DEEP SCRATCH

Category: Jack Sarfatti

  • Mavericks of the Mind Live! Review by Fly

    Mavericks of the Mind Live! by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick. 

     

    By Steven ‘fly agaric 23’ Pratt.
    Amsterdam. March 2, 2013.

    David Jay Brown quickly rewarded me for my response to a post he made on Facebook, proposing friends of his–read and review–advance copies of his new book ‘Mavericks of the Mind Live!’ I have spent the last week dipping in and out of the dialogues, sampling their taste, considering how to weigh them, and by what metric?

    “Seems to me like everyone should have an isolation tank and get free of all this! This is my addition to technology, the isolation tank.—Dr John Lilly

    Each of the panel members do not always agree, which to me shows the tolerance and good will of the participants and the tricky terrain they are exploring together. David and Rebecca launch the panel into free flowing feedback based on their provocative questions that include psychedelics, theology, law, anarchy and death. For me, the contributions by Dr Wilson in particular, illustrate how well human consciousness can formulate meaningful answers, on the fly, including both personal experience and published sources, with the noticeable effect of speaking like he writes: artfully. A great accomplishment for a social scientific philosopher and master satirist, me’ thinks. I should add that the book is worth purchasing and reading for the RAW and Timothy Leary contributions alone.     

    “Psychedelics just accentuated what I was beginning to develop out of mathematics and physics–a sense of the order.– Dr Robert Anton Wilson.

    The wisdom from the speakers, together with the good timing of the conferences that were right on the tip of the internet information explosion (1993-94), set an historical intersection point, well worth of reconsideration. Without the present day reference points of Google, Facebook, and Twitter each of the speakers navigate somewhat familiar pathways into discussion relevant to our current hyper-connected social networks, search engines and intelligent predictive technology.  Also how interpersonal relations, and everyday social life changes during consciousness shifts. These Mavericks are invoking the future (1993-2013) and beyond with good cheer and a no-bullshit attitude.

    “We can literally flash millions and billions of ideas to each other, and change and change, and change and add. William Gibson talked about the global atmosphere. You can tap into it and still be as personal and intimate as you want with those that you want to communicate with that way.–Dr Timothy Leary.

    Due to exulted status of these Maverick futurists, in particular Dr Robert Anton Wilson, Dr Timothy Lear, Dr John Lilly, Dr Nick Herbert and Dr Ralph Abraham, the trajectories they set as a tribe together in these dialogues, stand testimony to the great consciousness revolutions that flared during the 1960’s, and the technological innovations & methodologies they spawned, plus, lots of sex, drugs, rock and roll and yoga in the streets. Amen!

    “When nobody is complaining that they’re being hurt, that’s what I consider being a victimless crime. And the difference is not only that I can’t see any reason that a victimless crime should be against the law, but the only way you can enforce laws against victimless crimes is setting up a totalitarian state–because, to return to my example, if I’m getting hit over the head I’m going to go complain. But if three people are smoking pot in the next room and listening to New Age music, nobody is going to complain about that, because we don’t even know about it–so there’s no victim. The only way you can find out how many people in Santa Cruz are smoking pot and listening to New Age music tonight is by spying on the citizenry. – Dr Robert Anton Wilson.

    http://www.amazon.ca/Mavericks-Roundtable-Discussions-Kleefeld-ebook/dp/B00BE86ZRO

    Steven James Pratt a.k.a Fly Agaric 23.

    Steven James Pratt

  • Shannon Info, Jung-Paul Synchro, digital holographic DNA cosmology stuffing

    Is preparing food for my nerdrons: Claude Shannon’s Information Theory and DNA sequencing as fresh news that seems to me a hopeful avenue for some cutting edge research: 
    “What they prove is that there is a channel capacity that defines a maximum rate of information flow during the process of sequencing. ” It gives the maximum number of DNA base pairs that can be resolved per read, by any assembly algorithm, without regard to computational limitations,” they say.”http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27689/
    it’s a long wynding story, if you wanna’ likkle primer, watch this short video about Claude Shannon. I see this being useful as providing a framework (Shannon’s infomation theory) for thinking about human DNA RNA synthesis, and calculating better–more efficiently–so as to speed up the emerging DNA based medicine and therapy. It could be useful for every single aspect of human biological medicine, and at the same time, makes an explicit link between ‘digital bits‘ and ‘the biological ‘binary’ aspects of biology. ‘
    So, to continue on this tip, and explain myself a little, it’s been my hunch over the last 3 or so years that the ‘holographic principle‘ co-founded by Dutch Nobel prized physicist: ‘Gerard t’hooft‘ and ‘information theory’ as developed by Claude Shannon, underly a somewhat hermetic ‘unified theory’. The above link to DNA sequencing, and the following link to ‘cosmological’ BIT Theory, if you like, are examples for the seriousness of this pretty ‘far out’ idea that, in some sense, the whole universe seems contained within each atom! or you could say a ‘Digital‘ Universe, or better yet Multi-verse. As above, a new ‘Digital’ DNA information theory, and below:
    “Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital.”http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-space-digital

     p.s Physicist Jack Sarfatti has proposed similar idea’s that include Shannon’s maxim’s, and a neurological-cosmological ratio. I picked up on these ideas via Dr Robert Anton Wilson, who I suspect picked up some of these ideas from Jack, Saul Paul Sirag, David Bohm and others from the now legendary Bay Area based ‘Physics Consciousness Research Group‘ that he attended.

    –Steve Fly
     

    GOD IS IN THE NEURONS: A DOCUMENTARY EXPLAINING ‘MIRROR NEURONS, OR EMPATHY NEURONS:

  • Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 Edited by C. A. Meier

     

    Atom and Archetype:
    The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958
    Edited by C. A. Meier
    With a new preface by Beverley Zabriskie
    Translated by David Roscoe

    PAULI AND JUNGIAN ANALYSIS

    In his physics, Pauli sought a unified field. But his personal life was one of fragmentation and dissociation. Within one year, his mother poisoned herself in reaction to his father’s involvement in an affair, and Pauli plunged into a brief marriage with a cabaret performer. At thirty, he turned to Jung for help.

    Jung, in his 1935 lectures at the Tavistock, offered the following example of dreams effecting change:

    I had a case, a university man, a very one-sided intellectual. His unconscious had become troubled and activated; so it projected itself into other men who appeared to be his enemies, and he felt terribly lonely because everybody seemed to be against him. Then he began to drink in order to forget his troubles, but he got exceedingly irritable and in these moods he began to quarrel with other men. . . and once he was thrown out of a restaurant and got beaten up.16

    Jung saw that “he was chock-full of archaic material, and I said to myself: ‘Now I am going to make an interesting experiment to get that material absolutely pure, without any influence from myself, and therefore I won’t touch it.’” He referred Pauli to Dr. Erna Rosenbaum, “who was then just a beginner . . . I was absolutely sure she would not tamper.” Pauli applied the same passionate brilliance to his unconscious as to his physics. In a five-month Jungian analysis, Pauli recorded and spontaneously illustrated hundreds of his dreams. “He even invented active imagination for himself He worked out the problem of the perpetuum mobile, not in a crazy way but in a symbolic way. He worked on all the problems which medieval philosophy was so keen on.”17 For three months, “he was doing the work all by himself, . . . for about two months, he had a number of interviews with me . . . I did not have to explain much.” Jung believed Pauli “became a perfectly normal and reasonable person. He did not drink any more, he became completely adapted and in every respect normal . . . He had a new center of interest.” Jung had thirteen hundred of Pauli’s dreams as the basis for his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. “At the end of the year I am going to publish a selection from his first four hundred dreams, where I show the development of one motif only.”18
    The physicist F. David Peat believes Jung’s assessment of Pauli’s state after his termination with Dr. Rosenbaum was too positive. Pauli’s new “reasonableness” didn’t last, and later he again drank excessively.
    While Pauli’s work aimed toward a “psychophysical monism,” his intense inner tensions seemed to manifest physically in the so-called Pauli Effect, when his mere presence caused laboratory equipment to explode or fall apart.19 His internal “monotheism” and his sharp critical acumen and tongue earned him the titles “scourge of God,” “the whip of God,” and “the terrible Pauli.” Even in the midst of personal disarray, Pauli kept his stance as a scientist of such rigor that he was called “the conscience of physics.” Asked whether he thought a particular physics paper was wrong, he replied that was too kind–the paper was “not even wrong.”20 Heisenberg’s account of a 1927 conversation reveals that, in his youth, Pauli was concerned about the distinctions between knowledge and faith.21 Heisenberg saw that behind Pauli’s
    outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest, even in those dark areas of reality or the human soul which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was due in some measure to the clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of the creative and spiritual processes for which no rational formulation as yet exists.22 For Pauli, the creativity of science included considerations of the psyche. In science, he subscribed to the quantum uncertainty theory that the position and presence of the observer changes the perception and reality of what is observed. To that thesis–that one cannot measure the wave and the particle at the same time–he added a psychological dimension, observing that insofar as the scientist must opt to know “which aspect of nature we want to make visible . . . we simultaneously make a sacrifice, . . . [a] coupling of choice and sacrifice.”23 Pauli demonstrated the value of intuition to science’s empiricism. As Weinberg recounted,

    physicists in the early 1930’swere worried about an apparent violation of the law of conservation of energy when a radioactive nucleus undergoes the process known as beta decay. In 1932 Wolfgang, . . . Pauli proposed the existence of a convenient particle he called the neutrino, in order to account for the energy that was observed to be lost in this process. The elusive neutrino was eventually discovered experimentally over two decades later. Proposing the existence of something that has not yet been observed is a risky business, but it sometimes works.24

    In a metaphysical leap, Pauli referred as well to “forms belonging to the unconscious region of the human soul” and stated that “the relation between a sense perception and Idea remains a consequence of the fact that both the soul and what is known in perception are subject to an order objectively conceived.”25 He acknowledged that he had realized in a dream that the quantum-mechanical conception of nature lacked the second dimension, which he found provided by the archetypes of the unconscious.
    It seems, however, that he could not find his way to the uncertainty, the “choice and sacrifice” that allows for reparation within analysis. While Pauli knew “that a truly unified view must include the feeling function, since without feeling there is no meaning or value in life, and no proper acknowledgment of the phenomenon of synchronicity,” M.-L. von Franz said that he later sought only a “philosophical discussion of dreams”:

    He wrote to me . . . [and] made it clear that he did not want analysis; there was to be no payment. I saw that he was in despair, so I said we could try. The difficulties began when I asked him for the associations which referred to physics. He said, “Do you think I’m going to give you unpaid lessons in physics?” . . . He wanted something, but he didn’t want to commit himself. He was split.26

    Van Erkelens speculates that Pauli would have had to submit to a transference and to a deeper Eros than “his inner urge to develop a unified view of matter and spirit.” For whatever reasons, von Franz and Pauli were not able to achieve the relational bond that holds and contains explosive emotional material and so allows surrender to one’s unconscious and to a suffered analytic relationship.
    Jung and Pauli corresponded and later met, not for analysis but for a comparison of ideas–Pauli pursuing Jung’s synchronicity thesis and Jung fostering Pauli’s understanding of the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. Through their contact, William James’s two fields, to which both Jung and Bohr had been attracted, come together again. Von Franz writes that the

    notion of complementarity introduced by Niels Bohr to provide a better explanation for the paradoxical relationship between waves and particles in nuclear physics can also be applied to the relationship of conscious and unconscious states of a psychic content. This fact was discovered by Jung, but it was particularly elaborated by Wolfgang Pauli.27

    http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7042.html

    COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2001, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information, send e-mail to permissions@press.princeton.edu

  • Jung Pauli Field and RAW psych’ travel

    My paper given at the Star Ship conference has the basic equation for the timescape effect in the Jung-Pauli field. The Jung-Pauli field is the Seth Lloyd hologram computer software at our future de Sitter event horizon “boundary” of our observable universe whose area is the entropy of the interior hologram images that were and every material object are.–Jack Sarfatti, October, 2011.

    As information increases unpredictability increases, some information theorist said in 1989 at the world future society, I just learned from listening to RAW.

    I still listen to Robert Anton Wilson a lot, and for many reasons, one is that it feeds my own natural wonder in a way no other writer does, dead or alive. But, with such a mass of subjects covered by RAW in such a scientific and rational way where does one begin who wants to communicate the feeling of reading RAW? and/or information theory in general, which RAW approximates with his unique species of hologrammic prose. (one might propose influences on this hologrammic Prose as being Pound’s Ideogramic Method, Joyce’s nat language and linguistic relativistic fiction, Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, Schroedinger, Einstein and Bohmian equations, and mixed with Sufi stroke cabbalistic stroke Burroughsian styling)


    Needless to say RAW embodies the Hermetic principle, and the general Eastern philosophical leaning toward holism. Both in his writing technique and writing subject matter, and in his life philosophy and way of communicating RAW reflects the very general principle of holism, and so it’s no surprise he himself liked to call his particular writing style hologrammic prose.

    You can simply research all words beginning with the prefix HOL to get an idea of how far this general principle has entered 21st century culture. Holistic health and healing, holographic cosmology, holographic neurology, Holographic data storage remain strong 2012 memes floating around the web-sphere. A careful re-reading and focus upon the ‘holographic’ and ‘holistic’ themes and explicit mentioning in RAW’s work is a research programme I highly recommend and have been pursuing over the last 5 years.

    Over the last week (Feb 14-21) I have come to a new vision of how RAW’s interpretations of Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology, neurology and a special kind of writing (hologrammic prose) reflect some of the latest ideas in the more specific area of cosmological physics. In particular ‘holographic’ models of cosmology, in the tradition of David Bohm, Jack Sarfatti and yes, Giordano Bruno.

    Let me try to explain. And at least give you some mixed media links and source material for you to catch my drift.    

    “Now both men are dead. Physics has undergone great advances with its grand unified theories and its current development of superstring theory. Yet the central question remains: What is the nature of Pauli’s great dream? What is that speculum that lies between the worlds of mind and matter? Will it be possible to develop a new physics and a new psychology which are complementary to each other? This is not simply some intellectual problem or an idle inquiry; rather, it is vital to our very human survival.–F. David Peat.
    http://www.paricenter.com/library/papers/peat26.php

    The third part of a lecture given by Prof. Arthur I. Miller (University College London) on Thursday 10 December 2009 at CERN.

    Since Kepler believed in the famous dictum, “as above so below,” it was natural to assume that the solar system reflected an image of the Trinity and the human mind itself. Such ideas are certainly not far-fetched. David Bohm has told me how, while working on his theory of the plasma state, he felt that the whole plasma was a living thing, a society of electrons, as it were. Over the past decade, Bohm has been lecturing and thinking not only about physics but also about society, religion, and human consciousness. He explores these integrations on many levels without any sense of inner division. This approach would be familiar to Pauli, who pointed out how science and religion have a common origin which, alas, has been forgotten today.–http://www.paricenter.com/library/papers/peat26.php

    “The first four hundred were basis for his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. In a later collaboration, Pauli supported Jung’s synchronicity principle as scientific, and Jung fostered Pauli’s understanding of the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. They each explored the interconnections between the energies of psyche and matter, and the possibilities of acausal order and synchronicity. Pauli’s ground-breaking discoveries gave scientific demonstration of alchemical intuitions. Through him, alchemical and archetypal insights entered the discourse of physics. Through Jung, the apprehensions of microphysics entered our psychological language and thought.–http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=joap.040.0531a

    “Jung and Pauli were convinced that synchronistic events reveal an underlying unity of mind and matter, subjective and objective realities. Synchronicity was (and continues to be) a prime target for criticism of Jung that for decades bordered on outright dismissal by many in the scientific and academic communities. For example, historian of science Suzanne Gieser writes that she finds Pauli’s interest in Jung “unusual” because “most of those with an academic or scientific background dismiss Jung totally.”5 —http://www.metanexus.net/essay/wolfgang-pauli-carl-jung-and-acausal-connecting-principle-case-study-transdisciplinarity



    http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_11_3_atmanspacher.pdf

  • RAW and PHYSICS CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH GROUP (RAW Illumination)


     
    Michael Johnson annotates the new book

    [If you missed it, Michael Johnson posted a long comment to Sunday’s blog post about How the Hippies Saved Physics, which is literally all about the offbeat physicists in the Bay Area who greatly influenced RAW’s thinking. Michael’s comment is a useful annotation to the must-read book of the summer, so I am reposting it here everyone will see it — Tom]

    The Physics-Consciousness Research Group. See:

    Illuminati Papers: 32 (diagram of “context-dependent language model of Nick Herbert); 56 ( Sarfatti on ETI contactees); pp.94-103

    Leary’s Info-Psychology: 33 (and 8th circuit); 49 (note Sarfatti in context); 129-131 (written by Nick Herbert)

    Cosmic Trigger 2: 257 (Back To The Future best artistic expression of quantum logic: Sarfatti model fro Chris Lloyd); 267-268

    Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy: 242 & 314, 426-427 (Herbert’s QUIP); 274 (Capra’s Tao of Physics); 343-344 (Sarfatti); 345-346 (Sirag’s General Field Theory); 540-545

    Trajectories May 1982 and Fall 1984: Nick Herbert and Bell’s Theorem

    Gnosis, Winter 1988-89:(Sarfatti and Faster-Than-Light ideas FTL); Edwin Harris Walker

    Coincidance: 153-155 (Walker, Honegger, Sarfatti)

    Semiotext(E) SF: 70-72 (Nick Herbert’s wild particle physics story that includes RU Sirius)

    Omni, Dec, 1979, “UFO Update” (Sirag’s conjecture about time travellers)

    Prometheus Rising: acknowledgment page: Sirag, Sarfatti, Herbert, who “clarified (RAW’s) whole comprehension of epistemology;” 41 (and 8CB model); 183 (Barbara Honegger: cave paintings & 5th circuit yogic/shamanic brain: 30K yrs ago); 204 (Honegger’s theory of synchroncity); 267-269 (Bell’s Theorem and Sarfatti, et.al)

    Mavericks of the Mind: 67-88 (Nick Herbert); 124 (Honegger); 125 (Walker)

    Chaos and Beyond: 232-235 (review of Fred Alan Wolf’s Eagle’s Quest)

    Everything Is Under Control: 138 (Sarfatti)

    New Libertarian magazine Interview, 4/10-77: two pages on magick and quantum mechanics. Sarfatti as the head of the PCRG. RAW recommends Space-Time and Beyond, by Bob Toben, but Sarfatti says the ideas are his?

    for another view of Sarfatti, see him as a North Beach denizen (San Francisco) in Herbert Gold’s book on Behemia

    Email To The Universe: 41 (Capra and Herbert); 244 (group mentioned); 223 (Mishlove might have been PCRG)

    Michael Hollingshead interview (High Times?): RAW says he’s the PCRG’s “chief literary spokesman;” RAW talks about physicists who’ve used LSD

    Wilhelm Reich In Hell: 33 (Capra and “fundamental holism”)

    see Sarfatti in Imaginary Weapons, pp.11-14

    see Kripal’s book on Esalen: 291-314 (Capra, Stapp, Sarfatti, F.A. Wolf, Nick Hergbert, Gary Zukav)

    New Libertarian mag, RAW interview, 9/5/76: RAW recommends recent issue of Spit In The Ocean, for Sirag and Sarfatti on quantum consciousness Sarfatti as a “skeptical contactee”

    Eight Circuit Brain by Antero Alli: 293-294 (mentions Saraffti and Sirag at RAW’s salons in Berkeley hills, 1979)

    I could list more if anyone’s innarested.

    Were they related to the SRI group with Targ and Puhoff: Scientologists? Who funded them? What role might Werner Erhard have played? How close was Ira Einhorn to the group?

    How influential was Stapp? How did Barbara Honegger make it into the Reagan Administration? She wrote the first book titled October Surprise.

    RAW had mentioned a few times that he sometimes played with the idea that he had been a “useful idiot” to the CIA or some other group.

    http://www.rawillumination.net/

  • Stephen Hawking: RIVERRUN ENVIRONS.

    Joyce’s ‘pancosmos’
    may still yet send shock waves throughout the physics
    Cluster community consciousness…may yet, may yet.
    (and the global internet by default)
    if we would give equal credit to
    the inner-space of mind-like spaces,
    & the outer-space and external phenomena: still mind-like in fact,
    I guess… see our faulty wonky perception, the
    Shadows often mistaken for the ‘things’ themselves.

    LO! to balance the equation of being, of being, of being
    Like how James Joyce seems to balance ‘being’ the equation
    With holographic prose, prose writing the tightrope, spun prose;
    Innovated, deployed and distributed evenly
    Trughout Finnegans Week.

     

    Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time’s current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to traveling into the future, —Stephen Hawking.

    riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend
    of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
    Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce.

     

     

  • RAW V.A.L.I.S JOYCE & HOLO-GRAMIC PROSE?

    “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. –JAMES JOYCE, Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1926-11-24)”

    I have a playman’s or better yet ploughman’s interest in physics, science and the paranormal, once again due for the most part to Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

    I was fortunate to meet many of the bright characters from the Berkeley Based Physics Consciousness Research Institute, where RAW was a somewhat regular alumni, with an irregular illumi.

    Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson

    by Steven James Pratt

    Link: http://a.co/gOGNKyV

    (more…)

  • SPS is for Saul Paul Sirag (Interview with fly agaric23)

    When I recorded this interiew in 2000 A.D. on minidisc recorder I had no way to transcribe and upload the results, and there was no wikipedia to enhance the wisdom of Saul. Big thanks to Jack Sarfatti, please spend a moment at his new website:
    http://www.stardrive.org/

    FLY interviews Saul Paul Sirag:

    FLY: Robert Anton Wilson?

    SAUL: Yeah, i first introduced him to Jack,

    SAUL: Yeah, well he learned about this Bell’s theorem stuff from Jack and me, i introduced Jack to Wilson, that was when he was living in Berkeley.

    FLY: Oh, the trick top hat

    SAUL: what?

    SAUL: The trick top hat’, oh, yeah, the trick top hat, yeah that’s the next one i think, and the third one is called ‘homing pigeons’, trick top hat is the one that has references to both Jack and Me as coming up with futuristic kind of physics that changes things drastically and so on.

    FLY: That’s interesting as John Lilly just recently spoke about the…erm…form of law

    SAUL: Laws of form?

    FLY: yeah, and the trick top hat relates to that somehow?

    SAUL: I’m very interested in the Laws of form also, yeah he talks about it in both his fiction and he has written a lot of non-fiction too of course, and maybe more none-fiction than fiction actually, although, you know he’s one of these people that mixes the two together a lot, kind of like Borges’ the Argentinean writer, well, B draws a fine line between lit. criticism that is not fiction and the fiction that he’s criticizing, B’s criticism is so speculative and interesting that it reads almost as fiction, you know.

    FLY: I like the idea of exploring our unreality’s. At the back of the book “Secret Chamber by Robert Bauval” there’s an appendix in which the author mentions Wilhelm Reich and something he calls Cosmic ambience. Terence Mckenna is quoted at length, talk of probing into unreality’s, but now were realizing that’s our reality too.

    SAUL: One of the most important pieces of criticism that’s really fascinating, and it’s about that famous British poet – William Taylor Coleridge – and you see what’s interesting about that poem is that Coleridge calls it a – fragment of a poem – the reason he calls it a fragment is that he actually dreamt’ the whole poem, he woke up and just started writing it down, but he got the first part of it written down, and a visiter came and visited, and he forgot the rest of it, so he calls it a fragment of a poem anyway, its a beautiful poem all by itself, but here’s the weird thing that Borges points out – there really was a Khan who was a builder – and he was the grandson of Genghis Khan; who was just a conquerer, but Kubilai Kahn was a builder. What Coleridge never knew is that Kubilai Kahn really did order a pleasure dome to be built, and that was enough, but what wasn’t known in Cooleridge’s time is that it itself was an incomplete building, and that was discovered by archeologists after Cooleridge’s time, eh, so what Borges says is there’s a kind of archetype, a vast archetype thats trying to get in through our reality, the first time its comes in the form of a building Kubilai Kahn wants to build, and for some reason its not completed, and the second time it takes the form of a poem about Kubilai Kahn’s building, and that’s incomplete too, because of this guy who walks in and disturbs his memory of the dream. So then Borges speculates that it will try to come in a third time, and he thinks that the form will be different, in some way. My feeling about that is that the form, having my own prejudices about forms, is that the form is what Mathematicians have discovered, a beautiful set of structures, they call it the Coxeter graphs, named after the canadian H. S. M. Coxeter, who’s still alive in his 90’s still doing math very accurately, and he invented these graphs in the 1930’s to classify hyper-dimensional crystal structures, well that already sounds like Kubilai Kahn and Coleridge – and then in the 40’s totally independent of Coxeter’mathematicians work because it was in a totally different part of mathematics, a Russian mathematician named Dinken, invented the same set of graphs to classify very different kind mathematical objects, something called; lie algebras and lie groups. Then in the 60’s a french mathematician called Rene’ Thom invented a whole new field of mathematics called Catastrophe theory, which deals with dynamic systems that can undergo drastic changes due to a very small change in the parameters that they are dependent on, thus the word catastrophe, but catastrophe is to be taken in a neutral sense, that is to say a lot of catastrophes are good.

    In fact what RT was trying to model was the changes that living systems go through, he wanted a mathematics to deal with living systems, especially development and growth and so on; which is very difficult to deal with mathematically.

    Well then a Russian mathematician named V.I Arnold looked at Rene Thom’s work and said Thom just delt’ with a lower, small set, 7 of them in turned out, of catastrophe structures, but actually there is an infinite series and they are classified by these same graphs, so then of course the obvious idea that Arnold had was that the must be a whole bunch of other mathematical objects that can be brought into this classification scheme and so he set that up basically as a program for his students and himself to work on over the years and a lot of other mathematicians have been involved in this. And it has the feel of an archeological dig like their digging up this vast…. see because, Here’s why, its because all these mathematical objects are related to each other by way of these graphs, the graphs form a kind of bridge between different types of mathematical objects, that’s a very powerful thing to be able to do in mathematics because what’s very difficult to see with one type of math object and if you have a bridge between the two and you can switch back and forth and get a much broader and much more accurate feel for what’s going on.

    And so the idea now is that the mathematicians are wondering what the vast underlying object is that the whole set of graphs ultimately refers to and that object is this archeological structure in some sense, and its being dug up, its not a ruin its not something that’s incomplete because its mathematical, its – gotta’ be whole – so to speak. And a very interesting thing from the point of view of science is that all the math objects that have been brought into the classification scheme with these Coxeter graphs are of great use and interest in physics. In fact especially in unified field theory type physics, that’s cutting edge now, like string theory, uses all these kinds of objects usually without the physicist realizing that they’re grabbing objects that are related to each other by way of these graphs, because for the most part they don’t know about the history of these discoveries and that it’s kind of ongoing, sort of at the cutting edge of mathematics, a kind of unification in mathematics concurrently with a unification of the forces of physics, and these two programs are intimately interrelated, and so what i think is that this vast underlying object that underlies all these graphs, is simply reality – reality in all its forms – you know.

    A physicist is going to want to call it physics, because they want to bring everything into the physics program, someone else might want to call it something else, like life or something , it has the feeling of a living breathing creature, its a bit like Phil Dick’s idea of VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligence System, and yeah, ironically he claimed that the definition is in some Soviet encyclopedia of some distant year, and of course the soviet Union is long gone, but still the idea of VALIS is still valid i feel.

    FLY: valid VALIS!

    SAUL: Laughs.

    FLY: I’m also interested in the parable between the yang-mills field theory and the work of the mathematician Ramanujan.

    SAUL: Yeah, oh yeah, see that’s related to this ADE stuff too. It all is. Yang-mills fields was first a generalization of the electromagnetic field, the em field is mathematisized in a sense, by a simple group which is a circle called U1, a unitary one group, and its a communicative group, in other words the way in which you rotate a circle does not matter, 30 degrees plus 60 degrees equals 60 plus 30 degrees, so it doesn’t matter, and that;s a communicative group, and in the language we use today we say thats the gauge group of electromagnetism.

    But what Yang and Mills did back in the 1950’s, 54 i think was the year, generalized the group into a bigger group that deals with rotations ultimately rot’ in a 3d space, and thats the gauge group; they were trying to model the strong force, but it turned out to be the right group for the weak force, then in the 60′ there was the unification of the st and weak force by simply putting U1 and SU2 together as a bigger gauge group, work by Weinberg, Salem and Glashow, and this had certain experimental implications, like the existence of certain particles that were then found which verify the theory, but in fact there are still parts of the theory we are still trying to verify, like the Higgs particle, which hasn’t been found yet, and thats part of the theory, and we think that eventually it will be found, but generally these gauge groups are groups that are classified by the ADE groups, now SU actually is an ADE classification, simply the very first rung on the ladder so to speak, in order to bring in the other forces like the strong for force they have to go to a larger gauge group, put all 3 forces together, weak the strong and the electromagnetic force, they had to go to SU5, which is a 3 dim group, that work was done in 74 i guess, by Glashow and Geogee, the same Glashow that did the work on electro-weak theory.

    But then in order to bring in gravity which is a lot harder to do because gravity entails Einstein’s theory of general relativity which is so different from Quantum mechanics, these other forces are modelled by way of the rules of general relativity, which are very different, almost opposite from the rules of Quantum Mechanics, so it’s very hard to put these theories together; to assume sub theories, or some bigger theories. But thats been done now with superstring theory. Yeah, since 1984 superstring theory has been proven to be a viable consistent quantum gravity theory, and thats what started a sort of bandwagon effect in physics and when lots of young physicists got interested in studying strings.

    But the gauge groups involves in string theory are huge groups, like E8 x E8. There are 3 groups, which is interesting, an infinite A’s, An Infinite D’s and then only 3 E’s, E6 E7 and E8, the dimensionality is huge. E6, is a 78 dimensional group, E7 is a 133 dimensional group and E8 is a 240 dimensional group, and they use 2 copies of it. They have an E8 x E8 version of superstring theory, they have 496 dimensional group actually, and the E8 x E8 gives you 16 very special dimensions which they use to interpolate between the 26 dimensional superstring theory and the 10 dimensional theory in a very clever way. And all this is an out-growth of what you mentioned – the yang-mills theory of 1954 – it’s an out-growth of other developments too, but that was a key development in 1954 and i just wanted to plug that in and see how that fits into the ADE scheme itself, you see?

    FLY: I see a parallel between the superstrings and the strings on an instrument

    SAUL: Yeah, well it is like strings on an instrument in this sense, that the harmonics, what we call vibrational states, quantized vibrational States are exactly harmonics, auk, and string harmonics are what we used to call particle states, OK, that’s how string theory corresponds to particles, and the way the correspondence works is by way of the gauge groups that are classified by these ADE graphs so the ultimate tool is simply these graphs, which go way back into the 30’s to Coxeter’s work, not knowing the way these things were be used in the future but he really started something there and Dinken in Russia you know, the same graphs, classifying “Lie algebras which are the algebras of the gauge groups as we use them in physics now and he had no idea that development was going to happen, he was a pure mathematician not a physicist, even physicists in the 40’s should not foresee that development.

    And you mentioned RAM earlier, and some of the more esoteric discoveries of RAM are actually very fundamental parts of super string theory and special membrane theory, and so people thought of RAM’s work as not only been rather fantastic of course, its amazing he came up with those identities, allot of his work involved saying “this is equal to that, and the two things are so deferent that, you know, you might never in a thousand years think that was true, they’re still working on proving RAM’s ideas, and a lot of people are working on that now in mathematics. But a lot of his ideas are being brought into physics by Super-string theory funnily enough.

    FLY: One of the things i found really interesting in the work of Buckminster Fuller was the isotropic vector, (Vector equilibrium you mean?) yeah… i’m looking for relationships between the superstrings and Bucky’s work…

    SAUL: The vector equalibrium is an object that has 12 vertices, ok, and actually that object, is one of these crystallographic objects, in fact that crystallographic object exists exactly in what i call the reflection space, or you could call it a crystallographic space of the SU(4) group. OK, and in fact of course; those 12 vertices actually correspond to what we call; eigen values of the S4 group which correspond to what we call the gauge particles, or the force particles. You see; there’s two types groups of particles in quantum theory these force particles and matter particles.

    One of the fundamental ideas in particle theory is that matter particles interact by exchanging force particles, and mathematically the way that works is that in these gauge group structures you have two different types of crystallographic structure, you have the matter c.s and the force c.s, and in the case of SU(4) the matter crystallographic structures are like tetrathedra, you have two tetrahedra making a cube and those exactly correspond to the eigen values of the quarks and anti-quarks, and the electrons and the neutrinos. OK. So those are all matter particles, but then there are actually 15 force particles involved because SU4 is a 15 dimensional group but 3 of the force particles have zero eigen values, and 12 of them have none zero eigen values and those eigen values exactly correspond to the vertices of what Bucky fuller calls the ‘vector equilibrium’. So that object is being used but in a totally different way to what he thought of it.

    Fly Agaric: yeah.

    Interview with Saul Paul Sirag, in North Beach, San Francisco: 27/05/2000. Recorded and transcribed by Steven “Fly Agaric 23” Pratt.

    NOTES AND QUOTES:

    “In 1936 Coxeter moved to the University of Toronto, becoming a professor in 1948. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1948 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950. He met Maurits Escher and his work on geometric figures helped inspire some of Escher’s works, particularly the Circle Limit series based on hyperbolic tessellations. He also inspired some of the innovations of Buckminster Fuller. –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxeter

    A Fuller explanation: the synergetic geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller
    By Amy C. Edmondson
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=F6n2dZJ1POwC&lpg=PT122&dq=vector%20equalibrium&pg=PT122&output=embed

    Toward a science of consciousness: the first Tucson discussions and debates
    By Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Alwyn Scott
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=86KyIsdi8D8C&lpg=PA579&dq=saul%20paul%20sirag&pg=PA579&output=embed

    Ramanujan: essays and surveys
    By Bruce C. Berndt, Robert Alexander Rankin
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TT1T8A94xNcC&lpg=PA269&dq=superstring%20theory%20ramanujan&pg=PA269&output=embed

    The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science …
    By Lee Smolin
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z5rxrnlcp3sC&lpg=PA49&dq=unified%20field%20theory&pg=PA49&output=embed

    Strings, conformal fields, and M-theory
    By Michio Kaku
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9d-JpKu-2u0C&lpg=PA385&dq=unified%20field%20theory%20strings&pg=PA385&output=embed

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ip50x8IOfnEC&lpg=PA159&dq=murray%20gell%20mann%20quark&pg=PA159&output=embed

    http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

    http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics.html

    The search for a unifying theory was interrupted by the discovery of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which could not be subsumed into either gravity or electromagnetism. A further hurdle was the acceptance that quantum mechanics had to be incorporated from the start, rather than emerging as a consequence of a deterministic unified theory, as Einstein had hoped. Gravity and electromagnetism could always peacefully coexist as entries in a list of Newtonian forces, but for many years it seemed that gravity could not even be incorporated into the quantum framework, let alone unified with the other fundamental forces. For this reason, work on unification for much of the twentieth century, focused on understanding the three “quantum” forces: electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces. The first two were unified in 1967–68 by Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and Abdus Salam as the “electroweak” force.[7] However, while the strong and electroweak forces peacefully coexist in the Standard Model of particle physics, they remain distinct. Several Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) have been proposed to unify them. Although the simplest GUTs have been experimentally ruled out, the general idea, especially when linked with supersymmetry, remains strongly favored by the theoretical physics community

    In current mainstream physics, a Theory of Everything would unify all the fundamental interactions of nature, which are usually considered to be four in number: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. Because the weak force can transform elementary particles from one kind into another, the TOE should yield a deep understanding of the various different kinds of particles as well as the different forces. The expected pattern of theories is:

    		Theory of Everything

    		Gravity

    		Electronuclear force (GUT)

    		Strong force
    SU(3)

    		Electroweak force
    SU(2) x U(1)

    		Weak force
    SU(2)

    		Electromagnetism
    U(1)

    		Electric force

    		Magnetic force

    In addition to the forces listed here, modern cosmology might require an inflationary force, dark energy, and also dark matter composed of fundamental particles outside the scheme of the standard model. The existence of these has not been proven and there are alternative theories such as modified Newtonian dynamics.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

    Steven James Pratt