Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada?

 

There seems to be a love affair between the Vatican and Big Bang. "I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre proposed the theory of Big Bang for the first time,” said the physicist Hannes Alfven (1908 – 1995). “Lemaitre was both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creation out of nothing.” In 1951, in a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Pius XII offered his enthusiastic endorsement: "It would seem that present-day science, with one stroke across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies." The Pope went on to conclude that Big Bang proved the existence of God: “Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, science has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: therefore, there is a Creator.” In 1978 the cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking (*1942) visited the Vatican to receive the Pius XI Medal from the Pontifical Academy of Science.

In his book A History of Time, Hawking claims that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other scientists from trying to figure out how the universe began. “I was glad then,” Hawking said, “that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference – the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of creation.''

In that alleged lecture, Stephen Hawking brought forward the scenario of a universe expanding from Big Bang towards a maximum and then falling back into the “big crunch” without actually doing either. Instead of a linear progression, he proposed a permanent one-off where the whole process is laid out and suspended in a dimension of simultaneous occurrences beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. “The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility,” he argued, “in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just be.” It was the first time that I read something remotely appealing about this ugly idea of Big Bang. In Hawking’s analogy the Universe expands from the pole – symbolizing Big Bang – towards the equator, and further on shrinks back to the point of collapse at the other pole. Yet we continue on our travel, reach again the equator and then the opposite pole, and so on, indefinitely.

There is no beginning and no end. “If the laws of physics could break down at the beginning of the universe, why couldn’t they break down anywhere? To admit a singularity is to deny a universal predictability to physics, and, hence ultimately, to reject the competency of science to understand the universe.” That is an interesting statement by the very man who made a career out of the research of black holes, which are physical singularities by definition. The Universe “if completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge,” would have “neither beginning nor end: what place, then, for a creator.”

When Professor Hawking is saying that space-time has no boundary he didn’t, however, mean to say the Universe is infinite; at least to me the idea that a hamster can run in his wheel forever without ever hitting an obstacle, has nothing to do with infinity. Georg Cantor (1845 – 1918) has made us understand that infinite sets possess an actual, albeit infinite number of members and that various infinite sets can vary in size. Any section – for instance the prime numbers – out of an infinite number has as many members as the collection as a whole. Infinite sets are as complete as any set of finite integers and yet as "countable" as is every set that can be put in a one to one correspondence with other sets of integers.

In other words, “infinity” is not simply an ever-growing progression. It is complete and immediately present.

I am not a physicist; I grew up with Immanuel Kant’s contention that we are incapable of intuitively comprehending the true nature of time and space. The empirical world beyond our senses, does not know of “order” and “chaos.” These terms are cognitive categories to which we must seek an approximation in the world out there. Space, Kant explained, “is merely a form of intuition for the external, but not the real object in itself; it is not physically correlated to the phenomena.” This means that even our mathematical tools are drawn a priory from our capacity to work out categorizations – “scales” – as the receptacles for the empirical data at hand. Math is like using a balance to weigh your grocery. As in the advert, “everything begins with an idea.” Science is the story of hunches put to the test. By slotting in into our premise the empirical data, we consider it a proof for the validity of the fact if the assumption leads to a fitting conclusion. Yet even without the support of empirical evidence, an idea may still be ontologically valid if it is mathematically sound. Descartes observed that we can know everything there is to know about triangles, but this doesn’t guarantee the occurrence of a real life triangle out there. But should there be real life triangles, they will be exactly as our math is predicting them. It is the method of the testing that is the arbiter for the validity of an idea. But the story how we stumble over our ideas is a messy affair and riddled with detours, blind alleys, and the pitfalls of ill applied logic. I am not much of a believer in anything, but as far as I am concerned, the more complicated the explanation, the larger the margin for error.

We know of course exactly how old the Universe is. According to Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) the Old Potter opened for business on Sunday, the 27th of April in 3877 BC, at 11.00 am, central European time. Drinks were on the house. Who knows the Universe may be the latest model from a whole assembly line of discarded prototypes! This world – complete with the light reaching us from the galaxies in the Virgo cluster apparently after billions of years, with fossils of dinosaurs hidden in the rocks, with Professor Hawking lecturing the Vatican on a Universe without origin, and with me typing at this essay and recalling that only yesterday I’d arrived in Singapore after twelve hours on the plane – could have sprung into existence five seconds ago, and we wouldn’t be any the wiser for it.

Opinions remain divided whether the Old Potter merely dropped the ball for the kickoff and then withdrew to the terraces for tea and scones, or actually remained on the grounds for a spot of umpiring. These “grounds” seem to cover an awful lot of empty space; in the larger scheme of things, all our ingenious string theories and quantum mechanics are a mere glitch, barely a blip on the scale. Yet even “empty” space is a mathematical manifold with intrinsic metrics. The physical properties of mass, charge and velocity of objects in space correlate with these metrical values. Ptolemy (87 – 150 AD) – yes that Ptolemy, the one who placed Earth at the center of the Universe – understood already that space is not an entity separate from matter. Based on this Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) postulated that the element of time has to be included too, and referred to what is out there as the “Space-Time-Continuum” or “space-time.” A continuum that seems to be expanding!

In 1929, Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953) noticed a uniform shift towards red in the light-signature of galaxies and clusters at extreme cosmic distances. Since the light arriving from an object moving through deep space is either shifted towards blue when it approaches – like the Andromeda galaxy – or towards red when it hurries away, the likely explanation seems a universal motion away from the observer. The more distant the object, the more seems the escape velocity to increase. The factor of this increase is called the Hubble constant. When it was discovered "in 1926, it had a value of 500 kilometers per second per mega-parsec” (Halton Arp). Which prompted Halton Arp to make the sarcastic remark: “During the past half-century this variable has gradually declined to 50.3 kilometers per second per mega-parsec. The radius of the Universe is inversely proportional to the magnitude of this variable. Accordingly the Universe is expanding by a factor of 100 per century. Dividing this factor into the above ratio discloses that the expansion began here on Earth 961 years ago, or 1015 AD during the dark ages” (Halton Arp, 'Extragalactic Astronomy', Science, 17 Dec. 1971, vol. 174, p. 1189). That sounds absurd, yet we may be sitting at the center of this apparent “expansion,” for a good reason, but it is not a reason supporting Big Bang.

As long as the boundaries of the Universe exceed the observer’s horizon, any observer’s horizon, no matter where he is located, whether here or in one of the Sloan Galaxies, such observer occupies the center of his observational horizon. There is no preference of one observer over the other; all observers are equal in that they occupy the center of their observational horizon.

In a very much larger Universe, let alone in an infinite Universe, the tidal force from “outside” of every observer’s horizon must by far exceed the gravitational pull from “inside” the horizon. In other words, the light-signature of objects closer to the observational horizon should be uniformly shifted towards red, and the Hubble constant rather stands for the value of gravitational pull from the observational horizon’s outside, than for an inert escape velocity. The current value for the Hubble constant is seventy kilometers per second per mega-parsec, “with an uncertainty of ten percent.” This means that a galaxy appears to be moving 160,000 miles per hour faster for every 3.3 million light-years distance from Earth. If this were to indicate an expansion, the Universe would be rapidly dispersing into an ever-thinner cloud of nothing, leaving behind merely the debris of microwaves.

The theorists of Big Bang like to present this debris as the fossil signature of the initial bang. For them it is the clincher for their theory but it would be difficult to concoct any alternative cosmology without some or other form of radiation in the background. In fact the very presence of this radiation should put a question mark on Big Bang. No matter into what direction we look, the background temperature is pretty much the same everywhere, roughly 3º Kelvin with very minor fluctuations, but if we go by the assumption that a big bang actually had occurred, then not enough time has elapsed since this event for radiation to zip across the Universe and level out at the same universal average.

An affirmation of Big Bang would also require the Universe to look different in the past. There should be noticeably fewer heavy elements in the spectrum of ancient stars. Yet Galaxies from twelve billion years ago show the familiar distribution of stellar ages and a similar spectrum of chemical elements just like our Milky Way. As recent as January 2004, the American Astronomical Society confirmed that the Universe of billions of years ago and in distances marked by high red shift in the spectrum is of a very similar composition than our cosmic neighborhood. The observed superabundance of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7, may have been the product of a more “local” collision between regions of matter and antimatter each exceeding the size of the observed Universe. According to the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven this would create a superheated state and a rapid expansion of the debris into the space surrounding the area of annihilation, giving cause to nuclear synthesis. The model does not invoke any exotic physics and employs well-understood electromagnetic forces and gravity. (When I hear the term “dark matter” I feel a sensation of smelling burning flesh.)

The first real scientist taking infinity seriously was Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727). In his private notes Newton had anticipated much of Albert Einstein: "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of the Activity from the Particles of Light which enter the Composition?" I don’t know about you, but this is hitting pretty close to Einstein’s E=mv² (energy equals mass by the square power of light velocity). Sir Isaac even speculated, that "another force, independent of gravity, magnetism, and electricity, might prevail only at the smallest distances;" a truly eerie insight for a man from a century with horse manure piling up in every corner. In his publications however, he placed his reputation on Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. Newton’s resulting law of gravity suggested to him a world, ultimately collapsing on itself, (if not compensated by expansion). So to prevent this from happening, Newton’s celestial mechanics require a homogeneous Universe stretching into infinity. Professor Hawking in his book has brushed this aside, claiming, that even so all matter would ultimately coalesce and collapse into one dense mass. An example for Homer caught napping. After all, it was Professor Hawking himself, who had proven that even black holes eventually must evaporate, in other words, have a limited lifespan – which in an infinite Universe can only mean that some may not make the distance towards the crunch point. The imperial astrologer Johannes Kepler thought he had a better argument against infinity; it became later known as “Olber’s Paradox.”

In his novel Conversations with the Starry Messenger from 1610, the first piece of SF fiction known to history, Kepler wrote: “In an infinite Universe every line of vision must end on the surface of a star. Would this not make the whole celestial vault as luminous as the Sun?"

Kepler was as bright as Newton or Professor Hawking. Still writing by candlelight, it must have occurred to him that even an infinite number of candles do not burn all the time. In 1676 Ole Roemer (1644 – 1710) calculated a good approximation for the speed of light, and in 1901 Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) made the crucial step of expressing distances to stars in terms of their light signature’s travel time. In his paper On Ether and Gravitational Matter through Infinite Space, Lord Kelvin picked up on a suggestion by the poet Edgar Allen Poe, and pointed out that a star's lifetime is limited by it's available energy resources. As we look out into space, we also look back in time, to the darkness that existed before the birth of a luminous body and to the darkness that followed its expiration. Modern estimates of the distance of luminous bodies in the cosmic background give a value of 10²³ light years, meaning that in order to see a star’s emissions on every line of sight, such star must have been shining for at least 10 to the power of 23 years. But the lifetime of a sun-like star is only 10¹⁰ years. In other words the answer to the question where all the starlight has gone is, that it hasn't reached us yet, and some never will before our own solar system has expired. Even with all eternity available, in order to convene, the most distant objects will never arrive at the crunch point before they expire and disperse as microwaves; in a manner of speaking, there is just too much Universe. Of all possible explanations why and how in an infinite Universe the sky is dark at night – there are several I am aware of – this is the one with the fewest theoretical assumptions. Therefore “there is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed for an infinite time. Only myths attempt to say how the universe came about, either 4,000 or twenty billion years ago,” says Hannes Alfven.

It is a world where the number of transcendental numbers – values such as pi and e – is very much larger than the total of integers and the values of rare constants stand out from the chaos of random numbers like the nodes marking the intervals on a musical string instrument.

So what is really out there? I mean, what is out there when nobody is looking and slotting in things into his cognitive spider net of categories and instincts? What do we mean when we use the term “time?” To us, “time,” manifests itself as a linear progression with one direction, from the past to the future, from birth to death. We can neither retract our steps, nor return to a time before we were born.

Or can we? Physicists use the term “entropy” to categorize the irretrievable consumption of energy. In their parlance, they have a loose way to identify the degree of entropy with a state of order or disorder. Yet what really happens is that energy is burned whether we wage war or build a palace; the result is exactly the same: an increase in entropy. Entropy is quantified in units of energy per units of temperature. In a locomotive the steam pushes a piston until the energy from the fuel heating the water in the boiler is consumed. There is no viable way to reclaim the residual heat dispersed into the environment after the steam has done its work. Entropy has increased. Energy spent is spent for good. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the entire Universe is moving towards “a maximum" (Rudolf Clausius, 1822 – 1888). Maybe what we call “time” is just an expression for entropy?

The mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906 – 1978) is best known for his theorems of incompleteness: “For any consistent formal theory that proves arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable by the theory.”

In his private correspondence, Gödel argued at length for a belief in an afterlife: “I am convinced of the afterlife, independent of theology.” The operative words here are “if” and “must.” Gödel liked to think that “the world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.” I’ve heard the same thing from an elderly lady, waiting for her train on platform four of Waterloo Station. Einstein's field equations contain a fudge factor, a “cosmological constant.” The actual value of this constant is still everybody’s guess and, depending which value we prefer, allows for multiple solutions of the equations. Einstein himself later denounced this introduction of lambda as the “biggest mistake of my life.” In 1949, Kurt Gödel tweaked the value of lambda to the extent that he could propose a spinning Universe with no singularities but allowing for time travel.

Since there is no “outside” to the Universe, nobody “inside,” for lack of a point of reference, will ever notice the spin. Except we consider the inert effects of gravity. For instance on Earth the rotational velocity increases from zero at the poles to a speed of 1,500 km per hour on the equator, slightly pulling the planet out of its spherical shape. On a cosmic scale, this means that the rotational velocity at the "cosmic pole" has to be zero as well, while the increase towards the "equator" must affect the overall distribution of matter, very similar to the distribution of the bands of cloud formations and of weather systems on Jupiter. There are tantalizing clues right before our telescopes. The huge void of the “WMAP Cold Spot” could very well be the equivalent of a “cosmic pole,” only it isn’t actually that void. Recent long-range surveys from the Hubble telescope have been pinpointed at apparently void regions in the most distant expanses. These long exposures reveal the existence of a crowded world of galactic clusters too far away to be picked up in a normal sweep even by Hubble. Closer to the equator, matter should accumulate, stretching in bands along the latitudes. The “cosmic walls” in our telescopes – galaxies and clusters of galaxies, strung out a billion light-years across and streaming along at velocities that approach 1,000 kilometers per second may just fit the description. Some 150 to 250 million light-years away, there is the “Great Attractor,” a gravity anomaly within the range of the Centaurus Supercluster revealing the existence of a localized concentration of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of Milky Ways. It is observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies and their associated clusters over a region hundreds of millions of light years across. In 2003, a survey by the ROSAT x-ray satellite revealed another concentration of matter some twelve billion light years end to end. Who is to say this could not be the effect of a cosmic spin? And since in a spinning Universe the velocity of every region along one of the "cosmic latitudes" must vary from the other regions above and below, traveling at angles to other worlds along the cosmic longitudes should enable us to tunnel through time which is spinning forward along the latitudes; yet this was not what Gödel was after. "If one can travel to other worlds of a different time," Gödel asked, "how can time be the passage from a no longer existing past to a not yet existing future, when the physics of a spinning Universe require a form of “eternalism,” where the future is a foregone affair and the past embedded in the present because all points in time are equally valid frames of reference – or equally real." In Gödel’s Universe this has consequences for the entropy of matter and perhaps even for the second law of thermodynamics; in fact the implications may go much further: instead of going from the past into the future in a straight line, the two events are rolled together in a closed time-like curve (CTC) tying together every event in space-time, past present and future simultaneously. For Gödel this anomaly was the crucial point of his suggestion, and whatever it meant to Gödel himself, he arguably succeeded in proving that Einstein's equations of space-time are not consistent with what we intuitively understand time to be.

Einstein was generous enough to acknowledge that his friend had raised new and disturbing questions about the nature of time. Since then physicists have tried without success to challenge Gödel's physics or at least find a missing element in relativity itself that would rule out the applicability of Gödel's results.

Based on these physics Robert Heinlein wrote the short story All You Zombies. Jane is a baby girl, left abandoned at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. Never knowing her parents, Jane grows up and one day in 1963 she falls in love with a drifter. She becomes pregnant after which the man goes missing. During the delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they are forced to surgically change her gender. During the procedure, a mysterious stranger kidnaps Jane’s baby from the delivery room. Jane, now a "he," takes to the bottle and goes on the road. After years of drifting, in 1970, Jane enters a lonely bar and tells his story to the elderly bartender. The bartender offers an explanation and invites Jane to go with him on a ride with a time machine, dropping him off in 1963. Jane is falling in love with a young woman without family; the young woman becomes pregnant. The bartender with his time machine then goes forward nine months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender gives the by now thoroughly confused Jane a ride to 1985. Jane eventually is getting his life together, builds a time machine and takes on a job as a bartender back in Pop’s Place in 1970. By now the reader knows that the story is all about the same person, a person that theoretically can never die, although she may attend her own funeral.

I hear Gödel’s solution has been dismissed, because it doesn’t allow for cosmic expansion. But the supposed telltale sign for expansion, the increasing red-shift of distant objects, can be explained in many ways, even as the effect of the increased rotational velocities nearer to the “equator” of the Universe. In this case we would know that our own position in the Cosmos is somewhat removed from the cosmic equator. There is also a strange element of immediacy in the distribution of matter.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) had stated that short light-waves of high energy measure the location of an electron with a certain degree of precision, yet the procedure will severely disturb the electron's impulse. Measuring the impulse of an electron with a longer light-wave will leave the impulse less disturbed, since long-waved light contains less energy, but then the electron's location eludes precise measurement. From this Heisenberg drew the conclusion of a fundamental uncertainty in the correlation between impulse and location. A precise simultaneous measurement of location and impulse is just not possible, because the measuring light wave can only be short or long, not both at the same time. In other words, the physical correlation between impulse and position ceases to exist because the agent we use to measure it interferes and in the process destroys one of the two data.

The philosophical question here is: if a measurement is not even possible how are we to justify the stipulation that there is a correlation?

The answer should be simple! There is nothing to prevent us from choosing to measure either of the two data in this correlation and we will always get a result. Yet the fact that this choice is entirely up to our initiative has mislead some sane and formidable physicists like the late John Wheeler (1911 – 2008) and Eugene Wigner (1902 – 1995) to speculate about a “Participatory Universe.” Obviously this is not the case. If we were really “participators bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago,” it should enable us to erase Auschwitz from the records. Merlin would return from his grave. This is just another flirt with the irrational, and I am not the only one with strong feelings about this.

The Austrian Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961) devoted his entire working life to explain the movement of electrons in terms of waves. He demonstrated that these electron-waves don't even move. They are stationary. (Atoms don’t look at all like the little solar systems in Rutherford’s model; when IBM published an image of their logo written in iron atoms, it looked more like an arrangement of little mountains.) Each time you check the position of an electron you will find it in a different place, but that doesn't mean that it is moving in between the checks. It is the checking that moves the electron, or rather “collapses” its wave-signature at a certain point. The equation describing this process became known as Schrödinger's wave function. "In this article,” Schrödinger wrote, “I should like to show, for the simplest case of the (non-relativistic and unperturbed) hydrogen atom, that the usual rule for quantization can be replaced by another requirement in which there is no longer any mention of 'integers.' The integral property follows, rather, in the same natural way that, say, the number of nodes of a vibrating string must be an integer. The new interpretation can be generalized and, I believe, strikes very deep into the true nature of quantum mechanics" (E. Schrödinger, Annals of Physics 1926, 79, 361.). Schrödinger came to the conclusion that a subatomic particle such as an electron exists simultaneously in a number of possible states; the probability of each is incorporated in Schrödinger’s wave function. Common sense would reason that at any given point in time there are only two possibilities, either the atom has decayed, or it has not. Yet quantum mechanics is telling a different story: the atom is understood to inhabit both states simultaneously before it is observed.

This has been put to the test.

A team of physicists – Christopher Monroe, Dawn Meekhof, Brian King and Dave Wineland – confined a charged beryllium atom in a tiny electromagnetic cage and then cooled it with a laser to its lowest energy state. In this state the position of the atom and its "spin" (a quantum property that is only metaphorically analogous to spin in the ordinary sense) could be ascertained within a very high degree of accuracy, though limited by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The next step was to stimulate the atom with a laser just enough to change its wave function. According to the new wave function of the atom, it now had a fifty percent probability of being in a "spin-up" state in its initial position and an equal probability of being in a "spin-down" state in a position as much as eighty nanometers away, which is a vast distance in the atomic realm. And lo and behold, the atom was indeed in two different places at the same time as well as in two different spin states. The piece of clinching evidence was the observation of an interference pattern.

It is a telltale sign that the single beryllium atom had produced two distinct wave functions, which now interfered with each other. It is a bit like in the koan of the Zen master: “Where does the lake go when the geese fly to Canada?” Such instant interference between multiple manifestations of the same object could even put a new angle on the EPR paradox.

Albert Einstein was a great skeptic when it came to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. To lampoon the concept he and the physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen devised a famous thought experiment: “It is possible,” they argued, “to obtain a pair of particles, say electrons, in a so-called singlet state where their spins cancel out each other to give a total spin of zero. Let us suppose these particles move widely apart in opposite directions, after which the spin of the particle to the left is measured and found to be in the “up” state. Because the two spins must cancel each other out to zero, it follows the particle to the right must have “down” spin. In classical physics, this would be no problem at all. One would just conclude that the right particle always had “down” spin from the time of separation. However according to the Copenhagen interpretation, the spin of the particle to the left has no definitive value until it is measured, at which point it must produce an instantaneous effect at the particle to the right, collapsing its spin wave function into the opposite or “down” state.” Einstein concluded: “This bizarre situation demands action-at-a-distance or faster than light communication, neither of which is acceptable.”

Einstein thought he had made his point. Nevertheless, in 1964 John S. Bell proposed his “non-locality” theorem. He accepted Einstein’s ridicule as a serious proposition and if he was right, this would mean there is such a thing as instant interaction regardless, even, of distance. Therefore, in 1982, Alain Aspect set into practice what Einstein had merely suggested to ridicule the idea.

As prescribed by Bell, the experiment polarized identically a pair of photons and then emitted it into opposite directions from a single light source at the center. Each photon passed through a polarized filter of which the angle was rapidly varied. Using quantum mechanics one can predict the probability that each photon will pass through a filter tilted at a given angle. Yet according to the same theory, the probability of one photon passing through depends on how both filters are tilted. Aspect made sure that the filters were sufficiently apart, and that their reorientation was varied quick enough, so that no signal from one end could reach the other in time to affect the second measurement, even if the signal traveled at the speed of light. In fact, Aspect changed the initial spin every ten billionth of a second, and made measurements on the opposite particles when they were separated by four times the distance that light could travel in the interval between the alterations of the spin. The results were as predicted by quantum mechanics.

Some interactions in the particle-world are immediate and don’t diminish with distance. Such immediacy is also a feature of infinity. Meister Eckhard (1260 – 1328) was the first to suggest a world where every event is laid out simultaneously in time-withdrawn permanence.

© – 7/11/2009 – by michael sympson, 5,600 words, all rights reserved