Category: Physics, Psychology, and Creativity


Dreams are like rainbows—they are not objects, have no existence in spacetime except for in our unconscious, but are consciously experienced. Unlike rainbows, they express something. In a previous post I suggest rainbows are subjective melds of spacetime and quantum physics. What are dreams relative to this melding? How are reality and dreamtime superpositioned?

C.G. Jung once described dreams as potential. Jung would not embark on a project until a dream revealed to him the pathway and made available the energy to accomplish his goal. Building upon that, dreams provide the potential energy and the symbol; ego functions to bring dreams into the spacetime. If a dream is a metaphor for what is possible, it is a metaphor for superposition.

Like a rainbow, superposition is quantum possibility in a broader spectrum. We perceive the visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum even if there are more wavelengths we cannot perceive. They are out there but we are not sensitive to them. Dreams are like the things we cannot perceive but they are out there nonetheless. How can I make my dreams come true?

I tell my patients to put into some artistic form what their dreams tell them. It does not matter to me if they paint them, play them, work with clay, poetry, movies, movement. Just bringing them into this world crosses the threshold between quantum and relative reality. It is like bringing a rainbow into the world.

When I look at a rainbow, only I see it.  No, you see your own rainbow.  The physics of rainbows stipulates the center of a rainbow is the point opposite the sun, from your perspective.  Sunlight reflects off water droplets and rainbows are not concrete objects.  They cast no shadows and are not three-or other-dimensional.

My ego, body-based, differs from yours.  My reality is not identical with the reality of anyone else.  My history, my experience, my memory, none of it matches up exactly with those of anybody else.  Like the rainbow, I carry around my own continuum, light-cone, universe.

We live in both a macro and a subatomic universe.  The macro universe is ruled by Einstein, the subatomic universe by quantum law.  I submit we, each of us, reflect the alternate universe hypothesis so hot in today’s discussion among many physicists.  Each second, or rather, in the nanosecond of our reality, the existential point, we ride waves of energy, are carried places, surf the waves, move.  No one is sitting still.  At our stillest, in deep meditation, waves break on the beach of existence.  In satori we join with a quantum oneness.  Everything is one.  One holographic joining—a shared universe.  This experience of oneness is personal but feels universal.  The paradox of oneness and otherness is resolved.

If so, also resolved is the question of individual and total.  The total we are a part of we see as we see a rainbow.  Totality forms itself around our corporality.  We see it, experience it, from a singular perspective, yet it is Total.  We move through the Totality, sharing it, of it, and still a part of us remains apart from your Totality.

I carry my alternate universe around with me.  The quantum physicists who profess the concepts of what is referred to as string theory find unlimited, infinite numbers of quantum universes.  It is not simple—the gold standard of physics theories.  It is not elegant, and it is not pretty.  Simple would be melding Einstein and Bohr by living both in a shared and in a multiple world.  Everything would not only be relative, apart, and separate, but shared, responsive to action, and purposive.

Quantum theory describes superposition, a state of unqualification, potential, a wave that does not crash, Schrödinger’s cat neither dead or alive.  I live my life like that.  But not only do I wait for the wave to coalesce so I see which way it is breaking, I can make the wave emerge by making a move.  What I am saying is that the move does not have to be limited to our familiar 4-dimensional universe.

I will be making further efforts in the near future to merge the three pillars of existence—psychology, quantum physics, and relativity physics.

Seldom has so little happened to so many.

Look to the shadow

for it is the black hole spurting white spirit.

Both evil and good—

black hole and white jets—

entangle.

Triangles of blackwhite spacetime

transform and are transformed

when other blackwhite holes play with them,

a dance of spacetime and collapsing waves.

Waves become fields.

Where waves collapse fields emerge.

Fields are the beach upon which waves crash,

creating notes.

Notes shape emergent thoughts

wave upon wave

breaking on the shore of consciousness.

Entropy is how.

Low entropy is simplicity itself

and high entropy is chaos.

Out of chaos emerges a note

and the note condenses around a field of notes

that play and interact along arrows of time—

reversing or following temporal development

in pre- or post-time in the moment.

MIND AND MATTER

I assert that the mind functions according to quantum states.  Mind collapses probability waves as described clearly by Feynman.  The brain is an organ specifically organized to collapse probability waves, inducing mind.  We are connected by entanglement, every one of us.  We apperceive non-local events across superluminous and extreme distances at FTL—faster than light—speeds as they occur.  We apperceive events before they occur.  Time does not strictly follow the arrow of time as suggested by dreams, visions, psychotic states, paranoid delusions, schizophrenic experience of the living dead, communication through teeth of messages from people on Mars, or seers and prophets as they peer into the future.

By this last statement, I do not support all psychotic visions and experiences as true, but I wish to examine them from a different standpoint than commonly accepted agreed upon reality.  Different cultures induce trance states.  Many drugs induce alternative reality states.  Why not look at what these states represent from the perspective of quantum mind before throwing out the baby with the bath water?

Synchronicity, a Jungian principle of acausal meaningful simultaneous events, might come under the quantum mind definition.  Geomantic procedures, including the Chinese Book of Changes—the I Ching—as described in The Secret of the Golden Flower, appear to be based upon the belief that the universe is one and all events in the universe are entangled in the moment.  The I Ching explicitly states it relies upon the constellation of universal forces when the Oracle answers questions put to it.  I think astrology and Tarot may also rely on quantum mind.

Please don’t think I am adhering to the belief that ufo sightings “prove” anything.  Jung makes the point that these sightings may be projections of the unconscious and until an alien steps out of the movie screen and says hello I will have to maintain an air of polite skepticism as a psychologist.  I just do not feel it is wise to rule out events and experiences until they are adequately described in a scientific manner.

Spacetime is the universe our body and our brain occupies.  Our individuality can be explained by the individual frame occupied by each brain.  Your spacetime and mine coexist  relative to one another.  We communicate through the mind.  The mind is a marvelous thing.  Let us wonder.

Classical physics posits two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.  Ask any choreographer and you will obtain the same answer.  Through all the lifts, pas de deux, troupe choreography, you do not see dancers melt into one another (unless you are watching the Black Swan transform psychotically from a dancer into a swan).  But if you question a musician, you will hear something quite different.  Two musicians cannot, but two notes can occupy an identical spacetime continuum.  In this way music appears to be a form of quantum mechanics, specifically string theory postulates. Vibratory fields produce overtones of the dominant tone so all notes that interact have to occupy the same space at the same time.  When notes interact closely they produce beats, enrichen the timbre, producing physical results of their interaction.  Music defines a pointlike omicron of insertion that defies Newtonian physics, clarifies the classical mind, and invades string theory simultaneously.  Just ask any musician—they will say they have musically entered a private space when  they play with any other musician on the same piece.  In all written music, improvised music, folk music, spiritual, profane, rock, and all kinds of interactive music the notes/beats interact as they occupy the same space at the same time.  In turn, research suggests that in ritual, music synchronizes brains of participants too so that a group synergy emergent from the music and ceremony binds people together.

How can two massless objects, thin photons, occupy the same spacetime simultaneously?  If they have zero mass nothing keeps them apart or brings them together if they also have no charge.  But they have effects secondary to energy.  They take the form of a particular form of energy—frequency.  Photons, like other subatomic particles with mass, are emitted when electrons jump from an energized to a less energized quantum level of energy in quantum leaps.  As energy the photon has mass, but because it has no mass it has velocity equal to the speed of light, the speed of photons.  The question is, can two massless particles occupy the same spacetime simultaneously?

The classical Newtonian mind, the mind of Einstein, but not the mind of Bohr states e = mc2.  Bohr and Feynman do not classically define spacetime and famously classical physicists cannot account for events at quantum energies.  Quantum time moves but not specifically in a direction.  Classical spacetime moves forward or backward.  How is it spacetime moves only forward to massive objects?  You and I do not follow the arrow of time backwards.  To move at the speed of light, as in the speed of a photon, is to effectively halt time itself and to relativize spacetime.  Any object with mass has a cone of possibility limited to the speed of light.  Mass moves slower than the speed of light through spacetime.  But entangled subatomic particles are not limited to and do not follow 4 dimensional rules.  There is room for speculation about whether, in a quantum world, two objects of a certain energy that have no mass can indeed occupy the same space at the same time.

Superposition posits potential.

Out of quantum superposition emerges entanglement of particles in a world beyond spacetime.  The word spacetime might also be relativized by reversing the usual order to create the word timespace, that area within which something happens in time.  Time being a dimension, timespace includes everything so entangled particles interact in timespace, even at FTL, faster than light superluminous speed.  Many entangled particles interacting outside of spacetime do not yet exist because of the superposition principle.  They have yet to collapse into spacetime.  Let us refer to entangled, superpositioned particles as occupying timespace.  They are superpositioned and therefore occupy the same space at the same time.  Dropping out of timespace, superpositioned quantum particles collapse into spacetime and cannot then act according to timespace.  So in timespace, superpositioned entangled particles are different from spacetime collapsed wave particles, or wavicles to be precise.  Wavicles are the spacetime rendition of superpositioned quantum particles.  How do they interact besides collapsing?

Vibrations may offer a clue.  Consider two musicians playing with one another.  They might be able to pass through one another—give them enough time.  But the odds are against it.  But the music they play fills timespace.  Playing together entangles vibratory schemae.  A tone is produced which has harmonics—same tone with multiple waves vibrating at various frequencies.  This effect can be heard as if they filled the air with virtual particles occupying timespace.  Good music comes from another place.  It takes us to another place.  That place is called different things so I cannot name it in a specific way.  There are mathematical formulae which describe imaginary numbers which describe superpositioned quantum particles that also could describe good music.

SCALAR THOUGHTS

Thoughts imply scales of thoughts.  Chord changes are mindful potential elaborations of thoughts.  In the central vortex emotional thoughts arrange, entangle, and manifest physically and spiritually.  In thinking a thought a thought emerges to which thought converges.

Thoughts, like stars, warp spacetime in Riemanic spacetime curvatures.  Heavy thoughts attract thoughts.  Black thoughts accumulate –white thoughts expand.  Black holes of black thoughts create vortices out of which white thoughts create possibilities—a metaphor of creativity via superposition of thoughts, notes and scales.

TRITONIC TRANSFORMATION

Play one note and different scales are implied.  Play a second, and multiple scales are eliminated, inferring different scales which are more likely to emerge.  A third note illuminates the sky of quantum potential.  Chords imply scalar possibilities.  Changes eliminate as well as illuminate as potential emergent interactions precipitate out of rhythm and time.  Forward and backward are relative frames meeting in the middle of the tritonic triangle—the Jewish Tritonic Star, the Star of David, the poet and musician.  In the center all potential particles interact and vortices often emerge:  Coltrane’s pulse-time; time and space implicate one another; notes entangle, vortices entangle, thought subsumes to quantum mind—Timespace.

Tritones in classical music theory are referred to as sus4 chords, where sus is short for suspended, and 4 is representative of the interval between notes, in this case a total of four notes—a 4th.  A tritone consists of three notes, each a 4th apart:  a sus4 chord.  Like any chord, tritones establish a field and this group forms a specific type of group that sounds in a particular way.  A set of tritonic or sus4 chord changes, which I will refer to as changes, formulate multiple triangles that form field interactions within the triangulation.  They are the most unstable chords and transform into more stable chords in a process I call tritonic transformation.  Think of tritonic transformation like you imagine reification, or the collapsing wave of superpositioned subatomic particles suddenly emerging into spacetime from timespace.  They become real, are reified.  Quantum mechanics following Schrödinger and Heisenberg refer to this collapsing wave as the result of observation.  Or, “when you hear music it’s gone in the air—you can never catch it again (Eric Dolphy, Hilversum, Holland, 2 June1964).”

VITAL AND CONSCIOUS

The Vital is the way of life

My speculative position that there is a beginning of  consciousness and that consciousness begins with the beginning of life might sound new, but it is not.  What is new is my desire to formulate a test of consciousness and to apply it on many different levels of what is alive.  The test has certain principles.  It is not a paper and pencil test.  Once the principles are established, and I have noted only a few, then they can be applied.  At that point I introduce hypotheses.  The hypotheses are stated in the hypothetical-deductive model which is statistical and therefore relies on the null hypothesis.  I hope to challenge those among us who are interested in the deep structure of consciousness.  With any luck, I can begin to move toward my other radical position, proving that there is a quantum mind.

I think there are some things I ought say again about consciousness.  Vital are the processes we think of as ourselves.  (If I could write in German I would call this The Vital.)  Everything alive is vital.  Everything that is dead is not Vital. Anything alive is conscious.  Vital has consciousness.  Consciousness is locked up in the body.  Every body, i.e., living thing is also conscious.  This means a virus has consciousness.  The bacterium found in interstellar space are aware.  Do I wonder if awareness might be eternal bliss?  That fits in with the universal appeal of an afterlife.  And do we give ourselves the wish made into reality of eternal bliss?  This projection of the wish falls upon everything and may be organized along archetypal lines of energy.  Psychic energy falls upon all life forms.  We investigate conscious behavior, unconscious behavior, and emotional behavior, calling it unconscious.  Consciousness is primordial and indestructible having accompanied life since the inception of life.  Infants are conscious from the moment of conception and yet this consciousness is not innate to the neonate but rather passed on from sperm and egg.  So there is no beginning of consciousness at conception.

Consciousness begins with the beginning of life. The end of consciousness may be an illusion.  Illusory projection upon matter forms culture.  Whatever the medium, a projection channels energy and consciousness.  Media include visual art, physical art, physics and science in general, literary arts, music of all genres, dance and Sufi spinning, folk dance, and the healing arts, and in some cases, religion.

We start off alive and conscious of our being alive.  Awareness of being alive leads down cultural paths, warrior class, all social groupings.  Political parties use conscious energy to accomplish unconscious goals such as war and destruction, or to facilitate creative goals like making a living and raising a family.  Groups are punished on the model that rule of law can be manipulated.  Life needs an out, and if this means destruction, life destroys life.  Evil manipulation and good manipulation amount to the same old thing.  Freud and Thanatos, his death and destructive impulse, unconscious factor, leads to cathartic ecstatic celebration of whatever it is including joy at taking away life and consciousness and measures us.  The flip side of unconscious evil is conscious good.  The bifurcation of consciousness culturally emerges in institutions of congress.  Systems emerge from congress and evolve, devolve, integrate, analyze, and act.  The systems do not act, and they are but projections themselves.  Projection of content, making the unconscious conscious, changes things; moves things around; creates ideas to make into reality our dreams.  Projection creates change.  Dreams create projections and are projections themselves.

PROJECTIONS ARE PSYCHOLOGICAL.

My desire to measure psyche emanates from my logical, analytical being.  Taking hypotheses and measuring these hypotheses constitutes psychological testing.  What is consciousness and how can consciousness be measured:  my above incoherent exposition needs some order.  Let us proceed to order the disorder.

Psychology frames quantum reality

As projections are psychological, conscious knowing acts upon material macro, 4 dimensional reality.  The thinking of something changes quantum reality by the field of potential the projections constellate (to use a Jungian term meaning organizing unconscious “material”).  There are points at which quantum potential settles into a macro world expression that we experience as reality.  I refer to these as phase transitions.

At a phase transition the organization shifts.  When Kurt Lewin describes gestalts he refers to them in the abstract.  As such they are mathematical and therefore well within the measurable and observable universe we inhabit and investigate by all means possible, including psychologically.  How can we measure the phase transition of the vital force—where physics meets psychology?  The alternate universes we can as conscious living vital beings inhabit develop out of choices that are resonant frequencies of vitality that exist just as clearly as particles—sub-atomic and atomic—are resonant frequencies of superstring theory.  Physics does not mention life or vital yet physicists, such as Leonard Susskind, ascribe to the anthropic principle—the mind creation principle, the world as a hologram principle, i.e., a projection principle founded upon quantum reality which describes both a subatomic “world” and frequencies beyond observation.  Here again physics and consciousness measure the same thing.  Analysis explores limits.  Limits mark phase transitions.  Mind becomes real.

HYPOTHESES AND NULL HYPOTHESES

Did I mention these are hypothetical issues?  As such, they might be measured statistically if set up as null hypotheses.  Why do that?  Because scientific thinking requires it.  Instead of proving it, you have to prove it is not not true at a significant level, preferably at the .01 level.  Follow me down the path of disproving the proof.  If we can’t, the proof must be true as operationally defined.

  • Consciousness cannot be measured.
  • If consciousness can be measured, then consciousness in living organisms cannot be measured.
  • Starting with homo sapiensa measurement of consciousness needs to be scaled down to lower and lower orders on the evolutionary scale (as it exists on earth):
    • Eukaryotes are not conscious.
    • Prokaryotes are not conscious.

Putting it positively, consciousness can be measured in humans and so can artificial intelligence (AI).  I am not getting into machine intelligence (yet).  If I were to suggest AI answers some of the rules of the proving of the Turing Test as a form of consciousness, then I will need to convince myself that consciousness also accrues to man-made machines.  And if I go down that path, the next idea is to test if any of the visible bodies, cosmologically or sub-atomically, ascribe to consciousness.  That being the case, I can only suggest this should be re-examined once AI has not been disproved.

How can rules of what operationally defines intelligence be made into a reliable and valid test that can be scaled up and down?  Such a test requires a creative test development person to construct it.  Once this test is developed and validated we can begin applying the principles to lower and lower organisms.  So firstly it must measure not intelligence—don’t need to get sidetracked here—but consciousness in all mammals.  Proceeding to the reptiles, birds, and cold-blooded fauna, and then into vegetable flora, let us proceed down to the cellular level (eukaryotes) and the more primitive cellular level (prokaryotes).  If I’m missing a lower living thing, add it at this time.  Scalability of consciousness form depends on Jung’s theory of psychic energy and Jung makes an excellent case for the scalability of consciousness, in concert with Freud.  Psychodynamic psychotherapy relies upon such a foundation.  Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy also relies upon this as a substratum of information theory, which might constitute a route towards the construction of such an instrument.  Mindfulness theorists ought to have something to add to this discussion.  Advocates of phenomenology who follow Husserl could, if any still exist, process-orient the way questions or judgments about experience are asked.

 

TEMPORAL PHASE TRANSITIONS

Gödel/Einstein narratives are interrupted at critical times.  There is a phase transition at these points and the time-like narrative begins again, goes off in a new direction from a previous point, goes backwards, reversing entropy.  Time is relative to Einstein and space-time is also relative.  Time can go forward or backward.  But Gödel asserts that time does not exist.  Perhaps time exists but it can be interrupted.

Tonight I was listening to my bowels move in a glacially slow process that was the result of a very recent hernia repair.  It was as if time slowed down.  I was deeply in tune with my body.  I even heard different personalities within my psyche speaking to me, a very unusual occurrence for me.  One was a male, another a female who might have been in her 40s.  I got the distinct impression they were selves of mine that simultaneously exist but not in this space-time.

The tension between intuitive time and objective time commands attention. Gödel posits the need to exclude time or the universe, and since the universe exists, time does not.  From what I understand this holds true in a non-expanding universe.  I have to clarify this.  We do not live in a non-expanding universe so there might be a limiting factor and time does exist. Gödel expanded upon Einstein’s theory of general relativity which was originally founded in a static, flat universe.  The cosmological constant does not seem to be a part of Gödel’s reasoning.

There is the experience of cutting through the tangle, the web, the Feynmanian potential for all things to evolve in all possible ways, that Gödel’s logic wields like the sharpest knife.  Previously, my logic was dull so it cut poorly.  Now it is sharper–so sharp I can see an individual living in his or her own timeline.  Their time-like lives might be seen as narratives.  This is similar to but different from time-like determinism.  It is not defined as causative and thereby deterministic, but rather as narrative which includes deterministic as well as acausal events.  Illogical things happen to people. Chaos, while it does not always rule, intrudes in at-times mysterious ways.  Can we impute a religious motiv here, that things happen for a reason?  If you wish to impose order and meaning.  A religious motiv is valid here and does not need to be excluded.  If spiritual, out of space-time-like experiences occur, they might be for a reason.  They could be fractures in the continuum.  And fractures are described as abrupt.  The concept of a temporal phase transition is an attempt to describe them in a more inclusive manner.

I see phase transitions as boundary conditions that apply commonly when gasses transition to liquids, or to solids, and when solids transition to liquids or directly to gases.  A magazine, Phase Transitions, publishes papers on phase transitions that include

  • structural (ferroelectric, ferroelastic, high-pressure, order-disorder, Jahn-Teller, martensitic etc.) phase transitions
  • geophysical phase transitions
  • metal-insulator phase transitions
  • superconducting and superfluid transitions
  • magnetic phase transitions
  • critical phenomena and physical properties at phase transitions
  • liquid crystals
  • technological applications of phase transitions
  • multiferroics
  • quantum phase transitions

Transitions occur on the macro levels and on the quantum levels.  Super string theory does not exclude the potential for multiverses.  Temporal phase transitions are permitted within super string theory.  At each fracture point where time makes a transition to a different status time breaks off into a new space-time-like pathway.  I assert that this does not happen except in extreme circumstances such as when there is a singularity.  When mathematical equations approach infinity, temporal phase transitions can potentially occur.  Otherwise time-like experience cannot alter, and new time-like universes do not form.  This limiting condition introduces both consistency and clarity.

An individual is an individual due to temporal “narratives.”  Your narrative differs from mine even though you are standing right next to me.  You do not need to be moving at the speed of light for this to occur.  Any experience of an individual or monad is relative to the experience of any other individual or monad.  Please let me refer to a description of Gottfried Leibniz’s definition of monad in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Time to Leibniz is an illusion.  Time is immanent to a monad and it is within time that monads transform into what they are.  Monads become what they potentially are in time.  Time does not exist outside an object or a monad.  I as a monad differ from you or anyone else in my transformative capacity.

My intuitive understanding of time as transmutative property agrees with Leibniz–different people (monads) might live in precisely similar universal lawfully grounded conditions and still be different because individuals do not occupy the same exact space-time position.  Since that would not be possible, we live relatively, and we see things and experienced things differently from each other.  Living relatively means something—all experience is valid.  This profound truth relativizes Truth, and, vice versa, large and small truths are valid for each of us because our experience is relative to every other being.  What is valid for me may not be valid for you, though we may have shared experiences and can communicate them through whatever medium we can.  Monads communicate, I believe, on a quantum level that permits us to relate to one another.  The relativized individual is connected, is entangled with, the other individual so we can understand one another.  I find this to be true concretely and abstractly, on the level of existence and on the level of abstract reasoning.

In extreme conditions our time-like relativization breaks down.  That is why Gödel states time does not exist.  Time obviously does exist intuitively, but mathematically and objectively it does not.  How this can be so is the subject of my meanderings.  I believe the complex world within which we live can be understood better if temporal phase transitions become part of the lexicon that includes relativistic time-like experience.

A better question to ask might be what are the phases?  Is time different at different times?  I don’t want to stumble into a time loop here, or into what philosophy refers as a tautology.  I think we would all agree that time can speed up, slow down, stop, is excited in the moment, or is eternal.  To an existentialist, time exists only in the moment and the point is to excite the moment, to intensify the moment.  To Moses on the mountaintop bringing down the 10 Commandments time is eternal and every Jew who was ever born, who exists at that moment, and who will ever exist is present.  Thus a phase that is transitioned into and out of has many temporal properties, not just a different time-like line.

When I play music I often play in time.  But even as I measure out the music in beats, I am in an eternal space of no-time.  Time stops for me and music subsumes everything.  I cannot believe this is not true for any poet in the moment of inspiration, every artist engaged in whatever medium, or every dancer, musician, or performing artist expressing someone’s poem, performance piece, choreographed piece, or composition.  Going back Leibniz, each monad realizes him/herself in the moment.  That moment exists in different phases.  Passing into and out of such moments I refer to as a temporal phase transition.  Gödel and Einstein would agree.

WELCOME TO MY WORLD.

ANNOUNCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT!
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Gödel universes spin around an axis determined by geometrical laws that are extensions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

Gödel universes spin around an axis determined by geometrical laws that are extensions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.  Time as we know it, intuitive time, may exist for us, but time from an objective perspective does not.  As a consequence of both the spinning of our entire universe, and of a subset of spinning universes, time disappears.  We have a choice of either a universe or of time, and since the universe exists, time does not.  “For Gödel, if there is time travel, there isn’t time (Yourgrau, Palle, A World Without Time, The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein).  Ontologically neutral are both temporal distance—past and future—and spatial distance.

 

Gödel and Einstein were brought together by circumstance.  Both accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the ‘30s when neither could remain in Europe any longer because of Nazism.  Their outsider status also brought them into close proximity and as a 70th birthday present Gödel contributed an original essay that radically extended Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

 

I first read about Kurt Gödel last year (2011) and it caught my eye because I had had a similar idea to his about five years ago.  What if the universe spins? I asked myself, and then a couple of other physicists and scientists.  They had no idea, and had never heard of Gödel’s model.  Then I read about Cooper’s interest in spinning universes and how she queried Arthur Gamow about them.  She went on to develop concepts of dark matter and dark energy from this foundational perspective.  So I pursued the original source and unearthed this fabulous book (above).  Put yourself on my mailing list—I am sending it to all my interested friends as pre-Chanukah presents (or choose your reason to celebrate physics and the mathematics of the iconic Einstein and Kurt Gödel).

 

Einstein finds Gödel’s reasoning entirely reasonable and considered it an extension of his own mathematical understanding of the cosmos.  There is a deep philosophical foundation they shared, most specifically that of the later works of Husserl, the phenomenologist.  Husserl may be one of the most profound influences on my thinking.  I am amazed he was just as influential for Einstein and Gödel.  I am not the one to expound upon the philosophical principles at play here—read the book and get back to me.

 

This is the logic of an outsider, the logician whose Incompleteness Theorem establishes that mathematics cannot completely describe all phenomena.  This is the person who Stephen Hawking failed to take down with his “chronology protection conjecture.”

 

Why do I care whether or not time exists?  Music for me has rested upon a temporal structure.  “Time is the skeleton upon which the flesh of music hangs”  has been my mantra.  I love meter.  Indian ragas consist of tals of different meters and I have written pieces of various meters.  I love playing with tabla players because their training is to improvise within complex meters.  Jazz, too boring with 4/4 and ¾ and 6/8, needs to stretch out.  Free jazz ignores meter at its own risk.  No meter—better beware of boring.  So if time does not exist, time must be imposed upon reality by someone.  We are at the intersection of East and West.  East—no time.  West—time.

 

So, to a logician, which I am not, in a world without time, existing in spacetime, does consciousness impose time?  Is there a “western” consciousness that imposes time?  And does this western consciousness, the father of the scientific method, contain within it the seeds of no time?