos. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents. This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
Causing systems to differentiate, weak emergence is the root of higher-order complexity, coalescing novel, coherent structures. Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them, potentially including self-reflection. Humans become self-conscious and track their own evolution.
Open systems extract information and order out of their environment. They bring coherence to increasingly complex forms. Systems theory uses feedback loops to help us map how interactions influence each other. It names two types of feedback loops: reinforcing and balancing loops. Heeding the inner voice of the Anima mundi, can applied emergence help us work with the dynamics of emergent complexity to realize our intentions as life-serving outcomes?
REFERENCES
Ackerman, Jennifer, (2012) How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health Scientic American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ultimate-social-network-bacteria-protects-health
Allen, Gavin, Milky Way could contain billions of habitable planets, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2085268/Milky-Way-contain-billions-habitable-planets-reveal-scientists-year-study.html#ixzz1xcaIrj34
Bruno, Giordano, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. Jack Lindsay, p. 81. (Translated by Jack Lindsay. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
Michael Conrad, The geometry of evolution
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0303264790900305
David Fideler, The Soul of the Cosmos p.138. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 213. New York: Harmony Books, 1991.
John R. Gribbin, Martin J. Rees, (1989), Cosmic Coincidences, Black Swan (March 21, 1991)
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's Analysis of Interstellar Dust
http://www.panspermia.org/astronmy.htm
Jayawardhana, Walter , Chandra wickramasinghe says venusian life came to Earth during the transit
http://www.lankanewsweb.com/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1960:chandra-wickramasinghe-says-venusian-life-came-to-erath-during-the-transit&catid=1:general&Itemid=29
Jayawardhana, Walter , Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe - the man who asserted: "Life did not start here on earth but in space," has retired, http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/2788
King, Chris, Cosmic Symmetry-breaking, Bifurcation, Fractality and Biogenesis
http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Chris-King-fractal-approach.pdf
M. Kirschner and J. Gerhart. Evolvability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA), 95: 8420-8427, July 1998.
Lones, Michael, Biological Evolvability, http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mal503/common/thesis/c5.html
Radin, Dean (2012), Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments. Dean Radin,1,a) Leena http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20final.pdf
Clavelli, I. and R.E. White III, Problems in a weakless universe
http://bama.ua.edu/~lclavell/papers/weakless2c.pdf
Hierarchy Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem
Metanexus, http://metanexus.net/blog/evolving-gallups-poll-evolution?utm_source=2012.06.12+Evolving+Gallup%27s+Poll+on+Evolution&utm_campaign=2012.06.12&utm_medium=email
Miller, Iona, Anima Mundi: Soul-filled World, http://ionamiller2009.iwarp.com/whats_new_37.html
Salam, Abdus, (1991), The roleof chirality in the origin of life, http://library.ictp.trieste.it/DOCS/P/90/277.pdf
Sterzik, M. “Biosignatures as revealed by spectropolarimetry of Earthshine”, by M. Sterzik et al. in the journal Nature, 1st March 2012. The team is composed of Michael F. Sterzik (ESO, Chile), Stefano Bagnulo (Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, UK) and Enric Palle (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain). Read more
: http://www.universetoday.com/93929/is-there-life-on-earth/#ixzz1xccBsGyy
Strassler, Matt, The Hierarchy Problem, http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-hierarchy-problem/
http://www.learner.org/courses/physics/unit/text.html?unit=4&secNum=6
[The World Soul] “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” –Giordano Bruno.
If medieval theology had removed God to a wholly transcendent sphere, to the Renaissance Platonists nature was permeated by life, divinity, and numinous mystery, a vital expression of the World Soul and the living powers of creation. In the words of Richard Tarnas, “The garden of the world was again enchanted, with magical powers and transcendent meaning implicit in every part of nature.” --David Fideler
INTRODUCTION
Our universe is a profound symphony of the forces of nature that govern its unfolding. Throughout history, mythic and imaginal descriptions of the forces of nature preceded more scientific models of reality. Even such scientific models retain their metaphorical nature and applications which enrich our perceptions of our place in the Universe. Corollary concepts bridge the soul and the material universe.
The Hierarchy Problem describes the vast discrepancy between aspects of gravity and the weak nuclear force, which has to do with the size of the non-zero Higgs field. The hierarchy problem is a result of the calculated effective rest mass of the electron being skewed by omission of half of the Dirac equation.
An analogous philosophical problem comes from thinking a transcendent divinity was the source of all creation, and humanity lived in exile from heaven in a state of sin. This doctrine created a split between matter and spirit, causing the world of nature to be seen as separate from its creator and humanity. Such a hierarchical worldview is a collective loss of soul.
Culture can be defined as the work of soul-making. Returning soul to the world not only attends to the world, it offers more opportunity to engage in the work of soul ourselves.
The World Soul is not a fixed or defined substance, but a living substance made out of the hopes, dreams, and deepest imaginings of humanity and of all creation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation. This is the home of creation’s collective memories and the myths of humanity. What we used to describe in myths, we now explain in theories, which also retain their symbolic aspect.
A 2012 Gallup poll, described and critiqued in Metanexus, skews results by limiting options:
Here is how the question and choices currently are posed, with the 2012 percentages of Americans voicing each position represented in parentheses:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?
1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process. (32 percent)
2. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process. (15 percent)
3. God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. (46 percent)
All three options confuse mythic (meaningful) religious language with factual (measurable) scientific language. Sadly, for many people in America, such confusion is the norm—and priests and pastors in the pulpit are offering little help in sorting things out.
Even so, a growing number of thoughtful Americans have moved beyond the entrenched science vs. religion conflict. We go by many names and we find our homes both within and outside of church communities: religious naturalists, new theists, religious humanists, evolutionary humanists, emergentists. For us, we cannot say yes to any of the options Gallup offers.
It is thus time to evolve the Gallup poll on evolution. Simply add a fourth choice:
4. Human beings emerged naturally from a long process of physical and biological creativity that can be spoken of religiously as "God's creation" or scientifically as "evolution."
This proposed choice would enable a respondent to express a view of human origins fully grounded in mainstream science, while bridging to the mythic, interpretive language of religious tradition.
Joseph Campbell, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Huston Smith, Robert Bellah, Michael Shermer, Robert Wright, Pascal Boyer, and other scholars of comparative religion and evolutionary psychology remind us that we cannot understand religions and religious differences if we don't understand how the human mind instinctually and unconsciously relationalizes, or personifies, reality. More, there is no need for Americans today to give up the relational, to forgo meaningful connection and traditional language, even when we move beyond the supernatural belief systems of our ancestors. (Metanexus)
The Light of Being & Natural Wisdom
Jung suggested that the alchemists understood that there is a connection between the anima mundi and the soul or creative Source. The source of the wisdom and knowledge of the all-pervading essence of the anima mundi was “the innermost and most secret numinosum of man.” (Collected Works, vol. 14, para. 372.)
With the lumen naturae we can once again learn how to unlock the secrets of nature, so that we no longer have to attack and destroy the natural world in order to survive. To the archetypal psychologist the world, too, is a patient in need of therapeutic attention. When our fantasy of the world deprives it of personality and soul, we tend to treat this "inanimate" world badly.
The world soul (Greek: ψυχή κόσμου, Latin: Anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection, a vital force, between all living things. The World Soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions. The soul of the world in Platonism is the supposed spirit that permeates and animates all material nature. The "Soul of the World," is the same as Alaya of the Northern Buddhists; the divine Essence which pervades, permeates, animates, and informs all things, from the smallest atom of matter to man and god.
Anima mundi is the creative mystery of phenomenological resonance. In philosophy, anima mundi is a term denoting a universal spirit or soul that functions as an organizing principle. This divine spark in matter is the essence within creation, guiding the unfolding of life and the cosmos. Perhaps the secret of the Universe is simply that it is alive.
Is the quantum superposition of "quantum information" alive in some sense, animating reality? If “universal consciousness” informs matter as QM suggests, all forces must in some way express that consciousness in dynamic action. Anima Mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different points of view, different narratives. The material world is not set apart from ourselves. Quantum physics has revealed a fluid and unpredictable world, in which consciousness and matter are not separate—whether a photon of light behaves as a particle or wave depends upon the consciousness of the observer.
Creative Potential
We can explore the imaginal aspects of matter and fundamental forces, but not at the expense of our intellectual vision, or understanding of quantum and celestial mechanics. Antimatter may be the missing ingredient in our understanding of the Big Picture. Jung’s anima, a unifying panpsychic life-principle, could be applied to all lifeforms and it would be indistinguishable from the weak nuclear force which, like the anima, always adjusts its emanation so as to preserve life.
A double-slit optical system tests the possible role of consciousness in the collapse of the quantum wavefunction. The results appear to be consistent with a consciousness-related interpretation of the quantum measurement problem. (Radin et al, 2012)
The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics, and is also very important in chemistry. The mass of an electron is significantly less (at least 3 times less) than the mass of a proton or a neutron.
How electrons (mass, charge and spin) move in certain structures can be described by relativistic quantum physics, modeling them as if they have no mass at all. The electron mass is known to be sensitive to local fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and undergoes a small shift in a thermal field.
When an electron moves to a lower orbit it gives off excess energy and finds itself in its 'desired' location. It does not physically travel from one shell to another. It disappears from one location and appears at the other location.
Likewise in the mindscape, the expulsion or rejection of the imagination or many possibilities leads to a new perspective from a new narrower location in the mindscape. If the mind is not happy with many possibilities it can only find happiness with fewer possibilities.
But in the model nothing has moved other than the perspective, which is to say mind. The facts (if there be any) remained the same but the mind narrowed the possibilities or un-factual via focus. Focus moves the mind into a range of narrower possibilities. Focus appears to be like an electron moving to lower and lower orbits in the shell. The desire to reduce the virtual possibilities leads to physical collapse of the realities.
In the mindscape, the expulsion or rejection of the imagination or many possibilities leads to a new perspective from a new narrower location in the mindscape. If the mind is not happy with many possibilities it can only find happiness with fewer possibilities. Perhaps the particle waits for observation because the potential for observation provides the path of least resistance to the future.
If Anima Mundi is the essence of our being, what would we do without her? Clavelli and White explore such a possibility through modeling a weakless universe:
“The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws given that life exists on at least one planet. Recently it has been proposed that a universe without weak interactions, but with other parameters suitably tuned can nevertheless allow life to develop. If a universe with such different physics from ours can generate life, the scope of the anthropic principle is reduced. We point out, however, that on closer examination the proposed “weakless" universe strongly inhibits the development of life in several different ways. One of the most critical barriers is that a weakless universe is unlikely to produce enough oxygen to support life. Since oxygen is an essential element in both water, the universal solvent needed for life, and in each of the four bases forming the DNA code for known living beings, we strongly question the hypothesis that a universe without weak interactions could generate life.”
A force is that which causes mass to accelerate. There are four forces in the universe:
1) The gravitational force causes mass to attract other mass. It is weak but works over great distances.
2) The electromagnetic force exerts influence over charged particles in an electromagnetic field. Like charges repel, different charges attract. It is stronger than the gravitational force but works over much shorter distances.
3) The strong force is the strongest of all forces but only works over very, very tiny distances. It holds the nucleus together.
4) The weak force is...um...er, what?
It is a force that acts on particles which carry weak charge, which is more or less half of all particles. Although it is stronger than gravity, the weak force is only effective at very short distances (10-18 m). Technically, it is one of the strongest forces, but because the particles involved are so big, their travel is limited to the short distance The force carriers (which are called W and Z bosons) are very massive, meaning the force is very short range. It's essentially zero outside atomic nuclei, which is why we never notice it in ordinary life. Neutrinos interact only through weak forces (and gravity) - that's why they're so hard to detect.
The weak force, as one of these four fundamental forces of Nature, underlies some forms of radioactivity and certain interactions between subatomic particles. This is a fundamental interaction between elementary particles that is several orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic interaction. A force between elementary particles causes certain processes that take place with low probability. It is dependent on a particle's electrical charge and weak isospin. This fundamental force of nature underlies some forms of radioactivity, governs the decay of unstable subatomic particles such as mesons, and initiates the nuclear fusion reaction that fuels the Sun and stars.
In equilibrium, there is zero net force by definition, but (balanced) forces may be present. The strong and weak forces act only at very short distances. The strong force is by far the strongest of the forces, followed by the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and finally the extremely feeble gravitational force. Like the Electromagnetic & Strong forces, the Weak force is also mediated by “force carriers”.
How strong is the weak force? When we say that the weak force is weak, it's because two particles that can only interact weakly with each other are, in fact, very unlikely to interact at all. The effectiveness of the weak force is confined to a distance range of 10 −17 metre, about 1 percent of the diameter of a typical atomic nucleus. The muon is the key to the strength of the weak force.
The weak force is responsible for radioactive decay and neutrino interactions. During beta decay a neutron disappears, replaced by a proton, an electron and a neutrino (anti-electron). A down quark disappears and an up quark is produced. The up quark eventually turns into the electron and neutrino. Although we hardly encounter processes governed by the weak force in our everyday life, it is still of crucial importance to life in all potential manifestations.
One of the main breakthroughs in our understanding of the subatomic world in the 1970s was the proof that the weak interaction and the electromagnetic interaction -- another of the four fundamental forces -- are, in fact, two aspects of one and the same interaction. It is called the electroweak interaction and its strength is determined by three parameters, the Fermi constant being one of them.
Hierarchy problems are related to fine-tuning problems and problems of naturalness.
Studying the renormalization in hierarchy problems is difficult, because such quantum corrections are usually power-law divergent, which means that the shortest-distance physics are most important. Because we do not know the precise details of the shortest-distance theory of physics (quantum gravity), we cannot even address how this delicate cancellation between two large terms occurs. Therefore, researchers postulate new physical phenomena that resolve hierarchy problems without fine tuning (renormalization).
This has led to the search for the elusive Higgs particle, which models the subtle force that gives energy the resistence it needs to precipitate matter. So far, Higg’s mass cannot be calculated.
In particle physics, the most important hierarchy problem is the question that asks why the weak force is 1032 times stronger than gravity. Both of these forces involve constants of nature, Fermi's constant for the weak force and Newton's constant for gravity. Furthermore if the Standard Model is used to calculate the quantum corrections to Fermi's constant, it appears that Fermi's constant is unnaturally large and should be closer to Newton's constant, unless there is a delicate cancellation between the bare value of Fermi's constant and the quantum corrections to it.
Cancellation of the Higgs boson quadratic mass renormalization between fermionic top quark loop and scalar stop squark tadpole Feynman diagrams in a supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model.
More technically, the question is why the Higgs boson is so much lighter than the Planck mass (or the grand unification energy, or a heavy neutrino mass scale): one would expect that the large quantum contributions to the square of the Higgs boson mass would inevitably make the mass huge, comparable to the scale at which new physics appears, unless there is an incredible fine-tuning cancellation between the quadratic radiative corrections and the bare mass. (Wiki, Hierarchy Problem)
Anima Mundi & Panspermia
John Gribbin and Martin Rees (1989) point out that the so-called “weak force” that governs radioactive decay must be extremely fine-tuned in order for stars to shed matter in great quantities during supernova explosions. Our bodies are composed of elements that were forged in the interior of stars and then released in supernova explosions. Even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic distance scale.
We can summarize *the presently accepted view of the origin of life in three stages: the cosmic stage; the prebiotic chemical stage; and the biological stage. The cosmic stage concerns itself with the early history of the universe where the electroweak made a phase transition into two forces, electromagnetic and weak, 10 ~12 sees after the universe was born. The temperature was then 250 GeV and the carriers of the neutral weak force - the ZQ particle - acquired mass. In the matrix of embedded hierarchies, amplification of this electroweak advantage over the course of time by repetetive steps converted the 20 amino acids which make up proteins. (Salam)
In 2012 researchers announced the universe is potentially teeming with life. Life and (near-life) in the form of bacteria and viruses (together called microbes) pervade the universe in the interior of comets, meteorites and clouds of interstellar dust. Humans have nearly 60 bacteria species in their guts, harmful and beneficial. We have 10 times the number of bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, and 100 times bacterial genes than our own. So we are pretty much walking bacteria farms.
The human body contains about 100 trillion cells, but only maybe one in 10 of those cells is actually — human. The rest are from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. Scientists identified some 10,000 species of microbes, including many never seen before, according to the first wave of results, which are being published in 16 papers in the journals Nature and PLoS. Those 10,000 or so species have more than 8 million genes, which is more than 300 times the number of human genes. (Ackerman)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/13/154913334/finally-a-map-of-all-the-microbes-on-your-body
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ultimate-social-network-bacteria-protects-health
Before Chandra Wickremesinghe scientists thought that huge obscuring clouds in deep space like the horse head nebula were made up of ice particles. But his untiring research showed the particles were mainly made of carbon- a form of a substance that was connected with life- a freeze dried dormant bacteria. Wickramasinghe calls them our genetic ancestors or cosmic ancestry. Thus, the science of astrobiology was born.
According to William Lane Craig (Strobel 2000, p. 77), P. C. W. Davies concluded that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for the formation of stars is a one followed by at least a thousand billion billion zeroes. Davies also estimated that if the strength of gravity or of the weak force were changed by only one part in a ten followed by a hundred zeroes, life could never have developed (ibid.). ...fine tuning is distributed across enormous ranges makes it even more amazing that they should be found in just the right proportions.
Discovery of microbes in space has shifted theories of the "seeds of life" origin on Earth to the well-accepted idea that organic polymers in space are abundant and may be necessary for life. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were orginally ridiculed for detecting dried, frozen bacteria in interstellar space, but it remains plausible that extraterrestrial microorganisms have continued to reach the surface during the entire existence of the planet Earth. The same effect might seed other planets with universal lifeforms. Wickramasinghe even contends microorganisms from the upper cloud layers of Venus may have been driven to Earth by the solar winds during the 2012 transit of Venus. (Jayawardhana)
Habitable planets may be in orbit around billions of stars in the Milky Way, a long-term study has suggested. Astronomers came to this stunning conclusion after a six-year star survey which suggests planets on which humans could live are commonplace in our galaxy. Scientists estimate as many as 10 billion stars in the Milky Way may host planets in the habitable - or 'Goldilocks' - zone. (Allen)
All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA and RNA, and in the metabolic pathways, are ‘right-handed’. A wrong-handed amino acid disrupts the stabilizing α-helix in proteins. DNA could not be stabilized in a helix if even a single wrong-handed monomer were present, so it could not form long chains. This means it could not store much information, so it could not support life.
When primitive organisms completed their experiments with direct interaction with electromagnetism (photosynthesis) they moved on to EMs closest sibling, the weak nuclear force, which resulted (in the present majority view) in homochirality - (nominally ) right-handed DNA from left-handed amino acids - a direct interaction with weak force was evolutionarily successful.
β-decay is one form of radioactive decay, and it is governed by the weak force. This force has a slight handedness, called parity violation, so some theorists thought β-decay could account for the chirality in living organisms. However, the weak force is aptly named—the effect is minuscule—a long way from producing the required 100 % homochirality. Prebiotic conditions may or may not have favored asymmetric β-radiolysis as the selector of the exclusive signature of optical activity in living nature.’
The beginning of life remains nature’s greatest mystery. We still do not know what distinguishes organic from inorganic matter. The nature of matter is informed by the Weak Force of physics and the genius of Creation. The domain of Anima Mundi is not limited to Earth but extends from the subquantal domain to that of astrophysics, as an essential component and dynamic of all matter.
Every major scientific breakthrough in the history of the human race has a correlation in the human Soul. To make hidden things that are invisible appear and to manifest is the power of the imagination and the will. There is no greater power in man than these two combined forces. Imagination is the power to create images; it is the active evocation of inner images. This is an authentic feat of thought and idea, and this is how inventions are realized, and how all works of art, music, science and all great things are created.
By imagination the alchemist does not mean the spinning of aimless or groundless fantasies. He or she does not just play with its objects but tries to grasp the inner facts and tries to see them in images true to their nature. This activity is an opus, a work, and it is an art and a development.
The alchemist Ruland says that imagination is the star in man. The term Astrum is a term invented by Paracelsus. He said that the power to visualize belonged to something astral in man. He meant that it belonged to an intellect above the lower material man and that it was a divine intelligence belonging to the spiritual man, something like the quintessence in man. It is the mediator between man and the divine. Imagination is a concentrated psychophysical extract of the life forces.
Man has a visible and invisible workshop. The visible one is his body, the invisible one his imagination. The imagination is a sun in the soul of man acting in its own sphere, as the sun in our system acts on the earth. Wherever the latter shines, germs planted in the soil grow and vegetation springs up.
Quantum physics suggests consciousness is connected to matter at the quantum level. However, we are still unaware how to describe the nature of such universal consciousness, much less its interaction with matter, other than through the observations of the Standard Model.
Jung’s anima is a sort of constrained version of a similar but universal "force". The World Soul has agents, those who will heed Her voice and bring forth, synchronistically, knowledge that is important to the world at a particular time in history. Simultaneously, because of the principle of correspondence, this knowledge has corollary relevance for the human Soul. As above, so below.
"...It turns out that this “electron mass” hierarchy problem is exactly analogous to what is more commonly known as The Hierarchy Problem. This is the question of why the Higgs mass is so small...." It is because Dirac’s negative mass is ignored; weak force is all tangled up with Higgs blunting effect.
Independent researcher, K. Thomas didn’t intend to solve the hierarchy problem. He was looking for a gauge for determining the strength of the {outrageously misnamed) weak force. The relative strengths of electromagnetism, weak force, and gravity is the gauge. Right now, the weak force is unusually strong (that’s the basis of the hierarchy problem) and that presages problems re: species survival.
In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, some believe that the fact is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.
Yet, resonance energy transfer (RET)-Induced intermolecular pairing force is a tunable weak interaction. Passive and active tunable control of interactions enables phase transitions and switchable functionality. Dipoles and liquid crystals are tunable with magnetic fields and resonance. Energy transfer systems are characterized by tunability. Biological organisms ranging from bacteria to humans are assumed to be continuously tunable through choice.
Some structures are more suitable for self-organization. Such evolutionary adaptability (or evolvability) can itself evolve through variation and selection. Organizations that are complex in terms of numbers of components and interactions are more likely to meet peak-climbing conditions, but less likely to meet stability conditions. Biological structures that are characterized by a high degree of component redundancy and multiple weak interactions satisfy these conflicting pressures. Functional redundancy appears in many forms in biological systems.
Weak interactions are another form of redundancy, but one that occurs at the interconnection level. A weak interaction has a small informational effect. Redundancy through multiple weak interactions allows a system to have many components and interactions (and therefore a high degree of genetic control) while limiting the impact of any particular component or interaction. A system with weak interactions is highly controllable at the genetic level, and suggests why weak interactions are a key component of many evolvable structures seen in biology. The benefit of weak interactions can also be seen in the context of enhancing evolvability in non-biological systems.
"Weak interactions occur extensively in regulatory pathways. Regulatory pathways, in turn, are thought to have been of considerable importance to the evolution of complex multi-cellular organisms [Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998]. Examples of multiple weak interactions are the calcium ions whose concentration controls the secretion of neurotransmitters in the brain; and the interactions between the binding site, enzymes, enhancers, and control signals that lead to the formation of a transcription complex in eukaryotes. In each of these cases it is the net effect of all of the interactions that controls the activation level. Because of this, the strength of activation can be varied gradually through the addition and removal of components and interactions, and can respond flexibly to new sources of regulation. The effect of redundancy is to increase the tunability of evolution such that most mutations lead to small or neutral changes to an organism's fitness."
"Evolvability is the relative capacity for organismal lineages to become better adapted to their environment as a consequence of natural selection acting upon essentially random genetic variation. Biological systems are believed to be organised in a way that promotes evolvability. Important sources of evolvability include redundancy, compartmentalisation, exploratory mechanisms, and epigenetic and ecological processes. Redundancy in particular is though to support neutral evolution: a conceptually powerful mode of evolutionary exploration. Whilst it is not known how these sources of evolvability evolved, it has been speculated that this is due both to re-use of mechanisms evolved for other purposes and to lineage selection. "(Lones)
DISCUSSION
At the birth of our very tiny universe we would have seen the emergence of a glorious, symmetrical transition of physics. This was followed by the separation of the strong nuclear force from the unified electro-weak forcel. This led to an inflationary state where the universe expanded from infinitesimal size (.0000000000000000000000000000001 cm) to about the size of a marble or larger in a very small fraction of time – far less than a single second. The separation of the weak force from the electromagnetic force was a phase transition leading to the emergence of quarks, and then to hydrogen and helium nuclei. From them came stars which produced the other elements.
Weak nuclear forces are responsible for radioactivity and also for exhibiting some peculiar symmetry features not seen with the other forces. In contrast to electromagnetic and strong forces, the strength of the weak force is different for particles and anti-particles (Charge Violation), for a scattering process and its mirror image (Parity Violation), and for a scattering process and the time reversal of that scattering process (Time Violation).
The weak force drives radioactive decays that:
- help generate sunlight (hydrogen fusion),
- enable advanced medical diagnosis and treatment,
- help determine the age of organic materials from carbon isotope abundances,
- help determine the age of the earth from uranium isotope abundances
- provide heating for the Earth and an energy source for plate tectonics, through the decays of Uranium, Thorium and Potassium.
Clavelli and White conclude tenatively that a weakless universe would not be likely to support life but that much more work would have to be done to know for sure. They are solid on pro-life side but are very mainstream and are not intelligent designers or creationists.
“If there are many hospitable alternative universes, the anthropic principle based on observer selection would no longer be a useful guide to understanding the properties of our world except for the smallness of the cosmological constant. Faced with a plethora of life supporting alternative universes, the string landscape ideas would also lose whatever predictive power they might have unless the weakless universe or other alternatives could be shown not to be among the local minima of string theory. Obviously, however, much further theoretical analysis would be necessary to confirm
that a universe without weak interactions would, indeed, allow the evolution of life. The nuclear reactions proposed by the authors of ref. [1] as an alternate mechanism for stellarnucleosynthesis would need to be studied in greater detail. In addition to such open questions, however, we have proposed that a serious problem in a weakless universe from the point of view of generating life is the difficulty of distributing oxygen through the universe in anywhere near the required abundance. Such a universe would be extremely deficient in oxygen and life would, in effect, have been frustrated at an early stage. Our observations reduce the probability of generating life.”
The Weak Force
The strength of the weak force between interacting quarks and leptons can be characterized by their weak charge (distinct from their electric charge). The weak charges of quarks and leptons are comparable to their electromagnetic charges, a manifestation of how electromagnetism and the weak force are components of a unified electroweak force.
It is termed weak because its typical field strength is several orders of magnitude less than that of both electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force. Most particles will decay by a weak interaction over time. It has one unique property – namely quark flavor changing – that does not occur in any other interaction. In addition, it also breaks parity-symmetry and CP-symmetry. Quark flavor changing allows for quarks to swap their 'flavor', one of six, for another.
Weak interactions are most noticeable when particles undergo beta decay, and in the production of deuterium and then helium from hydrogen that powers the sun's thermonuclear process. Such decay also makes radiocarbon dating possible, as carbon-14 decays through the weak interaction to nitrogen-14. It can also create radioluminescence, commonly used in tritium illumination, and in the related field of betavoltaics. It is responsible for the radioactive decay of subatomic particles and initiates the process known as hydrogen fusion in stars. Weak interactions affect all known fermions; that is, particles whose spin (a property of all particles) is a half-integer.
The weak nuclear force controls the speed of nuclear reactions in the sun. "It is just weak enough so that the hydrogen in the sun burns at a slow and steady rate," explains physicist Freeman Dyson. Many other examples could be given to show how our life depends on the delicately balanced laws and conditions found in the universe. Science writer Professor Paul Davies compared these universal laws and conditions to a set of knobs and stated: "It seems as if the different knobs have to be fine-tuned to enormous precision if the universe is to be such that life will flourish." (Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler)
Thomas speculates that the weak force self adjusts - in various epochs - to maintain conditions for life potential. Just possibly, distress or other strong signals from living things could be a tiny part of the feedback loop. The “screams of the damned” could be any non-zero feedback, no matter how small. He admits, naturally, that can’t be proven yet and doesn’t need to be; it’s a plausible consequence of solving hierarchy.
The hypothesis is that the weak force consistently acts to push things toward an environment that life can survive in. Maybe all those bacteria, bugs, toads and everything are affecting it by psychokinesis, he boldly suggests.
IF the universe really is teeming with life as some recent evidence suggests, you could take Jung’s anima and apply it to all genders and all lifeforms and it would be indisinguishable from the weak nuclear force which, like the anima, always adjusts its emanation so as to preserve life.
The weak force has the following effects:
- That EM & Weak forces unify at high energies (1015K) has been verified in a particle accelerator.
- Some postulate that the weak force in beta decay might exert a selection preference.
- Exchange of identity between protons and neutrons is mediated by weak force decay; neutrinos only feel the weak force, which could explain their small mass. (King).
- The most basic manifestation of handedness in nature comes from the weak force (King)
- Although the electromagnetic force has chiral symmetry, the electron also interacts via the neutral weak force when close to the nucleus; the chiral weak force may provide a symmetrybreaking perturbation. (King).
- makes it possible for some stars, like the sun, to have a long steady middle age conducive to life.
- the weak force plays a crucial role in the explosion of massive stars such as supernovae, which distribute the elements necessary for the formation of life.
- the weak force is the source of WATER, by hindering somewhat the forces that would have bypassed water early on.
- there is strong evidence that microbes have virtuoso capacity to manipulate weak force on small scale its not unreasonable to wonder about the collective effect on a larger scale; particle-particle and microbe-particle interactions.
- we have all the equipment to interact with weak force because we are finely tuned to its first cousin, electromagnetism.
Thomas suggests a vase analogy using facts as established by orthodoxy:
The non-zero Higgs field has a size of about 250 GeV, and that gives us the W and Z particles with masses of about 100 GeV. But it turns out that quantum mechanics would lead us to expect that this size of a Higgs field is unstable, something like (warning: imperfect analogy ahead) a vase balanced precariously on the edge of a table. With the physics we know about so far, the tendency of quantum mechanics to jostle — those quantum fluctuations I’ve mentioned elsewhere — would seem to imply that there are two natural values for the Higgs field — in analogy to the two natural places for the vase, firmly placed on the table or smashed on the floor. Naively, the Higgs field should either be zero, or it should be as big as the Planck Energy, 10,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than it is observed to be. Why is it at a value that is non-zero and tiny, a value that seems, at least naively, so unnatural? (Of Particular Significance. Prof Strassler of Rutgers University)
This is the hierarchy problem.
- the weak force, by its "handedness" has acted to keep the vase just balanced at the very edge of the table from supposed "big bang" till now
- this has to be through a feedback loop
- it seems impossible that vase could stay just balanced - as it is now- to both GR and QM.
- QM says the vase must crash. GR says the vase has to be safe at center of table. BOTH agree on present and past position of vase at very edge of crashing
- the size of putative Higgs is determined by weak force
- the size of Higgs should be very big according to QM
- the weak force dictates something that doesn’t fit
- the vase doesn’t crash because weak force is "wrong size" doesn’t fit either QM or GR
CONCLUSIONS
Anima mundi only needs to be a tiny tiny fraction of one of the myriad feedback loops to be the deciding difference due to the unbelievably delicately balanced state of the vase-- which should be crashed by random quantum fluctuations - but never is. And that solves the hierarchy problem retroactively.
Thomas also contends - from other valid data- that the "vote" from biological signals is THE DECIDING VOTE, but that is impossible to explain in brief --AND DOESNT NEED TO BE. The deciding “bio vote” is NOT IM-POSSIBLE. That’s all that needs to be shown, the rest being detail work, rather than conceptual.
Electroweak Theory
The Standard Model of particle physics describes the electromagnetic interaction and the weak interaction as two different aspects of a single electroweak interaction, the theory of which was developed around 1968 by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. They were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. The Higgs mechanism provides an explanation for the presence of three massive gauge bosons (the three carriers of the weak interaction) and the massless photon of the electromagnetic interaction.
According to the electroweak theory, at very high energies, the universe has four massless gauge boson fields similar to the photon and a complex scalar Higgs field doublet. However, at low energies, gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken down to the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism (one of the Higgs fields acquires a vacuum expectation value). This symmetry breaking would produce three massless bosons, but they become integrated by three photon-like fields (through the Higgs mechanism) giving them mass. These three fields become the W+, W−and Z bosons of the weak interaction, while the fourth gauge field which remains massless is the photon of electromagnetism.
Although this theory has made a number of predictions, including a prediction of the masses of the Z and W bosons before their discovery, the Higgs boson itself has never been observed. Producing Higgs bosons is a major goal of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
"...[R]elative to the characteristic strength of weak interactions, which set the energy scale of modern-day particle physics..."
"WHICH SET THE ENERGY SCALE", (hint,hint). Yet, the weak force "gets no respect" and that’s why the weapons makers (physicists) keep missing the boat.
[raw
effective rest mass problem is not only analogous but actually PART of hierarchy problem
matt strassler had 2 versions of hierarchy problem explanation. one had vase analogy, one didnt
feynman kicked the can down the road by making the inaccuracies of classical and QM cancell exactly at electron mass
he fouled the time assymmetry of weak force the same way (nonreversible time needed for a record or history which could become hologram_) feynman cheerfully volunteered that he got the nobel prize fpr cheap magic tricks - but what he did was deemed necessary at the time the weak force is only about 80 years old - theorized by fermi and follow up has been slowed by lack of money due to lack of weapons applications and also because the lumpy rug of QM was caused mainly by difficulties in dealing with weak force - absent GRAVITY! - which QM ignores for simplicity but which cant be ignored in the case of weak force which is long range by proxy; it bends-the-beam of its sibling on either side (gravity and EM)
weak force is always attended by its own gravity and modulates EM
there is no question fermi feynman scwinger gell-man et al were aware of all this but it was too much to manage at the time - they had to come upo with a somewhat finished product first
at the solvay conference , einstein was politely informed that he was an out-of-touch has-been (1927)
for that reason he quit wrestling with the non-infinite lifetime of electron and left it for QM which states explicirly that the universe is falling apart and may have already collapsed -----ONLY because they cant believe the vase stays balanced on the catastrophic edge --- "but, still it".. stays]
the only practical way to exploit weak-tronics is to start with the MAGNETIC ISOTOPE OF MAGNESIUM (mg25) and its relation to variable beta decay. the larson idea of LENR's is a good example of what weak-tronics might do , IF we live in a universe where weak-tronics is POSSIBLE. Last years (2011) probe for the Higgs boson at LHC appears to be permissive for weak-tronics, putting the minimum energy for excitation of the fifth dimension (the vacuum) at about 4 TEV, down from 20TEV, but still higher than the 1 TEV predicted by some influential theorists (lisa randall et al).
I was holding out for my long time prediction of 19.5 GEV for the higgs resonance but 125GEV will do....and besides, i hadnt considered the possibility of the requirement of a shadow higgs (mostly because i considered the dominant heavy higgs theories to be ridiculous) in the 5th dimension/mirror universe/ adjacent vacuum to accompany the symmetry restoring right-handed weak force (or its equivilant).A higgs fragment at 19.5 means the vacuum is unstable and the universe could already be self destructing (hawking). i never worried about that because the universe has been here a very long time and cannot self destruct. NEVERTHELESS, a shadow higgs at 19.5 and a weak-force related higgs fragment at 125 would bode well for the future of our species, and a shadow higgs WAS discovered by CMS and it WAS significant (Ellis et al) but was dismissed -for now- by an accounting trick which is too complicated to get into here.
to comprehend the implications its necessary to consider the origin of "spin" and why that just about mandates a 5d (expandable to 11d) KK type universe with gravity - considered as an accelleration rather than a true "force" - as the unifying force.
5d origin of spin
john ellis (in link you sent) is the gut who organized the polite protest against the stashing away of the 19.5 FEV particle by CMS (CMS was the only LHC facility outfitted to detect it at the time.
"... agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" said British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."
"everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,"---A. Einstein
spin on spin:
Particles should be considered pointlike charges (therefore spherical when they escape from the intersection of 5d and 4d which confines them and PRODUCES THEM. (DEATHNIUM TRAP OR "HOLE")
In escaping, they twist off a little space that sticks to them and they gain spin by the poles of their helical (twisting or spinning) polarization. (seen head on this is circular or non-polarized) this will be enlarged upon momentarily.
the point (ho-ho) now is that the formation of a particle exactly recapitulates the formation of the universe
(spherical) from the pointlike big-bang and , in the electrons case produces a particle very much like a miniature universe - with the same lifetime, as well., so electrons are a little bit special, that way.
what particle gets formed depends entirely on the energy available at the particular 4d/5d jubction (the angle of the geometric contact)
we are taught that QM is perfectly reversible and that geometric space can be formed by matter. ergo :MATTER CAN BE CREATED BY "GEOMETRY" (NAKED SPACE, NOT SPACETIME)
Fractal fans and holographers may see significance here . sure, but it absolutely must NOT be overdrawn. (see a. einstein quote above)
There is no difference whatsoever between a massless particle , like the photon, and a wave. they are exactly the same thing. the distinction was originally due to the scale of our measuring tools; if you were a giant, you would insist a LF radio wave is a particle. Its about the same with debroglie waves but all these are very short - too short to measure easily in early 1900's. the earth is a wave- particle but the wavelength is way in the hard gamma ray range so , you might as well consider it a particle. hard gamma rays are too hard to do anything WITH.
everything does try to be round. the reason is economy, minimalization, most volume per unit of surface material.
nobody ever considers that the unique quality of pi is that it is NORMAL as are its roots and exponents. yes, its the same NORMAL as in RENORMALIZATION. the old idea of atoms being little solar systems and of charged particles being pointlike is passe but not at all invalid. theQM<QED<QCD way is a tiny bit more precise in practice but that tiny bit never makes any significant difference.
you can balance roots of pi against the (integers only!) PERIODIC TABLE and cancel out the infinities.
the reciprocal of the fourth root of pi is 1.33-something, which is where 4d meets 5d and relates to the only stable isotope of cesium.
an 11d noncompact kaluza klein built this way relates to and describes the most ancient and primitive form of esp. and it fills in the oddments of the nature of matter that QM cant reach.
its all little round things if you chose to look at it that way. the only proscription is you cant change formats in mid-solution; that produces a big mess.
Weak Emergence: Absolute Existence Becoming Experience
Is the observed strength of the weak force vital for the emergence of observers? Emergence is a possible order arising from chaos. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents. This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
Causing systems to differentiate, weak emergence is the root of higher-order complexity, coalescing novel, coherent structures. Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them, potentially including self-reflection. Humans become self-conscious and track their own evolution.
Open systems extract information and order out of their environment. They bring coherence to increasingly complex forms. Systems theory uses feedback loops to help us map how interactions influence each other. It names two types of feedback loops: reinforcing and balancing loops. Heeding the inner voice of the Anima mundi, can applied emergence help us work with the dynamics of emergent complexity to realize our intentions as life-serving outcomes?
REFERENCES
Ackerman, Jennifer, (2012) How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health Scientic American, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ultimate-social-network-bacteria-protects-health
Allen, Gavin, Milky Way could contain billions of habitable planets, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2085268/Milky-Way-contain-billions-habitable-planets-reveal-scientists-year-study.html#ixzz1xcaIrj34
Bruno, Giordano, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. Jack Lindsay, p. 81. (Translated by Jack Lindsay. New York: International Publishers, 1964.
Michael Conrad, The geometry of evolution
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0303264790900305
David Fideler, The Soul of the Cosmos p.138. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 213. New York: Harmony Books, 1991.
John R. Gribbin, Martin J. Rees, (1989), Cosmic Coincidences, Black Swan (March 21, 1991)
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's Analysis of Interstellar Dust
http://www.panspermia.org/astronmy.htm
Jayawardhana, Walter , Chandra wickramasinghe says venusian life came to Earth during the transit
http://www.lankanewsweb.com/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1960:chandra-wickramasinghe-says-venusian-life-came-to-erath-during-the-transit&catid=1:general&Itemid=29
Jayawardhana, Walter , Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe - the man who asserted: "Life did not start here on earth but in space," has retired, http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/2788
King, Chris, Cosmic Symmetry-breaking, Bifurcation, Fractality and Biogenesis
http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Chris-King-fractal-approach.pdf
M. Kirschner and J. Gerhart. Evolvability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA), 95: 8420-8427, July 1998.
Lones, Michael, Biological Evolvability, http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mal503/common/thesis/c5.html
Radin, Dean (2012), Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments. Dean Radin,1,a) Leena http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20final.pdf
Clavelli, I. and R.E. White III, Problems in a weakless universe
http://bama.ua.edu/~lclavell/papers/weakless2c.pdf
Hierarchy Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem
Metanexus, http://metanexus.net/blog/evolving-gallups-poll-evolution?utm_source=2012.06.12+Evolving+Gallup%27s+Poll+on+Evolution&utm_campaign=2012.06.12&utm_medium=email
Miller, Iona, Anima Mundi: Soul-filled World, http://ionamiller2009.iwarp.com/whats_new_37.html
Salam, Abdus, (1991), The roleof chirality in the origin of life, http://library.ictp.trieste.it/DOCS/P/90/277.pdf
Sterzik, M. “Biosignatures as revealed by spectropolarimetry of Earthshine”, by M. Sterzik et al. in the journal Nature, 1st March 2012. The team is composed of Michael F. Sterzik (ESO, Chile), Stefano Bagnulo (Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, UK) and Enric Palle (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain). Read more
: http://www.universetoday.com/93929/is-there-life-on-earth/#ixzz1xccBsGyy
Strassler, Matt, The Hierarchy Problem, http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-hierarchy-problem/
http://www.learner.org/courses/physics/unit/text.html?unit=4&secNum=6
June 2012 - Reuters reports "Big Bang particle discovery closer" and viXra log reports "LHC Prepares for ICHEP" Today 06/12/2012 Reuters reports that "[p]hysicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said on Tuesday." See here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/12/us-science-higgs-idUSBRE85B0EZ...
Meanwhile, Philip E. Gibbs reported on 06/10/2012 at the viXra log that "now the computer grid will light up as ATLAS and CMS push through the analysis for the Higgs and SUSY plots in time to get them approved for the massive ICHEP conference in one months time." See here http://blog.vixra.org/2012/06/10/lhc-prepares-for-ichep/ According to Gibbs, "The schedule of talks shows that each experiment will be giving detailed talks for each individual Higgs channel (plus possibly a new H -> Z+γ analysis) using 2012 data at 8 TeV leading up to the final combinations for each experiment. They will leave it up to bloggers to complete the full combination. It is likely that they will fall just short of discovery significance in diphoton channels and combined plots for each experiment. The full combined significance for the LHC will probably pass the 5 sigma finish line but no official combination will show that. This is not certain because the statistical fluctuations are not predictable."
Meanwhile, Philip E. Gibbs reported on 06/10/2012 at the viXra log that "now the computer grid will light up as ATLAS and CMS push through the analysis for the Higgs and SUSY plots in time to get them approved for the massive ICHEP conference in one months time." See here http://blog.vixra.org/2012/06/10/lhc-prepares-for-ichep/ According to Gibbs, "The schedule of talks shows that each experiment will be giving detailed talks for each individual Higgs channel (plus possibly a new H -> Z+γ analysis) using 2012 data at 8 TeV leading up to the final combinations for each experiment. They will leave it up to bloggers to complete the full combination. It is likely that they will fall just short of discovery significance in diphoton channels and combined plots for each experiment. The full combined significance for the LHC will probably pass the 5 sigma finish line but no official combination will show that. This is not certain because the statistical fluctuations are not predictable."
FURTHER READING
Problems in Particle Physics & Bianchi Type-III Cosmological Model: Part 1 Submitted by administrator on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 20:11 On a Natural Solution for the Hierarchy Problem Using Dimensional Regularization (by Ervin Goldfain): Abstract: This brief report suggests a straightforward solution for the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model using dimensional regularization of quantum field theory (QFT). Our viewpoint breaks away from traditional approaches to the hierarchy problem based on supersymmetry (SUSY), Technicolor, extra-dimensions, anthropic arguments, fine-tuning or gauge unification near the Planck scale. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/164
Nonlinear Theory of Elementary Particles Part VII: Classical Nonlinear Electron Theories and Their Connection with QED (by Alexander G. Kyriakos): Abstract: In this article of nonlinear theory of elementary particles (NTEP) a review of the nonlinear field theories in the framework of classical electrodynamics is presented. It is shown that the results found within these theories can be transferred to quantum theory. These results can also help us to understand many aspects of the quantum description of elementary particles. In particular, they explain why electron can be interpreted as a point and non-point particle simultaneously. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/168
Koide’s Formula Follows from Nonlinear Dynamics of Quantum Fields (by Ervin Goldfain): Abstract: In this brief report we argue that Koide’s formula arises from universal attributes of nonlinear dynamics in field theory. Feigenbaum scaling not only provides a natural paradigm for generating particle masses and coupling charges, but also a basis for understanding the family structure of fermions. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/165
Bianchi Type-III Cosmological Model with Negative Constant Deceleration Parameter with Wet Dark Fluid in Brans-Dicke Theory of Gravitation (by Kishor S. Adhav, A. S. Nimkar, M. R. Ugale, R. S. Thakare): Abstract: Bianchi type-III space time is considered in the presence of wet dark fluid source in the scalar-tensor theory of gravitation proposed by Brans and Dicke (Phys. Rev. 124:925, 1961). With the help of special law of variation for Hubble’s parameter proposed by Bermann (Nuovo Cimento 74B:182, 1983) a cosmological model with negative constant deceleration parameter is obtained in the presence of wet dark fluid with disordered radiation. Some physical and kinematical properties of the model are also discussed. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/146
Problems in Particle Physics & Bianchi Type-III Cosmological Model: Part 1 Submitted by administrator on Sun, 06/10/2012 - 20:11 On a Natural Solution for the Hierarchy Problem Using Dimensional Regularization (by Ervin Goldfain): Abstract: This brief report suggests a straightforward solution for the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model using dimensional regularization of quantum field theory (QFT). Our viewpoint breaks away from traditional approaches to the hierarchy problem based on supersymmetry (SUSY), Technicolor, extra-dimensions, anthropic arguments, fine-tuning or gauge unification near the Planck scale. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/164
Nonlinear Theory of Elementary Particles Part VII: Classical Nonlinear Electron Theories and Their Connection with QED (by Alexander G. Kyriakos): Abstract: In this article of nonlinear theory of elementary particles (NTEP) a review of the nonlinear field theories in the framework of classical electrodynamics is presented. It is shown that the results found within these theories can be transferred to quantum theory. These results can also help us to understand many aspects of the quantum description of elementary particles. In particular, they explain why electron can be interpreted as a point and non-point particle simultaneously. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/168
Koide’s Formula Follows from Nonlinear Dynamics of Quantum Fields (by Ervin Goldfain): Abstract: In this brief report we argue that Koide’s formula arises from universal attributes of nonlinear dynamics in field theory. Feigenbaum scaling not only provides a natural paradigm for generating particle masses and coupling charges, but also a basis for understanding the family structure of fermions. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/165
Bianchi Type-III Cosmological Model with Negative Constant Deceleration Parameter with Wet Dark Fluid in Brans-Dicke Theory of Gravitation (by Kishor S. Adhav, A. S. Nimkar, M. R. Ugale, R. S. Thakare): Abstract: Bianchi type-III space time is considered in the presence of wet dark fluid source in the scalar-tensor theory of gravitation proposed by Brans and Dicke (Phys. Rev. 124:925, 1961). With the help of special law of variation for Hubble’s parameter proposed by Bermann (Nuovo Cimento 74B:182, 1983) a cosmological model with negative constant deceleration parameter is obtained in the presence of wet dark fluid with disordered radiation. Some physical and kinematical properties of the model are also discussed. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/146
The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality: The Evolution of Existence into Experience: Part 2 Submitted by administrator on Fri, 06/08/2012 - 23:57 How Self-Relational Consciousness Produces and Interacts with Reality (by Huping Hu, Maoxin Wu): Abstract: In essence, Steven E. Kaufman’s work shows how self-relational Consciousness produces and interacts with reality. But to appreciate the important work done by Kaufman, one needs to read the whole 325 pages of this Focus Issue of JCER covering his work. Our goals with this Focus Issue are: (1) bring broader awareness of Kaufman’s work by scholars and all genuine truth seekers; and (2) promote scholarly discussions of the same through commentaries and responses to commentaries in the future issues of JCER. In so doing, we hope that all of us may benefit in our endeavor to reach higher Consciousness within ourselves and build a genuine Science of Consciousness. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/141
The Integration of Experience, Awareness, and Consciousness into the Relational-Matrix Model I: Experiential Mechanics (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In Article 2 & 3 of this work, we showed how existence, by forming relationships with itself repetitively and progressively, evolves into a relational structure that functions as the framework of reality. However, what we have described so far as the relational structure of reality, including the differentiation of that relational structure, explains only the fundamental behavior of, and some of the intrinsic relationships within, what we experience and are aware of as physical reality. What we have described so far doesn’t explain why there exists physical experience itself or why there exists an awareness of physical experience. To present a more complete, unified model of reality, it’s necessary to explain not only why physical reality behaves as it does but also, within the context of that same model, explain why we experience physical reality as we do, as well as why we’re aware or conscious of our experience, since experience, awareness, and consciousness are themselves integral parts of our reality. In that same vein, mental and emotional experiences are also integral parts of our reality and so must also be integrated into any model of reality that seeks to account for reality as a whole. The purpose of this article and the next article of this work, then, is to explain within the context of the same unified model of realty that was developed in Articles 2 & 3 of this work, how experience, awareness, and consciousness are all related, and in the process demonstrate that the physical, mental, and emotional experiential realities in which we find ourselves immersed can be understood in terms of a singular or unitary existence existing in relation to itself. Toward that end, we will now begin to explore how evolving existence, by existing in relation to itself at yet another level, becomes aware of physical, mental, and emotional experiences. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/139
The Integration of Experience, Awareness, & Consciousness into the Relational-Matrix Model II: Consciousness and the Awareness of Experience (Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: We have demonstrated how seemingly separate experiential realities can come to exist within the context of an ultimately indivisible, singular existence, but not why there exists an awareness of experience itself. That is, although we have demonstrated how existence can impactively interact with itself to create the form of any experience, we have yet to explain why there exists an awareness of that experiential form—in other words, why the differentiated area of reality that exists as the experiencer is aware of the form of its impactive-interactive relationship with the surrounding reality. In the following sections, we will explain why an awareness of the experiential boundary exists. In understanding why awareness exists, the nature of consciousness will become apparent.
Consciousness is unlimited, borderless, and undefined, whereas awareness is limited, bordered, and defined. When awareness becomes caught up in experiential reality, mistaking experiential reality for an independently existent reality, it literally becomes un-consciousness, or the opposite of consciousness. Since, for awareness, reality is whatever it experiences it to be, although awareness always remains what it is (i.e., consciousness), what awareness can experience itself to be is another matter entirely. For this reason, awareness can become unaware, can become unconscious of what it is, can become experientially cut off or separated from the consciousness that lies both within and beyond the screen of experience. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/140
The Integration of Experience, Awareness, and Consciousness into the Relational-Matrix Model I: Experiential Mechanics (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In Article 2 & 3 of this work, we showed how existence, by forming relationships with itself repetitively and progressively, evolves into a relational structure that functions as the framework of reality. However, what we have described so far as the relational structure of reality, including the differentiation of that relational structure, explains only the fundamental behavior of, and some of the intrinsic relationships within, what we experience and are aware of as physical reality. What we have described so far doesn’t explain why there exists physical experience itself or why there exists an awareness of physical experience. To present a more complete, unified model of reality, it’s necessary to explain not only why physical reality behaves as it does but also, within the context of that same model, explain why we experience physical reality as we do, as well as why we’re aware or conscious of our experience, since experience, awareness, and consciousness are themselves integral parts of our reality. In that same vein, mental and emotional experiences are also integral parts of our reality and so must also be integrated into any model of reality that seeks to account for reality as a whole. The purpose of this article and the next article of this work, then, is to explain within the context of the same unified model of realty that was developed in Articles 2 & 3 of this work, how experience, awareness, and consciousness are all related, and in the process demonstrate that the physical, mental, and emotional experiential realities in which we find ourselves immersed can be understood in terms of a singular or unitary existence existing in relation to itself. Toward that end, we will now begin to explore how evolving existence, by existing in relation to itself at yet another level, becomes aware of physical, mental, and emotional experiences. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/139
The Integration of Experience, Awareness, & Consciousness into the Relational-Matrix Model II: Consciousness and the Awareness of Experience (Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: We have demonstrated how seemingly separate experiential realities can come to exist within the context of an ultimately indivisible, singular existence, but not why there exists an awareness of experience itself. That is, although we have demonstrated how existence can impactively interact with itself to create the form of any experience, we have yet to explain why there exists an awareness of that experiential form—in other words, why the differentiated area of reality that exists as the experiencer is aware of the form of its impactive-interactive relationship with the surrounding reality. In the following sections, we will explain why an awareness of the experiential boundary exists. In understanding why awareness exists, the nature of consciousness will become apparent.
Consciousness is unlimited, borderless, and undefined, whereas awareness is limited, bordered, and defined. When awareness becomes caught up in experiential reality, mistaking experiential reality for an independently existent reality, it literally becomes un-consciousness, or the opposite of consciousness. Since, for awareness, reality is whatever it experiences it to be, although awareness always remains what it is (i.e., consciousness), what awareness can experience itself to be is another matter entirely. For this reason, awareness can become unaware, can become unconscious of what it is, can become experientially cut off or separated from the consciousness that lies both within and beyond the screen of experience. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/140
Unified Reality Theory in a Nutshell (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: Unified Reality Theory describes how all reality evolves from an absolute existence. It also demonstrates that this absolute existence must have consciousness as an attribute that's intrinsic to its being. Thus, it shows that consciousness, rather than being a product of the evolution of physical reality, is itself the source of what we experience as physical reality and that physical reality is itself but one aspect of an evolving universal consciousness. Ultimately, Unified Reality Theory uses science and logic to demonstrate that God exists, as a pervasive and absolute consciousness that transcends the realities of space and time, and that we, as well as everything else, are that. http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/107
Unified Reality Theory: Relational-Matrix Model (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: Our modeling of space-time as a structure must include an analysis and description of these two complementary aspects, i.e., something that exists, and the way that something is arranged into a structure. What space-time is made of we will analyze and describe in terms of spatial content. How that content is arranged we will analyze and describe in terms of spatial construct. Thus, In this article, we will describe the behavior of spatial content within the context of a defined spatial construct. This description will leave us with a model of space-time as a dynamic structure. We will call this model the relational-matrix model. This model will provide a framework that we can use to visualize the relationships between physical phenomena which we know must somehow be related but for which we currently lack the symbolic conceptual abstractions necessary to link together as a unified whole. http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/108
Unified Reality Theory: Relational-Matrix Model (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: Our modeling of space-time as a structure must include an analysis and description of these two complementary aspects, i.e., something that exists, and the way that something is arranged into a structure. What space-time is made of we will analyze and describe in terms of spatial content. How that content is arranged we will analyze and describe in terms of spatial construct. Thus, In this article, we will describe the behavior of spatial content within the context of a defined spatial construct. This description will leave us with a model of space-time as a dynamic structure. We will call this model the relational-matrix model. This model will provide a framework that we can use to visualize the relationships between physical phenomena which we know must somehow be related but for which we currently lack the symbolic conceptual abstractions necessary to link together as a unified whole. http://scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/view/108
Introduction to The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In this series of articles, we will show that reality as a whole can be consistently accounted for only if we understand that the nature of the singular existence from which reality extends through the process of repetitive and progressive self-relation isn’t other than consciousness itself. Thus, we will demonstrate that consciousness doesn’t come into existence at some later stage in the evolution of reality, but rather that the evolution of existence isn’t other than the evolution of consciousness and that experiential reality itself is what comes into existence at a certain stage in the evolution of consciousness-existence. In other words, we will show that consciousness isn’t a product of the machinations of physical reality but, on the contrary, that physical reality, as we experience it to exist, is itself a product of consciousness, albeit consciousness existing in relation to itself. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/136
The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality I: The Development of the Model (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In this article, we will describe the behavior of spatial content within the context of a defined spatial construct. This description will leave us with a model of space-time as a dynamic structure. For reasons that will later become clear, we will call this model the relational-matrix model. Once the relational-matrix model has been developed, we will then demonstrate in the next article how the functioning of this dynamic spatial structure can account for certain basic aspects of the nature and behavior of physical reality. Specifically, within the context of the relational-matrix model, we will account for the following aspects of physical reality: (1) the relationship between space and time, including the basis of temporal relativity, as well as the precise nature of time as a function of the dynamic aspect of the spatial structure; (2) the basis of the speed-of-light constant, including why the frequency and wavelength of electromagnetic radiation are inversely related as a function of that constant; (3) the basis of Planck’s constant, including why the energy associated with electromagnetic radiation exists in discrete amounts, or quanta; (4) the nature of gravitation, including why matter and gravitation are always associated and why gravitation is universally attractive; (5) the equivalence of the gravitational and inertial forces; (6) the relationship between electromagnetic radiation and gravitation; (7) the nature of energy; (8) wave/particle duality; and (9) the uncertainty principle. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/137
The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality II: Relating the Model to Space-Time and Physical Reality (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In this article, we will demonstrate that space-time functions as a dynamic relational structure. The relational-matrix model, as a visualizable representation of the structure of space, will be used to explain, among other things, why the physical relationships that Einstein mathematically described exist. Using the relational-matrix model to explain the behavior of physical reality, we will establish a conceptual basis for understanding how physical reality extends from the structure of space. By the end of this article, we will also have established a conceptual basis for understanding why nothing can truly be separated from anything else—i.e., why nothing can be said to exist independent of all other things. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/138
The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality I: The Development of the Model (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In this article, we will describe the behavior of spatial content within the context of a defined spatial construct. This description will leave us with a model of space-time as a dynamic structure. For reasons that will later become clear, we will call this model the relational-matrix model. Once the relational-matrix model has been developed, we will then demonstrate in the next article how the functioning of this dynamic spatial structure can account for certain basic aspects of the nature and behavior of physical reality. Specifically, within the context of the relational-matrix model, we will account for the following aspects of physical reality: (1) the relationship between space and time, including the basis of temporal relativity, as well as the precise nature of time as a function of the dynamic aspect of the spatial structure; (2) the basis of the speed-of-light constant, including why the frequency and wavelength of electromagnetic radiation are inversely related as a function of that constant; (3) the basis of Planck’s constant, including why the energy associated with electromagnetic radiation exists in discrete amounts, or quanta; (4) the nature of gravitation, including why matter and gravitation are always associated and why gravitation is universally attractive; (5) the equivalence of the gravitational and inertial forces; (6) the relationship between electromagnetic radiation and gravitation; (7) the nature of energy; (8) wave/particle duality; and (9) the uncertainty principle. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/137
The Relational-Matrix Model of Reality II: Relating the Model to Space-Time and Physical Reality (by Steven E. Kaufman): Abstract: In this article, we will demonstrate that space-time functions as a dynamic relational structure. The relational-matrix model, as a visualizable representation of the structure of space, will be used to explain, among other things, why the physical relationships that Einstein mathematically described exist. Using the relational-matrix model to explain the behavior of physical reality, we will establish a conceptual basis for understanding how physical reality extends from the structure of space. By the end of this article, we will also have established a conceptual basis for understanding why nothing can truly be separated from anything else—i.e., why nothing can be said to exist independent of all other things. http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/138
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Beyond Higgs: On Supersymmetry (or Lack Thereof) By Glenn Starkman | June 20, 2012 |
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/06/20/beyond-higgs-on-supersymmetry-or-lack-thereof/
With the search for the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, apparently reaching its long-anticipated-and-finally-successful conclusion, anticipation of the next set of discoveries is growing.
Recently the Stanford campus hosted a smallish gathering celebrating the 60th birthday of Savas Dimopoulos, justly acclaimed by each of the attendees as the (or at least one of the few) most insightful particle physics model builders of the last 30 years. (And my PhD adviser.) Now you’d think that the leading topic of discussion at such an event would be the details of the ongoing Higgs search – has it or hasn’t it been discovered? Does the fact that the two relevant experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ATLAS and CMS – both have a signal indicative of a new particle with the same mass? And what about the supportive analysis coming from Fermilab’s Tevatron?
Surprisingly (to the outsider) this was all considered old news. Repeatedly, the theorists joked that, with the exception of the actual CERN experimentalists present, all of us know that the Higgs has now been discovered with a mass of 125 GeV/c2. (It hasn’t, quite, but the hints are strong.) The message was clear: “We’ve known for decades that the Higgs is going to be found. So break open the champagne and get the celebrating over with, because what we really want to know is — which is the correct version of Beyond the Standard Model physics?” With a brief nod to large extra dimensions (a Dimopoulos, and associates A, D and also I, idea) and a fond farewell to Technicolor (another idea that Dimopoulos helped advance), the focus turned again and again to the likely suite of Supersymmetric (SUSY) particles (yet another stock in which Dimopoulos is heavily invested).
Supersymmetry – a theory that posits that for every known particle there is another (or more than one) yet-to-be-discovered partner particle – is the leading candidate for physics Beyond the Standard Model. It is central to string theory (a.k.a. super-string theory), required for gauge coupling unification (see below), useful for solving the Higgs Fine Tuning Problem (definitely see below) and also gives us the leading candidate for dark matter – the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP).
But I’m getting way ahead of myself, and probably you. Especially since I and my colleagues have come to believe that the principal indictment of the Standard Model, which has been used to argue so forcefully for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics is, hmmm, dubious. Or as one of those colleagues would say – completely wrong. A main rationale for supersymmetry evaporates on closer inspection.
So what is Beyond The Standard Model (BSM) physics, why are people so convinced it is around the corner, and should they be?
At least since the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN in 1983, physicists have been pretty much convinced that the Standard Model (SM) that emerged from the late 1960s and early 1970s is the correct model of fundamental physics. At least at energies below the so-called weak-scale – a few hundred GeV – or maybe a few times that. But particle theorists variously hoped/expected/knew that at higher energies the Standard Model was not the whole story, and a more fundamental theory would need to be found.
There are two types of reasons to doubt the completeness of the Standard Model – aesthetic (philosophical) and mathematical.
Aesthetic problem number one, physicists adore simplicity. Zero and one are our favorite numbers. Two can be suffered. After two comes “too many”, although identical copies (twins, triplets, …) may receive special dispensation. The Standard Model has too many too-many’s: three fundamental forces (a.k.a. gauge groups); way too many fundamental fermions (particles that make up matter)– three generations each with at least 5 representations (groups) of them — plus three sets of gauge bosons and the set of particles of which the Higgs boson is a member. It also has far too many (more than 20) independent parameters.
Aesthetic problem number two –– for no apparent reason the weak scale is much (as in about 1016 times) smaller than what we believe to be the fundamental energy scale of physics – the Planck scale (about 1019 GeV), a scale set by the strength of gravity (the one fundamental force not included in the Standard Model). This is known as the (Weak) Hierarchy Problem – and can also be understood in terms of the absolutely enormous strength of the three Standard Model forces compared to that of gravity between pairs of fundamental particles separated by appropriately microscopic scales.
It is however the technical problem that has carried the most weight in convincing people that there must be physics beyond the Standard Model. It is the story we tell our children — quantum mechanics makes the Standard Model unstable. Quantum mechanics teaches us that, as a particle such as a Higgs boson travels along, it can emit and reabsorb another particle. This process represents a “loop contribution” to the mass of the Higgs boson, so-called because a pictorial representation of the process – Feynman diagrams – depicts these processes as loops attached to the traveling Higgs boson.
Unfortunately, when you add up the loop contributions to the mass of the Higgs boson from all possible particles with all possible energies and momenta, they appear to be infinite or at least proportional to the maximum possible momentum that can be carried. For technical reasons these are called quadratic divergences and are widely derided. For the actual Higgs boson mass to be finite, there must apparently be subtle and precise cancellation of the loop contributions against the underlying “tree” (loop-free) mass. This Higgs Fine-Tuning Problem, so the lore tells us, must be remedied.
BSM physics is the proposed remedy. Supersymmetry cancels the loop of every known particle against the loop of an as-yet-to-be-discovered partner particle. Technicolor eliminates the Higgs boson – replacing it by a composite of new particles called techni-quarks. If there are large extra dimensions then the largest momentum that can circulate in a loop is actually only a little larger than the weak scale. Clearly BSM physics is not just desirable but essential.
Recently, however, my colleague Bryan Lynn suggested, and together with Katie Freese and Dmitry Podolsky, he and I explained, how the Standard Model actually comes up with a remedy all on its own.
The Higgs boson is one member of a set of quadruplets in the Standard Model. At energies below the weak scale, its three siblings get eaten – they get incorporated into the W and Z bosons. According to a famous theorem due to MIT’s Jeffrey Goldstone (hence “Goldstone’s Theorem”), the masses of the three siblings must be exactly zero. In particular, the quadratically divergent contribution to their masses are zero.
Although this doesn’t force the mass of the Higgs boson to be zero (a good thing, since it seems likely to be about 125 GeV/c2), it does mean that the quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass that have worried us for decades are not a problem of the Standard Model after all.
Now, not everybody buys our argument. Some of them prefer to focus on the aesthetic challenge of the Weak Hierarchy Problem, while others argue that we have no choice but to add quantum gravity to the Standard Model, inevitably resurrecting the Higgs Fine Tuning Problem.
We would counter that the absence of a Higgs Fine Tuning Problem in the Standard Model is such a virtue that, absent any hard evidence for BSM physics, preserving the Standard Model’s Goldstone miracle should be taken as a requirement of any proposed BSM theories.
The implication is clear. If there is no problem, there may be no need for a solution. Beyond the Standard Model Physics isn’t ruled out by the absence of a Higgs Fine Tuning Problem in the Standard Model, but it does mean that the Standard Model may well be the whole story, or at least the whole story at the energies that the LHC can command. In short, don’t be surprised if the Higgs is the last new particle discovered by the LHC. Theorists may hunger for physics beyond the Standard Model, but nature may be quite content without it, thank you very much. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/06/20/beyond-higgs-on-supersymmetry-or-lack-thereof/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/06/20/beyond-higgs-on-supersymmetry-or-lack-thereof/
With the search for the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, apparently reaching its long-anticipated-and-finally-successful conclusion, anticipation of the next set of discoveries is growing.
Recently the Stanford campus hosted a smallish gathering celebrating the 60th birthday of Savas Dimopoulos, justly acclaimed by each of the attendees as the (or at least one of the few) most insightful particle physics model builders of the last 30 years. (And my PhD adviser.) Now you’d think that the leading topic of discussion at such an event would be the details of the ongoing Higgs search – has it or hasn’t it been discovered? Does the fact that the two relevant experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ATLAS and CMS – both have a signal indicative of a new particle with the same mass? And what about the supportive analysis coming from Fermilab’s Tevatron?
Surprisingly (to the outsider) this was all considered old news. Repeatedly, the theorists joked that, with the exception of the actual CERN experimentalists present, all of us know that the Higgs has now been discovered with a mass of 125 GeV/c2. (It hasn’t, quite, but the hints are strong.) The message was clear: “We’ve known for decades that the Higgs is going to be found. So break open the champagne and get the celebrating over with, because what we really want to know is — which is the correct version of Beyond the Standard Model physics?” With a brief nod to large extra dimensions (a Dimopoulos, and associates A, D and also I, idea) and a fond farewell to Technicolor (another idea that Dimopoulos helped advance), the focus turned again and again to the likely suite of Supersymmetric (SUSY) particles (yet another stock in which Dimopoulos is heavily invested).
Supersymmetry – a theory that posits that for every known particle there is another (or more than one) yet-to-be-discovered partner particle – is the leading candidate for physics Beyond the Standard Model. It is central to string theory (a.k.a. super-string theory), required for gauge coupling unification (see below), useful for solving the Higgs Fine Tuning Problem (definitely see below) and also gives us the leading candidate for dark matter – the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP).
But I’m getting way ahead of myself, and probably you. Especially since I and my colleagues have come to believe that the principal indictment of the Standard Model, which has been used to argue so forcefully for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics is, hmmm, dubious. Or as one of those colleagues would say – completely wrong. A main rationale for supersymmetry evaporates on closer inspection.
So what is Beyond The Standard Model (BSM) physics, why are people so convinced it is around the corner, and should they be?
At least since the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN in 1983, physicists have been pretty much convinced that the Standard Model (SM) that emerged from the late 1960s and early 1970s is the correct model of fundamental physics. At least at energies below the so-called weak-scale – a few hundred GeV – or maybe a few times that. But particle theorists variously hoped/expected/knew that at higher energies the Standard Model was not the whole story, and a more fundamental theory would need to be found.
There are two types of reasons to doubt the completeness of the Standard Model – aesthetic (philosophical) and mathematical.
Aesthetic problem number one, physicists adore simplicity. Zero and one are our favorite numbers. Two can be suffered. After two comes “too many”, although identical copies (twins, triplets, …) may receive special dispensation. The Standard Model has too many too-many’s: three fundamental forces (a.k.a. gauge groups); way too many fundamental fermions (particles that make up matter)– three generations each with at least 5 representations (groups) of them — plus three sets of gauge bosons and the set of particles of which the Higgs boson is a member. It also has far too many (more than 20) independent parameters.
Aesthetic problem number two –– for no apparent reason the weak scale is much (as in about 1016 times) smaller than what we believe to be the fundamental energy scale of physics – the Planck scale (about 1019 GeV), a scale set by the strength of gravity (the one fundamental force not included in the Standard Model). This is known as the (Weak) Hierarchy Problem – and can also be understood in terms of the absolutely enormous strength of the three Standard Model forces compared to that of gravity between pairs of fundamental particles separated by appropriately microscopic scales.
It is however the technical problem that has carried the most weight in convincing people that there must be physics beyond the Standard Model. It is the story we tell our children — quantum mechanics makes the Standard Model unstable. Quantum mechanics teaches us that, as a particle such as a Higgs boson travels along, it can emit and reabsorb another particle. This process represents a “loop contribution” to the mass of the Higgs boson, so-called because a pictorial representation of the process – Feynman diagrams – depicts these processes as loops attached to the traveling Higgs boson.
Unfortunately, when you add up the loop contributions to the mass of the Higgs boson from all possible particles with all possible energies and momenta, they appear to be infinite or at least proportional to the maximum possible momentum that can be carried. For technical reasons these are called quadratic divergences and are widely derided. For the actual Higgs boson mass to be finite, there must apparently be subtle and precise cancellation of the loop contributions against the underlying “tree” (loop-free) mass. This Higgs Fine-Tuning Problem, so the lore tells us, must be remedied.
BSM physics is the proposed remedy. Supersymmetry cancels the loop of every known particle against the loop of an as-yet-to-be-discovered partner particle. Technicolor eliminates the Higgs boson – replacing it by a composite of new particles called techni-quarks. If there are large extra dimensions then the largest momentum that can circulate in a loop is actually only a little larger than the weak scale. Clearly BSM physics is not just desirable but essential.
Recently, however, my colleague Bryan Lynn suggested, and together with Katie Freese and Dmitry Podolsky, he and I explained, how the Standard Model actually comes up with a remedy all on its own.
The Higgs boson is one member of a set of quadruplets in the Standard Model. At energies below the weak scale, its three siblings get eaten – they get incorporated into the W and Z bosons. According to a famous theorem due to MIT’s Jeffrey Goldstone (hence “Goldstone’s Theorem”), the masses of the three siblings must be exactly zero. In particular, the quadratically divergent contribution to their masses are zero.
Although this doesn’t force the mass of the Higgs boson to be zero (a good thing, since it seems likely to be about 125 GeV/c2), it does mean that the quadratic divergences in the Higgs mass that have worried us for decades are not a problem of the Standard Model after all.
Now, not everybody buys our argument. Some of them prefer to focus on the aesthetic challenge of the Weak Hierarchy Problem, while others argue that we have no choice but to add quantum gravity to the Standard Model, inevitably resurrecting the Higgs Fine Tuning Problem.
We would counter that the absence of a Higgs Fine Tuning Problem in the Standard Model is such a virtue that, absent any hard evidence for BSM physics, preserving the Standard Model’s Goldstone miracle should be taken as a requirement of any proposed BSM theories.
The implication is clear. If there is no problem, there may be no need for a solution. Beyond the Standard Model Physics isn’t ruled out by the absence of a Higgs Fine Tuning Problem in the Standard Model, but it does mean that the Standard Model may well be the whole story, or at least the whole story at the energies that the LHC can command. In short, don’t be surprised if the Higgs is the last new particle discovered by the LHC. Theorists may hunger for physics beyond the Standard Model, but nature may be quite content without it, thank you very much. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/06/20/beyond-higgs-on-supersymmetry-or-lack-thereof/
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2012-07-02/god-particle-evidence-cern/55981840/1
Evidence of 'God particle' found By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Updated 52m ago
GENEVA – Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.
Scientists working at the The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher, may have discovered the existence of "The God Particle."
Sponsored LinksBut after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.
Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson — all but proving it exists — but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.
It appears to be a fine distinction.
Senior CERN scientists say the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border on July 4 are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one.
"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s, told The Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."
CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
The discovery of the Higgs boson won't change people's lives, but will help explain the underpinnings of the universe. It would confirm the standard model of physics that explains why fundamental particles have mass. Those particles are the building blocks of the universe. Mass is a trait that combines with gravity to give an object weight.
The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the wonders of the subatomic universe work than how it all started.
Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: "Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery," and he thinks it is a hair's breadth away.
Rosen compared the results that scientists are preparing to announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: "You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don't actually see it."
Though an impenetrable concept to many, the Higgs boson has until now been just that — a concept intended to explain a riddle: How were the subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves formed? What gives them their mass?
The answer came in a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. It envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
The idea is that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. Some liken the effect to a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.
Officially, CERN is presenting its evidence at a physics conference in Australia this week, but plans to accompany the announcement with meetings in Geneva. The two teams, ATLAS and CMS, then plan to publicly unveil more data on the Higgs boson at physics meetings in October and December. Each of the teams involves thousands of people working independently from one another, to ensure accuracy.
Scientists with access to the new CERN data say it shows with a high degree of certainty that the Higgs boson may already have been glimpsed, and that by unofficially combining the separate results from ATLAS and CMS it can be argued that a discovery is near at hand. Ellis says at least one physicist-blogger has done just that in a credible way.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday, however, that he would be "very cautious" about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data. "Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday," he told AP.
But if the calculations are indeed correct, said John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the book "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," then it is fair to say that "in some sense we have reached the mountaintop."
Sean M. Carroll, a California Institute of Technology physicist flying to Geneva for the July 4th announcement, said that if both ATLAS and CMS have independently reached these high thresholds on the Higgs boson, then "only the most curmudgeonly will not believe that they have found it."
——--
Borenstein reported from Washington.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Evidence of 'God particle' found By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Updated 52m ago
GENEVA – Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist.
- Martial Trezzini, AP
Scientists working at the The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher, may have discovered the existence of "The God Particle."
Scientists working at the The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher, may have discovered the existence of "The God Particle."
Sponsored LinksBut after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.
Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson — all but proving it exists — but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.
It appears to be a fine distinction.
Senior CERN scientists say the two independent teams of physicists who plan to present their work at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border on July 4 are about as close as you can get to a discovery without actually calling it one.
"I agree that any reasonable outside observer would say, 'It looks like a discovery,'" British theoretical physicist John Ellis, a professor at King's College London who has worked at CERN since the 1970s, told The Associated Press. "We've discovered something which is consistent with being a Higgs."
CERN's atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.
The discovery of the Higgs boson won't change people's lives, but will help explain the underpinnings of the universe. It would confirm the standard model of physics that explains why fundamental particles have mass. Those particles are the building blocks of the universe. Mass is a trait that combines with gravity to give an object weight.
The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the wonders of the subatomic universe work than how it all started.
Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, said: "Particle physicists have a very high standard for what it takes to be a discovery," and he thinks it is a hair's breadth away.
Rosen compared the results that scientists are preparing to announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: "You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don't actually see it."
Though an impenetrable concept to many, the Higgs boson has until now been just that — a concept intended to explain a riddle: How were the subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves formed? What gives them their mass?
The answer came in a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. It envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson.
The idea is that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. Some liken the effect to a ubiquitous Higgs snowfield that affects other particles traveling through it depending on whether they are wearing, metaphorically speaking, skis, snowshoes or just shoes.
Officially, CERN is presenting its evidence at a physics conference in Australia this week, but plans to accompany the announcement with meetings in Geneva. The two teams, ATLAS and CMS, then plan to publicly unveil more data on the Higgs boson at physics meetings in October and December. Each of the teams involves thousands of people working independently from one another, to ensure accuracy.
Scientists with access to the new CERN data say it shows with a high degree of certainty that the Higgs boson may already have been glimpsed, and that by unofficially combining the separate results from ATLAS and CMS it can be argued that a discovery is near at hand. Ellis says at least one physicist-blogger has done just that in a credible way.
CERN spokesman James Gillies said Monday, however, that he would be "very cautious" about unofficial combinations of ATLAS and CMS data. "Combining the data from two experiments is a complex task, which is why it takes time, and why no combination will be presented on Wednesday," he told AP.
But if the calculations are indeed correct, said John Guinon, a longtime physics professor at the University of California at Davis and author of the book "The Higgs Hunter's Guide," then it is fair to say that "in some sense we have reached the mountaintop."
Sean M. Carroll, a California Institute of Technology physicist flying to Geneva for the July 4th announcement, said that if both ATLAS and CMS have independently reached these high thresholds on the Higgs boson, then "only the most curmudgeonly will not believe that they have found it."
——--
Borenstein reported from Washington.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.