Having finally finished and mailed a form of the physics project that has driven me for most of the past two years there will now be a hiatus. If I live another 20 or 30 years I suppose it is conceivable I might see the beginnings of a result but realistically it is only for my grandson to know. Mostly I am just pleased that I have one more completion under my belt. Now I will maintain my interest but at a grandpa’s pace. There will only be occasional articles on Cowboy in Paris.

April 21, 2010 / Finally Finished / OC pg 41, © 2010 / CIP 848, April 22, 2010 / OAR

Whenever you listen to a physics lecture that is presented with an audience of laymen in mind you will hear at least two or three times how many million times this particular proposition has been tested, authenticated, proven or confirmed. Often you will come away with the very clear impression that at least this physicist knows exactly what he or she is talking about – right down to the nth degree with a millionth, billionth or trillionth factor of accuracy. Almost always within the parameters of the specific sentence they do. Physicists are careful with grammar.

Of course, as we often find out in life, the devil is in the details. In the classroom and in the equations physicists are extremely precise. But then we find out it is all Greek to us – just a simple Greek letter, can change everything. Actually Roman letters are only a little better but at least they often are the first letter of the quality that they stand for. Other symbols muddy up the water further – excluding letters there are over 400 distinct signs in physics and only one of them is equal. Most of the rest mean not equal to – perhaps asymptotic, approximately, almost, or even equivalent to, but not equal. Other symbols mean precedes, succeeds, subset, superset, less than, greater than, or even much greater than – but still not equal. Many of them can have a squiggle here or there to mean not asymptotic, approximate etc etcetera; or double, or triple the value, or whatever; some of them are just vulgar fractions.

Master all that and then we come to some of the words. Screening, sum over, symmetry (gauge, local or otherwise), super-symmetry, entanglements, correlated properties, constants and conversions are just a few of them. The latter two are mostly solid and real and actually the source of the millions of confirmations noted above. I suspect though that in most instances even here we don’t redo the math every single time. Some physicists might even admit that the highest and lowest constants have, as one of their main functions, the avoidance of infinities. The rest of the terms come closer to averaging than anything else.

There is a little bit of larceny and a smattering of fraud here, but on average a smoothing of rough edges. When politicians use similar phrases we call them weasel words – at least when they are from the opposition party. When financiers do the same we label them Madoff or Enron or LTCM. Mostly we don’t notice it when physicists do it. Apparently we all need fudge factors.

February 25, 2010 / A Fudge Factor / OC pg 22, © 2010 / CIP 846, Mar 21, 2010 / OAR, BST

Could it be that -273.15° is close, but no cigar? Could it be that -333.333333° is closer still? I have a second, second number as a backup, but for now let’s stick with this because it is simpler. The first number is the odd number. Of course that is the accepted value of absolute zero temperature. Still, when one thinks of Albert Einstein’s dictum that everything should be as simple as possible but not simpler, it appears to be an odd number. In that light the second number seems a lot simpler.

We could even spin some yarns as to possible reasons why it might be so. Perhaps absolute zero has to go beyond where all kinetic motion of matter ceases. Perhaps it has to take into account quantum mechanical considerations.

February 6, 2010 / An Odd Number / OC pg 18, © 2010 / CIP 844, Feb 23, 2010 / OAR

Could we define the Big Bang as the event where the finite meets the infinite, where 0 and 1 coalesce and where temp-time--space-time both originate and end?

Isn’t it simpler and more elegant to have only one multi-verse at any given point in time?

Wouldn’t it seem logical and reasonable that if there was inflation in the very beginning second there would be deflation in the very last second at the end?

I sometimes wonder if temp-time sandwiches space-time

The Cosmological Constant could be viewed as when Time and Temperature fuse with Mass and Energy into the next Big Bang. Einstein wins again!!

January 22, 2010 / Hypothetical Musings / OC pg 17, © 2010 / CIP 844, Feb 23, 2010 / OAR

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

What if he got it only half right? Okay – 90% if you consider the other four papers in that Miracle Year; and 99% if you just take it as far as he got. Could he have gone further if he wasn’t exhausted from recreating almost the whole universe? Is it possible that his marathon debate with Niels Bohr distracted him and colored or clouded his judgment? Was the other half of Einstein’s monumental equation E = mc² just one step away? One more flash of intuition may have been all it took to reach the ultimate ‘eureka moment.’ Of course the penultimate was pretty astounding.

Do I know the other half? No – but I suspect the outlines. We’ll have a little more on that in a moment.

Modern physics seems to be a mélange of ‘almost there.’ Promising blind alleys abound; tantalizing tidbits scattered from here to eternity; fascinating possibilities almost created, but not quite complete. The recent Q2C Festival at Perimeter Institute is a case in point, and before that there was the Origins Symposium at ASU in April of 2009. Somewhere out there today – perhaps at Perimeter, possibly at Cambridge or MIT, even Caltech – is the next Einstein to bring order out of entropy – no matter which way the arrow of time points.

Physicists like to talk about standing on the shoulders of giants and that has often been the model. Einstein and Planck did indeed stand on the shoulders of Galileo and Newton. For years it appeared that Penrose, Hawking and/or Witten would replace Einstein and Planck as the clear giants of an age. They may yet, but time is running out. Youth is often served. Perhaps the 21st Century will coalesce around someone who we are just beginning to hear murmurs of.

The candidates are legion – PhDs, Professors and post-docs multiply. Some of my favorites are Sean Carroll, Frank Wilczek, Neil Turok, Fotini Markopoulou, Lee Smolin, and perhaps a half a dozen others. Of course many of them seem to be dancing around some of my favorite themes. Perhaps a new synthesis of time and temperature; mass and energy; light speed and the Planck constant; all taken together and remixed in something akin to DNA could produce the other half of that equation. Perhaps it might be inversely proportional. Perhaps we could conceive of space-time as the macro world and temp-time as the province of the micro world. Would then the speed of light correlate to absolute temperature? Perhaps in the end it could even lead to an understanding of the ultimate phase transition. Order and disorder just a Planck length apart. It is always symmetry, synthesis and simplicity. More questions than answers, but at least a direction for PI - that hotbed of cold calculation.

November 13, 2009 / The Other Half / AFW pg 116 © 2009 / CIP # 838, November 14, 2009 / Best / OAR