If you are a genuine PhD physicist stop reading immediately. This is about the early origins of some of my physics views and it is highly unscientific. It is probably the antithesis of how most scientists come up with their theories and indeed would probably make some physicist’s blood boil (I am assuming here that they still have blood).

Way, way back in the mists – we’re talking very early 80’s now – my mother gave me a little volume entitled I Love You, I Hate You by Ernest F. Pecci. I owned a bookstore at the time but this volume was not on my shelves. I read it because my mother gave it to me, but, to be honest, I dismissed most of it at the time, probably for the same reason. Still I retained in my mind the possibility that love and hate can be only a hair breadth apart. Many years later when I witnessed a case up close I came to believe that it definitely occasionally occurred.

Some years before a different piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Having been born in London in 1942, literally under the rain of Hitler’s bombs, I took an avid interest in WWII. When I was at the university I had a deep interest in modern European history. In particular I studied Hitler and Stalin in some depth. Eventually I came to the conclusion that there was not one whit of difference between the two. The extreme left and the extreme right were nigh on to neighbors, though they arrived at the same point by different paths.

It took me much, much longer to independently accept that good and evil stood back to back in the circle of life. I didn’t want to believe they were close. Perhaps that I started viewing it as a circle helped. By now (mid 90’s) my absorption in science was growing and my fascination with history, politics and economics was ebbing. Circles, ellipses and orbits came into focus. Macro and micro became a concern. Quantum jitters gave me the jitters. One day it occurred to me that dry ice actually feels like it burns you. Could it be that extreme hot and cold were identical? Another day I thought if you could level the undulations and walk on water in a very, very straight line you would end up back where you had started. To that degree the furthest far is right behind you. Disparate threads began to fall into place. Gradually the OAR hypothesis dawned on me – I decided perhaps Opposites Aren’t Real.

January 21, 2010 / Origins of an Opposite / OC pg 16, © 2010 / CIP 843, Jan 22, 2010 / OAR

It’s coming. Ten-fifteen-twenty years of movement towards and now we are coming to the Big Crunch. For certain I won’t have the definitive answer, but hopefully I will have an inkling of weather my quest is worth pursuing.

In the last two or three years I have read quite a few physics books, sat in on a fair number of classes, and listened to innumerable lectures over the internet. Nothing so far has knocked me way off course. Yes, there has been evolution but so far no revolution. Two days ago I got the absolute latest word. The book was actually published just two days ago (January 7th) and I have had it on order for two months. It is specifically on the very heart of the subject that has gradually become almost a theory for me. Of course at best my beliefs don’t really reach anywhere beyond a series of hypothesis. Now – a real scientist, a real book, and a real answer.

Sean Carroll, a Ph.D. and a real live theoretical physicist at Cal Tech, has come out with his book From Eternity to Here – the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. I will read it word for word, page after page, including prologue and epilogue, appendix, notes and index. I will even scan the bibliography and acknowledgements. At the end I will have to decide which way to go – the Big Crunch.

Of course I have general idea what it says already. One of those innumerable lectures I mentioned earlier was a lecture by Sean Carroll entitled Origins of the Universe & the Arrow of Time on October 17, 2009 at the Q2C Festival (Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada). The lecture was specifically intended to promote his upcoming book and to preach to the already converted. That is what Perimeter Institute does – world class Foundational Physics. I ordered it the very next day.

My personal journey is coming to a crossroads. My years at college and the university were centered on history and the soft sciences: anthropology, psychology, geology and geography. There was a good reason – I wasn’t very good at math. It wasn’t until I got out in the real world and had to actually predict things that I found any real use for math. Then statistical analysis if not statistical mechanics became a strength. Without any formal training I became fairly good at utilitarian math.

Let’s time travel and in an instant move forward forty years. Business, books and games have been my life. Now I am ready to retire. Throughout a growing interest in science has evolved. Now I can indulge it.

Yes, the 30 years beyond UCLA had produced something only a little beyond an educated layman’s knowledge. Many ideas came and went – some stayed and developed. The last two or three years the tempo picked up and allowed me to fill in some of the gaping holes in my knowledge of physics – and also jettison a few impossible ideas. Of course nothing at this stage can make me a real scientist. The best I can hope for is to be a footnote. Crunch Time! Can I make the footnotes?

January 9, 2010 / The Big Crunch / OC pg 13, © 2010 / CIP 839, Jan 22, 2010 / OAR

With a bow to Arthur C. Clarke I stole his title. At least I did wait – it is the appropriate year, and now it is all about time! I am too old, too slow, and came to physics way too late. Obviously now a real physicist will have to do the heavy lifting. I even have some candidates in mind – and a dream. More on that later, but first a hypothesis in need of an equation:

Time is connected to Temperature in a similar fashion as Mass is connected to Energy. The latter is at the speed of light squared; the former at the speed of stop – all a Planck length apart.

The heavy lifting has to do with exponents and logarithms, boundary conditions, equations, superposition, emergent Hamiltonians, the nexus between macro and micro, Alpha & Omega and the like. Essentially it could eventually involve a major extension of Einstein’s vision; a new 21st Century synthesis; perhaps even the perspective of the Big Bang as the Ultimate Phase Transition. 2010 is a good year for a start.

Some of my candidates to carry this forward already seem to sometimes be dancing around the proposition. Frank Wilczek in his book The Lightness of Being (2008) has hints of it. Sean Carroll in From Eternity to Here (2010) also may have – actually I am only half way through the latter as it came out less than ten days ago. Still I did catch his lecture Origins of the Universe and the Arrow of Time (which gave me a little hope). Two other candidate’s presentations at the Q2C Festival in October caught my eye. Creating Spacetime by Fotini Markopoulo was particularly instructive. There seems to be some kinds of symmetry between Carroll and Markopoulou. Neil Turok, now the Director of PI spoke generally at Q2C, but I found his earlier lecture What Banged even more germane. Katherine Freese has to be in the mix too. All five have been involved with Perimeter Institute and of course PI itself could be my final candidate.

I am planning on writing a joint letter to all of them soon - probably in April, but May 1 at the latest. My wish is not for a reply but a reaction. Should they contact each other then maybe one, two, or even three could collaborate. Somewhere in all this there may be a Nobel lurking. If Space-time with its emphasis on the macro ever coevolves into Temp-time with an emphasis on the micro then perhaps the other half of an equation emerges. Everything could become a little simpler and more elegant. Einstein would rejoice. If that were ever to happen my dream is just that I am a footnote. In 2050 perhaps my grandson could point it out. Could that be a real future of 2010?

January 16, 2010 / 2010 / OC pg 14, © 2010 / CIP 840, Jan 22, 2010 / OAR

All my life I have had a knack for predictions. Not like Nostradamus but a knack. Perhaps it originated from my early career as a buyer for Sears Catalog. That’s all you did all day – predict what and how much a page would sell right down to each item and size. I was fairly good at it. I became a statistical mechanic without the thermodynamics.

Even after I left the big city I maintained my interest in books, games, business, the stock market and the Los Angeles Times. When I read Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick it gave me pause, but I found I could still predict with a fair degree of accuracy. Despite randomness, complexity, and fractals - such things as bubbles and dot com crashes were easy. Sometimes I found I could foresee even some pretty complicated things.

After I moved to France I decided to try to predict the first twenty finishers in the next Tour de France in thier exact order. I will admit I had been a Lance Armstrong fan for a long time, but that is still bloody difficult to do. I will further admit I spent way too much time on it, but I wanted to see how close I could come. I came up with my list of twenty riders in order, with the caveat that at least one, and possibly two, would abandon the race before the finish due to accidents, illness or the like. Out of my first ten, eight finished in the top ten with one abandoning (#4 as I recall) and otherwise with the first five in exact order. The second ten was almost as accurate though the order was a bit more jumbled. I was pretty proud of myself.

Now I am trying to predict what physicists will believe around 2050. I guarantee I will be more wrong than right, but I hope at least one or two of my hypothesis will be spot on and that my grandson will be proud of me. If not, I will just chalk it all up to Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle. That is the beauty of not being a PhD – you can bandy terms around loosely.

January 17, 2010 / Predictions / OC pg 15, © 2010 / CIP 841, Jan 22, 2010 / OAR

I would submit that in 1904 Albert Einstein wasn’t considered a real scientist or physicist. He was closer to a postdoc in a patent office. He was an almost, but a not quite – ignored and nearly forgotten. And then the Miracle Year happened! Focault and Farraday were in similar positions. Focault’s pendulums and credentials were scoffed at until he pointed out that he had proved the earth rotated under his foot. Farraday too made himself till they could no longer ignore him. In this day and age things are sometimes even carried forward by dropouts. Real science is that way on occasion. We’re not talking journeyman science here, we’re talking real leaps!

January 18, 2010 / Real Science / OC pg 16, © 2010 / CIP 842, Jan 22, 2010 / OAR