Vinegar eels forming a torus

 I ran across an article in Science News this week about the curious discovery that a tiny nematode called vinegar eels (because they swim around in raw vinegar) are able to engage in synchronized swimming when confined to a single water droplet. This synchronization of movement is quite unusual and unexpected. Here's what they look like when this happens:

 Turbatrix aceti, a species of nematode commonly known as vinegar eels, engage in synchronized swimming when confined to a water droplet. photo: ANTON PESHKOV

These vinegar eels coordinate two types of movement, directional motion plus oscillation, to create the torus shape pictured above. Confinement to a globular water droplet is required in order to coordinate these movements, otherwise the tiny nematodes swim by themselves through their liquid mediums.

The toroidal distribution exerts a measurable outward pressure toward the outside of the droplet to keep it from collapsing inward. 

Scientists are puzzled as to how these mindless, primitive organisms can coordinate this complex behavior. Such behavior has been predicted by computer modeling of fluid dynamics, but this is the first example discovered in living organisms.

The original report appears in the journal Soft Matter.

Synchronized oscillations in swarms of nematode Turbatrix aceti

Anton Peshkov,    Sonia McGaffigan and  Alice C. Quillen   

Here is another look at the nematodes in the process of organizing themselves into the torus.

A Simple Explanation of an Embryo's Development--It's a Torus!

Use of an amazing new microscope called light-sheet microscopy has yielded never-before-seen images of cellular development and organ formation in a living, implanted embryo. Over a two-day period, about a million images captured mouse cells developing from a simple sphere into an elongated shape as the embryo formed its organs.

These images track a mouse embryo from gastrulation through organogenesis.
K. McDole et.al. Cell/2018
 VOLUME 175, ISSUE 3, P859-876.E33, OCTOBER 18, 2018

Here is the embryo's development in motion:



As the embryo grows, a depression forms and collapses inward to form the hollow tube of the mouse's gut, while a brightness appears at the opposite pole and streaks across the outside to become the neural tube and notochord. The cells that will become other organs appear throughout the developing thickness of the embryo, with the heart forming at the surface, around the mouth of the positive pole. The heart cells begin beating almost immediately after their appearance. 

The Simple Explanation suggests that we are witnessing the inner, unseen, proto-torus at work within this embryo. The Simple Explanation hypothesizes that there is a torus-shaped informational source embedded in every piece of matter in our universe. It is this torus-shaped fractal that informs each piece of our universe with the information it needs.

What I see here is the developing embryo following the energetic and informational data flowing out of the torus at the center.

Information and energy explodes out of the middle of proto-torus and flows along the pole.

Here's how I see it working. Imagine the white starburst is the crossover point between non-material space and our universe. Energy from the non-material metaverse explodes outward from the middle, pushing chi or lifeforce or whatever you want to call this, outward. Meanwhile, the fractal formula of our universe informs the emerging material of its shape and job. In this instance, the formula informs the mouse embryo how to become a mouse.

As the torus throws energy from the middle, at first, when the material is very small and close to the source, it appears as a round sphere. The spherical shape is the first expression of a toroidal source. Then, as the object gains mass, it becomes too "heavy" to keep its proto-toroidal shape. At that point, it will begin to grow into the shape of its own particular destiny--in this case, a mouse.

Developing mouse embryo with color-coded organ cells. In this image, the purple to the left is the emerging heart. The black circular void is the mouth of the cylindrical gut. The neural tube appears as a green line at the equator, with red notochord cells mixed in with and running up the neural cord's length. The other colors represent other organs' cells.

Imagine the torus oriented as the illustration below, with the pole of the torus running horizontally. As the mouse embryo gains cells and mass, the metaversal torus cannot sustain the spherical shape and naturally collapses inward along the path of least resistance--the pole. This collapse of material forms a void around the pole, becoming the colon.

The developing colon forms along the path of least resistance--the torus pole (violet). The (white) starburst at the middle is the crossover point between the immaterial metaverse and our universe, known as "chi" in Eastern traditions.

In the next step of development, the heart forms around the mouth of the pole, the point closest to the hollow conduit of energy that has become the tube of the colon, which runs without interference through the middle point of the torus. The heart cells gather around the feeding pool of energy coursing up that hollow pole, gaining direct energy from the originating source of life itself. Now the heart beats and life has entered our universe from the crossover point.

The heart cells aggregate at the mouth of the positive pole of the torus (green). At the same time, the neural tube and notochord traverse the outside of the torus from the negative pole towards the positive pole (yellow circle).

Meanwhile, the neural tube forms, beginning at the pole opposite the heart and running along the outside towards the opposite pole. This neural tube will develop into the brain, spinal chord, and nervous system. 

Various colors represent cells of different organs appearing. The heart cells are purple (circled by green) and the neural tube appears as green, with the notochord cells mixed in (yellow circle).

Philosophically, the fact that the colon runs up the pole and through the torus middle is interesting. That makes our gut the nearest organ to our originating source, not the brain or heart, although they arise at the same time.

It is also interesting that the neural tube seems to begin at the negative pole, opposite the heart. Here we have a visual schema for "heart vs. head." These two organ systems develop at opposite ends of the torus/embryo. Yet the neural cells quickly shoot across the outside to unify the body with the heart. Philosophically, we could say that our brains are there to interface with the material universe, hence the neural tube's placement outside rather than inside with the gut. The heart is also on the outside, also interfacing with the world. Yet it is close to the originating source, clinging like material around the event horizon of a black hole, deriving its lifeforce from the energetic middle.

I realize this Simple Explanation appears as foolish hooey to hardcore materialist scientists. But we are dealing with the mystery of life itself. There can be no denying that the emerging embryo is newly alive. It is not good science to discard any hypothesis that can describe and explain this.

Watch this excellent 6-minute film that shows this process unfolding more slowly:

Circumgalactic Medium--It's a Torus! Science News Reprint

The Simple Explanation theorizes that there is a torus surrounding every material object in our universe. It is out of this proto-shape that energy and matter emerge. Now astronomers have identified and named, for the first time, the torus surrounding and shaping galaxies---just as the Simple Explanation predicted and describes. Read on...

The ecosystem that controls a galaxy’s future is coming into focus

The circumgalactic medium has been hard to observe, but new tools now make it possible.

BY 

LISA GROSSMAN 

7:00AM, JULY 12, 2018

COSMIC CLOAK  Whirls of cold and hot gas billow in this simulation of a circumgalactic medium surrounding a galaxy. With new tools and simulations, researchers have learned that the CGM helps a galaxy recycle its materials. 

M.S. PEEPLES ET AL/FOGGIE PROJECT

Magazine issue: Vol. 194, No. 2, July 21, 2018, p. 16

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There’s more to a galaxy than meets the eye. Galaxies’ bright stars seem to spiral serenely against the dark backdrop of space. But a more careful look reveals a whole lot of mayhem.
“Galaxies are just like you and me,” Jessica Werk, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “They live their lives in a constant state of turmoil.”
Much of that turmoil takes place in a huge, complicated setting called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This vast, roiling cloud of dust and gas is a galaxy’s fuel source, waste dump and recycling center all in one. Astronomers think the answers to some of the most pressing galactic mysteries — how galaxies keep forming new stars for billions of years, why star formation abruptly stops — are hidden in a galaxy’s enveloping CGM.
“To understand the galaxies, you have to understand the ecosystem that they’re in,” says astronomer Molly Peeples of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Yet this galactic atmosphere is so diffuse that it’s invisible — a liter of CGM contains just a single atom. It has taken almost 60 years and an upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope just to begin probing distant CGMs and figuring out how their constant churning can make or break galaxies.
“Only recently have we been able to really, truly, observationally characterize the relationship between this gaseous cycle and the properties of the galaxy itself,” Werk says.
Armed with the first extragalactic census, astronomers are now piecing together how a CGM controls its galaxy’s life and death. And new theoretical studies hint that galaxies’ stars would be arranged very differently without a medium’s frenetic flows. Plus, new observations show that some CGMs are surprisingly lumpy. A better understanding of CGMs, enabled by new telescopes and computer simulations, could change how scientists think about everything from galaxy collisions to the origins of our own atoms.
“The CGM is the part of the iceberg that’s under the water,” says astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski of ETH Zurich, who studies the more conventional parts of galaxies. “We now have good measurements where we’re sure it’s important.”

Frenetic fog

Researchers use a bright source of background light, like a quasar, to learn about a galaxy’s circumgalactic medium, a diffuse cloud of gas and metals (pink in the illustration) surrounding a galaxy. Gas is recycled between the galaxy and the CGM.

C. CHANG

Sources: J. Tumlinson, M.S. Peeples and J.K. Werk/Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 2017; M.S. Peeples/Nature 2015

Waiting for Hubble

That 2009 Hubble telescope upgrade, which made the CGM census possible, almost didn’t happen.
In a cosmic coincidence, the Hubble telescope’s chief champions were also the first astronomers to figure out how to observe a galaxy’s CGM. Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University and John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and other astronomers noticed something strange after the 1963 discovery of quasars (SN Online: 3/21/14), bright beacons now known to be white-hot disks surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies.
Everywhere astronomers looked, quasars’ spectra — the rainbow created when their light is spread out over all wavelengths — were notched with dark holes. Some wavelengths of light weren’t getting through.
In 1969, Spitzer and Bahcall realized what was going on: The missing light was absorbed by gas at the edges of galaxies, the same stuff that would later be called the CGM. Astronomers had been peering at quasars shining through CGMs like headlights through a fog.
Not much more could be done at the time, though. Earth’s atmosphere also absorbs light in those same wavelengths, making it difficult to tell which light-blocking atoms were in a galaxy’s CGM and which came from closer to home. Knowing that a CGM was there was one thing; taking its measurements would require something extra.
Spitzer and Bahcall knew what they needed: a space telescope that could observe from outside Earth’s atmosphere. The pair were two of the most vocal and consistent champions of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. Spitzer’s colleagues called him Hubble’s “intellectual and political father.”
Bahcall never stopped advocating for Hubble. In February 2005, six months before his death at age 70 from a rare blood disorder, he cowrote an article in the Los Angeles Times urging Congress to restore funding for a mission to fix some aging Hubble instruments, which NASA had canceled after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.
“What is at stake is not only a piece of stellar technology but our commitment to the most fundamental human quest: understanding the cosmos,” Bahcall and colleagues wrote. “Hubble’s most important discoveries could be in the future.”
His plea was answered: The space shuttle Atlantis brought astronauts to repair Hubble for the last time in May 2009 (SN Online: 5/19/09). During the repair, the astronauts installed the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which could pick up diffuse CGM gas with 30 times the sensitivity of any previous instrument. Although earlier spectrographs on Hubble had picked out CGMs a few quasar-beams at a time, the new device let astronomers search around dozens of galaxies, using the light of even dimmer quasars.
“It blew the field wide open,” Werk says.

Gas flows out from M82, the Cigar galaxy, to its invisible circumgalactic medium in this Hubble image.

NASA, ESA, HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM

The circumgalactic census

A team led by Jason Tumlinson of Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble’s academic home, made a catalog of 44 galaxies with a quasar sitting behind them from Hubble’s perspective. In a 2011 paper in Science, the researchers reported that every time they looked within 490,000 light-years of a galaxy, they saw spectra dappled with blank spots from atoms absorbing light. That meant that CGMs weren’t odd cloaks worn by just a few galaxies. They were everywhere.
Tumlinson’s team spent the first few years after Hubble’s upgrade like 19th century naturalists describing new species. The group measured the mass and the chemical makeup of the galaxies’ CGMs and found they were huge cisterns of heavy elements. CGMs contain 10 million times the mass of the sun in oxygen alone. In many cases, the mass of a CGM is comparable to the mass of the entire visible part of its galaxy.
The finding offers an answer to a long-standing cosmic mystery: How do galaxies have enough star-forming fuel to keep going for billions of years? Galaxies build stars from collapsing clouds of cool gas at a constant rate; the Milky Way, for example, makes one to two solar masses’ worth of stars every year. But there isn’t enough cool gas within the visible part of a galaxy, the disk containing its stars, to support observed rates of star formation.
“We think that gas probably comes from the CGM,” Werk says. “But exactly how that gas is getting into galaxies, where it gets in, the timescale on which it gets in, are there things that prevent it from getting in? Those are big questions that keep us all awake at night.”
Werk and Peeples realized that all that mass could help solve two other cosmic bookkeeping problems. All elements heavier than helium (which astronomers lump together as “metals”) are forged by nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. When stars use up their fuel and explode as supernovas, they scatter those metals around to be folded into the next generation of stars.
But if you add up all the metals in the stars, gas and dust in a given galaxy’s disk, it’s not enough to account for all the metals the galaxy has ever made. The mismatch gets even worse if you include the hydrogen, helium, electrons and protons — basically all the ordinary matter that should have collected in the galaxy since the Big Bang. Astronomers call all those bits baryons. Galaxies seem to be missing 70 to 95 percent of that stuff.
So Peeples and Werk led a comprehensive effort to tally all the ordinary matter in about 40 galaxies observed with Hubble’s new spectrometer. The researchers published the results in two 2014 papers in the Astrophysical Journal.
At the time, Werk reported that at least half of galaxies’ missing ordinary matter can be accounted for in their CGMs. In a 2017 update, Werk and colleagues found that the mass of baryons just in the form of cool gas in a galaxy’s CGM could be nearly 90 billion solar masses. “Obviously, this mass could resolve the galactic missing baryons problem,” the team wrote.
“It’s a classic science story,” Schawinski says. The researchers had a hypothesis about where the missing material should be and made predictions. The group made observations to test those predictions and found what it sought.
In a separate study, Peeples showed that although metals are born in galaxies’ starry disks, those metals don’t stay there. Only 20 to 25 percent of the metals a galaxy has ever produced remains in the stars, gas and dust in the disk, where the metals can be incorporated into new stars and planets. The rest probably ends up in the CGM.
“If you look at all the metals the galaxies ever produced in their whole lifetime, more of them are outside the galaxy than are still inside the galaxy,” Tumlinson says, “which was a huge shock.”

Recycling centers

So how did the metals get into the CGM? Quasars’ spectra couldn’t help with that question. Their light shows only a slice through a single galaxy at a single moment in time. But astronomers can track galaxies’ growth and development with computer simulations based on physical rules for how stars and gas behave.
This strategy revealed the churning, ever-changing nature of gas in galaxies’ CGMs. Simulations such as EAGLE, or Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments, which is run out of Leiden University in the Netherlands, showed that metals can reach CGMs through stars’ violent lives: in powerful winds of radiation blowing away from massive young stars, and in the death throes of supernovas spraying metals far and wide.

This EAGLE simulation shows that, over time, metals (colors) move away from the center of a galaxy to the circumgalactic medium.

  J. TUMLINSON, M.S. PEEPLES AND J.K. WERK/ANNUAL REVIEW OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS 2017

Once the metals are in the CGM, though, they don’t always stay put. In simulations, galaxies seem to use the same gas over and over again.
“It’s basically just gravity,” Peeples says. “Throw a baseball up, and it’ll come back to the ground.” The same goes for gas flowing out of galaxies: Unless the gas travels fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravity altogether, those atoms will eventually fall back into the disk — and form new stars.
Some simulations show discrete gas parcels making the trip from a galaxy’s disk out into the CGM and back again several times. Together, CGMs and their galaxies are giant recycling devices.
That means that the atoms that make up planets, plants and people may have taken several trips to circumgalactic space before becoming part of us. Over hundreds of millions of years, the atoms that eventually became part of you traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years.
“This is my favorite thing,” Tumlinson says. “At some point, your carbon, your oxygen, your nitrogen, your iron was out in intergalactic space.”

How galaxies die

But not all galaxies get their CGM gas back. Losing the gas could shut off star formation in a galaxy for good. No one knows how star formation shuts off, or quenches. But the answer is probably in the CGM.
Galaxies come in two main forms: young spiral galaxies that are making stars and old blobby galaxies where star formation is quenched (SN Online: 4/23/18).
“How galaxies quench and why they stay that way is one of the most important questions in galaxy formation generally,” Tumlinson says. “It just has to have something to do with the gas supply.”

Reading what's not there

Using light from a quasar (QSO), researchers can “see” CGMs. In this example, spectra from two galaxies, G1 and G2, have certain wavelengths missing (red, in bottom boxes) where the CGM atoms are absorbing light.

J. TUMLINSON ET AL/SCIENCE 2011

One possibility, suggested in a paper posted online February 20 at arXiv.org, is that sprays of supernova-heated gas could get stripped from galaxies. Physicist Chad Bustard of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues simulated the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and found that the small galaxy’s outflowing gas was swept away by the slight pressure of the galaxy’s movement around the Milky Way.
Alternatively, a dead galaxy’s CGM gas could be too hot to sink into the galaxy and form stars. If so, star-forming galaxies should have CGMs full of cold gas, and dead galaxies should be shrouded in hot gas. Hot gas would stay floating above the galactic disk like a hot air balloon, too buoyant to sink in and form stars.
But Hubble saw the opposite. Star-forming galaxies had CGMs chock-full of oxygen-VI — meaning that the gas was so hot (a million degrees Celsius or more) that oxygen atoms lost five of their original electrons. Dead galaxies had surprisingly little oxygen-VI.
“That was puzzling,” Tumlinson says. “If theory told us anything, it should have gone the other way.”
In 2016, Benjamin Oppenheimer, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, suggested a solution: The “dead” galaxies didn’t lack oxygen at all. The gas was just too hot for Hubble to observe. “In fact, there is even more oxygen around those passive galaxies,” Oppenheimer says.
All that hot gas could potentially explain why those galaxies died — except that these galaxies were full of star-forming cold gas, too.
“The dead galaxies have plenty of fuel left in the tank,” Tumlinson says. “We don’t know why they’re not using it. Everybody’s chasing that problem.”

Grabbing at the elephant

The chase comes at a good time. Until recently, observers had no way to map a single galaxy’s CGM. Researchers have had to add up dozens of quasar beams to understand the composition of CGMs on average.
“We’ve been like the three blind people grabbing at the elephant,” says John O’Meara, an observational astronomer at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt.
Teams using two new spectrographs — KCWI, the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope in Chile — are racing to change that. These instruments, called integral field spectrographs, can read spectra across a full galaxy all at once. Given enough background light, astronomers can now examine a single galaxy’s entire CGM. Finally, astronomers have a way to test theories of how gas circulates into and out of a galaxy.

The European Southern Observatory’s Medusa-like MUSE instrument was installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2014 to take spectra across a full galaxy.

 ERIC LE ROUX/SERVICE COMMUNICATION/UCBL/MUSE/ESO

A Chilean team, led by astronomer Sebastian Lopez of the University of Chile in Santiago and colleagues, used MUSE to observe a small dim galaxy that happens to be sandwiched between a bright, distant galaxy and a massive galaxy cluster closer to Earth. The cluster acts as a gravitational lens, distorting the image of the distant galaxy into a long bright arc (SN: 3/10/12, p. 4). The light from that arc filtered through the CGM of the sandwiched galaxy, which the team called G1, at 56 different points.
Surprisingly, G1’s CGM was lumpy, not smooth as expected, the team reported in the Feb. 22 Nature. “The assumption has been that that gas is distributed homogeneously around every system,” Lopez says. “This is not the case.”

MUSE makes a mark

Light from a source galaxy is deflected and magnified by an intervening galaxy cluster to form the bright arc seen in the projected image at far right. Unlike a quasar’s narrow beam of light, the extensive arc lights up a large area of galaxy G1’s CGM, showing it is surprisingly lumpy.

CARLOS POLANCO, ESO

O’Meara is leading a group that is hot on Lopez’s trail. Last year, while KCWI was being installed, O’Meara got an hour of observing time and was able to see hydrogen — which is associated with cool, star-forming gas — in the CGM of another galaxy backlit by a bright lensed arc. He’s not ready to discuss the results in detail yet, but the team is submitting a paper to Science.

FOGGIE computer simulations improve CGM resolution. In these renderings of the same galaxy, the bottom shows FOGGIE at work. The galaxy’s shape and size change dramatically.

 M. PEEPLES, G. SNYDER ET AL/FOGGIE PROJECT

Meanwhile, Peeples’ team is revisiting how computers render CGMs. “The resolution of the circumgalactic medium in simulations is, um, bad,” she says. Existing simulations are good at matching the visible properties of galaxies — their stars, the gas between the stars, and the overall shapes and sizes. But they “utterly fail at reproducing the properties of the circumgalactic medium,” she says.So she’s running a new set of simulations called FOGGIE, which focus on CGMs for the first time. “We’re finding that it changes everything,” she says: The shape, star formation history and even the orientation of the galaxy in space look different.
Together, the new observations and simulations suggest that the CGM’s function in the life cycle of a galaxy has been underestimated. Theorists like Peeples and observers like O’Meara are working together to make new predictions about how the CGM should look. Then the researchers will check real galaxies to see if they match.
“Molly will post a really amazing new render of a simulation on Slack, and I’ll go, ‘Holy crap, that looks weird!’ ” O’Meara says. “I’ll go scampering off to find a similar example in the data, and we get into this positive feedback loop of going ‘Holy crap! Holy crap!’ ”
While future circumgalactic studies will focus on gathering spectra from full CGMs, Tumlinson is hoping to squeeze more information out of Hubble while he still can. Hubble made CGM studies possible, but the telescope is 28 years old, and probably has less than a decade left. Hubble’s spectrograph is still the best at observing certain atoms in CGMs to help reveal the gaseous halos’ secrets. “It’s something we definitely want to do,” he says, “before Hubble ends up in the ocean.”

---

This article appears in the July 21, 2018 issue of Science News with the headline, "A Galaxy's Ecosystem: The circumgalactic medium is an invisible cloak that controls how galaxies live and die."

Citations
S. Lopez et al. A clumpy and anisotropic galaxy halo at redshift 1 from gravitational-arc tomography. Nature. Vol. 554, February 22, 2018, p. 493. doi: 10.1038/nature25436.
Jason Tumlinson, Molly Peeples and Jessica Werk. The Circumgalactic Medium. Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Published online June 28, 2017. doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-091916-055240.
J. X. Prochaska et al. The COS-Halos survey: Metallicities in the low-redshift circumgalactic medium. The Astrophysical Journal. Vol. 837, published March 15, 2017. doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6007.
J. Werk et al. The COS-Halos survey: Physical conditions and baryonic mass in the low-redshift circumgalactic medium. The Astrophysical Journal. Vol. 792, published August 8, 2014. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/792/1/8.
M. Peeples et al. A budget and accounting of metals at z~0: Results from the COS-Halos survey. The Astrophysical Journal. Vol. 786, published April 16, 2014. doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/786/1/54.
J. Tumlinson et al. The large, oxygen-rich halos of star-forming galaxies are a major reservoir of galactic metals. Science. Vol. 334, November 18, 2011, p. 948. doi: 10.1126/science.1209840.

Further Reading

A. Yeager. Half of the Milky Way comes from other galaxies. Science News. Vol. 192, August 19, 2017, p. 6.

C. Crockett. Andromeda reaches out to touch Milky Way. Science News. Vol. 187, June 13, 2015, p. 8.

G. Popkin. Galaxies’ missing mass may hide in gas clouds. Science News. Vol. 185, February 8, 2014, p. 6.

A Beautiful Piece of Toroidal Literature -- ‘The last man’ (Le dernier homme, 1957)

One of the blog's regular readers sent me this beautiful snippet of literature the other day. I have not read the entire book, but I hope you will recognize the Simple Explanation's toroidal flow and Units of Consciousness at work in the following:

“Against you, motionless thought, everything that is reflected in us of everyone comes to assume form, shine, and then disappear. In this way we have the most people, in this way everyone is reflected in each of us by an infinite glimmering that projects us into a radiant intimacy from which each returns to himself, illuminated by being no more than a reflection of everyone else. And the thought that each of us is only the reflection of the universal reflection, this answer to our lightness, makes us drunk with that lightness, makes us ever lighter, lighter than ourselves, in the infinitely glimmering sphere which, from its surface to its single spark, is our own eternal coming and going.”

Maurice Blanchot, ‘The last man’ (Le dernier homme, 1957), translated by Lydia Davis.

“Contre toi, pensée immobile, vient prendre figure, briller et disparaître tout ce qui se réfléchit en nous de tous. Ainsi avons-nous le plus grand monde, ainsi, en chacun de nous, tous se réfléchissent par un infini miroitement qui nous projette en une intimité rayonnante d'où chacun revient à lui-même, illuminé de n'être que le reflet de tous. Et la pensée que nous ne sommes, chacun, que le reflet de l'universel reflet, cette réponse à notre légèreté nous rend ivres de cette légèreté, nous fait toujours plus légers, plus légers que nous, dans l'infini de la sphère miroitante qui, de la surface à l'étincelle unique, est l'éternel va-et-vient de nous-mêmes”.

Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier homme, 1957

"Most Realistic Black Hole" Looks a Lot Like the Simple Explanation

This article was posted this morning on Huffington Post. Wanted to share the video animation with you.  Look familiar?  Same dynamics. This is one of the primal fractal expressions of toroidal flow. 

Here's the Huffington article:

Behold The Most Realistic Black Hole Simulation Yet

The Huffington Post  |  By Jacqueline Howard

Posted: 04/22/2015 8:26 am EDT Updated: 04/22/2015 8:59 am EDT

What happens when two black holes collide? Spectacular new simulations show the swirling action like never before, and they're definitely worth a watch.

Dr. Stuart Shapiro, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, presented the simulations in Baltimore on April 13 at a meeting of theAmerican Physical Society.

"Our simulations of binary black holes merging in circumbinary magnetized disks of gas allow us to probe a cosmic event that astronomers believe occurs in distant active galaxies and quasars," Shapiro told The Huffington Post in an email.

(Story continues below.)

A sped-up version of one of the video simulations. (Click to see original).

Using Einstein's theory. What sets these black hole simulations apart from previous examples? The researchers used a full-blown treatment of Einstein's general theory of relativity to build their 3D simulation models on supercomputers -- marking the first time such simulations were done without having to guesstimate the data, Nature reported.

Einstein's equations describe the gravitational field around a black hole, and the researchers developed a mathematical model to pair the equations with equations that account for the motion of matter and magnetic fields.

“As a technical achievement, there’s no doubt that this is a giant step forward,” Dr. Cole Miller, a University of Maryland astronomer who was not involved in the research, told Nature.

Timely simulations. The new simulations come at just the right time. Last March, astronomers provided evidence of two black holes on paths to collide. Their research -- along with the new simulations -- could shed light on how black holes get close enough to merge.

Holy moly.

Some Beautifully Rotating Tori from the Web

One of the blog's readers shared these lovely images with us. Thanks, Tony!

www.abzu2.com

The rotating torus gif above closely resembles the torus I see in my mind. This is the flow direction indicated by my drawings. Up over the equator and down into the singularity from the top. Looking through the middle, you can see the energetic center point (what I call "ananda-joy") exploding outward onto the skin to roll back around again. In my Simple Explanation model, some of the force explosion is also diverted into the torus's interior, creating ordinary matter.  Looking at the flow, you can see how the information coming in from the top is all "potential" while the energy exploding out the bottom is "history." The center point is "here and now" aka "observation."

http://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/11/simple-cosmology-of-universe.html

http://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/11/simple-cosmology-of-universe.html

http://s579.photobucket.com/user/taffgoch/media/Torus_Spiral.gif.html

The above inside view of the torus is interesting to me because I haven't thought of the energy spirals as riding up horizontally like that. In my diagrams, the energy always comes up the sides in straight lines or lazy spirals, the same way patterns wrap around fruit. One thing I really like about this view is that we are standing "inside" the torus, looking from one wall over toward the other wall. In my writing, I call this area the "chewy blue middle." 

http://www.horntorus.com/illustration/torus_gifs.html

Here we see the straight lines of historical information emerge from the bottom and wrap around to the top to reposition themselves as potential for the next go-around.   The page where this gif came from has several beautiful tori gifs, if you want to go and see more. 

Thanks again, Tony!