Novblog 2024

Epoch

The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos has temporarily gone out of print.

This definitive Grimoire of the early 21^st century has become a collector’s item that now occasionally changes hands between the cognoscenti at extraordinary prices.

I originally published it privately and then used my commercial business to distribute it. After retiring from that business I handed the distribution of the remaining copies to Mandrake of Oxford.

Now that the stock has gone, Mandrake plan a further edition in a more compact format and also a more conventionally sized card deck to accompany the book. Details will follow when ready.

Politics.

Flabby fish-faced fanny fumbler Alex Salmond croaks it, and unsurprisingly the Scottish ‘government’ declines to repatriate the body of this ‘Titan of Independence’ or give it a state funeral in Edinburgh. Salmond never attempted to make an economically coherent case for Scottish independence. He merely used tartan romanticism in pursuit of his own political career and after resigning in disgrace he split the independence movement and formed a new party to continue his career. Nicola Sturgeon also resigned in disgrace when investigations began into who had their hands in the till. Both of them appear to have prioritized their own political careers above all else. I doubt that either of them believed that Scottish Secession made any kind of economic or geopolitical sense. So hopefully the whole daft idea will remain kicked into the long grass indefinitely. Hurrah! I love the highlands and have blood and treasure there.  

In the UK we elected Boris Johnson, knowing that he had a dubious character, in order to sort out the intractable post Brexit-Vote shambles. He did achieve a workable result of sorts, and then we retired him soon after for bad behaviour.

Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump present wishful thinking and over-promising populism with scant regard for what many would regard as ‘facts’. Moreover they do it with   disarming buffoonery. In this media dominated age, democratic politics seems to have evolved from ‘the art of the possible’ towards a chaos-magical thinking that can (sometimes) turn pretended beliefs into reality.   

Narcissistic Machiavellian Psychopaths make ghastly dictators but they can make a reasonable job of governing democracies that have a suitable suite of checks and balances. As a self-serving egoist without any principles, Donald Trump seems unlikely to initiate any war or policy that he thought might put his own popularity rating at risk.

As a lawyer turned career politician Kamala Harris remains an unknown quantity, who knows whether egoism or ideology motivates her.

Domestic policy differences between the candidates for POTUS seem minor and neither candidate will manage to do anything revolutionary if elected because of the awesome inertia of vested interests and the politico-legalistic paralysis that has built up in the American system. American presidents have some executive freedom in foreign policy but not much domestically. So the election has become contested largely on grounds of style and identity.

America appears close to producing the worst possible result – a non-decisive result.

Thus, if in doubt, don’t vote. Substantial abstentions in favour of ‘neither of the above’ will at least reduce either candidate’s opportunity to declare the election stolen by dirty tricks, it will reduce identity based polarisations, and weaken conspiracy theories. Low turnouts in open democracies signify societies at peace with themselves, and a healthy scepticism about politicians.

Towards Net Zero Everything.

In a Zero Sum Game all player’s gains come from other player’s losses. As pressure on the world’s environment and the resources it provides becomes intense, politicians find it increasingly difficult to pretend that economics can still function as a Positive Sum Game, in which everyone can gain something.

We have built fragile economic systems predicated on debt serviced by growth.

As resource depletion and waste pollution accelerate worldwide, growth falters, citizens can only use more resources at the expense of other citizens, and nations can only use more resources at the expense of other nations.

The newly elected UK Labour government preaches Growth! Growth! Growth! It will not happen now. At best they will merely achieve some redistribution from the moderately wealthy to the slightly less wealthy, and from the private sector to the public sector.

We need politicians to stop promoting growth through resource consumption. We need scientists and technicians to create substitutes for growth through improving the use of reduced resources. We need better stuff that lasts, not just more stuff. Quality not quantity.

We should concentrate on INNOVATION, RESORCE FRUGALITY, and LEISURE rather than work.

Otherwise we will end up in ever more conflicts and wars which become Negative Sum Games in which everyone loses.

Matter – Antimatter Symmetry in a Hypersphere.

The previous post, Septblog 2024, shows how the spacetime worldlines of all galaxies form the great circles of a Hopf Fibration of the Hyperspherical universe. A Hopf Fibration will exhibit a symmetry breakage and have either a left chiral or right chiral form. This universe probably has a left chiral twist to it because of the several examples of symmetry breakage in favour of left handed forms within it. For examples, galaxies have a propensity to lie in left handed tetrahedral configurations with respect to their three nearest neighbouring galaxies. Spiral galaxies also seem to exhibit a preference for anticlockwise rotation. Most biologically active molecules in the terrestrial biota that have possible chiral forms tend to use only the left handed forms. The smallest fundamental particle in the universe, the neutrino, occurs only in left handed spin form, and hence the weak force, responsible for the burning of stars and nuclear transmutation, only involves left handed particles.

We can view a hypersphere as having two 360 degree twists in all the spacetime paths or geodesics within it. One twist joins the paths into circles, the other twists all the circles together so that any one of them passes inside of all the others.

But what about the most profound asymmetry of all in the universe – why does it not seem to contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter?

Very small amounts of antimatter do occasionally appear to us, for example some radioactive decays produce positrons (anti-electrons), and violent smash ups of particles in particle accelerators can produce anti-matter versions of many types of particle. Some physicists find it convenient to model anti-particles as particles going backwards in time, and this description  seems plausible and self-consistent. It seems that if you hit particles hard enough some may get kicked backwards in time. Fascinatingly, anti-neutrinos always have a right handed spin, exactly as you would expect for a time reversed left handed spin neutrino.

Now we can take a single circular spacetime geodesic to represent the path of a single immortal proton around the universe. (Okay I know stars can transmute protons to neutrons, but they can eventually revert back to protons. We can create anti-protons in particle accelerators but only at the expense of creating a proton at the same time and the created antiproton will annihilate a proton eventually, so the total number of protons remains constant for a finite but unbounded ‘eternity’.)

As the proton follows a geodesic around the hyperspherical universe it becomes ‘rotated’ : -

By analogy if you stand anywhere on the equator of the rotating Earth, then twelve hours later your orientation will have rotated by 180 degrees, relative to your starting position. Even if the Earth did not rotate, Antipodeans (people on the other side of the planet) stand upside-down with respect to observers.

Now in a hypersphere a body will become rotated by 180 degrees in all dimensions of space and time as it vorticitates to its antipode position. This will include an inversion of all of its spins including those of electromagnetic and nuclear charge that have imaginary time components. Thus a vorticitation to its antipode will turn a left handed proton into a right handed antiproton relative to an observer at its ‘start’ position.

The photons of light act as their own antiparticles and they interact in exactly the same way with matter as with antimatter, so we cannot tell by simply looking whether distant galaxies consist of one or the other. Plus light does not follow the geodesics of the hyperspherical vorticitation, it flies, if you like, ‘tangentially’ to them and thus remains subject to a ‘deceleration’ which causes redshift in direct proportion to distance travelled.

You might ask, what about particles or galaxies only halfway to an observers antipode, do they consist of the same sort of stuff as the observer or do they consist of some sort of halfway stuff between matter and antimatter? Well in a sense they do from the observer’s initial perspective but they will look the same because light does not differentiate, and if an observer attempted to go a vast distance anywhere in a powered spacecraft, the power expended by the spacecraft to get there would effectively rotate it and the observer into a configuration that matched the local conditions, so observers will find what they recognise as ‘matter’ everywhere.

Thus it doesn’t really matter that the other side of the universe consists of antimatter, but at least we have a self-consistent explanation of the local matter-antimatter asymmetry.

Fantasy Space Fleets.

(Of course I only make these for the grandkids, ahem, but a man needs a break from relentless research in the conjuratorium and the maths lab, plus one may as well start one’s second childhood early to make the most of it.)

As we prepare to close down the lodge on a remote Welsh shore for the winter, the last Lithonian ship of the year emerges from the beach detritus, recycled vape accessories, and bits of metal scrap in the space yards. Herewith the Lithonian Experimental Systems Vessel: -

Whilst configured as a testbed platform, it may have to serve as a warship if diplomacy between Lithonia and Skaron fails. In the planned scenario, the old Skaron Empire relies on technologies and ancient ships that have not changed for millennia whilst the upstart Lithonian rebels have innovated at speed and have a fleet of peculiar unique vessels at varying levels of sophistication and ability. The rule structure of the eventual game may get a bit complicated………..

Herewith the two fleets so far: -