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

Rattling around on the early pages of Cowboy in Paris are a little over 300 short pieces aimed at the original concept of Cowboy in Paris. They told of my impressions of the people, places and things that I found noteworthy regarding Paris and France, and occasionally a little further afield. They ran, more or less in rotation, between April 2005 and March 2007.

Every once in awhile one of those articles rattles around with enough force to reach temporary escape velocity. When it does it arrives here. This little piece was on Charles de Gaulle and entitled “Pride and its Consequences”. It last ran on March 8th 2007:

Charles de Gaulle gave to France what it most desperately needed in its darkest hour. He gave it back its pride. France was mortally wounded at Waterloo and died at Verdun. It disintegrated in the early stages of WWII, though De Gaulle fought well. It was reborn in the persona of a General without an army who stood ramrod straight and declared victory. He substituted talk for action, but it was glorious talk, and the French believed. France was reborn not as a state, but as a state of mind. Talking everything to death was infinitely better than dying. Image trumped substance. There was a little of the Napoleonic Complex Redux there, but, when you have nothing, it is best to grab at straws. Sometimes pride cometh after the fall. And on this pride France rebuilt gloriously.

May 23, 2010 / Ricochets Revisiting / OC pg 45, © 2010 / CIP 953, May 24, 2010 / BIO, BTR

It was the day before the day before Christmas. A chance phone call to set up a January meeting provided the backdrop. I had called an old friend who I had known since very close to the days when I first met my wife back in 1976. She and her husband, both Professors at the University, had visited us in Paris a few years ago. We had kept irregular but relatively continuous contact over the 30 plus years.

The conversation ambled as it is likely to do at this time of year. Somewhere she mentioned that she had run into an old flame of mine whom she hadn’t seen for over twenty years, but was from our same original era. Of course she told her I was back from Paris. My old girlfriend it seems then commented that she remembered me as; ‘a real man – a good man who tried hard to do the right thing.’ And then my friend said to me: “It’s funny – that is exactly how Dominique described you to me in Paris.” I demurred a little with something on the order of I sometimes stumble but I always try. And the conversation rolled on to autism – my friend is a Professor of Behavioral Psychology.

It was not till the next day – today, now, Christmas Eve – that I realized I had gotten one of the best Christmas presents I ever got. There were three people whom I had known for many, many years - all three now remembering me how I would like to be remembered. Christmas doesn’t get any better than that.

December 24, 2009 / A Christmas Present / OC pg 12, © 2009 / CIP 670, Dec 25, 2009 / BIOG, BTR

The year started out poorly and did nothing but improve. That’s infinitely better than the other way around. It was the second year of improvement. I think I will declare myself healed. No, the gaping hole is not gone, but at least it is not a black hole. I can still see the beauty and the light and eventually I will join her. In the meantime there is a life to live, and I am going to do it.

Part of it is the organization of a cowboy, part just being on familiar ground, but most of it is simply a matter of stepping out. It will consist of reconnecting, restoring and even relieving by reliving. It will be a short spring for an old man. Still I can’t help but express one more time my eternal gratitude for the two who managed to get me through, two more who did their utmost, and the hundred who tried to help. They all deserve some credit for getting me to the other side.

January 1, 2010 – will be a New Year and ‘normal’. Except for an occasional hibernation I will rejoin the world. It pleases me.

December 22, 2009 / Healed / OC pg 11, © 2009 / CIP 793, Dec 25, 2009 / SHE

I came across this poem recently and felt it immediately and strongly. I print it here in the hope that my first family can understand my second family, and vice versa. Even more I hope they can both understand me better. It was written at least 1600 years ago by John Chrysostom the Archbishop of Constantinople (c. 347-407). Its title is Wherever We Are:

She whom we love and lose,
Is no longer where she was before.
She is now wherever we are.

December 11, 2009 / Wherever We Are / OC pg 10, © 2009 / CIP 792, Dec 25, 2009 / SHE

With a title like that you probably think it is an oxymoron. This mélange and that cowboy can never be organized! Actually, I try to do it; sometimes every six months and other times every couple of years. There is even a way for you to understand it. Read this little essay and, when you forget how, just push the button on the left marked ‘general’ and it will pop right back up again. And then you will remember. Wonder of wonders, right below it will be all my other reorganizations back to the beginning.

Let’s talk about the beginning for just a moment. The homepage of Tricolors gives a fair amount of the history and is still relatively accurate for the period between 1999 and 2007. Boil it down to one sentence and the timeline would read: 1999 DDBookline; 2000 Tricolors; 2003 Paris Arrival; 2005 Cowboy in Paris; 2008 Return. The one glaring error on the homepage is the beginning of paragraph 2: “We is a she: Dominique ….” As readers for the last two or three years will know, she is no longer. I just simply can’t change the homepage yet. For one reason it is still home for me. The last couple of years have been all about that and my physics.

Now I am reorganizing. That little tip about pushing the button marked general under categories is crucial to understanding Cowboy in Paris now. The original categories were all about the initial concept of explaining Paris and France to the English speaking world. They were, more or less, self explanatory then. The beauty is they still work for the current pages of 19-49. Yes, everything I know about France is still there – it is just buried a little deeper now.

I don’t know how to change the structure or the names so I have just adapted. Good was and is everything I thought was good about France; more recently it is just the category Europe, and even more recently biography. Better were the things I thought were even better than good about Paris; more recently the subject was business and games. Best were all the things superb about Paris, France and the French; more recently the subject covered was physics and science. Mixed is a mixed bag. About France it covered those things that had both positive and negative aspects. Since 2007 it has dealt primarily with my Sweetheart, cancer and death. It is a very mixed bag and tends toward the emotional. It is my personal perspectives. Ugly is ugly and I seldom used the category even then – in the beginning it was about the few things I did not like about France and the French. Great was about all the Places I wrote about in France because it is very hard to find a place that isn’t gorgeous. General, as I have already explained, is organizational.

Some aspects of Tricolors are no longer operable. Now, neither the Magazine nor the game Common Denominator is functioning. I hope to have them back up sometime in the future, but my hope is dimming. My plan was to change the name of the magazine to SHE and have most of the items that are currently in ‘mixed’ appear there. I am not technically capable of managing the infrastructure of the site so I just work around the original structure. Another thing that no longer worked was the links between title and article so I have delinked the original Table of Contents. You can get around that by simply typing the first couple of words of the title in the search box. I have also added a new Table of Contents for the items added in the last 18 months.

November 30, 2009 / Organization of a Cowboy / OC pg 1, © 2009 / CIP # 657, Dec 25, 2009 / GEN