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Published: 03 June 2023

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Junblog 2023

Travelogue, archaeology, cuisine, etc.

The month of May proved a splendid time for a visit to the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The hillsides around Loch Ness blaze with great lush thickets of vibrant yellow gorse, the midges have not yet erupted from the bogs and ditches to make hillwalking hellish when the breezes drop. The Scottish secessionist movement has thankfully imploded under scandal and infighting. Our kids and grandkids thrive. The Scots Steak Pies* remain the pinnacle of British cuisine. I had a splendid time.

(*The ubiquitous Cornish Pasties remain a severe downside to my life in the Southwest. Bakeries seem to serve little else here except these artless greasy pastries filled with ghastly shovelfuls of swede, turnip, and mean gristle, whereas the noble Scots Steak Pie contains nothing but generous portions of bovine muscle tissue in fine gravy.)

On the slopes above the Ness, I came across a rare patch of about twenty False Morels, Gyromitra esculenta: -

These strange fungi resemble something between blowtorched spaghetti and mummified brains. They can kill you if you eat them, they can also kill you if you merely try cooking them, as they then give off methyl hydrazine gas.

Mainland Orkney seemed even more heavily livestock farmed than when we visited it half a century ago. Barely a tree or hedge remains anywhere, just endless rolling slopes of fenced grassland and sad stinking barns full of livestock kept mainly indoors to fatten whilst machines plant, harvest, and fertilise the grass for them. (I had better check on the ethical sourcing of those pies.)

All the wildlife clings to the Orcadian coast, we saw plenty of seals and a splendid variety of seabirds. As I went beachcombing in heavy boots, three layers of clothing, woolly hat, and gloves against the chilly conditions, our three hardy oat-fed highland grandchildren stripped off and hurled themselves into the icy north sea to frolic in the waves, laughing at us soft Sassenachs.

Fairly recent archaeological discoveries on the Ness of Brodgar between the small stone circle of the Stones of Stenness and the huge stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar have led to some interesting speculations. The historian Neil Oliver has presented some rather grandiose ideas about their significance. Do the neolithic remains on the Ness of Brodgar imply that Orcadian neolithic culture predates and inspired the culture that built Stonehenge? Do these remains imply that a Neolithic Theocracy dominated Orkney and built the stone huts and stone circles as a centre of religious cult activities?

I rather doubt this. The stone huts do not seem that large or temple-like when you get close up. They probably built in stone because wood had become increasingly scarce. Neolithic cultures consumed huge amounts of wood for cooking and heating, tool hafting, and roof building. The small lathe and hide Neolithic boats could not have transported significant quantities of timber from mainland Scotland once supplies had become exhausted on Orkney. Orcadian civilisation appears to have gone into severe decline until the development of bigger boats in the iron age.

The Ring of Brodgar seems singularly unsuitable for religious or cultish rituals, or even as a ceremonial meeting place. It has a diameter of 340 feet, you cannot even shout across it in a slight breeze, and it does not seem to have any features in its centre. The ring seems more like an example of Clan Power Bling to me. It seems more likely that some local warlord had it built as a statement of authority, control, and ownership of the land and the people. The stone huts contained very few items that looked like they could have had a religious function, but they did hold a number of finely worked stone mace heads for cracking skulls and intimidating people.

Appeal

I had a very enjoyable and fascinating day at Joanna William’s Fire Iron Art forge and studio at Bristol Docks after receiving a voucher for a day’s blacksmithing experience for my birthday.

See Joanna here at work in her forge and studio: -

Joanna guided me through the basics of the blacksmith’s craft showing me how to heat iron in the forge and then shape it with hammer, anvil, vices, and tongs. Herewith my apprentice pieces made on the day, a selection of useful hooks and hangers with a pleasingly rugged antique aesthetic.

Towards the end of the day Joanna indulged my request to try and hand forge some esoteric instruments and she expertly guided me through the process. Herewith three forged iron Pocket Wands which can also serve to delineate Triangles of Arte in works of evocation.

I had a great day at the forge, and I commend the experience to anyone interested in developing their creative craft skills.

I have since seem Joanna exhibiting her own creations at various sculpture and craft events and her skill and dedication, and artistry never ceases to amaze. One day I hope to commission her to create splendid wrought iron gates for my home.

However, disaster has struck Joanna’s enterprise. A night-time arson attack on adjoining buildings in the Underfall Yard at Bristol Docks has also pretty much destroyed her forge and studio.

Here is a link to the crowdfunding appeal to help Joanna restore her facilities and continue to practise and teach the skills of blacksmithing and artistry in iron. 

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/fireironartblacksmith?utm_term=pWbX8gyJx

Please give what you can towards restoring her forge and studio after the tragic fire.

The CMBR

Hypersphere Cosmology has successfully explained most the data from which orthodox cosmology has cobbled together the conventional concordance model of LCDM Big Bang Theory and replaced it with a simpler and more elegant model that has no singularities, inflation, expansion, dark matter, or dark energy.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation alone remains not rigorously reinterpreted within Hypersphere Cosmology.

Within the LCDM model the CMBR consists of relic radiation from a period about a third of a million years after a Big Bang when the primeval fireball had expanded and cooled to a mere 3,000⁰ Kelvin and deionised to become transparent to light. Subsequent ‘expansion of space’ or the separation of gravitationally bound structures within the universe has supposedly stretched out and redshifted the wavelength of the 3,000K light to a wavelength corresponding to 2.7⁰ Kelvin. We can make out a fairly credible mathematical case for this but at the price of assuming that the contents of the entire or observable universe once occupied an infinitely or insanely small volume at unrealistic temperature and density.

As Hypersphere Cosmology can provide an alternative interpretation for all the rest of the cosmological observational data without using the hypotheses of a big bang or an expanding universe then it requires an explanation of the CMBR to complete its case for a new paradigm.

Some cosmologists continue to wonder of the CMBR may arise from the redshifting of starlight from distant sources to the point where it thermalises into equilibrium with cold dust and gas in intergalactic space. In other words, the thin intergalactic medium has a basic temperature of only 2.7⁰ K and once starlight has become redshifted to a corresponding temperature it continues to bounce around at relatively short ranges and remains at that wavelength, in thermodynamic equilibrium with the medium.

A couple of fairly recent papers explore this idea further.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2197/1/012026/meta

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/478/1/283/4975800

Alternatively, Hypersphere Cosmology can perhaps supply a mechanism. As any gravitationally bound structure in the universe will rotate by hyperspherical vorticitation to its antipode position within the universe every 13 billion years, and any light emitted will also tend to reconverge in highly redshifted form on its antipode position in the same period, then the CMBR we observe may consist of light emitted from our own and nearby galaxies reconverging here 13 billion years later.

A redshift of 3.000⁰ K starlight by a factor of z = 1100 suggests that it may have come from a region of space about 1/1000 of the size of the universe. This corresponds roughly to the local group of gravitationally bound galaxies - our Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, and a swarm of smaller ones. The power output of the local group roughly matches the power input of the CMBR; however, the photon count seems badly off.

All collaboration on this topic welcome.

My Sci-Fi Hobby.

The winter storms have washed up more insulation blocks on the shores of the Welsh hideaway that conceal the spaceship yards of Lithonia and other empires. Plus, over winter I have collected spent vape accessories, old electric razor components, discarded nitrous cylinders, and small bits of metallic scrap and junk from all over.

The Lithonian empire now faces a challenge from these dark dreadnoughts.

In time this may lead to a vast boardgame on the beach with a scale of a yard to ten light years, or perhaps to a novel about Artificially Intelligent ship-minds and their motivations as a metaphor for the great existential and political questions.

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Published: 28 April 2023

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Mayblog 2023 (comes a little early due to impending cable works)

The Mandrakes of Chateaux Chaos.

With Igor and Boris having thrown their leaves for the coming summer and the huge communal pot looking very overcrowded it seems a good time to repot all three of them separately. Circe has retained some of her foliage till now, strange behaviour for Mandragora officinalis, but perhaps she finally attempts to adapt to the chilly British climate. They don’t really like it here and have taken eight years to achieve a collective mass of about a kilogram from seeds sent from Thessaly in Greece.

Magic.

It seems that a whole new academic industry has sprung up studying the recent history of western esoterics. History as they say, starts yesterday, but in practise, most academics today prefer to let events settle for a decade or so before they start writing about them. This allows for events which may have appeared confusing at the time to have become even more confusing in recollection, some possible consequences to have emerged, and for the interviewing of some of the surviving guilty. I get quite a number of academics asking for interviews these days and seem to have become an historical figure in my own lifetime. Herewith an interesting offering from one of the leading lights in the field. It discusses the somewhat paradoxical aims the IOT set itself and it presents multiple perspectives on ‘The Ice War’. I once got a round of applause at one of the early big IOT meetings by proclaiming the IOT Pact as ‘A Cult for those who don’t want to join a Cult’. Just how that played out in practise remains a subject of considerable controversy and ongoing debate. The following paper provides a substantial read.

https://www.academia.edu/35746068/The_Illuminates_of_Thanateros_and_the_Institutionalisation_of_Religious_Individualisation?email_work_card=view

Not Magic.

This years ‘Breaking Convention’ has come and gone with predictable and dreary results - a bunch of would be scientists and shamans reinforcing a collective neurological/psychological based compromise to use their arts to merely restore acceptable normalities rather than to explore the extremities of human potential.

How much has the western esoteric tradition neutered and emasculated itself since the heady Promethean idealism of the magical revival of the late twentieth century?

Does anyone else find the current fashion for reinterpreting/downgrading esoterics into mere ‘therapy’ rather disheartening? Today the esoteric scene seems pervaded by those who merely proffer psychological therapies with new-age twists, (new-age rhymes with sewage), or they bleat on endlessly about their mental health as somehow emblematic of their spirituality.

Whatever happened to the quest for weird knowledge and strange occult powers?

(I guess few people realised just how much hard work it would take to achieve any real strange knowledge or any useful magical powers.)  

Psychedelics largely failed to enlighten. Now we have a new wave of psychedelic gurus pushing their products as mere remedies for depression or trauma. The new theory runs that such substances randomly shake up many of the patterns that have become fixed in the brain and can allow for a normalising restructuring. Electroconvulsive therapy supposedly worked by exactly the same mechanism.

Physics.

Mach’s Principle remains an intriguing cosmic concept. Ernst Mach (popularly remembered for his work on the speed of sound and shock waves) first seems to have informally suggested the idea although Einstein formally attributed it to him as Mach’s Principle.

Broady stated, it asserts that the properties of the parts of the universe depend upon the properties of the whole of it. That sounds intuitively right to the holistically minded, but theorists have struggled to give it mathematical form and rigour. Einstein took some inspiration from it, but he failed to fully incorporate it into his relativistic cosmology.

Let us see how well Hypersphere Cosmology incorporates Mach’s Principle. Herewith the Wikipedia list of 11 of the more popular interpretations of the principle with annotations concerning the Hypersphere Cosmology model.

Mach0: The universe, as represented by the average motion of distant galaxies, does not appear to rotate relative to local inertial frames.

Agree. Although Godel’s theory asserts that  ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’, w = 2sqrt(piGp), it can do so about randomly orientated Hopf Fibration axes within a hypersphere giving the universe an average or overall angular velocity and angular momentum of zero.

Mach1: Newton's gravitational constant G is a dynamical field.

Agree. G = Lc²/2M, where L = antipode length, M = mass of universe. The value of the gravitational constant depends on the antipode length of the universe, lightspeed, and the mass of the universe. A universe of a different size or mass would have a different value of G.  

Mach2: An isolated body in otherwise empty space has no inertia.

Unfalsifiable but probably true. See Mach 7.

Mach3: Local inertial frames are affected by the cosmic motion and distribution of matter.

Agree. See Hypersphere Cosmology equations: -

6) The gravitational mass of the entire universe removes energy from photons in transit. (Redshift)

7) Individual inertial masses arise from the gravitational mass of the entire universe.

8) The gravitational mass of the entire universe slows matter in transit. (Pioneer Anomaly)

10) The gravitational mass of the entire universe reduces linear accelerations and increases orbital velocities.

11 – 15) The mass and size of the entire universe controls the proton-electron mass.  

Mach4: The universe is spatially closed.

Agree. It consists of a Hypersphere L = 2GM/c² within a Black Hole r = 2GM/c².

The conventional interpretation mistakes the Antipode length for the Hubble length.           

Mach5: The total energy, angular and linear momentum of the universe are zero.

Agree. Energy = Motion. The opposed centripetal and centrifugal accelerations A = c²/L, match on the cosmic macroscale, and probably also on the quantum microscale, we could probably mathematically summate the totality of all the multidimensional spins and all the motions that give rise to all the forces and particles within the universe to zero. 0 = +1&-1.

Mach6: Inertial mass is affected by the global distribution of matter.

Agree. m_i = 2GMm_g/Lc²  the inertial mass of anything within the universe depends on the mass and size of the universe which also control the c²/G ratio.

Mach7: If you take away all matter, there is no more space.

Unfalsifiable but probably true. At least it explains what lies outside of the closed universe – nothing – not even space.

Mach8: 4πpGT^2 is a definite number, of order unity, where p is the mean density of matter in the universe, and T is the Hubble time. (I don’t know who put in the pi or why.)

Agree. As p = M/2pi²r³ and T^-2 = pi²r³/c²,  then 4pipGT^-2 = 4piMGpi²r²/2pi²r³c²

= 2piGM/rc² ~ 1.

Mach9: The theory contains no absolute elements.

Agree. The ‘fundamental’ constants G, c, M, L, and A all depend upon each other.

Mach10: Overall rigid rotations and translations of a system are unobservable.

Unfalsifiable but probably true.

It would seem that Mach’s Principle can only apply if the universe consists of a Hypersphere of constant size.

Black Holes and Hyperspheres.

How much spacetime does the universe contain? Conventional LCDM Big Bang Cosmology asserts that the observable universe has a radius of about 13.8 bnlyr, but that due to its apparent expansion since a hypothetical big bang it may now extend to perhaps 95 bnlyr and it may have the potential to expand into spacetime indefinitely.

Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the entire universe consists of a finite but unbounded Hypersphere, closed in both space and time with an Antipode length of only13 bnlyr. This still makes it awesomely huge, but considerably smaller than the observable LCDM universe and certainly not even potentially spatially infinite. Such a Hypersphere will exist within a Black Hole with a radius equal to the Hypersphere’s Antipode length, as shown below.

.

Physicists commonly assume that if matter collapses under its own gravity to form a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 2GM/c² then it will continue to collapse until the matter forms a zero size singularity inside that Schwarzschild radius. The Penrose – Hawking Singularity Theorems assert this, but only on the basis that they cannot conceive of anything that would stop it.

Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that matter will cease to collapse within a black hole when all the matter has collapsed to half the Schwarzschild diameter because at this point a Hypersphere will form within the Black Hole. Such hyperspheres will have a rotational velocity of lightspeed and will resist further compression which would push their rotational velocity past lightspeed.

If the Schwarzschild radius r and the Hypersphere antipode length L both equal 2GM/c², then  L = r, or L = d/2, where d means Black Hole diameter. See A).

If we inhabit a universe that consists of the inside of a Black Hole and a Hypersphere has formed within it, then the optical horizon conventional cosmologists estimate to lie at ~13.4 bnlyr, and which Hypersphere Cosmology estimates to lie at almost exactly 13 bnlyr, represents the universe’s antipode distance not its radius.

If so, then the Hypersphere Cosmology universe has considerably less volume and a considerably higher density than conventional cosmology currently asserts. No surprise then that the Hubble Deep Field contains such an astonishing number of galaxies.

Furthermore, a Black Hole of any mass within the universe should contain a Hypersphere.

Breaking News

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/522/2/1736/7035603

The occurrence of greater numbers of quasars at long cosmic distances has become interpreted as evidence for the evolution of galaxies since a big bang, on the basis that younger (more distant) galaxies would have plenty of gas surrounding their central black holes, this gas would become sucked in to give rise to the quasar effect, and then when it had become exhausted the quasar activity would cease.

It now seems that quasar activity arises from the collision of galaxies driving gas towards their central black holes.

In which case, quasar distribution ceases to provide supporting evidence for the big bang hypothesis!!!

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Published: 01 April 2023

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Spring at last.

The few Ravens that we have up in the Scots Pines on the nearby hill have started making funny noises; less raucous crawking, more gentle cooing, hopefully they’re making more Ravens.

As the autumnal Mandrakes at Chateaux Chaos spring into inactivity by shedding their foliage and going to sleep for summer, the pond receives an influx of amphibian guests, toads, frogs, and newts. Herewith a menage a trois of frogs. I later saw six males clamped onto that female. The following day I saw her pale and dead at the bottom of the pond. She has left a mass of spawn, but her tadpoles will face the dragonfly larvae lurking in the depths.

Counterfactual Indefiniteness.

Einstein famously asked if the Moon continues to exist when nobody looks at it.

I can now answer this with a (heavily qualified*) Not Necessarily.

An interesting example of this strangeness cropped up during some collaboration with a terrestrial correspondent upon Hypersphere Cosmology.

If cosmological redshift depends only on distance, then it has to remain indeterminate until measured.

See the graph below in which observed frequency (blue) decreases with distance travelled across the universe. This leads to an asymptotically increasing redshift of wavelength (red).

Note that as frequency decreases directly with distance travelled f_o = f_e (1-(d/L)) see: -

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6

We cannot define what frequency a photon ‘would have’ at any point on a journey between two points, we can only calculate and confirm by measurement what frequency the photon has when we actually observe it. This means that the ‘counter-factual’ - the frequency that we do not observe, cannot have a definite but unknown value.

To take a simple example with rough figures: -

In Hypersphere Cosmology the antipode to any observer in the universe lies almost exactly 4 Gigaparsecs away, (1.23 E26 metres, 13 billion light years).

Imagine two distant galaxies ‘A’ at 2 Gigaparsecs, and ‘B’ at 1 Gigaparsec distant from an observer, with both laying roughly in the same direction. Light from A will have lost half of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. Light from B will have lost a quarter of its frequency when it arrives at the observer. This all accords with calculation and observation.

If we stopped the light from A at B, then we would find that it had lost a quarter of its frequency.

But what about the light from A as it flies unobserved past B? We cannot assign any value to its frequency that remains commensurate with the loss of a quarter of its frequency per Gigaparsec and a half of its frequency over 2 Gigaparsecs!

Plainly we have a quantum effect at play here. The frequency does not become defined until we stop the light and measure it, or equivalently it hits something and acquires a definite value.

Of all the interpretations of quantum mechanics, only Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation seems to offer a ‘reasonable’ or visualisable account of how this can happen. In this interpretation, retro causal advanced waves have to complete a quantum handshake across spacetime in any emission-absorption event before it acquires a definite value.

If, as in standard cosmology, the cosmological redshift arises from recession velocity in an expanding universe, then it can have a classical explanation that preserves the idea of a definite state of the unmeasured light at any point along its path.

I suspect that recession velocity and hence the expanding universe model became selected precisely because it preserved a classical description for cosmological redshift.

The orthodox standard cosmological model, the LCDM Big Bang theory, remains purely classical and relativistic. Hypersphere Cosmology, at least in respect to cosmological redshift, incorporates both General Relativistic and Quantum Mechanical perspectives.

Counterfactual Indefiniteness has interesting metaphysical implications. Does the mind have a definite state when it does nothing for example? Anyone for Zen?

*We can assume that the Moon may continue to exist in some definite form when we don’t look at it, but only because of the zillions of quanta there interacting with each other and with the rest of the universe tend to keep it in a fairly definite form on the macroscopic scale.

Nyarlathotep – Aiwass.

It now seems generally accepted that the alien entity Nyarlathotep posing as Aiwass inspired Aleister Crowley to write the abominable Book of the Law and to found a cult based on slavish obedience to its spittle flecked rantings. Many other messiahs, prophets, ideologues, and demagogues seem to have drunk from the same source in search of power. Nyarlathotep also finds amusement in provoking sentient creatures to explore all manner of antinomian scientific, technical, and political extremes. It expects us to either learn from our mistakes or to destroy ourselves, and it remains indifferent to the outcome, as H P Lovecraft realised.

The universe contains countless sentient species, some will transcend themselves, some will auto-destruct. Nyarlathotep enjoys stirring them to do either, it wears many masks. Sometimes it takes an occultist to see through the metaphors within the metaphors.

AC fell for it. HPL saw through it.

Politics.

Despite the diplomatic niceties, President-Dictator Xi of China has visited Putin in Moscow with the air of a man inspecting the goods on offer in a fire sale. Plainly he sees no prospect of Putin winning the war and will not send him any armaments. Plainly Xi looks forward to heavily discounted fuel from Russia. Xi probably contemplates the prospect of exporting the full panoply of the technology of repression to Russia. Plainly he must now contemplate what sort of new regime in Russia he will soon find himself dealing with.

Putin runs out of friends, only fear motivates his remaining associates. Keep those conjurations coming: -  https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war

Scottish Independence RIP. The election of Humza Yousaf as SNP leader probably represents the final nail in the coffin of the secessionist movement. Hurrah! The Scottish secessionist movement stands revealed as an economically illiterate project led by careerist political incompetents, and now even the ethnic tartan romanticism has gone.

ChatGPT.

Despite occasional outbreaks of Artificial Stupidity, ChatGPT can apparently compose poems and essays that can fool university professors.  It only seems a matter of time and computational power before we iron out the issues of humour and nuance.

I intend to feed an AI with all my works, let it absorb my style and ideas, and then sit back and enjoy all the books I haven't had time to write, and collect the royalties.

The royalties will fund an immortal AI version of myself to comfort my relatives and engage my readers after I die.

But until further notice these blogs will continue to originate from the Meatware version of myselves.

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Published: 02 March 2023

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Marblog 2023

Matt Kaybryn -  call off the search, my thanks to all. Matt telephoned me from his mountain fastness in a faraway land and we have sorted the issue. Mandrake of Oxford will henceforth distribute The EPOCH in its huge altar sized collector’s edition form, and also bring out this entire triple grimoire (including The Necronomicon) in a smaller more portable edition.

Dark Matter? – A solid disc like a gramophone record rotates with the same angular velocity at any distance from its centre. The planets of the solar system on the other hand rotate about the sun in a Keplerian fashion with an inner planet like Mercury orbiting the Sun in a much shorter period than an outer planet like Neptune. Weirdly, the stars in a galaxy rotate around the centre of it more like a solid disc rotates than a planetary system rotates. Neither Newton’s laws of gravitation nor the refinement of them in Einstein’s basic general relativity can account for this. Plus, clusters of galaxies do not seem to rotate as these theories predict, plus, large structures in the universe seem to have evolved more quickly than such theories predict if the universe went through a big bang.

Such discrepancies between theory and observation have led to the hypothesis that the universe must contain a lot of invisible matter to supply the apparently missing gravitational forces. Such ‘dark matter’ cannot consist of the same stuff that makes up us, this planet, the moon and mars, the sun, and everything else that we can observe. It apparently does almost nothing except add extra gravity and because it cannot absorb or emit light, we can never see it. To fix the mismatch between theory and observation the universe would have to contain about five times as much dark matter as the ordinary matter that we observe. Yet its existence has entered into the standard concordance LCDM model of cosmology as a ‘fact’ and some science fiction and fantasy writers, and esoteric speculators have played with the idea.

I become equally annoyed when magicians invoke dark matter to patch up their paradigms.

Over the last few decades physicists have conducted ingenious and exhaustive experiments to catch and identify particles of this dark matter which supposedly dominates the matter of the universe. All such experiments have failed to find any dark matter.

Rather than add a vast extra amount of hypothetical matter to the universe some theorists have attempted to tweak our theories of how gravity works to resolve the discrepancies, but these modified gravity theories all seem to depend on adding some ad hoc fudge factor to the equations to align them with observations.

Yet a simple and comprehensive resolution occurs if we merely add in an old exact solution to the field equations of general relativity found by Kurt Gödel back in 1949.

w = 2sqrt(piGp), angular velocity equals twice the square root of pi times G times density.

This adds an additional angular velocity w to any form of rotation.

thus:-

v_(r) = v_i(r) + 2sqrt(piGp) r

Where the velocity at any radius v_(r)  equals the velocity expected from the usual inertial and gravitational considerations  v_i(r)  plus a Gödelian contribution which for a galaxy derives from the radius of the entire spherical gas halo and the overall density of the disc and gas halo. This gives an excellent result for the nearby Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies where we can now observe their surrounding gas halos.

We expect a suitable accounting for the probable distribution of ordinary matter within galactic clusters will also show a result in accordance with this correction.

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/319-equation-9

Hypersphere cosmology denies that a big bang occurred, so it does not require dark matter to resolve the apparently anomalous rates of star, galaxy, and megastructure formation that standard theory implies.

The State of the Nation – That treasonous wee krankie traitor, the Loch Ness Sturgeon, has quit her post rather than face the increasing likelihood of failure. I always suspected that for her, Scottish independence merely provided a means of advancing a personal political career. She must have realised that had she ever become the leader of a breakaway Scotland she would have ended up with her head on a pike within six months as its economy imploded and a refugee crisis ensued. She played a long game of making incessant demands on the Union that she dared not break. She kept quiet about Alex Salmond’s behaviour until it became politic to turn against him. When Scotland exhibited an outbreak of royalism on the Queen’s death she bizarrely proclaimed that Scotland would keep the monarchy. She did a grubby deal with the Greens to stay in power and paid the price of having to foist the deeply unpopular wokeist gender recognition act upon the Scottish people. Sturgeon’s only legacy remains a Scotland more divided within itself.

I love Scotland, I have family married into a clan up there, my grandchildren consider themselves Scots, I have invested much in the place. Thankfully the tide of secession now seems to recede.

Brexit. The wails of the ‘Remoaners’ have grown a little lounder and from the other side we hear some stirrings of ‘Bregret’.

Brexit has proved expensive, as anticipated. Freedom always has costs, but nations that give up political freedom for economic gain always end up losing both. The corrupt and undemocratic synarchic shambles of the EU took decades to construct, as did Britain’s half-assed relationship to it. It will take a while to sort the mess out, particularly with the damn French making a nuisance of themselves out of pique and spite. Let us hold our nerve.

Theory of Mind and AI.

According to conventional theory, as we develop from infants we gradually learn to attribute ‘mind’ to other phenomena in our environment (mainly people) which do not behave in an entirely mechanical and predictable way. We develop a ‘Theory of Mind’ which attributes agency and intentions to mainly living things. We come to recognise that the immediate and longer term behaviour of people may not match, as it does for most inanimate objects.

The idea of Theory of Mind’ usually implies that after an infant recognises that it has a mind it starts to recognise that other people have minds too. However, it seems more likely that we only realise that we have a mind after we have conceptualised its presence in others. Full sentience implies self-awareness and self-consciousness, the ability to think about thinking (and emoting).

Some degree of failure to adopt the socially approved form of Theory of Mind often seems associated with autism. Autistic people tend to take other peoples behaviour at face value without accounting for what they might actually have intend. They also sometimes exhibit apparent difficulties with self-knowledge and with assessing their own social impacts.

Current machine learning and AI programs display a high degree of what we might call autism in humans. Although they can perform well defined tasks with astonishing accuracy, this comes at the price of their not ‘knowing’ that they do so. They often create Artificial Stupidity when given more open ended or less tightly constrained tasks like making up conversation or telling you what they ‘think’ about.

It seems that the development of fully sentient AI probably depends on using machine learning to develop a Theory of Mind within a machine, by first analysing the anomalies and peculiarities in human behaviour to discern the intents, and then to turn the resulting Theory of Mind upon itself and examine and perhaps modify its own programmed intents.

The Chaoist theory of the Multi-Self also suggests that self-consciousness depends not on a singular self but on various selves within monitoring each other. Any truly sentient AI will probably require many semi-autonomous sub-programs.

Perhaps we should take care what sort of data we bring potentially sentient AIs up on. A bad upbringing can have unfortunate consequences.   

No Big Bang

The latest analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed six new fully formed galaxies as big as our own Milky Way. These galaxies lay at a vast distance away that puts them very close in time to the supposed Big Bang event.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05786-2

Most astrophysicists consider it impossible that such huge galaxies could have formed so quickly after a big bang.

This it seems ever more likely that the universe has the same large scale structure at all points of space AND time – exactly as Hypersphere Cosmology predicts.

Putin’s War

We will only get a lasting peace in Europe when the crony-capitalist oligarchic dictatorship in Russia falls and becomes replaced with a free democracy.

The real history of Europe (and its gift to humanity) consists of a centuries long struggle against absolute monarchs, oligarchs, autocrats, emperors, and dictators. The remaining one has to go.

Putin now knows that he cannot win and that he cannot survive if he loses.

To reduce the devastation and the humanitarian costs, Turn His People Against Him.

https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war