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) = vi(r) + 2sqrt(piGp) r
Where the velocity at any radius v(r) equals the velocity expected from the usual inertial and gravitational considerations vi(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.