Saturday and Sundry Shank o' the Year Bits & Bobs

Beginning with an update to my Christmas post - a new family gathering photograph from Monday evening. There are a couple of absentees due to distance, but most are there, somewhere. Your friendly neighbourhood blogger's head is the white haired one peeking around back mid-photo. Anyjazz, said blogger's husband is far left, after running back to group having prepared camera to do its stuff automatically. (Clicking on image should bring up a larger version.)

We're back at the shank of the year once more, some of us a tad bloody but unbowed. This is a time when I often dust down my bookmarks, disposing of any items which no longer serve a purpose. In doing so yesterday I came upon the following, fairly recent links to articles about which I'd intended to scribble a few words, but didn't get around to doing so.

The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man!
A new theory of consciousness
by Tam Hunt.
(Tam Hunt is a practicing lawyer (renewable energy law and policy) by day and by night a scholar (affiliated with the University of California Santa Barbara's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics.)



SNIP:

All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies. Resonance is a type of motion, characterized by oscillation between two states. And ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields.

An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating things/processes come into proximity: they will often start, after a little time, to vibrate together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious. This is described today as the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization.

Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness and about the universe more generally.


Stephen Strogatz provides various examples from physics, biology, chemistry and neuroscience to illustrate what he calls “sync” (synchrony) in his eponymous 2003 book, including:

Fireflies of certain species start flashing their little fires in sync in large gatherings of fireflies, in ways that can be difficult to explain under traditional approaches.
Large-scale neuron firing can occur in human brains at specific frequencies, with mammalian consciousness thought to be commonly associated with various kinds of neuronal synchrony.
Lasers are produced when photons of the same power and frequency are emitted together.
The moon’s rotation is exactly synced with its orbit around the Earth such that we always see the same face.

Resonance is a truly universal phenomenon and at the heart of what can sometimes seem like mysterious tendencies toward self-organization....................

The piece ends with:

It is all about vibrations, but it’s also about the type of vibrations and, most importantly, about shared vibrations.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it … man.

After reading that piece I wondered if, perhaps, astrology could be linked to vibrations - somehow. I'm convinced that one day something like this will come along and lights will go on in some scientist's head and shine so brightly until he/she is forced to day "Well, that's funny - maybe there is something to that astrology rubbish!"

A similar thought followed my reading of this piece:

Leonardo da Vinci & The New Biology

by Sayer Ji

SNIP (need to scroll down):

"Biological Science has been under the spell of Newton’s atomistic view of the universe since the late 17th century. Yet revolutionary new discoveries in molecular biology reveal a connectivity and proportionality embedded within our bodies and the biosphere as a whole reminiscent of ideas once held by visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci.?"

"The concept that the body, along with many other natural phenomena, contains proportions and geometries found in the universe as a whole is already established in Fibonacci series (a series of numbers in which each number ( Fibonacci number ) is the sum of the two preceding numbers. The simplest is the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), also known as the golden ratio. From fingers to faces, flower petals to seed heads, pine cones to galaxies, the pattern is the same.

The idea, of course, relates to the age old concept that “as above, so below,” or the quasi-holographic idea that the part reflects the properties of the whole. Previous to the discovery that there is horizontal gene transfer and reversibility of information flow in cells from the outside in (environment > nucleus), the reductionist view of biological atomism precluded there being a mechanism to connect the part to the whole. Now we see that the kingdoms of life are no longer hermetically sealed off in endless competition with one another. They participate with and in one another, in a type of network which speaks to the oneness and openness of life as a whole."

Here's a fun quiz to do:


Do you have a hidden Hugh Grant or Highland Scot inside?
Take our quiz and we’ll pinpoint what part of the UK you most sound like you’re from – even if you’re not British.

I took the quiz and was accused of coming from Middlesbrough! To be fair that is in roughly the correct ballpark: in the north of England, towards the east - half correct, kind of. A ball would have to travel around 90 miles south to hit the places where I lived most of my years until aged 60+. I truly do not have a Middlesbrough accent though. I know that accent well, having worked reasonably close to the city for a season, long ago.

BEAM ME UP Professor Higgs?

I managed to ignore this week's news about Higgs bosun for a while. Physics is a closed book to me, didn't do physics at school, or chemistry; I was one of those "other side of brain" students who found French, Latin, English literature and grammar easy-peasy, but could never get the hang of applied mathematics and science. Aquarian curiosity about Higgs bosun eventually overcame me though. I went looking for a "Noddy Meets Higgs Bosun" version of the theory. If I can (kind of) understand astrological theory on decans, duads, degrees, etc. maybe I'll find a way to understand some tiny part of Higgs bosun.
(Image credit: ATLASCERN)

This video helped :



In a nutshell: Higgs boson particle, elusive until recently, is what gives matter mass, it explains why we're here - or rather - how we come to be here.

A lot of time, money and expertise has been spent on this experiment. There must be reasons for it all, other than to complete a theory and add chapters to text books. What possibilities could this discovery open up? Any practical use at all?

Here's where I became really interested!

From
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48087875/ns/technology_and_science-science/

A century after Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity, a constellation of Global Positioning System satellites is orbiting Earth, making practical use of his ground-breaking understanding of time. If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, will even more mind-bending technologies result? Theoretically, it's possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss; but practically, it's unlikely.

"If you could manipulate the Higgs field locally, you'd have a great 'Star Trek' device. You could make objects disappear. It'd be a great weapon, a great magic trick — if you could put things back together again," Krauss told Discovery News.

But how would you tweak the field, which is believed to be responsible for giving matter its substance?

"It's possible if you were able to heat up some region to something like a billion, billion, billion degrees, then in that region, the Higgs field would probably go away. Of course, by the time you heated things up to a billion, billion, billion degrees, everything would be gone anyway," Krauss said.

Consider the Star Trek transporter, a staple of science fiction for converting matter into energy, beaming it at the speed of light to a new locale, then reassembling the bits into their previous form.

Theoretically, manipulating a Higgs field would be one way to turn a person into energy and make them "disappear." The hard part would be putting them back together again.

"The only reason why the particles around us, and that make us up, are bound is because of the Higgs field," Krauss said. "They have mass. If the Higgs field were to go away, then the particles would all of a sudden move at the speed of light. "If I could manipulate a Higgs field, that would be a first step in making a transporter, but the only way I know of to manipulate the Higgs field is to heat the whole thing up to such an incredible temperature that it's not surprising you'd disappear anyway," he said.

Time travel is another theoretical prospect.
"If you were able to manipulate a Higgs field over a large region so that it had energy, it would be gravitationally repulsive. It would cause that region of the universe to accelerate and move things apart faster than light, which is pretty neat," Krauss said."The existence of Higgs makes it clear that you can get something from nothing. A Higgs field can produce space and time itself," Krauss said. "But it's hard to imagine a Higgs technology."

Half a century ago it would have been hard to imagine most things we now take for granted. I discount nothing, it could all be possible - one day.

Coincidentally we watched a VCR tape of the Star Trek Motion Picture the other evening. I was never a Star Trek fan, but husband found the tape in a junk store and told me I should try it...."You'll like it", he promised. I did too. Saw the "beam me up" thingie and enjoyed the overall plot involving Voyager 6 and the quest of alien entities to discover who made them. Echoes of Prometheus?

Sci-fi is fast becoming sci-fact before our eyes - well, almost. And this is what's truly exciting!

Prof. Peter Higgs (29 May 1929, Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK) : Sun in Gemini, Moon in Aquarius (whatever time he was born), Sun/Moon in harmonious trine in two Air signs known for mental acuity - and both in helpful sextile to Aquarius's ruler Uranus (the avant garde) at 12 Aries. I love it when a plan comes together, as George Peppard used to say, often, in The A Team).

Interestingly transiting Uranus is curently at 8 Aries, almost back to its position in the Professor's natal chart.