Freewill and Quantum Mechanics

Misguided folks in the mainstream keep looking to quantum mechanics (QM) to support their belief in freewill. Of course, all that is handled by our Second and Third Assumptions:

The Second Assumption of Science, causality (All effects have an infinite number of material causes).

The Third Assumption of Science, uncertainty (It is impossible to know everything about anything, but it is possible to know more about anything).

Logically, however, both the freewill and the QM arguments are founded on the assumption of finity. Poke a freewillist or a QM guy and you will find an infinity denier. It is interesting to see the evolution of a scientist such as Jerry Coyne, who is steadfastly and appropriately opposed to freewill, but still favors QM (empty space, 4-D, the BBT, and all the other fantasies you are supposed to believe to remain employed in the mainstream). I include the link to his blog on this topic, not for its clarity, but as an example of the struggles one gets into when you don’t have all your assumptive ducks in a row:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/jim-khalili-mistakes-unpredictability-for-free-will/

Univironmental Determinism, Evolution Deniers, and the Big Bang Theory

Even though the suppositions underlying the Big Bang Theory are taken straight out of Genesis, many creationists nevertheless find the theory abhorrent. They don’t mind things popping out of nothing, but they assume that it had to be with the help of an imaginary friend. As Jerry Coyne mentions in his post below, belief in naturalistic evolution in the US is still only about 15%:

From Jerry Coyne’s review of the recent poll by Gallup (http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/latest-gallup-poll-on-u-s-acceptance-of-evolution-flatlined-as-usual/ ).

Not only that, note that the liberal religious position has recently lost 6%, while the strictly creationist position has gained 6%. Remarkably, this is in spite of the rise of the unaffiliated, which is an inverse function of age:

Why these two polls don’t agree is somewhat of a mystery, although, as Jerry points out, the summary written for the Gallup poll “is somewhat of a sop to evolution-deniers, unworthy of a respectable poll.” The Gallup poll, of course, concerns only biological evolution. You can imagine what the results would be for univironmental determinism, which after all, states that “what happens to a portion of the universe is determined by the infinite matter within and without.” Coyne’s charge is to teach evolution to the mostly devout college students. He has enough trouble with the biological; he doesn’t need to introduce the univironmental. Besides, like most other neo-Darwinists, he is a great supporter of the Big Bang Theory. It does purport to have an evolutionary component after all. Neo-Darwinists generally take offense at any disparagement of the BBT, automatically assuming that anyone in opposition must be anti-science at the least or a creationist at the most. Few seem to realize that the assumption opposing creation is conservation, not evolution. I guess that biologists need more education in thermodynamics, whose first law is the Fifth Assumption of Science, conservation (Matter and the motion of matter can be neither created nor destroyed).  

Birth of Univironmental Determinism

Wilderness love can get you out of the office just when it is needed, even if you don't  know that it is needed. Showers Lake, in the high Sierra, is one such needed place. Before venturing to the Sierras, I had been contemplating philosophical questions—big ones like the universe exploding out of nothing, which was a hot topic round about 1977, as it still is today. Like many others, who consider themselves deceived by Genesis, I just could not get my head around that thought. The whole universe supposedly was expanding rapidly into a sort of 4-dimensional space-time. I remember that one of my feeble attempts to make sense of it involved thoughts of intersecting light beams creating new matter as they extended from various galaxies at the outer edge of the universe.

As a devotee of soil science, I had studied quite a bit of biology as well. Everything in biology eventually gets down to evolution. Darwin said that biological entities were subject to all sorts of nasty stuff in the environment. That mechanism, “natural selection,” ignored the fit and destroyed the unfit. A seed in fertile soil would produce a much healthier plant than one in infertile soil. With Mendel’s discovery of genetics, it became clear that it was more than just the environment that affected what happened to an organism. There had to be something inside that carried over to the next generation. This combination of environment and genes, dubbed “Neo-Darwinism,” remains the official mechanism of evolution. Strictly speaking, of course, it only applies to things that have genes.

An especially interesting aspect of soils is that they appear to evolve too. My specialty is “pedochronology,” the age dating of soils. Young soils, such as those along streams, tend to be gray or black, while old soils, such as those in the hills, tend to be brown or red. Over time, percolating water picks up clays from the surface, depositing them in the subsurface. The thicker the resulting clay films become, the older the soil. Over a hundred soil properties change with age. We called the process “pedogenesis” or “soil development.” We did not call it “Neo-Darwinism”—no genes, after all. Moreover, we avoided calling it “soil evolution,” for reasons of which we were mostly unaware.

Back to the trip... As usual, Showers Lake was especially beautiful, with shores of nearly white granite surrounding the dark blue. There was little wind and the temperature was ideal. Getting back to nature, of course, does not immediately rid one of the concerns of the day, but it does impose itself. Showers Lake had tall trees and short trees. I got to thinking. Why was this? Exactly what controlled how tall a tree would be? Why fifty or a hundred feet? Why not a thousand feet? I knew the answers just like I knew the answers for soils. Everything is controlled by everything else. The big ones shade out the little ones and the wind eventually knocks down the big ones. But there is knowing something and there is really, really knowing something. Fact is, every portion of the universe experienced what these trees and soils experienced. Rocks evolved, Earth evolved, the solar system and the Milky Way evolved. People evolved and whole societies evolved. In each, the controls for these changes were exerted from within and without. It was how the universe worked, but there were no words for it.

Later, back in civilization, I got to talking with my friend Elizabeth. We needed a word that focused not merely on a portion of the universe, but on how that portion interacted with the rest of it. Systems philosophy was all the rage at the time, but “systems” would not do. Systems were too microcosmic, with their overemphasis on the thing and the tendency to ignore the environment. Now, in science, we have an assumption that we must use even though we can never prove it completely: there are material causes for all effects. It is what makes us determinists and what makes us successful. I mentioned to Elizabeth that there once was something called “environmental determinism.” It was sort of the opposite of systems philosophy in that it ignored the thing and overemphasized the environment (just like Darwin did with his natural selection). We needed a unification of the two that would emphasize both equally. I do not know which one of us thought of it, but the appropriate word was “univironment” (yew-nee-viron-ment). The eventual result was univironmental determinism, the observation that what happens to a portion of the universe is determined by the matter within and without. It is the universal mechanism of evolution.

Univironmental determinism is important because it applies to all things—including you. If you do not like your present life, change your environment. Do not expect to think your way out of every problem. Get out of the office, to the woods, to the library, to new friends. This has worked wonderfully for me. After working out some of the most important implications of univironmental determinism, I have written what many consider a revolutionary opus on scientific philosophy. Best of all, I am no longer perplexed by the silly idea that the universe exploded out of nothing. My book, "The Scientific Worldview," has set the stage for Infinite Universe Theory, which I predict will replace the Big Bang Theory within the next few decades. It turns out that communing with nature and understanding the universe have much in common.

Is Dark Matter the “Universal Glue”?

Thanks to Carl, who sent this heads-up:

According to Wednesday's report, we are getting close to discovering the nature of the “mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together:”

http://m.apnews.com/ap/pm_5030/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=u25UmbFW

This amendment to the Big Bang Theory had better be good, for it involves another $2 billion of your tax money. Regressive physicists declare that they will soon know whether the missing matter “could be the strange and unknown dark matter or could be energy that originates from pulsars.”

First, let’s get rid of the idea that the missing matter “could be energy that originates from pulsars.” Energy does not exist. It is neither matter nor motion. Energy is a calculation (E=mc²) that describes the motion of matter. Although it is one of the pillars of regressive physics, “dark energy,” construed as matterless motion, likewise, neither exists nor occurs.

Second, dark matter appears to be real. For 80 years, astronomical observations have confirmed that many galaxies behave as if they have many times as much mass as can be seen with telescopes. As most of you know, gravitation between any two objects is dependent on their masses. Thus, if a small galaxy were to pass by a large galaxy, it would be pushed toward the larger galaxy. The curvature of its path would be dependent on its mass and the mass of the larger galaxy. Astronomers calculate the mass of a galaxy by estimating the number of stars that it has. For instance, our own star, the Sun, has a mass of 2 X 10³⁰ kg. There are about 200 billion stars in are own galaxy, the Milky Way. The visible mass is about 4 X 10⁴¹ kg and the total mass is about 3 times that. So, you can see that dark matter is a problem.

But what is dark matter? In our book, "Universal Cycle Theory: Neomechanics of the Hierarchically Infinite Universe,” Steve and I speculate that dark matter is ordinary (baryonic) matter. Vortex theory implies that rotation produces particle size segregation following Stokes Law. As you can see in our demonstration video at www.universalcycletheory.com, large particles in a vortex are pushed toward the center and small particles are pushed away from the center. Dark matter is the non-luminous stuff surrounding spinning galaxies and galactic clusters. This stuff could be planets, asteroids, rocks, molecules, atoms, or aether—anything that has mass. I would shy away from proposing aether as a possibility, because it is the cause of gravitation, except for one thing: aether too, has (immeasurable) mass, and must be entrained at especially high densities in the outer edges of any spinning vortex. Note that globular clusters are more or less spherical with almost no spin. As predicted by vortex theory, they have little dark matter.

I find the silly comment about the “mysterious substance that is believed to hold the cosmos together” to be nevertheless intriguing. At first thought, the infinite universe doesn’t need anything to “hold it together.” Only a finite universe (as proposed by the Big Bang Theory) would need that. On second thought, this is a subtle admission that a push, rather than a pull, would be necessary to do the holding. On third thought, that is exactly the concept that Steve and I proposed in our book and summarized in Borchardt and Puetz (2012), although we see this “mysterious substance” as aether_-1 and being necessary for the gravitation of baryonic matter anywhere in the infinite universe.

References

Borchardt, Glenn, and Puetz, S.J., 2012, Neomechanical gravitation theory ( http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6529.pdf ), in Volk, G., Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, 19th Conference of the NPA, 25-28 July: Albuquerque, NM, Natural Philosophy Alliance, Mt. Airy, MD, v. 9, p. 53-58.

 Heilprin, J., and Borenstein, S., 2013, Scientists find possible hint of dark matter ( http://m.apnews.com/ap/pm_5030/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=u25UmbFW

 ), Associated Press, April 3.