Feblog 2023
Matt Kaybryn. Does anyone have any contact with this artist who seems to have completely disappeared off-scene and off-net? If he still lives, I would really like him to contact me to discuss future publications of the EPOCH artwork.
Cosmology - JWST update. At the time of writing, the James Webb Space Telescope has astonished conventional cosmologists by revealing huge numbers of apparently ‘young’ and ‘old’ galaxies at very high redshifts. According to conventional theory this means that we now see them at vast distances in space and time as they would have looked just a few hundred million years after the hypothesised big bang event 13.8 billion years ago.
At the very least these new observations will lead to a severe revision of the theories about how fast galaxies can come into existence and develop after a purported big bang.
If the JWST can find stars and galaxies even closer to the CMBR horizon, then the LCDM big bang hypothesis will die.
Hypersphere Cosmology predicts with increasing confidence that we inhabit a finite and unbounded non-expanding universe, homogenous and isotropic in space AND time on the large scale. It only appears to expand, and at an increasing rate, because conventional LCDM theory fails to acknowledge the gravitational origin of cosmological redshift in a universe with a small positive curvature which leads to a redshift dependent only on distance, and an overall hyperspherical cosmic lensing which dims distant objects and creates the optical illusion of an accelerating expansion.
The CMBR arises from highly redshifted galactic light from near antipode distance, and this creates an effective horizon that we cannot see beyond.
FSW Update.
Frontier Space War has remained a work in progress intermittently for the last 50 years. It consists of related game ideas for modelling interstellar conflict at the level of individual spacecraft and surface forces.
In the FSW universe, spacecraft can warp jump from one star system to an adjacent one between points of equal gravitational potential and they can also manoeuvre in system to engage enemy ships or surface units.
The latest innovations to this simulation system appear in the scenario shown below: -
Spatial Topology – The board represents a three dimensional volume of space with five factions (empires, corporations, polities, alien races, neo-feudal great houses?) within it, each having borders with the other four, note the identification of opposite corners of the board by the placing of halved areas in the corners. The territories of the five factions thus have a topological relationship equivalent to a pentachoron.
The use of discs to represent star systems and the touching of discs to represent permitted jump routes allows for a clearer and less ambiguous positioning of pieces than point like stars joined by lines.
The use of metal pieces throughout allows for a vertical aesthetic (they have a pleasing weight and don’t easily fall over). The pieces consist of nuts and bolts, ball bearings, woodscrews, masonry and plaster anchors, and plumbing fittings, with 2 part epoxy resin glue where appropriate.
Art - As the project begins to take on its mature form I have blinged it up with high end metallic spray paints.
Rule structures continue to evolve in several directions. For simpler play, combat proceeds using Risk like protocols with polyhedral dice, D20 for fortresses/manufactories, D12 & D10 for capital ships, D8 for cruisers and carriers, D6 & D4 for destroyers, frigates, fighters, and forts. More complex play depends on the use of Asymmetric Combat Polygons, secretly selected tactics, plus also diplomacy and simultaneous moves on written orders in the afficionado versions.
Ethical note: Nobody gets killed in FSW. As animals cannot survive the stresses of interstellar warship manoeuvring, backed-up AIs and droids crew all the vessels. Civilians merely become informed of new laws and taxes as planetary ownership changes.
Alternative Physics. The Quantum Chromo-Dynamics model of how the nuclei of atoms work looks increasingly like a mess of questionable suppositions and dodgy mathematics that have little explanatory or predictive power. In response to the extensive zoo of meson and baryon particles that arise from smashing nuclear particles together at high energies the quark-gluon QCD model evolved. In this model protons and neutrons both consist of three quarks each and gluon exchanges hold them together. Each of the two major types of quark has to have a fractional electric charge of one third or two thirds, and to come in one of three possible ‘colours’ which represents another abstract property, plus it has to come in one of three possible ‘flavours’ which differ only in their masses. Additionally, each variety of quark has its own fundamental field, and an antiparticle with an anti-charge and an anti-colour, although not an anti-mass. This deceptively ingenious scheme does have the virtue that it can qualitatively describe all baryons like the proton and the neutron and all the heavier baryons that we can create for fleeting moments in particle colliders as quark triplets and all the fleeting mesons as quark-antiquark doublets.
However, quark theory doesn’t add up without the additional assumption that the three ‘valence’ quarks which supposedly make up a baryon each have a surrounding cloud of ‘virtual’ ‘sea quarks’ with seemingly arbitrary properties to fix the maths.
Yet individual quarks (virtual or sea) and gluons remain undetectable, and far too few things really add up quantitatively in QCD. Murray Gell-Mann who largely devised the model did sometimes wonder if quarks and gluons only existed as mere explanatory devices of our own creation.
The model of baryons as quark triplets demands that something like colour-anti-colour gluons must hold them together. This leads to the supposition that attractive proton-proton and neutron-neutron forces exist.
Yet apart from hydrogen which has only a single proton in its nucleus, all clusters of nucleons in all atomic nuclei have to consist of a mixture of protons and neutrons. Poly-proton nuclei without neutrons do not exist. Heavy nuclei require that the number of neutrons exceeds that of protons to overcome the mounting electric charges and forces which tend to push protons apart. Thus, it seems that a proton-neutron attraction remains the only significant force required to bind atomic nuclei together if we discard the quark hypothesis. The relatively simple exchange of charged Pions can account for this. (The gravitational forces and the chiral spin alignment forces between nucleons remain orders of magnitude weaker.)
What then could explain the whole zoo of transient exotic baryons and mesons that our particle smashers can create? Why do orthodox theorists think in terms of ‘coloured’ and ‘flavoured’ down, up, strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks, plus all their antiparticles and meson and baryon combinations and eight varieties of colour-anti-colour quarks, and twenty six separate fundamental fields of which each of these particles constitutes an excitation?
It would seem far more economical to explore the hypothesis that only a single fundamental field, that of spacetime itself, actually exists, but that it has more dimensions than commonly supposed and that it can support quantised spinorial rotations in various of its dimensions. And that these spinorial rotations remain conserved in all particle interactions. In this case only a single type of stable fundamental baryon really exists – the proton, (or if it spinorialy rotates in the opposite direction the - anti-proton). The neutron then just consists of a proton with an added opposite electrical spinorial rotation. All ‘higher’ versions of baryons simply consist of excited states with exotic extra spinorial rotations. Neutrinos play a big part in the universe but only because they carry away leftover spinorial spins and anti-spins from nuclear interactions. The ubiquitous nature of attractive gravity arises because any and all distortions in an elastic medium will tend to attract each other weakly regardless of their relative direction of ‘twist’.
This line of speculation has a manifold motivations: - both quantum mechanics (particularly in its Transactional interpretation) and certain esoteric phenomena seem to demand extra-temporal dimensionality in the universe. Gravity remains impossible to integrate with current quantum field theory. Quantum field theory looks like it has gone down a mathematically intractable blind alley, particularly with the overenthusiastic application of SU3 symmetries. Such triplicities as exist may well arise from the three dimensionality of time.
Entertainment. Only Prince Harry seems to have realised the real function of royalty in a constitutional monarchy – to act as highly paid entertainers in a family soap opera. Let us hope he turns up for his father’s coronation bash and does something ‘interesting’. I don’t watch either of them, but here in the UK we have two popular soap operas: Eastenders, a proletarian soap opera, and Westenders, an aristocratic one. Eastenders does not have much of an export market, so well done Harry for creating one for Westenders. Marrying a professional actress has obviously helped.
Actual War. I guess the main question for the western alliance has now become ‘How quickly do we want Putin’s forces in Ukraine defeated?’
A rapid defeat would prove easy to accomplish and economically cheaper, but it increases the slight possibility of the use of WMDs, and it increases the chances that Putin could manage a retreat into an even more repressive neo-feudal Fortress Russia which might effectively become a client state of totalitarian China.
A slower defeat may prove more costly in humanitarian and economic terms, but it would reduce the chances of WMD use, inflict even greater damage on the Russian economy and the standing of Putin and his cronies, and increase the chances of a regime change, hopefully towards something more democratic.
Keep up the good work https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war