SCIET Theory offers a useful concept of time. Time is a byproduct of consciousness. I will not try to explain consciousness since that would go beyond the intent of this post.
Astrological resonance between a person and the positions of the planets, moons, and stars is repeated by the rotation of the Earth each day. These patterns furnish us with a useful way to record memories.
Think of each day as a thread of time being wound onto a spool that requires a day to make one revolution. Imagine that each turn is laid one on top of the other. Each turn is like a level or a floor in a spherical building. Since the floors are wound around a center, it can be experienced as a single floor from its beginning to its end, or you can use the elevator to move from one floor to the next. The elevator is a line between any external point and the center of the spherical “building of mind.” Each level or stop on the “elevator” represents a different but harmonious, stepped-down or up value. Each holographic memory level of this building of mind can be accessed horizontally or vertically.
The ability of space to automatically reduce incoming values toward a point is responsible for our perception of time. This ability of space is not unique to conscious beings but is responsible for them. The by-product of this process is time. The universal experience of consciousness exists at the moment of shared creation, a moment built on the sequence of events begun 13.6 billion years ago. This moment is the unfolding of our universe, but all that has continued to exist in space/time can be accessed through the elevator of memory and mind. The values of each moment of creation exist in permanent relationships throughout the universe.
All memory is related to the values explained by the “building of mind” analogy. Time is the product of the creative process in which new parts are added to an existing structure. You cannot separate time from the structure any more than you can separate a building from the space in which it exists. The processes of space inextricably entwine time and memory. Time can be understood as the shifting of values or stepping-down of values in space on a universal scale. The mind utilizes this process to maintain a continuous linkage between what has happened and what is happening. The values used by the consciousness exist universally and can be used to access any moment in time, anywhere in the universe.
SCIET Theory originated as a means to answer the long-standing questions about the existence of the soul and provide a logical explanation for it.
A scientific explanation is also a goal, but the first goal is to provide a logical means to account for its existence and behavior in the context of human experience. Four decades of consideration have produced these ideas, giving ample time to try as many approaches as possible before deciding that this Theory is the best.
Notice that the orbs seen near spiritual researchers are similar in size to the brain cavity of a living human.
The Theory did not begin as an explanation for the Creation of matter, but since the Soul could not be defined as emerging from matter, it was necessary to explore what came before matter, and thus we have an explanation for how the matter was formed.
None of these ideas came from experience or experiments but were given as whole thoughts during a twenty-minute period in 1974. From that point on, I knew this information, but it has taken almost fifty years to find the words and concepts to communicate it to others.
Always the simplest answer emerged as the best. In this vein, the proton is remarkably similar to the Soul. Each has a Point of Awareness at the center surrounded by memories of its past. The environment of the proton has few variables and its memories are only of other protons. The incredible age of the proton accounts for the strength and power of its structure, and the calculations regarding its energy are consistent with the forces that have molded it.
SCIET Theory offers a method to understand the formation of atomic structures through the function of a single mathematical structure that occurs pulse-like and records its existence in space as a spherical layer around a point of AwarenessIn
Actual photograph of nuclei of pure iron taken with a radiation microscope. Note that it is made of spherical shells connected by lines from the center to center,
In SCIET Theory protons are the final stage of the creation of the Universe from Crystalline Space, which begins with the First Action and continues through eighty-one magnitudes of subdivision to stimulate resonance return at the boundary layer.
SCIET Resonance Return: A SCIET is an information-filled assembly of twelve leg-like regions equidistant from one another, and angled toward the center, forming a star-like structure of twelve angles. All points are SCIETS, and when two of them resonate, the resulting midpoint structure is also a SCIET, although its information is a harmonic of both. When it is disturbed or forced to adjust and recalculate its information value, the original mid-point information value pulses toward, or resonancereturns to each of the original SCIETs, The twelve legs approach the center but cannot reduce into it, and so span it and each leg surrounds the center as a level, forming a twelve level layer, or quanta.
SCIET Boundary Layer: The SCIET First Action leads to successive subdivisions of the first measure and does not end until it reaches a Boundary Layer, a predefined value that represents the limit of the First Actions area of effect. This is common n the Nervous system
Photons are the same but exist independently of another structure.
This process continually adds SCIETorbital components around the center of each interference point. This initial cumulative effect resulted in the formation of protons, electrons, and neutrons.
Thus protons emerged from or appeared in, the crystalline space at the beginning of the universe simultaneous to the creation of radiation and gravity. The proton shells continued to grow due to resonance with each other and this effect began the effects of gravity, the attraction of matter together based on sharing orbital layers. these protons formed clouds and moved toward others of the same nature, as the clouds grew close, the layers that surrounded them adjusted and stabilized at a standard distance, with the midpoint resonance between them becoming an Electron, and its apparent movement due to its shifting from the midpoint of one proton to another that is also in resonance. Other protons at different distances would have electrons specific to them
The very high resonance rates or densities of the interiors of stars enabled protons to assemble in close proximity and become molecules.
Neutrons are those so compacted that the midpoints would standardize very close to the shell.
The Proton and Causal Levels
The role of molecularSCIET is to explain the nature and behavior of the molecular structures.
By focusing on the atoms separately from the events that lead to their formation or the mechanisms of their combination into molecules, we can get the most distinct view of the SCIETorbital concept and the important idea of Causal Levels.
The term level is used to denote the next or previous of the same interval, such as a value that steps twelve levels to create a layer.
A ny increment that can exist is described as a level when considering it in relation to the formation of the shells, layers or lattice.
Causal Levels begin inside the proton shell where incoming Resonance Return Values Symmetrically React to the SCIET angle at the center and establish a pulsed polarity of those values into the surrounding space where they become parallel in twelve levels and orbit in perpetuity to form SCIETspheres
SCIET Theory attributes the formation of protons to the sufficient subdivision of space to stimulate resonance return as a common event.
Protons and electrons formed out of the original creation during the plasma and from them, neutrons and all the molecules emerged from the furnace of stellar gravity.
Protons and electrons remain the fundamental source of materiality and understanding them will reveal the patterns that underlie all of nature.
The proton is derived from the internalization of the void created by the first SCIET which defined itself, not as a relationship between two points in space, but as a point on the surface of a sphere between an internal and an external void.
SCIET Theory offers a method to understand the formation of atomic structures through the function of a single mathematical structure that occurs pulse-like and records its existence in space as a portion of a closed-loop layer surrounding both origin and destination.
The concept of the SCIETorbital and its closed-loop nature underlies much that is mysterious in nature, but it is to be expected that a simple rule is universal and responsible for many effects.
The most obvious area to seek confirmation of these ideas is in the realm of atomic structures and quantum mechanics.
A SCIET interacts with other SCIETs that have matching values. This means that every value defined around the center is treated as a SCIET.
At the smallest levels of creation, this has important implications.
The minimum unit of change is at the center of the proton and reaches out from that deep place to define the infinitesimal substrate that exists throughout the Universe.
When each of the twelve steps away from the center are considered in the context of being originating values, it is obvious that each value becomes the basis of a whole system of derived values.
“Consciousness creates reality”
Physicists admit the Universe is immaterial, mental, and spiritual
“Consciousness creates reality.” This statement has changed the scientific and medical landscape, and alternative media outlets around the world have and continue to explore its meaning and implications for out future. Countless scientists study this idea and how it might be correlated with the nature of our reality.
It raises the question, what is consciousness?
Consciousness includes a number of things. It’s how we perceive our world, it’s our thoughts and intentions, it’s being aware, and so more.
“Looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking in the radio for the announcer.” –Nasseim Haramein, Director of Research for the Resonance Project
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” – Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918
“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician
The notion that “consciousness creates reality” raises so many questions. Does this mean we as individuals (and on a collective level, as one human race) can shape and create whatever reality we’d like for ourselves? Does it mean we can manifest a certain lifestyle, and attract certain experiences? Does it happen instantly? Does it take time? How do we do it?
We know so little still. Although we might not be able to answer these questions with scientific certainty, we do know that yes, a correlation between consciousness and our physical material world does indeed exist in some way. The extent of that correlation is still poorly understood, but we know it’s there, and we know it must have some sort of significance.
According to RC Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, in a 2005 essay:
A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction.
Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.
The Science Behind the Statement “Consciousness Creates Reality”
The quantum double slit experiment is one way we can see how consciousness affects the physical material world. One potential revelation of this experience is that “the observer creates the reality.” A paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays by Dean Radin, PhD, explains how this experiment has been used multiple times to explore the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality.
In this experiment, scientists use a double-slit optical system to test the possible role of consciousness in the collapse of the quantum wave-function. They had predicted the ratio of the interference pattern’s double slit spectral power to its single slit spectral power would decrease when attention was focused toward the double slit as compared to away from it, yet instead foundthat factors associated with consciousness “significantly” correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern. In other words, scientists affected the results of the experiment just by observing it.
“Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.”
Although this is one of the most popular experiments used to posit the connection between consciousness and physical reality, there are several other studies that clearly show that consciousness, or factors that are associated with consciousness, directly affect our reality. A number of experiments in the field of parapsychology have also demonstrated this.
Sure, we might not understand the extent of this connection, and in most cases scientists can’t even explain it. However they are, and have been observed time and time again.
Other examples we’ve written about include government sponsored psychokinesis experiments, the global consciousness experiment, intelligence agency remote viewing experiments, thoughts and intentions altering the structure of water, the placebo effect, teleportation studies, and more. You can find more details about those specific experiments here.
How We Can Incorporate This Information Into Our Lives and Use Consciousness to Transform the World
Change requires action, but the place within ourselves that we take action from makes a big difference in the outcome.
Modern day science, especially quantum physics, has been catching up to ancient mysticism and concepts deeply ingrained in various cultures throughout the ancient world. One great example of this is the fact that everything is energy, and nothing is solid. You can read more about that here.
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” – Gautama Buddha
“Broadly speaking, although there are some differences, I think Buddhist philosophy and Quantum Mechanics can shake hands on their view of the world. We can see in these great examples the fruits of human thinking. Regardless of the admiration we feel for these great thinkers, we should not lose sight of the fact that they were human beings just as we are.” – Dalai Lama (source)
A great example of quantum physics meeting ancient wisdom can be seen in the fact that Nikola Tesla was influenced by Vedic philosophy when pondering his ideas of zero point energy. You can read more about that here.
So why is this relevant? Because new physics is finally discovering that the observer shapes the reality. The way we think and perceive could significantly impact our lives and the world around us.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Unknown
If we look at the world and examine it on a collective level, what do we see? How do we perceive it? Right now, the masses believe a ‘normal life’ means going to school, paying bills, raising a family, and finding a ‘job’ within the current paradigm to support yourself. Many people on the planet are not resonating with this experience, however. They want change. We’ve been repeating and perceiving our reality this way for a very long time, as though we are drones trained to accept things the way they are; to not question what is happening in our world and to continue on with the status quo, only caring for ourselves and our own lives. As Noam Chomsky would say, our consent has been manufactured. If we continue down this path and continue to perceive and view reality as “this is just the way it is,” we will, in essence, prolong that type of existence and experience for the human race without ever changing it.
In order to create and manifest a new reality for ourselves, our thought patterns and the way we perceive reality must change. What changes the way we perceive reality? Information. When new information emerges it changes the way we look at things and, as a result, our reality changes too, and we begin to manifest a new experience and open our minds to a broader view of reality.
What’s also important about teachings from new physics is that, if consciousness creates reality, that means change starts within. It starts with the way in which we are observing the outer world from our inner world. This touches on the earlier point of how we perceive our reality. Our perception of the external world might very well be a reflection of our inner world, our inner state of being. So ask yourself, are you happy? Are you observing, perceiving, and acting from a place of love? Or from a place of hate or anger? All of these factors are associated with our consciousness and observation; the one (or the many) who are doing the “observing” might significantly impact the type of physical world the human race manifests for itself.
What do you think?
We are indeed the observers, and we can create change and break patterns to open up new possibilities, all through the way in which we observe ourselves, others, and the world around us.
I believe that the human race is in the process of waking up to a number of different things at once, and as a result, the way we perceive and “observe” the world around us (on a mass scale) is shifting drastically. So if you want to help change the world, change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will change.
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
Lord Kelvin made this statement in 1900, and was proven wrong only five years later when Einstein published his paper on special relativity. The new theories proposed by Einstein challenged the current framework of understanding and forced the scientific community to consider new ideas about our world. This stands as a great example of how things that once were regarded as truth can and do change.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Ghandi
“Lord Kelvin’s statements bares with it the voice of paradigms past. . . . We knew that the Earth was flat, we knew that we were the centre of the universe, and we knew that a manmade heavier-than-air piece of machinery could not take flight. Through all stages of human history, intellectual authorities have pronounced their supremacy by ridiculing or suppressing elements of reality that simply didn’t fit within the framework of accepted knowledge. Are we really any different today? Have we really changed our acceptance towards things that won’t fit the frame? Maybe there are concepts of our reality we have yet to understand, and if we open our eyes maybe we will see that something significant has been overlooked.” – Terje Toftenes (source)
A proposed theory of gravity does away with dark matter, even as new astrophysical findings challenge the need for galaxies full of the invisible mystery particles.
For 80 years, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one, suggesting that we barely know our own universe. Thousands of physicists are doggedly searching for these invisible particles.
But the dark matter hypothesis assumes scientists know how matter in the sky ought to move in the first place. This month, a series of developments has revived a long-disfavored argument that dark matter doesn’t exist after all. In this view, no missing matter is needed to explain the errant motions of the heavenly bodies; rather, on cosmic scales, gravity itself works in a different way than either Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein predicted.
Instead of hordes of invisible particles, “dark matter is an interplay between ordinary matter and dark energy,” Verlinde said.
To make his case, Verlinde has adopted a radical perspective on the origin of gravity that is currently in vogue among leading theoretical physicists. Einstein defined gravity as the effect of curves in space-time created by the presence of matter. According to the new approach, gravity is an emergent phenomenon. Space-time and the matter within it are treated as a hologram that arises from an underlying network of quantum bits (called “qubits”), much as the three-dimensional environment of a computer game is encoded in classical bits on a silicon chip. Working within this framework, Verlinde traces dark energy to a property of these underlying qubits that supposedly encode the universe. On large scales in the hologram, he argues, dark energy interacts with matter in just the right way to create the illusion of dark matter.
In his calculations, Verlinde rediscovered the equations of “modified Newtonian dynamics,” or MOND. This 30-year-old theory makes an ad hoc tweak to the famous “inverse-square” law of gravity in Newton’s and Einstein’s theories in order to explain some of the phenomena attributed to dark matter. That this ugly fix works at all has long puzzled physicists. “I have a way of understanding the MOND success from a more fundamental perspective,” Verlinde said.
Many experts have called Verlinde’s paper compelling but hard to follow. While it remains to be seen whether his arguments will hold up to scrutiny, the timing is fortuitous. In a new analysis of galaxiespublished on Nov. 9 in Physical Review Letters, three astrophysicists led by Stacy McGaugh of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, have strengthened MOND’s case against dark matter.
The researchers analyzed a diverse set of 153 galaxies, and for each one they compared the rotation speed of visible matter at any given distance from the galaxy’s center with the amount of visible matter contained within that galactic radius. Remarkably, these two variables were tightly linked in all the galaxies by a universal law, dubbed the “radial acceleration relation.” This makes perfect sense in the MOND paradigm, since visible matter is the exclusive source of the gravity driving the galaxy’s rotation (even if that gravity does not take the form prescribed by Newton or Einstein). With such a tight relationship between gravity felt by visible matter and gravity given by visible matter, there would seem to be no room, or need, for dark matter.
Even as dark matter proponents rise to its defense, a third challenge has materialized. In new research that has been presented at seminars and is under review by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of Dutch astronomers have conducted what they call the first test of Verlinde’s theory: In comparing his formulas to data from more than 30,000 galaxies, Margot Brouwer of Leiden University in the Netherlands and her colleagues found that Verlinde correctly predicts the gravitational distortion or “lensing” of light from the galaxies — another phenomenon that is normally attributed to dark matter. This is somewhat to be expected, as MOND’s original developer, the Israeli astrophysicist Mordehai Milgrom, showed years ago that MOND accounts for gravitational lensing data. Verlinde’s theory will need to succeed at reproducing dark matter phenomena in cases where the old MOND failed.
Kathryn Zurek, a dark matter theorist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said Verlinde’s proposal at least demonstrates how something like MOND might be right after all. “One of the challenges with modified gravity is that there was no sensible theory that gives rise to this behavior,” she said. “If [Verlinde’s] paper ends up giving that framework, then that by itself could be enough to breathe more life into looking at [MOND] more seriously.”
The New MOND
In Newton’s and Einstein’s theories, the gravitational attraction of a massive object drops in proportion to the square of the distance away from it. This means stars orbiting around a galaxy should feel less gravitational pull — and orbit more slowly — the farther they are from the galactic center. Stars’ velocities do drop as predicted by the inverse-square law in the inner galaxy, but instead of continuing to drop as they get farther away, their velocities level off beyond a certain point. The “flattening” of galaxy rotation speeds, discovered by the astronomer Vera Rubin in the 1970s, is widely considered to be Exhibit A in the case for dark matter — explained, in that paradigm, by dark matter clouds or “halos” that surround galaxies and give an extra gravitational acceleration to their outlying stars.
Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1980s, some researchers, including Milgrom, took a different tack. Many early attempts at tweaking gravity were easy to rule out, but Milgrom found a winning formula: When the gravitational acceleration felt by a star drops below a certain level — precisely 0.00000000012 meters per second per second, or 100 billion times weaker than we feel on the surface of the Earth — he postulated that gravity somehow switches from an inverse-square law to something close to an inverse-distance law. “There’s this magic scale,” McGaugh said. “Above this scale, everything is normal and Newtonian. Below this scale is where things get strange. But the theory does not really specify how you get from one regime to the other.”
Physicists do not like magic; when other cosmological observations seemed far easier to explain with dark matter than with MOND, they left the approach for dead. Verlinde’s theory revitalizes MOND by attempting to reveal the method behind the magic.
Verlinde, ruddy and fluffy-haired at 54 and lauded for highly technical string theory calculations, first jotted down a back-of-the-envelope version of his idea in 2010. It built on a famous paper he had written months earlier, in which he boldly declared that gravity does not really exist. By weaving together numerous concepts and conjectures at the vanguard of physics, he had concluded that gravity is an emergent thermodynamic effect, related to increasing entropy (or disorder). Then, as now, experts were uncertain what to make of the paper, though it inspired fruitful discussions.
The particular brand of emergent gravity in Verlinde’s paper turned out not to be quite right, but he was tapping into the same intuition that led other theorists to develop the modern holographic description of emergent gravity and space-time — an approach that Verlinde has now absorbed into his new work.
In this framework, bendy, curvy space-time and everything in it is a geometric representation of pure quantum information — that is, data stored in qubits. Unlike classical bits, qubits can exist simultaneously in two states (0 and 1) with varying degrees of probability, and they become “entangled” with each other, such that the state of one qubit determines the state of the other, and vice versa, no matter how far apart they are. Physicists have begun to work out the rules by which the entanglement structure of qubits mathematically translates into an associated space-time geometry. An array of qubits entangled with their nearest neighbors might encode flat space, for instance, while more complicated patterns of entanglement give rise to matter particles such as quarks and electrons, whose mass causes the space-time to be curved, producing gravity. “The best way we understand quantum gravity currently is this holographic approach,” said Mark Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who has done influential work on the subject.
The mathematical translations are rapidly being worked out for holographic universes with an Escher-esque space-time geometry known as anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, but universes like ours, which have de Sitter geometries, have proved far more difficult. In his new paper, Verlinde speculates that it’s exactly the de Sitter property of our native space-time that leads to the dark matter illusion.
De Sitter space-times like ours stretch as you look far into the distance. For this to happen, space-time must be infused with a tiny amount of background energy — often called dark energy — which drives space-time apart from itself. Verlinde models dark energy as a thermal energy, as if our universe has been heated to an excited state. (AdS space, by contrast, is like a system in its ground state.) Verlinde associates this thermal energy with long-range entanglement between the underlying qubits, as if they have been shaken up, driving entangled pairs far apart. He argues that this long-range entanglement is disrupted by the presence of matter, which essentially removes dark energy from the region of space-time that it occupied. The dark energy then tries to move back into this space, exerting a kind of elastic response on the matter that is equivalent to a gravitational attraction.
Because of the long-range nature of the entanglement, the elastic response becomes increasingly important in larger volumes of space-time. Verlinde calculates that it will cause galaxy rotation curves to start deviating from Newton’s inverse-square law at exactly the magic acceleration scale pinpointed by Milgrom in his original MOND theory.
Van Raamsdonk calls Verlinde’s idea “definitely an important direction.” But he says it’s too soon to tell whether everything in the paper — which draws from quantum information theory, thermodynamics, condensed matter physics, holography and astrophysics — hangs together. Either way, Van Raamsdonk said, “I do find the premise interesting, and feel like the effort to understand whether something like that could be right could be enlightening.”
One problem, said Brian Swingle of Harvard and Brandeis universities, who also works in holography, is that Verlinde lacks a concrete model universe like the ones researchers can construct in AdS space, giving him more wiggle room for making unproven speculations. “To be fair, we’ve gotten further by working in a more limited context, one which is less relevant for our own gravitational universe,” Swingle said, referring to work in AdS space. “We do need to address universes more like our own, so I hold out some hope that his new paper will provide some additional clues or ideas going forward.”
Video: Erik Verlinde describes how emergent gravity and dark energy can explain away dark matter. Ilvy Njiokiktjien for Quanta Magazine
The Case for Dark Matter
Verlinde could be capturing the zeitgeist the way his 2010 entropic-gravity paper did. Or he could be flat-out wrong. The question is whether his new and improved MOND can reproduce phenomena that foiled the old MOND and bolstered belief in dark matter.
One such phenomenon is the Bullet cluster, a galaxy cluster in the process of colliding with another. The visible matter in the two clusters crashes together, but gravitational lensing suggests that a large amount of dark matter, which does not interact with visible matter, has passed right through the crash site. Some physicists consider this indisputable proof of dark matter. However, Verlinde thinks his theory will be able to handle the Bullet cluster observations just fine. He says dark energy’s gravitational effect is embedded in space-time and is less deformable than matter itself, which would have allowed the two to separate during the cluster collision.
But the crowning achievement for Verlinde’s theory would be to account for the suspected imprints of dark matter in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), ancient light that offers a snapshot of the infant universe. The snapshot reveals the way matter at the time repeatedly contracted due to its gravitational attraction and then expanded due to self-collisions, producing a series of peaks and troughs in the CMB data. Because dark matter does not interact, it would only have contracted without ever expanding, and this would modulate the amplitudes of the CMB peaks in exactly the way that scientists observe. One of the biggest strikes against the old MOND was its failure to predict this modulation and match the peaks’ amplitudes. Verlinde expects that his version will work — once again, because matter and the gravitational effect of dark energy can separate from each other and exhibit different behaviors. “Having said this,” he said, “I have not calculated this all through.”
While Verlinde confronts these and a handful of other challenges, proponents of the dark matter hypothesis have some explaining of their own to do when it comes to McGaugh and his colleagues’ recent findings about the universal relationship between galaxy rotation speeds and their visible matter content.
In October, responding to a preprint of the paper by McGaugh and his colleagues, two teams of astrophysicists independentlyargued that the dark matter hypothesis can account for the observations. They say the amount of dark matter in a galaxy’s halo would have precisely determined the amount of visible matter the galaxy ended up with when it formed. In that case, galaxies’ rotation speeds, even though they’re set by dark matter and visible matter combined, will exactly correlate with either their dark matter content or their visible matter content (since the two are not independent). However, computer simulations of galaxy formation do not currently indicate that galaxies’ dark and visible matter contents will always track each other. Experts are busy tweaking the simulations, but Arthur Kosowsky of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the researchers, working on them, says it’s too early to tell if the simulations will be able to match all 153 examples of the universal law in McGaugh and his colleagues’ galaxy data set. If not, then the standard dark matter paradigm is in big trouble. “Obviously this is something that the community needs to look at more carefully,” Zurek said.
Even if the simulations can be made to match the data, McGaugh, for one, considers it an implausible coincidence that dark matter and the visible matter would conspire to exactly mimic the predictions of MOND at every location in every galaxy. “If somebody were to come to you and say, ‘The solar system doesn’t work on an inverse-square law, really it’s an inverse-cube law, but there’s dark matter that’s arranged just so that it always looks inverse-square,’ you would say that person is insane,” he said. “But that’s basically what we’re asking to be the case with dark matter here.”
Given the considerable indirect evidence and near consensus among physicists that dark matter exists, it still probably does, Zurek said. “That said, you should always check that you’re not on a bandwagon,” she added. “Even though this paradigm explains everything, you should always check that there isn’t something else going on.”
A recent article in Scientific American has reported the discovery that fractal patterns and the golden ratio have been discovered in outer space for the very first time. Researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have been studying a specific kind of stars called RR Lyrae variables using the Kepler Space Telescope. Unlike normal stars, they expand and contract, causing their brightness to adjust dramatically, and in so doing create pulsations.
But the pulsations aren’t random or arbitrary. They are pulsating in accordance with the golden mean. We have seen the golden ratio turn up in nature all the time, but this is the first time it has ever been identified in space.
“Unlike our Sun, RR Lyrae stars shrink and swell, causing their temperatures and brightness to rhythmically change like the frequencies or notes in a song,” Dr Lindner, the lead Researcher, explained. It’s the ratio between this swelling and shrinking that is so important.
They have been studying the pulsations of these stars, and several of them have been pulsating frequencies nearly identical to the Golden Ratio. These specific stars are called “Golden RR Lyrae Variables.”
“We call these stars ‘golden’ because the ratio of two of their frequency components is near the golden mean, which is an irrational number famous in art, architecture, and mathematics,” Dr Lindner said.
The Golden Mean
The Golden Mean or Ratio, (1.61803398875…) is a pattern that is absolutely essential to the understanding of nature, as its found in everything from sunflowers, to succulents, to sea shells, and is commonly referred to in the study of Sacred Geometry.
The Golden Ratio was essential to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, can be found in studying the Pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon, and several researches believe they have correlated it to the understanding of the human genome and unlocking the codes in our DNA.
The Golden Ratio or Divine Proportion, when plotted numerically, creates a sequence that emerges what we can see as a Fractal Pattern. Metaphysicians and Modern Physicians for the last 15-years have been avidly suggesting that the study of fractal patterns can lead us to a greater understanding of the Universe, and a Unified Field within it that very likely may be at play in structuring the Universe.
“The golden stars are actually the first examples outside of a laboratory of what’s called “strange nonchaotic dynamics.” The “strange” here refers to a fractal pattern, and nonchaotic means the pattern is orderly, rather than random. Most fractal patterns in nature, such as weather, are chaotic, so this aspect of the variable stars came as a surprise.” Reported an article in Scientific American.
These RR Lyrae variable stars are at their youngest over 10 billion years old and their brightness can vary by 200 percent over half a day. This makes it a bit challenging to study from Earth due to our day-night cycle. It’s the variation itself causing this mathematical phenomenon.
Plato had theorized that the Universe as a whole is simply a resonance of the “Music or Harmony of the Spheres.” This new study may provide deeper insights to pairing the Philosophies & Spiritual Sciences offered throughout the ages with modern Astronomy, and how we may understand the underlying elegance of nature as a whole.
While some of these stars pulsate with a single frequency, observations confirm that others pulsate with multiple frequencies.
“Just as flamboyant rock stars deliver pulsating rhythmic beats under their song melodies, so, too, do these variable stars,” said Dr Lindner.
But the dark matter hypothesis assumes scientists know how matter in the sky ought to move in the first place. This month, a series of developments has revived a long-disfavored argument that dark matter doesn’t exist after all. In this view, no missing matter is needed to explain the errant motions of the heavenly bodies; rather, on cosmic scales, gravity itself works in a different way than either Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein predicted.
Instead of hordes of invisible particles, “dark matter is an interplay between ordinary matter and dark energy,” Verlinde said.
To make his case, Verlinde has adopted a radical perspective on the origin of gravity that is currently in vogue among leading theoretical physicists. Einstein defined gravity as the effect of curves in space-time created by the presence of matter. According to the new approach, gravity is an emergent phenomenon. Space-time and the matter within it are treated as a hologram that arises from an underlying network of quantum bits (called “qubits”), much as the three-dimensional environment of a computer game is encoded in classical bits on a silicon chip. Working within this framework, Verlinde traces dark energy to a property of these underlying qubits that supposedly encode the universe. On large scales in the hologram, he argues, dark energy interacts with matter in just the right way to create the illusion of dark matter.
In his calculations, Verlinde rediscovered the equations of “modified Newtonian dynamics,” or MOND. This 30-year-old theory makes an ad hoc tweak to the famous “inverse-square” law of gravity in Newton’s and Einstein’s theories in order to explain some of the phenomena attributed to dark matter. That this ugly fix works at all has long puzzled physicists. “I have a way of understanding the MOND success from a more fundamental perspective,” Verlinde said.
Many experts have called Verlinde’s paper compelling but hard to follow. While it remains to be seen whether his arguments will hold up to scrutiny, the timing is fortuitous. In a new analysis of galaxiespublished on Nov. 9 in Physical Review Letters, three astrophysicists led by Stacy McGaugh of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, have strengthened MOND’s case against dark matter.
The researchers analyzed a diverse set of 153 galaxies, and for each one they compared the rotation speed of visible matter at any given distance from the galaxy’s center with the amount of visible matter contained within that galactic radius. Remarkably, these two variables were tightly linked in all the galaxies by a universal law, dubbed the “radial acceleration relation.” This makes perfect sense in the MOND paradigm, since visible matter is the exclusive source of the gravity driving the galaxy’s rotation (even if that gravity does not take the form prescribed by Newton or Einstein). With such a tight relationship between gravity felt by visible matter and gravity given by visible matter, there would seem to be no room, or need, for dark matter.
Even as dark matter proponents rise to its defense, a third challenge has materialized. In new research that has been presented at seminars and is under review by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of Dutch astronomers have conducted what they call the first test of Verlinde’s theory: In comparing his formulas to data from more than 30,000 galaxies, Margot Brouwer of Leiden University in the Netherlands and her colleagues found that Verlinde correctly predicts the gravitational distortion or “lensing” of light from the galaxies — another phenomenon that is normally attributed to dark matter. This is somewhat to be expected, as MOND’s original developer, the Israeli astrophysicist Mordehai Milgrom, showed years ago that MOND accounts for gravitational lensing data. Verlinde’s theory will need to succeed at reproducing dark matter phenomena in cases where the old MOND failed.
Kathryn Zurek, a dark matter theorist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said Verlinde’s proposal at least demonstrates how something like MOND might be right after all. “One of the challenges with modified gravity is that there was no sensible theory that gives rise to this behavior,” she said. “If [Verlinde’s] paper ends up giving that framework, then that by itself could be enough to breathe more life into looking at [MOND] more seriously.”
The New MOND
In Newton’s and Einstein’s theories, the gravitational attraction of a massive object drops in proportion to the square of the distance away from it. This means stars orbiting around a galaxy should feel less gravitational pull — and orbit more slowly — the farther they are from the galactic center. Stars’ velocities do drop as predicted by the inverse-square law in the inner galaxy, but instead of continuing to drop as they get farther away, their velocities level off beyond a certain point. The “flattening” of galaxy rotation speeds, discovered by the astronomer Vera Rubin in the 1970s, is widely considered to be Exhibit A in the case for dark matter — explained, in that paradigm, by dark matter clouds or “halos” that surround galaxies and give an extra gravitational acceleration to their outlying stars.
Lucy Reading-Ikkanda for Quanta Magazine
Searches for dark matter particles have proliferated — with hypothetical “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs) and lighter-weight “axions” serving as prime candidates — but so far, experiments have found nothing.
Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1980s, some researchers, including Milgrom, took a different tack. Many early attempts at tweaking gravity were easy to rule out, but Milgrom found a winning formula: When the gravitational acceleration felt by a star drops below a certain level — precisely 0.00000000012 meters per second per second, or 100 billion times weaker than we feel on the surface of the Earth — he postulated that gravity somehow switches from an inverse-square law to something close to an inverse-distance law. “There’s this magic scale,” McGaugh said. “Above this scale, everything is normal and Newtonian. Below this scale is where things get strange. But the theory does not really specify how you get from one regime to the other.”
Physicists do not like magic; when other cosmological observations seemed far easier to explain with dark matter than with MOND, they left the approach for dead. Verlinde’s theory revitalizes MOND by attempting to reveal the method behind the magic.
Verlinde, ruddy and fluffy-haired at 54 and lauded for highly technical string theory calculations, first jotted down a back-of-the-envelope version of his idea in 2010. It built on a famous paper he had written months earlier, in which he boldly declared that gravity does not really exist. By weaving together numerous concepts and conjectures at the vanguard of physics, he had concluded that gravity is an emergent thermodynamic effect, related to increasing entropy (or disorder). Then, as now, experts were uncertain what to make of the paper, though it inspired fruitful discussions.
The particular brand of emergent gravity in Verlinde’s paper turned out not to be quite right, but he was tapping into the same intuition that led other theorists to develop the modern holographic description of emergent gravity and space-time — an approach that Verlinde has now absorbed into his new work.
In this framework, bendy, curvy space-time and everything in it is a geometric representation of pure quantum information — that is, data stored in qubits. Unlike classical bits, qubits can exist simultaneously in two states (0 and 1) with varying degrees of probability, and they become “entangled” with each other, such that the state of one qubit determines the state of the other, and vice versa, no matter how far apart they are. Physicists have begun to work out the rules by which the entanglement structure of qubits mathematically translates into an associated space-time geometry. An array of qubits entangled with their nearest neighbors might encode flat space, for instance, while more complicated patterns of entanglement give rise to matter particles such as quarks and electrons, whose mass causes the space-time to be curved, producing gravity. “The best way we understand quantum gravity currently is this holographic approach,” said Mark Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who has done influential work on the subject.
The mathematical translations are rapidly being worked out for holographic universes with an Escher-esque space-time geometry known as anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, but universes like ours, which have de Sitter geometries, have proved far more difficult. In his new paper, Verlinde speculates that it’s exactly the de Sitter property of our native space-time that leads to the dark matter illusion.
De Sitter space-times like ours stretch as you look far into the distance. For this to happen, space-time must be infused with a tiny amount of background energy — often called dark energy — which drives space-time apart from itself. Verlinde models dark energy as a thermal energy, as if our universe has been heated to an excited state. (AdS space, by contrast, is like a system in its ground state.) Verlinde associates this thermal energy with long-range entanglement between the underlying qubits, as if they have been shaken up, driving entangled pairs far apart. He argues that this long-range entanglement is disrupted by the presence of matter, which essentially removes dark energy from the region of space-time that it occupied. The dark energy then tries to move back into this space, exerting a kind of elastic response on the matter that is equivalent to a gravitational attraction.
Because of the long-range nature of the entanglement, the elastic response becomes increasingly important in larger volumes of space-time. Verlinde calculates that it will cause galaxy rotation curves to start deviating from Newton’s inverse-square law at exactly the magic acceleration scale pinpointed by Milgrom in his original MOND theory.
Van Raamsdonk calls Verlinde’s idea “definitely an important direction.” But he says it’s too soon to tell whether everything in the paper — which draws from quantum information theory, thermodynamics, condensed matter physics, holography and astrophysics — hangs together. Either way, Van Raamsdonk said, “I do find the premise interesting, and feel like the effort to understand whether something like that could be right could be enlightening.”
One problem, said Brian Swingle of Harvard and Brandeis universities, who also works in holography, is that Verlinde lacks a concrete model universe like the ones researchers can construct in AdS space, giving him more wiggle room for making unproven speculations. “To be fair, we’ve gotten further by working in a more limited context, one which is less relevant for our own gravitational universe,” Swingle said, referring to work in AdS space. “We do need to address universes more like our own, so I hold out some hope that his new paper will provide some additional clues or ideas going forward.”
The Case for Dark Matter
Verlinde could be capturing the zeitgeist the way his 2010 entropic-gravity paper did. Or he could be flat-out wrong. The question is whether his new and improved MOND can reproduce phenomena that foiled the old MOND and bolstered belief in dark matter.
One such phenomenon is the Bullet cluster, a galaxy cluster in the process of colliding with another. The visible matter in the two clusters crashes together, but gravitational lensing suggests that a large amount of dark matter, which does not interact with visible matter, has passed right through the crash site. Some physicists consider this indisputable proof of dark matter. However, Verlinde thinks his theory will be able to handle the Bullet cluster observations just fine. He says dark energy’s gravitational effect is embedded in space-time and is less deformable than matter itself, which would have allowed the two to separate during the cluster collision.
But the crowning achievement for Verlinde’s theory would be to account for the suspected imprints of dark matter in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), ancient light that offers a snapshot of the infant universe. The snapshot reveals the way matter at the time repeatedly contracted due to its gravitational attraction and then expanded due to self-collisions, producing a series of peaks and troughs in the CMB data. Because dark matter does not interact, it would only have contracted without ever expanding, and this would modulate the amplitudes of the CMB peaks in exactly the way that scientists observe. One of the biggest strikes against the old MOND was its failure to predict this modulation and match the peaks’ amplitudes. Verlinde expects that his version will work — once again, because matter and the gravitational effect of dark energy can separate from each other and exhibit different behaviors. “Having said this,” he said, “I have not calculated this all through.”
While Verlinde confronts these and a handful of other challenges, proponents of the dark matter hypothesis have some explaining of their own to do when it comes to McGaugh and his colleagues’ recent findings about the universal relationship between galaxy rotation speeds and their visible matter content.
In October, responding to a preprint of the paper by McGaugh and his colleagues, two teams of astrophysicists independently argued that the dark matter hypothesis can account for the observations. They say the amount of dark matter in a galaxy’s halo would have precisely determined the amount of visible matter the galaxy ended up with when it formed. In that case, galaxies’ rotation speeds, even though they’re set by dark matter and visible matter combined, will exactly correlate with either their dark matter content or their visible matter content (since the two are not independent). However, computer simulations of galaxy formation do not currently indicate that galaxies’ dark and visible matter contents will always track each other. Experts are busy tweaking the simulations, but Arthur Kosowsky of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the researchers, working on them, says it’s too early to tell if the simulations will be able to match all 153 examples of the universal law in McGaugh and his colleagues’ galaxy data set. If not, then the standard dark matter paradigm is in big trouble. “Obviously this is something that the community needs to look at more carefully,” Zurek said.
Even if the simulations can be made to match the data, McGaugh, for one, considers it an implausible coincidence that dark matter and the visible matter would conspire to exactly mimic the predictions of MOND at every location in every galaxy. “If somebody were to come to you and say, ‘The solar system doesn’t work on an inverse-square law, really it’s an inverse-cube law, but there’s dark matter that’s arranged just so that it always looks inverse-square,’ you would say that person is insane,” he said. “But that’s basically what we’re asking to be the case with dark matter here.”
Given the considerable indirect evidence and near consensus among physicists that dark matter exists, it still probably does, Zurek said. “That said, you should always check that you’re not on a bandwagon,” she added. “Even though this paradigm explains everything, you should always check that there isn’t something else going on.”
This article was reprinted on TheAtlantic.com.