Liber Cyber info

Hey all, i know this is super long winded, but some of you may enjoy it, especially those who love attention to detial like Rag, this is copied from the Liber Cyber and i make no claim to it being my work, but definately worth the read.

CHAOS AND COSMOS
A paper by Frater Choronzon
"We are Stardust" - Joni Mitchell (Woodstock)
"Every man and every woman is a star" - Crowley/Aiwass/Nuit (AL)

Neither of the writers here quoted necessarily expected their words to be interpreted literally, but in the course of this paper I would hope to impart a rational sense of meaning to both statements. Human attempts to understand and make predictions about events in the cosmos are rooted in classical antiquity, and have been addressed briefly in my papers on 'Paganism and Heresy' and 'Secret Societies' in this series. Particularly significant events were Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope in 1610, Newton's formulation of Calculus and the Laws of Motion as a means of explaining what was observed, and the inauguration of the Royal Society of London. At this point 'Science' became respectable, and its practitioners breathed a sigh of relief; at last all the alchemists, wizards and mathesists, who had made such a valuable contribution to keeping the spirit of enquiry alive through the dark centuries of intellectual repression, could be forgotten about.

Today Newton's writings on magic and alchemy are quietly ignored; that material is even omitted from respectable volumes for which claims are made that they present his 'complete works'. The fact was that science had reached a point where it was able to offer a model of the movement of bodies in the Solar System which could be defended by reference to the Axioms of Mathematics, as stated by Euclid, which gave the right answers, and which even predicted irregular events like eclipses with impressive accuracy. The final 'proof of the pudding' occurred in 1768 when Captain James Cook was commissioned by the Royal Society to convey "Gentlemen of the Society" and their assistants to Tahiti, in the South Pacific, to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun - he continued west to discover New Zealand and Australia, and completed a circumnavigation back to Blighty in 1771.

Since that time scientific orthodoxy has been as zealous as clerical orthodoxy in its attempts to debunk and deny any vestige of validity to those subjects which were lumped together as the 'Occult'. Although the scientists still had their own squabbles with the Christian view of the universe, they thought that they had the means completely to explain the workings of the cosmos, and very negative attitudes were (and still are) struck towards any dissenter who should dare to present evidence to suggest that phenomena existed which could not be explained by the established Laws of Physics.

As regards observations made on objects and events within the normal scale of terrestrial perception, there were few problems. The difficulties arose when scientists, with the benefit of improved instruments, started to examine very small things, or to try to explain events observed at very large distances, or to consider what happened at extreme velocities. Newtonian physics simply gave the wrong answers, and the first reaction of scientific orthodoxy was to castigate the new-fangled instruments and/or accuse their protagonists of fraud. Einstein and the early Quantum Mechanics, Schrodinger, Heisenberg et al, had few friends in the scientific establishment when they first published material in the domain of what is now termed 'Modern Physics'. Even today it is possible to find people teaching science in schools who have not properly taken on board the fact that Newton's Laws simply do not hold true in anything but the most ordinary situations.

Relativity started to gain some respectability when it was appreciated that it provided an explanation for anomalies in the orbit of the planet Mercury; specifically, an advance in the perihelion (the point of nearest approach to the Sun) of 38 arc-seconds per century. Previously this had been attributed to the postulated existence of another intra-Mercurial planet; i.e. one even closer to the Sun.

Unlike Quantum Mechanics, the new ideas in Relativity were largely the work of a single individual, Albert Einstein, aided, abetted and perhaps inspired by his wife, Mileva, who was also a talented physicist. Although Einstein's first published work on the subject was in 1905, while he was working as an examiner in the Swiss patent office, it was not until November 1919 that any general accliam was accorded to his theories. This occurred in the wake of another eclipse observance expedition organised by the Royal Society of London, this time to Principe Island (adjacent to Fernando Po, for Illuminatus! fans) in the Gulf of Guinea for a solar eclipse. The resultant calculations verified predictions made by Einstein about the bending of starlight rays by strong gravitational fields, and although few could understand what relativity was about, he was acclaimed as a genius, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

Despite the fact that his work, and specifically the famous equation
e = mc2
provided the impetus for the development of the atomic bomb, Einstein was a lifelong pacifist, and strongly influenced by Judaic concepts of the cosmos. He did not like the philosophical directions in which Quantum Mechanics appeared to be leading - "God does not play dice", he is reputed to have said in a comment on the Uncertainty Principle developed by the theoretical physicist and Quantum Mechanic, Werner Heisenberg.

Quantum Mechanics is in essence the physics of very small objects. Although the Electromagnetic theories of Faraday and James Clark Maxwell relied on classical (Newtonian) concepts, when researchers started to inquire into the fine structure of the particles involved, and into the nature of matter itself, the results were quite unexpected. When light or an electron beam is directed through a pair of narrow slits onto a screen, for example, instead of two thin lines of light on the screen, the experimenter sees an interference pattem of alternating light and dark areas. When a particle beam is directed at a very thin sheet of gold foil, peculiar scattering patterns result (commonly termed Rutherford scattering). These results were quite at variance with the predictions of classical physics.

The earliest model of the atom to attempt to explain this behaviour, put forward by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913, suggested a compact nucleus with a number of smaller electrons in orbit around it. It was basically a 'sun and planets' model where electrons could jump from one energy level or orbital radius to another. Although this representation held some appeal, if only on the basis of micro/macrocosm self-similarity, the maths simply did not give the right answers.

The Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger developed some ideas on probability put forward by a Frenchman, Louis de Broglie, and by fudging together terms for the total energy, potential energy and momentum of a particle according to classical Newtonian rules, he came up with an equation which yielded solutions which were compatible with what was observed. To a non-mathematician (and quite a few mathematicians) Schrodinger's equation resembles a distastefully arrayed salad with ingredients drawn from the Greek and Roman alphabets and dropped randomly on a plate:

Many physicists found the consequent conclusions about the nature of matter equally unpalatable. At the nub of it, nothing was fixed or certain about the structures described. The matter was summed up in the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg, which can be loosely stated as follows:
A particle can have velocity and no position, or it can have position and no velocity, but it is uncertain which of these conditions may obtain at any point in time.
The situation was made worse by the impossibility of devising any experiment to test the state of a given particle at any moment in time, since to carry out the experiment would irretrievably modify the particle. This difficulty was summed up in the quaintly named paradox of 'Schrodinger's Cat'.

Two conclusions deriving from Quantum Mechanics were held up, by Einstein among others, to be so ludicrous as to render the entire theory invalid; these were mentioned briefly in my previous paper in this series, 'Chaos and Gaia'. The first is Bell's Theorem which was derived mathematically in 1964 by Dr John S Bell on the basis of work on the production of particle pairs by Paul Dirac (of whom it was once said "There is no God and Dirac is his prophet"). Bell showed that if Quantum Mechanics is valid, any two particles, having been simultaneously produced, will continue to exert an instantaneous influence on each other no matter how far apart they subsequently move. This, of course, violates Special Relativity which asserts that energy cannot travel faster than the speed of light. More recent refinements suggest that Bell's Theorem applies only the particle 'spin' parameter, which may be considered to be in the domain of 'information' rather than 'energy'

The second bizarre conclusion is developed as a generalisation from Bell's Theorem and implies that every particle in the universe must at some time have been in contact with every other particle. These concepts can be combined into the notion, perhaps familiar to magicians and Zen Buddhists, that an influence exerted on any single particle will induce some echoed or resonant effect, however infinitesimal, on every other particle in the universe. In my previous paper I surmised that the Mandlebrot Set might provide a model by which such processes could be understood in terms of the transfer of system structure and control information. Items of this class of information were categorised as 'Cyber-Morphs'.

While the arguments were raging between the adherents of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as to which represented the 'ultimate truth' regarding the structure of the cosmos, a young American named Edwin Hubble had been deciding what he wanted to do in life. He majored in Maths and Astronomy at Chicago University, and also established some reputation as an athlete and as a boxer, before deciding to study Law as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He became a barrister in 1913 in Kentucky, but got bored with that and went back to Chicago to do a PhD in Astronomy. He finally settled down to a job at Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

Here ends part one

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and here continues part two..
Using the 100 inch telescope at Mount Wilson between 1922 and 1924, Hubble discovered that not all of the objects in the night sky are part of our Milky Way galaxy. 'Spiral Nebulae', of course, were known, but they were thought to be inter-stellar gas clouds within the Milky Way. Hubble was studying stars classified as Cepheid variables; for these objects a known relationship existed between their astronomical magnitude and the time period over which their light output varied. In the case of Cepheids which appeared to be associated with some of the Spiral Nebulae, Hubble noticed that the objects had much lower magnitude than they ought to have, given their observed period of light output variation. Hubble determined that these particular Cepheids must be several hundred thousand light years away, while the Milky Way itself is no more than about seventy thousand light years in diameter. The conclusion was that the Spiral Nebulae associated with these faint Cepheids must be separate galaxies outside our own, and astronomers were forced radically to alter their perception of the universe when Hubble's work was published in 1924.

Hubble set about identifying and classifying objects outside our own galaxy and made a second remarkable discovery which can best be understood after a brief discussion of visible spectrum lines:-
Quantum Mechanics explains quite precisely why each chemical element can emit light at only a few characteristic frequencies, related to the quantum energy levels which the electrons in its atoms can adopt. The result is that each element has its own spectral 'signature' in the pattem of spectrum line wavelengths arriving from some distant light source. By this means astronomers can work out not only what elements are present in the composition of an object being examined, but also what sort of temperatures exist at the source.

Hubble found, as he examined his remote objects, that he was seeing spectral patterns which he recognised, but that in many cases they were shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. Moreover, the more remote the object, the greater the red-shift. The conclusion was that the universe was expanding, since light emitted from a receding object will have a longer wavelength than that emitted from a stationary one.

The conventional view at the time was of a steady-state universe; this is reasonable enough if one's overall perception of the cosmos stretches no further than our own galaxy. It also provided a rare fragment of common ground between scientists and the Judeo/Christian model of cosmogenesis. Many scientists were reluctant converts to Hubble's expanding universe, and the debate is still occasionally revived by academics who appear to be unable to break out of the creationist paradigm, Professors Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi for example. For some 20 years though, the consensus among astronomers has been of the universe having had its origin in some explosive 'Big Bang'; where the debris, for the most part, continues to be propelled outwards from the location of that primal event.

Adherents of the great monotheistic traditions have eventually come to terms with the Big Bang. At least, they avow, it shows that everything originated from some single source, and something must have initiated it, so that something must be God. I don't have any real problem with that particular 'irrefutable hypothesis', but it is nontheless interesting to examine precisely what sort of processes may have been at work in this primal cosmic event.

A simplistic view might be that all the matter in the universe was once clumped together in some single mass or 'singularity', and that this then exploded by some divine 'fiat'. Such a conception might indeed be possible in a universe where the celebrated Parallel Postulate of Euclid has validity, and parallel lines never meet. If the real universe was like that, it is quite unlikely that matters would ever have progressed to the point where sentient entities like ourselves were in a position to give the matter consideration. The fact is that there are no parallel lines. Einstein demonstrated that the space/time continuum is curved, and, although he probably would not have liked it, recent work indicates that the only model of the Big Bang which does not reduce to nonsense in mathematical terms is one of a chaotic inflation.

It begins to look as if Hesiod, or his Muses, had it right in 750 BC when he was inspired to write: "Chaos was the primal source, first of all".
No less an intellect than Dr Stephen Hawking, who currently occupies Newton's old chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, seems to agree. In his recent best-selling book 'A Brief History of Time', Hawking points to a "Chaotic Inflationary Model", first proposed by the Russian theoretician Andrei Linde, as providing one of the best explanations for the progress of events in the early moments of the universe. The dominant system structure and control paradigm (or cyber-morph) is described as a 'Spin 0 Field'. Because of quantum fluctuations of a chaotic nature, it is asserted that this field would have large values in some regions of the early universe, and that an associated reverse gravitational effect would make those regions expand in an inflationary manner. As this inflation progressed, there would be a decrease in the energy values of the 'Spin 0 Field' in those regions, and the inflationary expansion would change to an explosive expansion; one of those original regions now constitutes what we see as the observable universe. This model accounts for observed fluctuations in the temperature of the micro-wave background radiation which is purported to be the residual cosmic 'echo' of the Big Bang.

The initial explosive phase of the expansion is estimated by Hawking to have lasted for about 100 seconds some ten thousand million years ago. After that brief elapse of time, the temperature would have fallen to a mere one thousand million degrees, equivalent to the climatic regime prevailing inside the hottest stars, and protons and neutrons would no longer have sufficient energy to resist the attractive effect of the strong nuclear binding force. At that point those particles would start to combine to form deuterium (heavy hydrogen) nuclei, some of these combining with additional protons and neutrons to form helium nuclei (atomic number 2) and small proportions of lithium and beryllium (atomic numbers 3 and 4). This process would have ceased within a few hours of the Big Bang, but Hawking asserts that such events provide the best explanation for an unexpectedly large amount of helium in the universe.

For the next million years or so, nothing much happened; the universe just got bigger, and the temperature dropped gradually to some few thousand degrees. At this point electrons and nuclei no longer had sufficient energy to resist the electromagnetic attraction between them, and they began to combine to form atoms.

The original genesis from Chaos produced variations in the density of the cooling expanding matter, and in regions of higher density gravitational attraction began to initiate local recollapses. Some of these collapsing regions were influenced by uneven gravitational forces exerted by their surroundings and started to rotate, spinning faster as they became smaller, like spinning skaters do as they pull their arms in. Thus were spiral form galaxies, like our own, brought into being.

Within the galaxies, smaller local concentrations of hydrogen and helium start to collapse under gravitation, and as they contract their temperature starts to rise until nuclear fusion reactions are triggered. This is the point at which a star switches on. The configuration within the star can then remain stable for a long time, say a hundred million years. Hydrogen is converted to helium by nuclear fusion, and the heat given off maintains a pressure which stops the gas cloud collapsing any further. Eventually the fusion processes begin to convert the helium to elements like carbon and oxygen (atomic numbers 12 and 16), and further reactions generate the other naturally occurring elements. In the end a point is reached where the central core of the star collapses under it's own gravitational attraction to a super-dense state: that of a Neutron Star or even a 'Black Hole'. At that moment the outer layers of the star are blown off in a supernova explosion. The resultant 'star-dust' then drifts through space until enough of it accretes with residual primal hydrogen and helium for another star to be bom when the fusion process starts up again.

Here ends part two, if anyone has actually read to this point let me know and will paste the rest, peace out.

Most Heinous Man, Most Heinous
Keep Frying our brains with this awesome paper

Our sun is estimated to be a second or third generation star because of the proportion of heavy elements in its composition. Almost all of the material from which the Earth was formed some four thousand million years ago consists of debris from earlier supernova explosions.
Since the greatest part of our own bodies (by weight) is composed of heavy elements, it is indeed true to say that "we are stardust".
The model of a very hot universe cooling as it expanded is consistent with all the observational evidence available today, but there are several unanswered questions. Hawking points to the following:
1. Why was the original primal material so hot?
2. How come the expansion is so close to the critical rate which separates models which expand indefinitely from those which will ultimately recollapse?

Two other questions which he raises relating to the uniformity of the universe and the existence of local variations, in my view, are explained by the prevalence of the processes of Chaos in all stages of it's evolution.

Local collapses on a galactic scale do occur. Black Holes were first proposed as a theoretical concept in 1916 by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzchild, whose calculations were based on Einstein's general theory of relativity. The basic idea is that when a star or some other massive body reaches a point where it's own gravitational attraction becomes sufficiently powerful, the structure of the atoms of which it is composed will collapse into super-dense matter, with the space separating the atomic nuclei effectively eliminated. It is postulated that a lump of such material equivalent to approximately three solar masses would exert a gravitational field so powerful that no radiation of any kind could escape from it. The boundary of such a body is designated the 'Event Horizon', and its distance from the centre of the body the 'Schwarzchild Radius'.

Bodies conforming to this pattern have been identified, but they are not Black. In fact material entering the Event Horizon is travelling so energetically that it emits large quantities of high frequency radiation just before it disappears. By a strange co-incidence I happened to be a contract technician working for the research group at University College, London whose experimental camera (the Image Photon Counting System (IPCS)) made the first positive identification of a celestial body as a Black Hole in 1978. The head of that team, Dr Alec Boksenberg, is now Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and the only person I know ever to have had an asteroid named after him! The first definite Black Hole was an object with the unromantic name of M87; it is a long way from here and looks like a galaxy guzzling its neighbour. The diagnosis of a Black Hole was made on the basis of the energy emitted by material crossing the Event Horizon. Many others have now been identified, and it is suspected that the powerful radio source at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy may be a Black Hole.

The critical rate of the expansion of the universe means that there is some doubt as to whether the cumulative gravitational attraction of all matter is sufficient to eventually reverse the expansion.
When considering issues and topics where the cutting edges of pure maths, physics and cosmology intersect, it is easy to feel that one has entered a region where science fiction meets science fact. I would like to stress that the most part of what has been presented here quite definitely falls within the domain of established science fact. Where I have extrapolated or introduced new ideas of my own, I have attempted to make it clear that this has been done.

To venture briefly into matters which sometimes provide a basis for science fiction, I would like to give some consideration firstly to 'Worm-Holes'. These are purported structures by which it is apparently possible for material to enter some region of the physical universe and then re-emerge in a different physical location, with or without some elapse of time. I first encountered such entities in 'The Cosmic Trigger' by Robert Anton Wilson, along with discussion of non-local quantum effects, and presented in the same sort of theoretical context. It may well be that mathematicians and/or theoretical physicists have indeed made serious proposals about such entities within recent decades, but, as far as I have been able to determine, they are not under active consideration at present by prominent workers in the relevant subject areas. This may be a disappointment to 'Dr Who' and 'Startrek' fans, since several key elements of such fictional series would seem to depend on something akin to Worm-Holes; for example, the mechanism by which a physical crew member might be 'beamed' up or down between an orbiting spacecraft and a planet's surface. I am also unable to point to any serious current work on the general subject of physical time travel. That of course does not rule out the possibility that such phenomena may become the subject of serious work at some time in the future.

What I would hope that I have been able to impart is the notion that so-called 'empty space' is in fact far from empty. Inter-galactic space is clearly permeated by the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. If it were not, we would not be able to collect data from remote galactic systems; albeit that such information is inevitably representative of the state of affairs at those remote locations at the time when the detected radiation set out on its joumey to our observation point, travelling at 186 000 miles per second - the speed of propagation of light (and other electromagnetic radiation) in a 'vacuum'.

As regards the space within our own galaxy, and more specifically within our own solar system, I would draw attention to an article by Alan Johnstone (lecturer in physics and astronomy at University College, London) entitled 'In Search of Empty Space', published by New Scientist in February 1990. Johnstone describes interplanetary space as being permeated by a sparse gaseous plasma. This is unlike any gas that we are directly familiar with on earth, consisting of charged particles such as exist in the tube of a fluorescent light, but ratified to a density of some 10 particles per cubic centimetre.

The upper layers of the Sun boil off more than a million tonnes of plasma into space every second, creating a 'wind' which blows through the solar system. Plasma is an extremely good conductor of electricity, and consequently magnetic fields permeate the solar system like tangled strands of spaghetti. Boundaries between the Sun's field and those of the planets are defined, but they are chao-dynamic in character; that is they experience alterations which are linked to the intensity of the solar wind. Significant electric currents can build up in the plasma of the boundary regions.

Among the observed terrestrial effects of such phenomena are the auroras which can often be seen in polar latitudes, for example as the Nonhem Lights. These are seen frequently in the North of Scotland and the Shetland Isles, but have been observed in recent years as far south as Swindon and Bristol. Aurora events have been noted to be directly correlated with the incidence of anomalous behaviour of the Earth's magnetosphere and with the occurrence of relatively large numbers of sunspots.

Auroras and related events at the magnetospheric boundaries are not completely understood by present day science and various space probes are planned to make detailed investigation of the whole range of these phenomena in as much as they effect the Eanh. A probe named 'Ulysses' was launched by the Space Shuttle this year; it is intended to go into orbit about the poles of the Sun to make detailed analysis of that particular star's magnetic field. It may be some years before results are available, because it has been necessary to 'slingshot' the vehicle round the giant planet Jupiter to use that planet's gravitational field to give it sufficient velocity to escape from the plane of the 'ecliptic'; the disk-like expanse of space extending out from the Sun's equator which the orbits of most of the planets lie within.

It seems that situations can arise where a chaotic interaction occurs between the Sun's and the Earth's magnetic fields, and under these circumstances the solar wind, instead of being deflected, is able to permeate the Earth's atmosphere, effectively switching on aurora displays. The effect is like that which occurs in a TV tube, but with the upper atmosphere playing the role of the screen. The complexity of the particle interactions is evidenced by the finely detailed structure observed in the aurora displays, which are fractal in character -that is they exhibit self- similarity between their large scale and their small scale appearance.

It is thought likely that a comprehensive understanding of the processes involved in aurora generation will lead to new insights about the behaviour of plasmas in general. These insights are likely to play a significant part in modelling phenomena ranging from solar flares to fusion reactions to supernova events.
An area of interest which appears to be totally ignored by established researchers is the extent to which the movement of the Earth and other planets with respect to each other and to the Sun may modify the various electric, magnetic and gravitational fields permeating interplanetary space. I intend to present evidence in the next paper in this series to support the suggestion that such effects may not be insignificant, and that these areas of research may be critical to our arrival at some understanding of a number of phenomena which might generally be classified in the domain of Astrology.

Done, and if you have read this feel free to ask me for any assistance on anything knowing that i will use this as a reference to explain alot of concepts, this can all be used for understandings relating to other topics.

This..is the sweetest information i`ve tasted :D