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

The odyssey is over but what a magnificent journey. Oddly it started with an incredibly loaded van chugging up Deadwood one noon day on the way to Camarillo; and ended with a little lighter pickup floating down Deadwood at midnight from that very same city of Camarillo. It seems a circle is still a circle, and this was a full one. It took eight years and maybe covered 80 thousand miles.

I’m not going to chronicle the journey here again. In fact most of it has been the subject of Cowboy in Paris all along. Any page will show you a facet and all the pages reflect the route. Here I’m just grateful that I had the guts to go. It’s one thing to strike out at thirty – I’ve been there and done that; and it was good, but it was normal – that’s just what we do when we are young and don’t know any better. Twenty five years later I was in heaven and I knew it – and I still went. That was a leap, but it was the smartest leap I ever made. I learned more from that woman than any man has any right to know. I lived, and learned, and experienced more in our 10 years together than in my first 55 combined – and those first 55 were great years to begin with! The people I met and the one I married, the tears of joy and the tears of life all combined into an epic odyssey. I am a lucky and blessed man.

And now I am home, and tired, and ever so accepting of my fate, because I did it my way – which really was just Max Ehrmann’s way, which I borrowed and repeated almost every single day for 35 years. I still repeat the words of the Desiderata daily and try to live them. I only wish she had been with me last night to watch The Curious Case Of BENJAMIN BUTTON – it would have been a fitting end.

May 20, 2009 / The Odyssey is Over / AFW pg 92 © 2009 / CIP # 772, May 23, 2009 / SHE

With that title we could be talking physics but we’re not – we’re much closer to home. We’re talking family and truth. We’re talking listening and hearing; seeing and believing. The subject is perception and filters; communication and relativity. So maybe there is a little physics here too, but that is uncertain.

Many years ago I thought my mother was lying. She is long since dead now, so none of this really matters, except as illustration. The point is that for quite a long time I thought she lied. She would recount incidences to others, right in front of me, that I knew I had been present at. Often the retelling was not even close to what I remembered. Gradually I had to conclude she lied. It is a shock for a young man to realize his mother lies.

I did not revisit the conclusion for many years. It was just a sad fact that I knew about my mother. Very gradually though it dawned on me that sometimes other family members were occasionally doing the same thing. Now I had to start questioning my own memory because it seemed unlikely that my sisters or my cousins would be fibbing to me. Sometimes it did turn out my memory was less than perfect, though more often than not I continued to have faith in my own recollections. I suspect there’s just a little human nature and prejudice showing there. Still the seeds of doubt were planted.

In America families tend to split up and move to various corners of the state; or the country; or even the world. Long absences ensue and the problem compounds. Now, not even experiences are the same. It turns out our perceptions are very colored by our individual adventures and our separate milieus. Our truths are molded by our lives. Though certainly they used the terms very differently, perhaps Einstein and Heisenberg had a point. Everything is relative and nothing is certain.

Anyway I’m not so sure my mother was always lying. She probably believed a great deal of what she said. All our truths are relative – especially when they deal with relatives.

May 12, 2009 / On Seeing What Isn’t There / AFW pg 88 © 2009 / CIP # 770, May 23, 2009 / SHE

If all’s well that ends well, It’s bad when it ends sad.

If – Love is never having to say you’re sorry, Then perhaps it should end up saying thank you.

All this possibly implying that endings and beginnings, like near and far, aren’t opposite but are rather right next door to each other. Matter and antimatter in a particularly relative, uncertain way

May 18, 2009 / Endings / AFW pg 89 © 2009 / CIP # 771, May 23, 2009 / SHE, OAR (or SHORE)

Almost robust might be the way I would characterize my current health – it would be ‘very robust’ if I added the phrase ‘for 67 years of age’. For the past 35 years I have experienced superb health – largely, I always claim, because 35 years ago I gave up doctors, hospitals and insurance, at least for myself. If you have no choice, and you listen to your body, the answers become evident. Balance, time, common sense, and small adjustments can fix almost anything. It won’t last forever. Everyone dies. Still, I have already won a thousand-fold.

As for the ‘almost’ – two things niggle. For maybe 10 or 12 years now I have been complaining my knees are gone. Well, in fact, a few weeks after the latest move my knees always get almost better. True, each move there has been some slippage, but it’s slight. I’m just going to stop moving, and stop complaining. As for my eyes, alluded to earlier, I think I will just fall back on the Desiderata: “Do not distress your-self with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.”

We can go back almost 50 years now to what I originally decided would be my end. For some reason way back then I decided I would die of a blood clot breaking loose from a spot just below the calf in my left leg. I can touch the spot, I can always feel it and I am pretty certain there is a real problem there. It would be a great way to go and I am ready. I won’t hurry it because I am at home, in peace, and happy with my pictures and my memories. Still I kind of hope it is soon because I would like to join my Minou. Then we can hold hands forever.

May 21, 2009 / Almost Robust / AFW pg 93 © 2009 / CIP # 773, May 23, 2009 / SHE

Every couple of years I adjust the direction and emphasis of Cowboy in Paris. If you click on ‘General’ under categories on the left of this page you can read all the earlier adjustments chronologically in reverse. If I was you I wouldn’t read them all – you’ll probably get easily bored. But I would read carefully the second article entitled A Simpler Time and perhaps skim a few of the others. At least you will learn a little on how to navigate the site and what you might find if you push some of the other buttons below ‘General’. Really, the problem is that the infrastructure was built with the earliest concept of ‘Cowboy’ in mind. I don’t know how to change that – so I jerry rig.

The first two years we stuck fairly close to the original concept of relaying impressions of the people and places of Paris and France from the perspective of this cowboy. They are all still there just further back. The last couple of years have been scattered all over the place and decidedly more personal. A Simpler Time mentioned above makes it a little clearer. I will continue in the same vein but there will be a little more emphasis on physics. It has been about 2/3 personal and 1/3 physics but, starting with the next installment, those figures will be generally reversed.

There is one other point. Back in 2007 we were ‘off the air’ for a few weeks. I believe it had something to do with changing servers. Finally we did get most of the written content back up, but most of the links and pictures didn’t work. I tried hard but failed to get that fixed. It used to be a much better site.

May 21, 2009 / Going Forward / AFW pg 93 © 2009 / CIP # 774, May 23, 2009 / General