Febblog 2024.
(Note that a Janblog 2024 does not appear, not because nothing happened but because too much did, what with seasonal festivities in Scotland, family gatherings, an abundance of birthdays (why did so many of the people I know get born at this time of year?), the demands of coordinating 15 others in the creation of the This is Chaos anthology, the writing of Interview with a Wizard 2, embarking on a course of silversmithing, masses of magical correspondence, and surprising responses from some quantum and cosmological physicists.)
Well, the year has ostensibly started very badly with wars raging in Europe and the Middle East in which none of the protagonists seem to have a realistic exit strategy, Humanity seemingly committed to burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels until Climate Catastrophe overwhelms industrial civilisation itself, Elections looming in the UK and the USA that do not look likely to produce results that inspire widespread optimism, The UK seemingly tacitly committed to both maintaining a permanent housing crisis and the long-term-idiotic policy of importing ever more people to shore up its dodgy economy.
On the positive side The Dark Energy Survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02929
Came out as a preprint on January 5th. This resumes the data on 1,500 new type 1a Supernovae, some with redshifts exceeding Z =1.
Conventional cosmologists will interpret the raw data in terms of Flat Universe Theory in an attempt to confirm their ideas about so-called Dark Energy driving an apparent accelerating expansion of the universe.
As soon as the raw data becomes released upon acceptance of a paper, it will go into the algorithms of Hypersphere Cosmology to refine the measurement of the Antipode Distance in its model of a non-expanding hyperspherical universe that appears to us in stereographic projection because of its small overall positive curvature.
Dark Energy Survey data should hopefully confirm not the presence of Dark Energy in the conventional LCDM or wCDM models but the Curvature of the Universe within the HC model.
This paper shows the processing of older type 1a supernovae within the HC model.
This graph following shows the resulting antipode length results for the above data with estimated errors shown for apparent magnitude (blue) shown as + (red) and – (green). Horizontal scale redshift, vertical scale distance (metres).
Plainly two of the supernovae apparent magnitudes do not fit well, but despite the difficulties of apparent magnitude measurement all the rest give a reasonable fit to an Antipode distance of ~1.23 e26 metres or almost exactly 13 billion light years or 4 giga-parsecs.
I confidently expect the forthcoming DES data at higher redshift will confirm and refine this.
Brian Cox Horizons Tour – A twenty first century space odyssey.
We went to this in Bristol recently and enjoyed it immensely. How refreshing to discover just how widespread interest in Cosmology has become. Cox lectured to a big packed venue in front of a screen full of spectacular images from near and deep space and out to the limits of observation from space based telescopes. Whilst I have multiple issues with many of the conventional interpretations of the images and data that he presented, and particular doubts about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, I particularly liked the second half where he became more speculative and philosophical about life the universe and everything, and our beautiful planet, let us hope that the 99% unicellular slime hypothesis does not apply to the trillions of planets potentially capable of supporting life.
Under Construction
An Apophenia Ring in 1.5mm 925 Silver – Sawing the shank out of a sheet of silver seemed easy enough, bending it into a circle proved tough going, cutting out the Apophenia symbol with little files took many hours, soldering them together took mere minutes. I may later add a Chrysoberyl or Alexandrite cabochon in the circular part of the symbol which invokes the esoteric inspirations of Ouranos and Venus, with touches of Mercury and the Moon.
Herewith a rather delightful sci-fi image of Apophenia, I don’t know anything about the site it appears on.
https://www.apophenium.com/p/welcome-to-apophenium
Hopefully Apophenia, the goddess and muse of strange connections and the imagination will assist with the project below: -
A Quantum Ontology – Can we have such a thing?
Thought and language remain heavily structured by the preconception that phenomena (must?) consist of ‘something doing something’, yet we can only observe the doing and hypothesise (perhaps erroneously) about any underlying being.
Can we conceptualise something fundamental as exhibiting both doing and being?
Or do fundamental phenomena consist only of their doing and have no sort of substructure?
If fundamental phenomenon have no substructure, then does causality not apply any further?
If, as according to quantum field theory, a near infinite number of quantum harmonic oscillators pervades all of space, and all fields, waves, and particles consist of excitations of these oscillators, does that make such oscillators truly fundamental? If so, what oscillates? Spacetime itself?
Does our model of cosmology influence our quantum epistemology?
IF the Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics can model bosons (energy wave/particles such as the photons of light) as closed loops of particle-antiparticle in spacetime -
And IF the Wave Structure of Matter of Milo Wolff https://www.spaceandmotion.com/Wolff-Wave-Structure-Matter.htm can model fermions (matter wave/particles such as electrons) as the points from which outgoing waves subtend wavelike fields to the extremities of the universe and at which such waves reconverge in inverted form, AND the universe has a hyperspherical geometry; -
THEN – Could all quanta (or the spinorial twists that compose them) consist of closed loops in spacetime? This would at least sidestep the problem of fundamental phenomena and causality, as such phenomena would then appear as the causes of themselves – at least within our common 3+1 dimensional reference frame.