Here is a new NASA image of the lovely torus that is our galaxy--
STARS WITH A VIEW Two newly discovered clusters of stars lie far from the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Planets orbiting these stars might get this view of the galaxy in all its spiraling glory.
R. HURT/ESO/JPL-CALTECH/NASA
One of the basic propositions of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is what I call the Simple Golden Rule--everything, no matter the scale, reaches out to others and "holds hands" to create something larger than itself that can only come about through cooperation with others.
In the diagram below, you can see how everything "levels up" to contribute to larger and larger structures. Up near the top of the diagram, we reach the global or "Gaia" scale of organization and consciousness.
*********************************************************************************
Why Most Planets Will Either Be
Lush or Dead
BY DAVID GRINSPOON JANUARY 12, 2017
Can
a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had
an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She
and chemist James Lovelock together theorized that life must be a
planet-altering phenomenon and the distinction between the “living” and
“nonliving” parts of Earth is not as clear-cut as we think. Many members of the
scientific community derided their theory, called the Gaia hypothesis, as pseudoscience,
and questioned their scientific integrity. But now Margulis and Lovelock may
have their revenge. Recent scientific discoveries are giving us reason to take
this hypothesis more seriously. At its core is an insight about the
relationship between planets and life that has changed our understanding of
both, and is shaping how we look for life on other worlds.
Studying
Earth’s global biosphere together, Margulis and Lovelock realized that it has
some of the properties of a life form. It seems to display “homeostasis,” or
self‐regulation. Many of
Earth’s life‐sustaining qualities
exhibit remarkable stability. The temperature range of the climate; the oxygen
content of the atmosphere; the pH, chemistry, and salinity of the ocean—all
these are biologically mediated. All have, for hundreds of millions of years,
stayed within a range where life can thrive. Lovelock and Margulis surmised
that the totality of life is interacting with its environments in ways that
regulate these global qualities. They recognized that Earth is, in a sense, a
living organism. Lovelock named this creature Gaia.
Margulis
and Lovelock showed that the Darwinian picture of biological evolution is
incomplete. Darwin identified the mechanism by which life adapts due to changes
in the environment, and thus allowed us to see that all life on Earth is a
continuum, a proliferation, a genetic diaspora from a common root. In the
Darwinian view, Earth was essentially a stage with a series of changing
backdrops to which life had to adjust. Yet, what or who was changing the sets?
Margulis and Lovelock proposed that the drama of life does not unfold on the
stage of a dead Earth, but that, rather, the stage itself is animated, part of
a larger living entity, Gaia, composed of the biosphere together with the
“nonliving” components that shape, respond to, and cycle through the biota of
Earth. Yes, life adapts to environmental change, shaping itself through natural
selection. Yet life also pushes back and changes the environment, alters the
planet. This is now as obvious as the air you are breathing, which has been
oxygenated by life. So evolution is not a series of adaptations to inanimate
events, but a system of feedbacks, an exchange. Life has not simply molded
itself to the shifting contours of a dynamic Earth. Rather, life and Earth have
shaped each other as they’ve co-evolved. When you start looking at the planet
in this way, then you see coral reefs, limestone cliffs, deltas, bogs, and
islands of bat guano as parts of this larger animated entity. You realize that
the entire skin of Earth, and its depths as well, are indeed alive.
The
acceptance of the Gaia hypothesis was, and remains, slow, halting, and
incomplete. There are several reasons for this. One is just the usual inertia,
the standard conservative reluctance to accept new ways of thinking. Yet Gaia
was also accused of being vague and shifting. Some complained that the “Gaians”
had failed to present an original, well‐defined, testable scientific proposition. How can you evaluate,
oppose, or embrace an idea that is not clearly stated, or that seems to mean
different things to different people? There was certainly some truth to this.
Gaia has been stated many different ways. Also, it didn’t help that Margulis
and Lovelock were more than willing to mix science with philosophy and poetry,
and they didn’t mind controversy; in fact, I’d say they enjoyed and courted it.
The
truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not really a hypothesis. It’s
a perspective, an approach from within which to pursue the science of life on a
planet, a living planet, which is not the same as a planet with life on
it—that’s really the point, simple but profound. Because life is not a minor
afterthought on an already functioning Earth, but an integral part of the
planet’s evolution and behavior. Over the last few decades, the Gaians have
pretty much won the battle. The opposition never actually surrendered or
admitted defeat, but mainstream earth science has dropped its disciplinary
shields and joined forces with chemistry, climatology, theoretical biology, and
several other “‐ologies” and renamed itself “earth system science.”
The
Gaia approach, prompted by the space-age comparison of Earth with its
apparently lifeless neighbors, has led to a deepening realization of how
thoroughly altered our planet is by its inhabitants. When we compare the life
story of Earth to that of its siblings, we see that very early on in its
development, as soon as the sterilizing impact rain subsided so that life could
get a toehold, Earth started down a different path. Ever since that juncture,
life and Earth have been co-evolving in a continuing dance.
As
we’ve studied Earth with space-age tools, seen her whole from a distance,
drilled the depths of the ocean floor, and, with the magic glasses of
multispectral imaging, mapped the global biogeochemical cycles of elements,
nutrients, and energy, we’ve learned that life’s influence is more profound and
pervasive than we ever suspected.
All
this oxygen we take for granted is the byproduct of life intervening in our
planet’s geochemical cycles: harvesting solar energy to split water molecules,
keeping the hydrogen atoms and reacting them with CO2 to make organic food and body parts, but spitting the
oxygen back out. In Earth’s upper atmosphere some of this oxygen, under the
influence of ultraviolet light, is transformed into ozone, O3, which shields Earth’s surface from deadly ultraviolet, making
the land surface habitable. When it appeared, this shield allowed life to leave
the ocean and the continents to become green with forests. That’s right: It was
life that rendered the once deadly continents habitable for life.
The
more we look through a Gaian lens, the more we see that nearly every aspect of
our planet has been biologically distorted beyond recognition. Earth’s rocks
contain more than 4,000 different minerals (the crystalline molecules that make
up rocks). This is a much more varied smorgasbord of mineral types than we have
seen on any other world. Geochemists studying the mineral history of Earth have
concluded that by far the majority of these would not exist without the
presence of life on our planet. So, on Earth’s life‐altered surface, the
very rocks themselves are biological byproducts. A big leap in this mineral
diversity occurred after life oxygenated Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a
plethora of new oxidized minerals that sprinkled colorful rocks throughout
Earth’s sediments. Observed on a distant planet, such vast and varied mineral
diversity could be a sign of a living world, so this is a potential
biosignature (or Gaiasignature) we can add to the more commonly cited Lovelock
criterion of searching for atmospheric gases that have been knocked out of
equilibrium by life. In fact, minerals and life seem to have fed off each other
going all the way back to the beginning. Evidence has increased that minerals
were vital catalysts and physical substrates for the origin of life on Earth.
Is it really a huge leap, then, to regard the mineral surface of Earth as part
of a global living system, part of the body of Gaia?
What
about plate tectonics and the dynamics of Earth’s deep interior? At first
glance this seems like a giant mechanical system—a heat engine—that does not
depend upon biology, but rather (lucky for life), supports it. Also, although
we’re probably still largely ignorant about the deeply buried parts of Earth’s
biosphere, it’s unlikely there are any living organisms deeper than a couple of
miles down in the crust, where it gets too hot for organic molecules. Yet, just
as we’ve found that life’s sway has extended into the upper atmosphere,
creating the ozone layer that allowed the biosphere to envelop the continents,
more and more we see that life has also influenced these deeper subterranean
realms. Over its long life, Gaia has altered not just the skin but also the
guts of Earth, pulling carbon from the mantle and piling it on the surface in
sedimentary rocks, and sequestering massive amounts of nitrogen from the air
into ammonia stored inside the crystals of mantle rocks.
By
controlling the chemical state of the atmosphere, life has also altered the
rocks it comes into contact with, and so oxygenated the crust and mantle of
Earth. This changes the material properties of the rocks, how they bend and
break, squish, fold, and melt under various forces and conditions. All the clay
minerals produced by Earth’s biosphere soften Earth’s crust—the crust of a
lifeless planet is harder—helping to lubricate the plate tectonic engine. The
wetness of Earth seems to explain why plate tectonics has persisted on Earth
and not on its dry twin, Venus. One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia
camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over
the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life‐giving water, while Venus and Mars, lifeless through most
of their existence, lost theirs. If so, then life may indeed be responsible for
Earth’s plate tectonics. One of the original architects of plate tectonic
theory, Norm Sleep from Stanford, has become thoroughly convinced that life is
deeply implicated in the overall physical dynamics of Earth, including the
“nonliving” interior domain. In describing the cumulative, long-term influence
of life on geology, continent building, and plate tectonics, he wrote, “The net
effect is Gaian. That is, life has modified Earth to its advantage.” The more
we study Earth, the more we see this. Life has got Earth in its clutches. Earth
is a biologically modulated planet through and through. In a nontrivial way, it
is a living planet.
Now,
40 years after Viking landed on Mars, we’ve learned that planets are common,
including those similar in size to Earth and at the right distance from their
stars to allow oceans of liquid water. Also, Lovelock’s radical idea to pay
attention to the atmosphere and look for drastic departures from the expected
mixture of gases now forms the cornerstone of our life‐detection strategies.
Gaian thinking has crept into our ideas about evolution and the habitability of
exoplanets, revising notions of the “habitable zone.” We’re realizing that it
is not enough to determine basic physical properties of a planet, its size and
distance from a star, in order to determine its habitability. Life itself, once
it gets started, can make or keep a planet habitable. Perhaps, in some
instances, life can also destroy the habitability of a planet, as it almost did
on Earth during the Great Oxygenation Event (sometimes called the oxygen
catastrophe) of 2.1 billion years ago. As my colleague Colin Goldblatt, a sharp
young climate modeler from the University of Victoria, once said, “The defining
characteristic of Earth is planetary scale life. Earth teaches us that
habitability and inhabitance are inseparable.”
In
my 2003 book Lonely Planets, I described what I
call the “Living Worlds hypothesis,” which is Gaian thinking applied to
astrobiology. Perhaps life everywhere is intrinsically a planetary‐scale phenomenon with a
cosmological life span—that is, a life expectancy measured in billions of
years, the timescale that defines the lives of planets, stars, and the
universe.
Organisms
and species do not have cosmological life spans. Gaia does, and this is perhaps
a general property of living worlds. Influenced greatly by Lovelock and
Margulis, I’ve argued that we are unlikely to find surface life on a planet
that has not severely and flagrantly altered its own atmosphere. According to
this idea, a planet cannot be “slightly alive” any more than a person can (at
least not for long), and an aged planet such as Mars, if it is not obviously,
conspicuously alive like Earth, is probably completely dead. If the
little whiffs of methane recently reported by the Curiosity rover turn out to
be the signs of pockets of Martian life on an otherwise generally dead world,
this would prove that my Living Worlds hypothesis is wrong, and that life can
take on very non-Gaia-like forms elsewhere. But a living world may require more
than temporary little pockets of water and energy as surely exist underground
on Mars. It may require continuous and vigorous internally driven geological
activity. I believe that only a planet that is “alive” in the geological sense
is likely to be “alive” in the biological sense. Without plate tectonics,
without deep, robust global biogeochemical cycles which life could feed off
and, eventually, entrain itself within, life may never have been able to
establish itself as a permanent feature of Mars, as it did on Earth.
As
far as we can tell, around the time when life was starting on Earth, both Venus
and Mars shared the same characteristics that enabled life to get going here:
They were wet, they were rocky, they had thick atmospheres and vigorous
geologic activity. Comparative planetology seems to be telling us that the
conditions needed for the origin of life might be the norm for rocky worlds.
One real possibility is that Mars or Venus also had an origin of life, but that
life did not stick, couldn’t persist, on either of these worlds. It was not
able to take root and become embedded as a permanent planetary feature, as it
did on Earth. This may be a common outcome: planets that have an origin of
life, perhaps even several, but that never develop a robust and self‐sustaining global
biosphere. What is really rare and unusual about Earth is that beneficial
conditions for life have persisted over billions of years. This may have been
more than luck.
When
we stop thinking of planets as merely objects or places where living beings may
or may not be present, but rather as themselves living or nonliving entities,
it can color the way we think about the origin of life. Perhaps life is
something that happens not on a planet
but to a planet: It is something that a planet
becomes.
Think
of life as analogous to a fire. If you’ve ever tried to start a campfire, you
know it’s easy to ignite some sparks and a little flicker of flame, but then
it’s hard to keep these initial flames going. At first you have to tend to the
fire, blowing until you’re faint, to supply more oxygen, or it will just die
out. That’s always the tricky part: keeping it burning before it has really
caught on. Then it reaches a critical point, where the fire is really roaring.
It’s got a bed of hot coals and its heat is generating its own circulation
pattern, sucking in oxygen, fanning its own flames. At that point it becomes
self-sustaining, and you can go grab a beer and watch for shooting stars.
I
wonder if the first life on a planet isn’t like those first sparks and those
unsteady little flames. The earliest stages of life may be extremely
vulnerable, and there may be a point where, once life becomes a planetary
phenomenon, enmeshed in the global flows that support and fuel it, it feeds
back on itself and becomes more like a self‐sustaining fire, one that not only draws in its own air supply,
but turns itself over and replenishes its own fuel. A mature biosphere seems to
create the conditions for life to continue and flourish.
A
“living worlds” perspective implies that after billions of years, life will
either be absent from a planet or, as on Earth, have thoroughly taken over and
become an integral part of all global processes. Signs of life will be
everywhere. Once life has taken hold of a planet, once it has become a
planetary‐scale entity (a global
organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill. Certainly life has seen
Earth through many huge changes, some quite traumatic. Life here is remarkably
robust and persistent. It seems to have a kind of immortality. Call it quasi‐immortality, because
the planet won’t be around forever, and it may not be habitable for its entire
lifetime. Individuals are here for but an instant. Whole species come and go,
usually in timescales barely long enough to get the planet’s attention. Yet
life as a whole persists. This gives us a different way to think about
ourselves. The scientific revolution has revealed us, as individuals, to be
incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire existence, not just as
individuals but even as a species, to be brief and insubstantial against the
larger temporal backdrop of cosmic evolution. If, however, we choose to
identify with the biosphere, then we, Gaia, have been here for quite some time,
for perhaps 3 billion years in a universe that seems to be about 13 billion
years old. We’ve been alive for a quarter of all time. That’s something.
The
origin of life on Earth was not just the beginning of the evolution of species,
the fount of diversity that eventually begat algae blooms, aspen groves, barrier
reefs, walrus huddles, and gorilla troops. From a planetary evolution
perspective, this development was a major branching point that opened up a
gateway to a fundamentally different future. Then, when life went global, and
went deep, planet Earth headed irreversibly down the path not taken by its
siblings.
Now,
very recently, out of this biologically altered Earth, another kind of change
has suddenly emerged and is rewriting the rules of planetary evolution. On the
nightside of Earth, the lights are switching on, indicating that something new
is happening and someone new is home. Has another gateway opened? Could the
planet be at a new branching point?
The
view from space sheds light on the multitude of rapid changes inscribed on our
planet by our industrial society. The orbital technology enabling this
observation is itself one of the strange and striking aspects of the transition
now gripping Earth. If up to now the defining characteristic of Earth has been
planetary‐scale life, then what
about these planetary‐scale lights? Might this spreading, luminous net be part of a
new defining characteristic?
David Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the Planetary
Science Institute. He serves on the science teams for several active and
proposed interplanetary spacecraft missions. In 2013 he was appointed as the
inaugural chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress. His latest
book, Earth in Human Hands, was published in 2016. Also a
musician, he plays guitar for the House Band of the Universe. He tweets @DrFunkySpoon.
From the book Earth in Human Hands by David Grinspoon. Copyright © 2016 by David Grinspoon. Reprinted
by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on Nautilus Cosmos in December 2016.
When I first conceived of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything back in 2008, I was unfamiliar with Leibniz's theory of monads. Didn't know about panpsychism either. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything was entirely cooked up in my own little brain while dipping in and out of the transpersonal consciousness we all share. Had I been a philosophy major, I would have known the names for the various components of the Simple Explanation. But I wasn't a philosophy major; I am instead a psychologist with a Ph.D. in Classical Rhetoric. My field of deep study is ancient texts and beliefs, and these are what influenced the development of my theory, not modern philosophers. So, rather than kludge together other's ideas, I built the Simple Explanation from the ground up using logic and observation. Another way of saying this is that my theory is not derivative in the normal way that most academics produce work.
By now I realize that the Simple Explanation is "monadistic" and "panpsychic." So what does that mean? Simply put, a monad is a singular point of view. And pansychic simply means that consciousness permeates everything in the universe. Rather than rehash the philosophy of Leibniz, which you can read elsewhere, let me jump right in and describe the monadology and panpsychism of the Simple Explanation.
The Simple Explanation proposes that undifferentiated consciousness is the ground state of reality; I call this state the Metaverse. Undifferentiated consciousness means "no-thought." The Metaverse is outside of time and space and particularity of any kind--omniscient and omnipresent.
Then the Metaverse had a thought. It needed to envelop that thought in a bubble in order to keep it from sullying the waters of undifferentiated consciousness. This thought bubble took on the form of a torus and brought with it all of the knowledge of the Metaverse. I call this first thought bubble the Universal Unit of Consciousness. This Universal UC is localized into a single point of view floating in the nothingness of the Metaverse. The Universal UC is the first monad, afloat in the panpsychic sea.
The Universal UC reproduces itself into innumerable, fractal copies of itself. I call these Units of Consciousness, or UCs. All of these UCs are monads. The physics of the Simple Explanation proposes that the Universal UC spits copies of itself out of the zero point field at its center.
I wrote the following article for my other blog, A New Gnostic Gospel. I know that many of you here at the Simple Explanation blog are more interested in toruses and science than religion. I am now embarking on a work that combines both the Simple Explanation with the Gnostic Gospel. Both philosophies complement each other and neither of them contains information that contradicts the other. Most of the Gnostic articles will continue to be posted over at the Gnostic Gospel blog. But I want you to see for yourself the overlap with your understanding of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, so I'm posting today's article to both blogs. Enjoy!
It is often said that there is no single Gnostic text or
philosophy. While it is true that there is much diversity in the texts of the
Nag Hammadi over details, there is a certain set of core beliefs that various
Gnostics should be able to agree upon. Below is a diagram taken from my Simple
Explanation blog and book that applies just as well to Gnostic beliefs. Let me
explain--
The diagram above was designed with the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything in mind. However, it works equally well as a Gnostic diagram that explains how our universe is put together. This article will define the words that both philosophies use in an attempt to clear up any confusion of terms. If you are already familiar with the Simple Explanation, you can use this article to understand basic Gnostic belief. On the other hand, if you are a reader of the Nag Hammadi texts, you may find this diagram useful for sorting out our cosmogony.
The limitless consciousness the Gnostic books call the Father, or the God above Gods, is called the Metaverse in Simple Explanation terms. This originating consciousness is the One with no thought that forms the basis of all that follows. The diagram above places the Father/Metaverse outside of the triangle. The Father is the ground state behind the diagram, out of which everything else arises.
The Gnostic cosmogony diverges from the Simple Explanation here to discuss entities that exist outside of our universe, whereas the Simple Explanation is only about our universe and so does not attempt to characterize specific occurrences prior to that. The two philosophies will synch back up once creation kicks in.
The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun.
The Gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own is said to have "Fallen." This "Fall" is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, although it may be possible to consider the Garden as another word for the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness, and a reference to the same Fall as that of the Aeon. In my view, the Fall represents the rise of the Ego, as this Aeon acted on its own presumption with its own motives, apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness.
Here is where we catch back up with the Simple Explanation cosmogony. The Simple Explanation characterizes the Fall as simply the Metaverse having a Thought:
Then consciousness had a thought. This multidimensional Metaverse still lacked space and time but it now quivered with limitless mathematical potential unfolding into countless dimension. In a twinkling, our entire universe was imagined in the fullness of its complexity, from the tiniest quanta through the greatest astral body; every animal, vegetable, and mineral; every element. Every thing and every function.
Once the Metaverse had a particular thought, thought became an object in the great sea of no-thought... On this day that time began, consciousness wrapped itself around our universe, forming a border between us and infinity. Mind took on a shape.
As I said, Gnostic texts differ in their identification of
the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although they seem to agree the
Fallen produced this universe and its ruler. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities
and plans spread throughout the contained space and created our universe. It is
said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to
the Fullness to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within the
Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with it.
Away from the Pleroma, contained within this newly formed
space and time, a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became
aware of itself. This entity thought it was the prime parent of the universe
because it was not aware of the Pleroma or the Father and Son. This creator-god
is called by Gnostics "the Demiurge." The Old and New Testaments call
it the creator-god "Yahweh." One of the great heresies of Gnosticism
is our identification of the creator-god as product of the Fall rather than the
"God above gods," or the true "Father."
Because it is the result of the Fall and unsanctioned by
both the Father and the Pleroma, the universe produced by the Demiurge is
devoid of life. It is called the "Deficiency." The Deficiency is
populated by small, lifeless things--things that are "shadows" of
those that live in the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and
principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. The
Simple Explanation, being science and math based rather than religious, does
not identify this universe as Fallen in the negative sense of being deficient.
It is merely limited by localized monads replacing the omnipresent
Metaverse.
Looking at the hierarchical diagram above, the Demiurge sits
near the bottom, producing the minerals of our universe. As the Demiurge is
contained away from the Father/Metaversal consciousness, it lacks the life
force and love that characterize the Father. The Demiurge can only produce
lifeless matter--"mud." The Demiurge is able to animate some of the
mud by means of the forces and principalities contained within the Border. A
good example of animated mud is viruses. Viruses are not alive, yet they are
amazingly complex molecules that are able to carry out far-ranging search and
destroy missions. It is also thought that the Demiurge produces lifeless
entities out of pure force rather than material. These disembodied entities are
called "archons." Archons are the offspring and servants of the
Demiurge.
At this point in the story, many Gnostic texts explain how
the Demiurge mated with the life-force carried by Sophia to produce living
creatures out of the mud. Again, this is a religious description of the process
of bringing consciousness to matter. Sophia is given the title of the Mother of
Creation, bringing life to the universe. Her mission was authorized; it was the
plan cooked up to redeem creation from the Fall.
The Simple Explanation identifies Sophia as the Universal
Unit of Consciousness. Sophia resides on the outside of the fractal border that
holds the universe apart from the Metaverse. As such, she is part of the
toroidal flow, and it is this flow that pushes the life-force and consciousness
out through the zero-point field at the center of the universal torus. In
Gnostic terms, Sophia rides upon the outside of the Border, which I identify as
"the waters" of ancient texts. Sophia's "face" “presses
against the waters" and can be seen by the Demiurge, who is contained within
the Border.
The ancient Gnostic texts say that Sophia mated with the
Demiurge to produce the living creatures of our universe. Another way of saying
this is that dead matter is imbued with life and consciousness at the point
where it emerges from the zero-point field at the center of the Universal UC.
Every living thing has its life force attached to the "mud" of its
body at the point of conception. It is the consciousness given by the Father
through the actions of Sophia melding with the otherwise dead material produced
by the Demiurge that brings life to our universe. This is how "mud"
becomes "meat." It is through this process of populating the universe
with consciousness that the Fall and the Deficiency will be rescued.
The Simple Explanation puts it this way:
As the torus of our universe expanded, over and over and
over again, echoes of the Universal Unit of Consciousness attached
themselves to the particles streaming out of the Big Bang, each of a Unit of
Consciousness (UC) with a particular, localized, point of view.
Gnostics can use this fresh insight to figure out other
aspects of Gnostic belief, such as the relative strength and power of entities
created by the Demiurge, versus entities imbued with the life force of the
Fullness of God, that being the true Father and the God above the god of this
material sphere. It is said that the life forms of this universe are the Second
Order Powers sent to do battle with the forces of the Deficiency. We have been
assured that the power that is in us is greater than the power that is in the
world. I hope this article and the hierarchical diagram helps you to realize
this.
Blessings. Onward and upward!
General relativity yields the predictions of
black holes and the Big Bang at the origin of our universe. Yet the
“singularities” in these places, mysterious points where the curvature of
space-time seems to become infinite, act as flags that signal the breakdown of
general relativity. As one approaches the singularity at the center of a black
hole, or the Big Bang singularity, the predictions inferred from general
relativity stop providing the correct answers. A more fundamental, underlying
description of space and time ought to take over. If we uncover this new layer
of physics, we may be able to achieve a new understanding of space and time
themselves.
I would like to offer a solution. According to the Simple Explanation
cosmology, our universe is not shaped like a shuttlecock, as current theories propose,
but rather like a donut—a torus. In this case, the Big Bang occurred at the zero point singularity
at the center of the cosmic torus and spread outward not as a sphere or a
shuttlecock, but as an ever-expanding torus. Matter, as it emerges from the
universal torus, forms itself into a steady stream of multi-dimensional toruses
pushing out into the interior of the expanding 3-D donut, never reaching the
edge which continues to grow beyond the reach of matter.
A newly emerging mathematical field called “mirror symmetry”
demonstrates that there are an infinite number of toruses associated with every
apparent object, looping themselves out of our ordinary 3-D space into six neighboring
dimensions. An
article printed in Quantum Magazine describes the “SYZ conjecture” this
way:
In the same way that we can
now explain similarities between very different organisms through elements of a
shared genetic code, mathematicians attempted to explain mirror symmetry by
breaking down symplectic and complex manifolds into a shared set of basic
elements called “torus fibers.”
A
torus is a shape with a hole in the middle. An ordinary circle is a
one-dimensional torus, and the surface of a donut is a two-dimensional torus. A
torus can be of any number of dimensions. Glue lots of lower dimensional tori
together in just the right way, and you can build a higher dimensional shape
out of them.
To take
a simple example, picture the surface of the earth. It is a two-dimensional
sphere. You could also think of it as being made from many one-dimensional
circles (like many lines of latitude) glued together. All these circles stuck
together are a “torus fibration” of the sphere — the individual fibers woven
together into a greater whole.
Here is the illustration of the concept provided
by Quantum Magazine:
The Simple Explanation has always suggested that gravity is
the force felt on the outside of ordinary objects due to presence of unseen
toruses associated with ordinary matter. What the illustration refers to as “Point
Problems” is actually the emergence of gravity. It seems to me that this symplectic
geometry supplies a proof of this concept and, at the same time, resolves physic’s
ongoing conundrum regarding the quantum level activity of black holes and the
originating Bang.
We can imagine a very simple particle of matter as both that
particle that we can see and measure and, at the same time, as a series of torus
fibrations. The fibrations at the poles with
their infinite singularities originate the gravitational force, most of which
occurs in alternate dimensions, but some of which “leaks” into our 3-D space.
In the case of a small particle, the gravitational leakage is correspondingly small.
But, when you aggregate particles into massive structures, the gravitational
leakage becomes large and noticeable, as if the neighboring dimensions were trying
to suck our space time into their dimensions.
The gravitational field around an object increases in
proportion to the number of symplectic torus fibrations associated with the
object’s ordinary matter. The reason gravity does not travel far from its
originating object is because it is physically attached to the structure of the
object—more precisely, to the toruses looping into neighboring dimensions. The
more infinitely large singularities there are on the other side of the object’s
multidimensional formula, the stronger the gravity of the object. The more
aggregated ordinary matter, the more looping toruses.
In other words, gravity does not lead to black holes. Rather,
massive objects produce so many toroidal fibrations of infinite singularities
that the singularities themselves intrude into our 3-D space, revealing
themselves and the toruses associated with them. When these singularities
intrude into ordinary space, we see them in their normal symmetrical geometrical
form as a single torus shape of infinite density and weight—a black hole.
Another conundrum standard physics is wrestling with has to
do with “degrees of freedom.” Why, they wonder, do black holes have fewer
degrees of freedom than ordinary objects? Meaning, why is their gravity only associated
with the 2-dimensional outside surface of the black hole torus?
Since
2011, the Simple Explanation has suggested that gravity emanates from the
exterior shell of the invisible torus wrapping around the exterior of ordinary
matter. In the case of a black hole,
ordinary matter disappears into the center singularity, leaving only the shell
of the symplectic torus to pull at space with its infinite gravitational shell,
which is why the black hole’s gravity appears to be constrained to the surface.
Top view of torus, with yellow arrows representing gravitational
force
I am grateful to Quantum Magazine for running these two recent articles on “Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces” and “Mathematicians Explore Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds.” I believe “mirror symmetry” and the “SZY conjecture” provide the math behind the Simple Explanation’s theory of gravity. In symmetrical fashion, I hope my Simple Explanation will be discovered and considered by mathematicians and physicists struggling with these issues.
Here's a well-written article that explains how a toroidal universe is directly related to and mirrors our ordinary perceptions of space and geometry. In a nutshell, there are an infinite number of toruses associated with all ordinary geometric shapes. These toruses (aka tori) are situated in multi-dimensional space that is not perceived by our senses, but are nonetheless mathematically related to the objects that we can perceive.
This newly discovered mathematical symmetry between ordinary perception and toroidal geometry fits in nicely with the Simple Explanation's model of toroidal realities. At this time, the mathematicians are able to make corresponding formulae that demonstrate the symmetry of these two vastly different geometries, but they are unable to explain the how or why. It is the how and why that the Simple Explanation cosmology provides, as yet undiscovered by conventional mathematicians and physicists.
Curiously enough, this new symmetry is called the "SYZ conjecture" after the first initials of the 3-person team who discovered it, although the word "syzgy" means "yoked together," which is itself a highly appropriate title for this symmetrical geometry. Here's the reprinted article:
Credit: Mike Zeng for Quanta Magazine.
In 1991, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world.
To physicists, the correspondence was interesting. To mathematicians, it was preposterous. They’d been studying these two geometric settings in isolation from each other for decades. To claim that they were intimately related seemed as unlikely as asserting that at the moment an astronaut jumps on the moon, some hidden connection causes his sister to jump back on earth.
“It looked totally outrageous,” said David Morrison, a mathematician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the first mathematicians to investigate the matching numbers.
Nearly three decades later, incredulity has long since given way to revelation. The geometric relationship that the physicists first observed is the subject of one of the most flourishing fields in contemporary mathematics. The field is called mirror symmetry, in reference to the fact that these two seemingly distant mathematical universes appear somehow to reflect each other exactly. And since the observation of that first correspondence — a set of numbers on one side that matched a set of numbers on the other — mathematicians have found many more instances of an elaborate mirroring relationship: Not only do the astronaut and his sister jump together, they wave their hands and dream in unison, too.
Recently, the study of mirror symmetry has taken a new turn. After years of discovering more examples of the same underlying phenomenon, mathematicians are closing in on an explanation for why the phenomenon happens at all.
“We’re getting to the point where we’ve found the ground. There’s a landing in sight,” said Denis Auroux, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley.
The effort to come up with a fundamental explanation for mirror symmetry is being advanced by several groups of mathematicians. They are closing in on proofs of the central conjectures in the field. Their work is like uncovering a form of geometric DNA — a shared code that explains how two radically different geometric worlds could possibly hold traits in common.
What would eventually become the field of mirror symmetry began when physicists went looking for some extra dimensions. As far back as the late 1960s, physicists had tried to explain the existence of fundamental particles — electrons, photons, quarks — in terms of minuscule vibrating strings. By the 1980s, physicists understood that in order to make “string theory” work, the strings would have to exist in 10 dimensions — six more than the four-dimensional space-time we can observe. They proposed that what went on in those six unseen dimensions determined the observable properties of our physical world.
“You might have this small space that you can’t see or measure directly, but some aspects of the geometry of that space might influence real-world physics,” said Mark Gross, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge.
Eventually, they came up with potential descriptions of the six dimensions. Before getting to them, though, it’s worth thinking for a second about what it means for a space to have a geometry.
Consider a beehive and a skyscraper. Both are three-dimensional structures, but each has a very different geometry: Their layouts are different, the curvature of their exteriors is different, their interior angles are different. Similarly, string theorists came up with very different ways to imagine the missing six dimensions.
One method arose in the mathematical field of algebraic geometry. Here, mathematicians study polynomial equations — for example, x2 + y2 = 1 — by graphing their solutions (a circle, in this case). More-complicated equations can form elaborate geometric spaces. Mathematicians explore the properties of those spaces in order to better understand the original equations. Because mathematicians often use complex numbers, these spaces are commonly referred to as “complex” manifolds (or shapes).
The other type of geometric space was first constructed by thinking about physical systems such as orbiting planets. The coordinate values of each point in this kind of geometric space might specify, for example, a planet’s location and momentum. If you take all possible positions of a planet together with all possible momenta, you get the “phase space” of the planet — a geometric space whose points provide a complete description of the planet’s motion. This space has a “symplectic” structure that encodes the physical laws governing the planet’s motion.
Symplectic and complex geometries are as different from one another as beeswax and steel. They make very different kinds of spaces. Complex shapes have a very rigid structure. Think again of the circle. If you wiggle it even a little, it’s no longer a circle. It’s an entirely distinct shape that can’t be described by a polynomial equation. Symplectic geometry is much floppier. There, a circle and a circle with a little wiggle in it are almost the same.
“Algebraic geometry is a more rigid world, whereas symplectic geometry is more flexible,” said Nick Sheridan, a research fellow at Cambridge. “That’s one reason they’re such different worlds, and it’s so surprising they end up being equivalent in a deep sense.”
In the late 1980s, string theorists came up with two ways to describe the missing six dimensions: one derived from symplectic geometry, the other from complex geometry. They demonstrated that either type of space was consistent with the four-dimensional world they were trying to explain. Such a pairing is called a duality: Either one works, and there’s no test you could use to distinguish between them.
Physicists then began to explore just how far the duality extended. As they did so, they uncovered connections between the two kinds of spaces that grabbed the attention of mathematicians.
In 1991, a team of four physicists — Philip Candelas, Xenia de la Ossa, Paul Green and Linda Parkes — performed a calculation on the complex side and generated numbers that they used to make predictions about corresponding numbers on the symplectic side. The prediction had to do with the number of different types of curves that could be drawn in the six-dimensional symplectic space. Mathematicians had long struggled to count these curves. They had never considered that these counts of curves had anything to do with the calculations on complex spaces that physicists were now using in order to make their predictions.
The result was so far-fetched that at first, mathematicians didn’t know what to make of it. But then, in the months following a hastily convened meeting of physicists and mathematicians in Berkeley, California, in May 1991, the connection became irrefutable. “Eventually mathematicians worked on verifying the physicists’ predictions and realized this correspondence between these two worlds was a real thing that had gone unnoticed by mathematicians who had been studying the two sides of this mirror for centuries,” said Sheridan.
The discovery of this mirror duality meant that in short order, mathematicians studying these two kinds of geometric spaces had twice the number of tools at their disposal: Now they could use techniques from algebraic geometry to answer questions in symplectic geometry, and vice versa. They threw themselves into the work of exploiting the connection.
At the same time, mathematicians and physicists set out to identify a common cause, or underlying geometric explanation, for the mirroring phenomenon. In the same way that we can now explain similarities between very different organisms through elements of a shared genetic code, mathematicians attempted to explain mirror symmetry by breaking down symplectic and complex manifolds into a shared set of basic elements called “torus fibers.”
A torus is a shape with a hole in the middle. An ordinary circle is a one-dimensional torus, and the surface of a donut is a two-dimensional torus. A torus can be of any number of dimensions. Glue lots of lower dimensional tori together in just the right way, and you can build a higher dimensional shape out of them.
To take a simple example, picture the surface of the earth. It is a two-dimensional sphere. You could also think of it as being made from many one-dimensional circles (like many lines of latitude) glued together. All these circles stuck together are a “torus fibration” of the sphere — the individual fibers woven together into a greater whole.
Credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Quanta Magazine.
Torus fibrations are useful in a few ways. One is that they give mathematicians a simpler way to think of complicated spaces. Just like you can construct a torus fibration of a two-dimensional sphere, you can construct a torus fibration of the six-dimensional symplectic and complex spaces that feature in mirror symmetry. Instead of circles, the fibers of those spaces are three-dimensional tori. And while a six-dimensional symplectic manifold is impossible to visualize, a three-dimensional torus is almost tangible. “That’s already a big help,” said Sheridan.
A torus fibration is useful in another way: It reduces one mirror space to a set of building blocks that you could use to build the other. In other words, you can’t necessarily understand a dog by looking at a duck, but if you break each animal into its raw genetic code, you can look for similarities that might make it seem less surprising that both organisms have eyes.
Here, in a simplified view, is how to convert a symplectic space into its complex mirror. First, perform a torus fibration on the symplectic space. You’ll get a lot of tori. Each torus has a radius (just like a circle — a one-dimensional torus — has a radius). Next, take the reciprocal of the radius of each torus. (So, a torus of radius 4 in your symplectic space becomes a torus of radius ¼ in the complex mirror.) Then use these new tori, with reciprocal radii, to build a new space.
In 1996, Andrew Strominger, Shing-Tung Yau and Eric Zaslow proposed this method as a general approach for converting any symplectic space into its complex mirror. The proposal that it’s always possible to use a torus fibration to move from one side of the mirror to the other is called the SYZ conjecture, after its originators. Proving it has become one of the foundational questions in mirror symmetry (along with the homological mirror symmetry conjecture, proposed by Maxim Kontsevich in 1994).
The SYZ conjecture is hard to prove because, in practice, this procedure of creating a torus fibration and then taking reciprocals of the radii is not easy to do. To see why, return to the example of the surface of the earth. At first it seems easy to stripe it with circles, but at the poles, your circles will have a radius of zero. And the reciprocal of zero is infinity. “If your radius equals zero, you’ve got a bit of a problem,” said Sheridan.
This same difficulty crops up in a more pronounced way when you’re trying to create a torus fibration of a six-dimensional symplectic space. There, you might have infinitely many torus fibers where part of the fiber is pinched down to a point — points with a radius of zero. Mathematicians are still trying to figure out how to work with such fibers. “This torus fibration is really the great difficulty of mirror symmetry,” said Tony Pantev, a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Put another way: The SYZ conjecture says a torus fibration is the key link between symplectic and complex spaces, but in many cases, mathematicians don’t know how to perform the translation procedure that the conjecture prescribes.
Over the past 27 years, mathematicians have found hundreds of millions of examples of mirror pairs: This symplectic manifold is in a mirror relationship with that complex manifold. But when it comes to understanding why a phenomenon occurs, quantity doesn’t matter. You could assemble an ark’s worth of mammals without coming any closer to understanding where hair comes from.
“We have huge numbers of examples, like 400 million examples. It’s not that there’s a lack of examples, but nevertheless it’s still specific cases that don’t give much of a hint as to why the whole story works,” said Gross.
Mathematicians would like to find a general method of construction — a process by which you could hand them any symplectic manifold and they could hand you back its mirror. And now they believe that they’re getting close to having it. “We’re moving past the case-by-case understanding of the phenomenon,” said Auroux. “We’re trying to prove that it works in as much generality as we can.”
Mathematicians are progressing along several interrelated fronts. After decades building up the field of mirror symmetry, they’re close to understanding the main reasons the field works at all.
“I think it will be done in a reasonable time,” said Kontsevich, a mathematician at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) in France and a leader in the field. “I think it will be proven really soon.”
One active area of research creates an end run around the SYZ conjecture. It attempts to port geometric information from the symplectic side to the complex side without a complete torus fibration. In 2016, Gross and his longtime collaborator Bernd Siebert of the University of Hamburg posted a general-purpose method for doing so. They are now finishing a proof to establish that the method works for all mirror spaces. “The proof has now been completely written down, but it’s a mess,” said Gross, who said that he and Siebert hope to complete it by the end of the year.
Another major open line of research seeks to establish that, assuming you have a torus fibration, which gives you mirror spaces, then all the most important relationships of mirror symmetry fall out from there. The research program is called “family Floer theory” and is being developed by Mohammed Abouzaid, a mathematician at Columbia University. In March 2017 Abouzaid posted a paper that proved this chain of logic holds for certain types of mirror pairs, but not yet all of them.
And, finally, there is work that circles back to where the field began. A trio of mathematicians — Sheridan, Sheel Ganatra and Timothy Perutz — is building on seminal ideas introduced in 1990s by Kontsevich related to his homological mirror symmetry conjecture.
Cumulatively, these three initiatives would provide a potentially complete encapsulation of the mirror phenomenon. “I think we’re getting to the point where all the big ‘why’ questions are close to being understood,” said Auroux.
Kevin Hartnett is a senior writer at Quanta Magazine covering mathematics and computer science.
