Back in March of 1998 I scribbled some physics notes entitled The Shape of Everything. Sophomoric would be a kind description for them, but even back then there were a few recognizable echoes to my current ideas (which I now call Opposites Aren’t). Some of the elements even ended up in my ‘musings.’ For five years a page here, a page there was all that I added. In 2003 or so it started to take on a more substantive flavor and a little synthesis began to creep in. My reading got a little broader and the writing a touch more detailed. In the last couple of years I actually went back to school, attended lectures and found out how much I had missed. Now I know a little more and a lot less – and now I even have an idea of who had some of my ideas first. I think I will pick up the pace.

I’m not a physicist so I can use terms loosely – only PhDs are bound by the degrees they have earned. I’m not a mathematician so I can leave that to others, though I will occasionally make reference to what I call ‘fuzzy math’. I’m old, my memory is slipping and I’m slower than I used to be. I’m also a klutz, but I don’t think that’s germane. Still it appears that the deeper I go the more I become convinced that a few of my musings might have some merit. At any rate some great minds thought various versions of them first and recent books are moving in my direction.

Three areas of focus will be my main concern going forward. The relationship and implications of mass to energy is vital but somewhat plowed now. For me the relationship and implications of time to temperature, especially as it correlates to the first issue, will be paramount. Tangentially I will make forays into size, shapes and structure. Of course I majored in history not physics so I believe that borrowed strands (rewoven) are what we all work with – historians and physicists alike.

AFW pg 96 © 2009 / CIP # 832, June 11, 2009 / OAR

Does it matter about matter – or antimatter for that matter? Could the very subject lend weight – dare I say mass – to one of my favorite conjectures? Could the possibility that opposites are, end up meaning that ultimately they aren’t?

Physicists love to find or postulate new elements or particles – pion, muon, neutrino, proton, hadrons, bosons, fermions the list goes on and on and each ends up with an anti – antipion, antimuon etc. You can’t blame the physicists – often they end up with a Nobel for it. But if, in the aftermath of the Big Bang, in that crucible of ultimate heat after absolute zero, we ended up with matter and antimatter simultaneously – couldn’t it be that opposites aren’t. That charge is charged at both ends – positive and negative. Is it possible that if God doesn’t play dice, he does flip coins? Isn’t that a little simpler and more elegant? Isn’t yes, no; and 0, 1; finite and infinite joined? Do Dirac’s antiparticles imply any of that?

AFW pg 95 © 2009 / CIP # 829, June 11, 2009 / OAR

Let’s say the temperature is within a degree of absolute. Are we close to the mother of all transitions? Is the ultimate phase transition imminent? Is this where symmetry breaking gets jumbled? Certainly we are at a critical point. Perhaps it is a phase transition of an infinite order!

Of course temperature is all important when the subject is phase transitions. Our iced tea tells us that. Still, for our purposes, I suspect that the transition between plasma and gases is more central. Ionization, deionization and the plasma parameter are more germane than Lipton. Sir William Crookes ‘radiant matter,’ now called plasma, is said by some to be by far the most common phase of matter – liquid, gas and solids are all distant also rans. Of course on earth we seldom see plasma except in lightening and the aurora borealis.

For now it is just a taste – like iced tea – but I suspect when we zero in on a singularity the phase transition will become increasingly important.

AFW pg 95 © 2009 / CIP # 830, June 11, 2009 / OAR

The double helix has to have significance beyond DNA. It is just too classical and symmetrical to have only been used once in the grand scheme of things. Early on I had imagined the vehicle of choice to illustrate some of my concepts going forward would turn out to be a Möbius strip. It may still happen that way, but the double helix has possibilities too. And an elongated ∞∞∞, infinity and a half as it were, would be perfect. That could tickle your concept bone couldn’t it?

Anyway somewhere we cross (I call it x) between the subatomic and quantum to the atomic and micro. Perhaps we cross over (or x) again to the macro of our world. Finally we cross again – this time to the other worldly – the cosmic and galactic. There are so many scales that might also be construed as phases. Size counts. And when size is central the X factor comes into play. To comprehend a little better what I am getting at just type in the entry x factor into the search box on the left of this page. That will give you every article that ever used the term x factor in Cowboy in Paris. In particular note the words in the article titled X Factor / Significant or Not. They tell a story about x.

AFW pg 96 © 2009 / CIP # 831, June 11, 2009 / OAR

There is another sentence in the Desiderata that has been much on my mind of late: “As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.” Most of the sentences have come to my aid on a particular day or week somewhere over the decades, but this one has cropped up a lot – perhaps more than any other single sentence. Getting the balance right is deucedly difficult.

Of course, the right and easy thing to do is to emphasize the ‘be on good terms with all persons’ side of the equation. Doing what they want you to do assures you smooth sailing most of the time. They are almost always happy with you and the only person who is occasionally unhappy is you. But then they will often end up taking advantage and pretty soon they will assume that you will do nothing else. And, of course, doing it always, is, by definition, surrender. It’s a conundrum of the first order.

Real heaven comes when you just automatically always take good care of your ‘other’ first, without thought or surrender, and it turns out that she (or he) always does the same. I was married thrice and finally got it right.

AFW pg 94 © 2009 / CIP # 775, June 11, 2009 / SHE