Last updated on 27 Feb 2009

Popular science books are good since they often try to make sense of a whole spectrum of ideas and concepts, drawing connnections between them - something which most professional scientists have no time for. Note that by popular I mean appealing to a greater audience, not cheap.

Having read some of these books over the years - and taken some notes along the way, it is my aim to order all these notes in a logical fashion so they can be used as a springboard for future additions. Of course, trying to classify these different concepts is quite artifcial since they all are related to, or subsets of, each other. Many of these books touch on topics such as psychology, spirituality and even consciousness - hence their inclusion on this page. Philosophical quotations have been relegated to a page already dedicated to this topic - see philosophy of science.

As you see, no mathematics and equations, just trying to come to grips with basic scientific concepts. The index below contains all the topics accumulated so far. Click on them to take you to that particular topic on this page.

The diagrams we see of our solar system give us a false impression. All distances are scaled in order to be able to see all the planets. Given some very basic information, it is easy to draw some comparisons, the unit of measure I use here is the smarties chocolate sweet which I'm sure most of us are familiar with. So here goes -

If the Earth were the size of a smarties (13 mm diameter), then

• The Sun would be 150 meters away and have a diameter of 1.4 meters.
• The Moon would be 0.5 meter away.
• Pluto would be 6 km away.

If the sun were the size of a smarties (14 mm diameter) then

• Earth would be 1.5 m away.
• Pluto would be 60 meters away.
• The next star would be 420 km away.

If our galaxy, the Milky Way were the size of a smarties, then

• The next galaxy - M31 - would be 13 cm away
• The entire observable universe would fit within a sphere just 1 km accross.

Other interesting measurements

• The universe is about 15 billion years old.
• There are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
• The Milky Way has about a 100 billion bright stars.
• The Milky Way is about 100,000 lightyears accross, 30,000 lightyears thick at the center, and 2600 lightyears thick on the outsides.
• The nearest star is 4.2 lightyears away.
• We can see about 3000 stars with the naked eye.
• The solar system orbits the center of our galaxy at 220 km per second.
• The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
• The Earth's speed around the sun is 30 km/s.
• The Earth's biosphere is proportional in size to the skin of an apple.
• The Moon's size is 1/4 of the Earth, but 1/80th the Earth's mass.
• Only one five billionth of the sun's light strikes the earth.

Further comments

• Interesting how we say the Earth, the Sun and the Moon, but not the Pluto.


• The Big Bang theory is still in dispute by some eminent scientists, such as John Dobson, the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope. In his words ...
  The Big Bang cosmologists want to get the Universe out of nothing. It's like asking us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing. But that's not what shows in our physics.


• Since more distant galaxies recede from us at a faster speed (one argument against a 'Big Bang' starting from an origin), we should maybe call this universe the 'observable universe'.


• There is proportionality in the distances within our galaxy, expressed as Bode's Law: Given the distance Sun-Earth (149.6 x 10⁶ km) as x, and a doubling sequence {3, 6, 12, 24, 48, ...}, then each successive distance can be calculated with ((2n + 4)/10)x, where n is each successive number from the series. Read more on this here.

Through a variety of fusion processes, stars build hydrogen into helium; helium into carbon; carbon into oxygen and magnesium, and so forth. Indeed, given that the energy released amounts to but a tiny fraction of the mass being shuffled about, we could say that element making is the primary business of stars, and that their light and heat is but a by-product of that process...

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp272

... the ultimate energy source in the stars which produces the greatest amount of energy is gravity power.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp280

Speculation about the origin of the universe is an old and notorious human activity; notorious because the cosmogonic [pertaining to the origin and evolution of the universe] speculations that resulted told us more about ourselves than about the universe they claimed to describe.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp349

The recession velocity of any galaxy we observe is proportional to the galaxy's distance. The more distant the galaxy, the faster it moves away from us. At double the distance, the recession velocity will also double. We observe the furthest galaxies approach the speed of light, and the light from galaxies beyond that distance will never reach us.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp181

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Under proper circumstances any substance can have its mass exploded outwards as energy. A single sheet of paper harnasses an energy that if erupted would cause an explosion greater than that of a large power station.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

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As the light beam starts going forward, a little bit of electricity is produced, and as this electricity moves forward it powers up a little bit of magnetism, this in turn powers up another surge of electricity, and so on. The electricity and magnetism keep on leapfrogging over each other in tiny, fast jumps. Maxwell's equations summarizing this insight became known as one of the greatest theoretical achievements of all time.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

So what would happen if our object was traveling close to the speed of light and a great amount of energy would be added to it? If the speed can't go over the limit, what happens to the extra energy? Experiments with protons in huge powerful accelerators showed that their mass was increasing! At speeds of 99.9997 percent of the speed of light, the protons ended up 430 times bigger than their original size.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

Maxwell found that the speed with which electromagnetic fields are propagated is equal to the ratio between the electrical force exerted between two electrical charges when at rest and the magnetic force they exert when in motion. As this turned out to be nothing other than the velocity of light, Maxwell concluded that light itself is an electromagnetic field ... The velocity of light results from a fundamental constant in the equations that describe the behaviour of electromagnetic fields.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp187

Electromagnetism is the force that holds electrons in their orbits around nuclear particles to make atoms, binds atoms together to form molecules, and ties molecules together to form objects. Every tangible thing, from stars and planets to this page and the eyes that reads it, carries electromagnetism in the fibre of its being.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp193

Maxwell's equations show that electric fields and magnetic fields cannot exist separately. There is indeed only a combined electromagnetic field with an electric component and a magnetic component at right angles to each other.

In electric phenomena, positive charges and negative charges can exist independently of each other. An object can be either positively charged or negatively charged. In magnetic phenomena, the magnetic poles do not exist separately.

Maxwell showed that from his equations you can demonstrate that an oscillating electric field will produce inevitably an oscillating magnetic field, which will in turn produce another oscillating electric field, and so on indefinitely.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

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I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern, when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight". I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.

Einstein

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The electron is a little bubble of wave energy. The electron wave can set up paricularly stable standing vibrations (resonance) - this leads to emmision or absorption of electro-magnetic radiation in atoms and molecules. When an electron falls from an outer to an inner orbit it emits a photon. The wavelength of that photon is determined by the particular orbits between which the electron has made the transition. And that is why a spectrum, which records the wavelengths of photons, reveals the chemical elements that make up the stars or other object the spectroscopist is studying.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp258

The dot over a letter i has many more protons than there are stars in our galaxy. (+100 billion)

The nucleus virtually ties up all the mass of the atom, electrons determine its size.

What happens inside a nucleus is largely independent of what happens to the electrons.

Atomic explosion works by 'rearranging' inside nuclei. Chemical explosion rearranges electrons in their orbits.

In the outer regions of an atom, electrons emit visible light when changing orbit. Inside the nucleus, a proton or neutron making a similar change emits an x-ray with a million times more energy.

The diameter of an atom is approximately 4 . 10^-10 meters.
Roughly 1000 atoms span one wavelength of light.
One milimeter is around 2.5 million wavelengths.

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Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to me as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a very high degree of symmetry which is hidden from us in ordinary life.

Weinberg 1977

Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam had been right; we live in a universe of broken symmetries, where at least two of the fundamental forces of nature, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, have diverged from a single, more symmetrical parent.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp326

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We observe how the very geometry of our world often produces squares... In fact, almost anything that steadily accumulates will turn out to grow in terms of simple squared numbers.

D. Bodanis: e = mc2

Mathematical truth is independent of perception and it is a truth of a very peculiar sort, and is concerned only with symbols. Numbers are logical fictions.

Plato

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Jean B.J.Fourier (Eighteenth century Frenchman) ... developed a mathematical way of converting any pattern, no matter how complex, into a language of simple waves. He also showed how these waveforms could be converted into the original pattern. The equations he developed to convert images into wave forms and back again are known as Fourier transforms.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, 27

Particles moving in wave patterns do not exist in nature. In a water wave, for example, the water particles do not move along with the wave but move in circles as the wave passes by. Similarly, the air particles in a sound wave merely oscillate back and forth, but do not propagate along with the wave. What is transported along the wave is the disturbance causing the wave phenomenon, but not any material particle.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p137

TRANSVERSE waves: Water waves spread outward, and the particles of water move up and down in a direction perpendicular to the direction in which the wave progresses.
LONGITUDINAL waves: Sound waves also spread outward,but the particles of air move parallel with the direction in which the waves progress.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

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Electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order from which it sprang.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp43

... A particle can only be defined in terms of its connections to the whole, and these connections are of a statistical nature - probabilities rather than certainties.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p144

The electromagnetic field can manifest itself as a free field in the form of travelling waves / photons, or it can play the role of a field of force between charged particles. In the latter case, the force manifests itself as the exchange of photons between the interacting particles. The electric repulsion between two electrons, for example, is mediated through these photon exchanges.

Neither of the two electrons feels a force when they approach each other. All they do is interact with the exchanged photons. The repulsive force is nothing but the collective macroscopic effect of these multiple photon exchanges.

... According to quantum field theory, all interactions take place through the exchange of particles. In the case of electromagnetic interactions, the exchanged particles are photons; nucleons, on the other hand, interact through the much stronger nuclear force which manifests itself as the exchange of a new kind of particles called "mesons".

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p202

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Light follows a path along which the time taken is a minimum.

C stands for CELERITAS which is latin for swiftness.

What's hard to comprehend about light is that an object traveling close to the speed of light and emitting a light beam will observe this light beam ahead still at the full speed of C.

The photon, having no charge, is its own antiparticle. Pairs of electrons and positrons can be created spontaneously by photons, and can be made to turn into photons in the reverse process of annihilation.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, p168

About 50 atoms can be placed end to end along a single wavelength of light.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

[According to my calculations this should be more in the order of 1000 atoms. Also, it takes about 2.5 million wavelengths to traverse 1 mm of distance.]

It takes only 5 or 6 photons to activate a nerve cell via the human eye and pass a message to the brain. If we could see 10 times more sensitively, then we would see very dim light of a particular colour as a series of intermittent little flashes of equal intensity.

The energy of an atom is precisely related to its wavelength. An atom absorbing a photon provides energy for an electron to move to an orbit further away from the nucleus. When an electrom falls into the old orbit, it emits a photon with the same energy - the energy corresponding to the gap between the orbits.

Note that the light you see 'reflected' doesn't consist of the same photons that reached the object in the first place.

Each element is capable of generating only photons of a few specific frequencies (colours), hence it has a unique spectrum.

When we look at photons on a large scale, the rules are approximated by Light travels in straight lines. But when the space becomes small, such as the pinholes in the double slit experiment, those rules fail. The same holds true for electrons; on a large scale they travel like particles on definite paths, but on a small scale, such as inside an atom, there is no main path - and interference reins.

R. Feynman

Space and time are not constants. Time slows down near the speed of light. Speed of light is the true constant.

A body radiates energy not in a continuous stream, but in discrete bundles called quanta. Each of these bundles of energy carries the amount of energy that is a multiple of its frequency. The higher the frequency, the higher the energy. The equation for calculating the energy of a bundle of, say, light from its frequency is called Planck's Law. The constant that accomplishes the conversion is Planck's Constant. Einstein extended this idea for light, whose discrete bundles could knock electrons out of a metal - calling the light quanta photons. However the term photon is often extended to comprise any quanta of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

A wavelength of light is around 4 . 10^-7 meters. 1 milimeter contains roughly 2.5 million wavelengths.

If you are a photon, traveling at the speed of light, then it's true that you sense no passage of time; everything becomes simultaneous.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Photons carry energy in proportion to their frequency.

Photons came about, at the turn of the 19th century, as a consequence of the German physicist Max Planck's solution to a difficult puzzle presented by classical physics: the black body radiation.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Green light will expel electrons from a piece of sodium metal, but to knock electrons out of more common metals, such as copper or aluminium, you need to go to more energetic ultraviolet light. Moreover, it was found that, once electron liberation has begun, turning up the intensity of the light increases the number but not the energy of the electrons that are popped out, while turning up the frequency of the light brings out electrons of higher individual energy, but at the same rate as before. These facts are hard to understand using a wave theory of light, in which the energy carried by waves is a product of the frequency and the intensity.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

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Bohm's analogy to space / matter separation:
A crystal cooled to absolute zero will allow a stream of electrons to pass through it without scattering them. If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the crystal will lose their transparency, and begin to scatter electrons. From an electron's point of view such flaws would appear as pieces of matter floating in a sea of nothingness. But this is not really the case, they are both part of the same fabric, the deeper order of the crystal.

Bohm

When two particles collide with high energies, they generally break into pieces, but these pieces are not smaller than the original particles. They are again particles of the same kind and are created out of the energy of motion (kinetic energy) involved in the collision process. The whole problem of dividing matter is thus resolved in an unexpected sense...[because] this way we can divide matter again and again.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp67

The inertia of a material object - the object's resistance against being accelerated - is not an intrinsic property of matter, but a measure of its interaction with all the rest of the universe.

Ernest Mach

Momentum is conserved, so momentum rather than speed is the important quantity.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Plasma is the 4th manifestation of matter after solids, liquids, and gasses. It consists of super-heated gas which becomes ionized.

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Mind and matter are different aspects of the same reality. What we call "matter" is the aspect we apprehend when we look at a person, a plant, or a molecule from the outside; "mind" is the aspect we obtain when we look at the same thing from the inside.

Ervin Laszlo: Science and the Akashic field

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What is an electric field? We don't know. When we discover a new kind of field it seems mysterious. Then we name it, get used to dealing with it and describing its properties, and it no longer seems mysterious. But we still do not know what an electric or a gravitational field really is.

Bohm

Faraday and Maxwell found it more appropriate to say that each charge creates a disturbance, or a condition, in the space around it so that the other charge, when it is present, feels a force. This condition in space which has the potential of producing a force is called a field. It is created by a single charge and it exists whether or not another charge is brought in to feel its effect.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp47

Electric fields are created by charged bodies and their effects can only be felt by charged bodies. Magnetic fields are produced by charges in motion, i.e., by electric currents, and the magnetic forces resulting from them can be felt by other moving charges.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp193

Since all motion is relative, every charge can also appear as a current - in a frame of reference where it moves with respect to the observer - and consequently, its electric field can also appear as a magnetic field. In the relativistic formulation of electrodynamics, the two fields are thus unified into a single electromagnetic field.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp194

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Atoms, like electrons, can be scattered, and can create interference patterns, Just recently a version of the two-split expreriment was done with atoms instead of photons, and the appropriate interference pattern emerged.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

There is no interaction of any kind between the photons in the two-split experiment. they are always alone.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Photons arrive at the screen of a two-split experiment, having traveled through empty space, whith as much energy as they had in the first place.

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Planck units are units of measurement named after the German physicist Max Planck, who first proposed them in 1899. They are an example of natural units, i.e. units of measurement designed so that certain fundamental physical constants are normalized to 1. In Planck units, the constants thus normalized are:

• the gravitational constant, G;
• The reduced Planck constant, h;
• the speed of light in a vacuum, c;
• the Coulomb force constant, k;
• Boltzmann's constant, kB (or simply k).

The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the 'Quantum of Length', the smallest measurement of length with any meaning. It is roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton.

The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the 'Quantum of Time', the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning.

The energy E contained in a photon, which represents the smallest possible 'packet' of energy in an electromagnetic wave, is directly proportional to the frequency f according to the following equation:

E = hf

If E is given in joules and f is given in hertz (the unit measure of frequency), then:

E = (6.626176 x 10^-34) f

and conversely:

f = E / (6.626176 x 10^-34)

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Physicists could not find any way to figure out how a fixed amount of energy would be shared among these infinite possibilities (infinite harmonics) in such a way as to arrive at a meaningful average energy per wave which could be thought of as the temperature.
Planck suggested that each electromagnetic wave could carry energy only in multiples of a basic amount proportional to its frequency, so that the energy in any individual wave was a whole number times the frequency of that wave, multiplied by a conversion factor that came to be knowns as Planck's constant.
For waves at very high frequency (the zillionth harmonic) the minimum unit of energy became so large that it exceeded all the energy in the heated box, which meant that very high frequency oscillations never arose. Planck's quantization of energy meant that the available number of oscillations in a box became finite.
This unit, this quantity of energy, this division into little packets, was a new idea in physics. And so the photon was born.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

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There are 2 aspects to quantum physics; in a sense it's a bit like dice. There are 2 aspects to dice. There are the individual dice events that occur, and then there are the statistical patterns - like a lot of sevens will occur and not many twelves. Bell's theorem shows that none of these patterns are ever connected faster than light; you will never see a faster than light pattern. But the individual events, the dice falls themselves, must be tight together faster than light.

Nick Herbert: Consciousness and Quantum Reality (interview - Thinking Allowed Productions)

Here's a great analogy for understanding the quantum world. It's taken from Where does the weirdness go? from David Lindley - ISBN 0-09-974751-0
Imagine a pair of gloves, each of which is packed in a sealed box. Each box is then sent with a person to opposite sides of the globe, say France and Australia. First consider the normal state of affairs in the macro world we live in. Assuming you don't know which glove is in your packet - you only can find out when you open it - then you also know the other's glove.
Now consider the quantum gloves. The difference here is that the glove in each packet is neither RH nor LH before someone actually opens a packet. If person A opens it up in Australia, there's a 50/50 change that it is either R or L - and it will also determine the state of the other glove. Trouble is that you can't tell if the other one already had opened it and finalised the state of your glove before you opened it. If you wanted to find out, you would have to phone her - and there you are limeted by the speed of light. In other words, and this is crucial, when one person opens up the parcel, the other one becomes realised as well INSTANTANEOUSLY, but to actually find out what happened you're limited by the speed of light.

In quantum , measurement is an act by which the measurer and the measured interact to produce a result. It's not simply the determination of a preexisting property ... Rather, the system is indeterminate until the measurement is made.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

In classical applications, probabilities are a cover for ignorance - acquiring more data can make steadily more accurate predictions. Predictions in quantum mechanics are probabilistic not because of insufficient information or understanding, but because the theory itself has nothing more to say.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

The raw material of quantum mechanics - the formulas and equations, deviced throught the collective efforts of many physicists and preserved within the pages of numerous textbooks - is not the topic disagreement. The theory is rigorous and exact; physicists know how to use it, and don't argue about the predictions it makes. ... but physicists still cannot honestly say what the theory means.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is a measured phenomenon.

John Wheeler

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No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Bell's Theorem has been described as the 'most profound discovery of science' (not just physics) and many people seem to agree. This theory basically proves that reality is non-local and thus validates Schrodinger's notion of 'entanglement', i.e. when 2 quantum systems meet and then separate, they still remain connected somehow, even when they are lightyears apart.

A good starting point is Gary Felder's article Spooky Action at a Distance.

A more detailed description can be found at the University of Toronto - a particularly enlightening one.

Alain Aspect, of the university of Paris, was the first to provide an unambiguous practical test of Bell's theorem.

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The wavefunction is a mathematical device that allows you to figure out the correct probability for the photon hitting the screen at any place you choose .

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

Wavefunctions are what we use to predict the results of measurements, and measurements are the way we build up knowledge of the world ... A wavefunction describes a system - the thing being measured and the measurement being made - rather than being an independent description only of the thing being measured.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

What was initially a half-up, half-down electron becomes simply an up electron. After any such measurement, the wavefunction becomes less expansive or capacious than it was. Hence the name "collapse" or "reduction" of the wavefunction.

David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go?

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String theory postulates that there exists and has existed only a single variety of particle, but that this particle has an infinite number of manifestations - as in the innumerable tunes that may be composed on a single string of Pythagoras's lyre. Thus a single supersymmetric variety of particle shows up in various harmonics as gravitons and gravitini, quarks and squarks, photons and photinos, and so forth. Since, as Gell-Mann noted, "these infinitely many particles all obey a single very beautiful master equation," the theory suggests how maximum complexity could have arisen from maximum simplicity.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp347

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The most important thing to keep in mind about Einstein's universe is the fantastic stiffness of space - of the rubber sheet if you like...space is 1032 times stiffer than steel...In other words, the enormous but not infinite stiffness of Einstein's space-time tells us that, while space is not infinitely rigid, it is very, very rigid. In fact, odd as it sounds, space is the most rigid stuff in the universe.

Blair

Space is merely a system of relations

Leibniz

Since Einstein, distance is between events, not between things, and thus involves time as well as space. This modern view can not be stated except in terms of differential equations.

Russell

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... holograms also possess a fantastic capacity for information storage. By changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. Any image thus recorded can be retrieved simply by illuminating the film with a laser beam possessing the same angle as the original two beams. By employing this method researchers have calculated that a one-inch-square of film can store the same amount of information contained in 50 bibles.

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The dripping tap whose intervals are timed reveals a graph that shows an infinite order. Successively zooming into the graph will produce likewise pattens.

A curve can twist in such a complex way that it fills a plane. The dimension is fractional between 1 (a line) and 2 (a surface).

An attractor is a region of space, called phase space, which exerts a magnetic appeal for a system, seemingly pulling the system towards it.

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Active role of consciousness experiment
People volunteer to have electrical signals recorded at a point on their heads (EEG's). They were asked to flex their right index finger suddenly at various times entirely of their own choosing. What is found is that there is a gradual build-up of recorded electric potential for a full second, or perhaps even up to a second and a half, before the finger is actually flexed. This seems to indicate that the conscious decision process takes over a second in order to act! This may be in contrasted with the much shorter time that it takes to respond to an external signal.

Passive role of consciousness experiment
Patients undergoing brain surgery consented to having electrodes placed at points in their somatosensory cortex. When a stimulus was applied to the skin of these patients, it took about half a second before they were consciously aware of that stimulus, though the patients were not aware of the delay. Touching the corresponding point in the cortex only revealed sensation if touched for more than half a second. Now suppose that the skin is first touched, and then the point in the somatosensory cortex is electrically stimulated about a quarter second after the touching of the skin. The skin touching will not be felt at all --> backwards masking... The conscious perception can be prevented by a later event, provided that the event occurs within about half a second. This tells us that the conscious awareness of such a sensation occurs at something like half a second after the actual event producing that sensation. It would appear that half a second must elapse before consciousness is called in to play; and then well over a second before one's 'willed' response can take effect. ... Perhaps consciousness is, after all, merely a spectator who experiences nothing but an 'action replay' of the whole drama.

R. Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, pp568-569

Consciousness is, after all, the one phenomenon that we know of, according to which time needs to flow at all! The way in which time is treated in modern physics is not essentially different from the way in which space is treated. Yet, according to our perceptions, time does flow...

R. Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, pp574

Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp50

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It was known that the electrical communications that take place between the brain's nerve cells, or neurons, do not occur alone. Neurons possess branches like little trees, and when an electrical message reaches the end of one of these branches it radiates outward as does the ripple in a pond.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp20

John Von Neumann once calculated that over the course of an average human lifetime, the brain stores something on the order of 2.8 X 10²⁰ bits of information.

We possess Transference of learned skills, i.e. we can write words with our left elbow.

On the brain and hallucination
Konorski conceived of a dynamical system which, he wrote, "can generate perceptions, images and hallucinations ... the mechanism producing hallucinations is built into our brains, but it can be thrown into operation only in some exceptional conditions." Konorski brought together evidence - weak in the 1960s, but overwhelming now - that there are not only afferent connections going from the sense organs to the brain, but 'retro' connections going in the other direction. They provide, Konorski felt, the essential anatomical and physiological means by which hallicunations can be generated.
What then normally prevents this from happening? The crucial factor, Konorski suggested, is the sensory input from the eyes, ears and other sense organs, which normally inhibits any backflow of activity from the highest parts of the cortex to the periphery. But if there is a critical deficiency of input from the sense organs, this will facilitate a backflow, producing hallicunations physiologically and subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions. (There is normally no such reduction of input in conditions of silence or darkness because "off-units" fire up and produce continuous activity).

Oliver Sacks: Musicophelia, pp77

On brain cell loss

Most estimates say we have about 100 billion brain cells (neurons), and about ten times that many, or one trillion, support cells (glia) that help the neurons. We'll just concentrate on the neurons themselves.

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp257

Sri Aurobindo [born 1872 a thinker, political activist, Yogic teacher, and mystic whom Indians revere alongside Gandhi...]. Through meditation, he eventually learned to become, in his own words, "an explorer of the planes of consciousness." One of his most intractable obstacles he had to overcome was to learn how to silence the endless chatter of words and thoughts...To plumb the subtler and more implicate regions of the psyche does indeed require a Bohmian shift of attention. ...

"We fragment things because we exist at a lower vibration of consciousness and reality", says Aurobindo, and it is our propensity [tendency] for fragmentation that keeps us from experiencing the intensity of consciousness, joy, love and delight for existence that are the norm in these higher and more subtle realms.

Just as Bohm believes that it is not possible for disorder to exist in a universe that is ultimately unbroken and whole, Sri Aurobindo believed that the same was true of consciousness ...

But if the cosmos is ultimately ineffable [beyond words], a farrago [mixture of different things] of multicoloured vibrations, what are all the forms we perceive? What is physical reality? It is, said Sri Aurobindo, just "a mass of stable light."

M. Talbot: The Holographic Universe, pp264

We must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the Finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state...Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable [too great for words] who refuses to limit itself to any form or expression.

Sri Aurobindo

Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.

Cuang-tzu

Zen, being Buddhistic in its essence, is a unique blend of the philosophies and idiosyncrasies of three different cultures. It is a way of life which is typically Japanese, and yet it reflects the mysticism of India, the Taoists' love of naturalness and spontaneity and the thorough pragmatism of the Confucian mind.

F. Capra: The Tao of Physics, pp108

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts

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All proteins are various compositions of twenty specific naturally occurring amino acids.

The twenty naturally occurring amino acids that comprise proteins are (almost) ALL of the L- form. Only ONE of the twenty amino acids is not in the L- form, and that is glycine. The reason for this is that the side chain group is a hydrogen atom.

Aside from the twenty standard amino acids, there are a vast number of "non-standard" amino acids. Two of these can be specified by the genetic code, but are rather rare in proteins.

Amino acids form short polymer chains called peptides or longer chains called either polypeptides or proteins.

Proteins are versatile macromolecules which perform a variety of functions by changing their conformational shape. Life is organised by changes in protein shape.

The main driving force in protein folding occurs as uncharged non-polar groups of particular amino acids join together and avoid water (hydrophobic).

Each protein begins as a polypeptide, translated from a sequence of mRNA as a linear chain of amino acids. However each amino acid in the chain can be thought of having certain 'gross' chemical features. These may be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or electrically charged, for example. These interact with each other and their surroundings in the cell to produce a well-defined, three dimensional shape. The resulting three-dimensional structure is determined by the sequence of the amino acids.

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Gas anesthetics work by very weak, purely physical, quantum-mechanical interactions. they don't form chemical or ionic bonds of any kind, they're not polar molecules, they don't bind to receptors and they can be inert. For example, the inert gas xenon is an anesthetic.

Within proteins are specific tiny pockets that are lipid-like and the anesthetic gas molecules get sucked into these little pockets. Once there, the anesthetic molecules don't form chemical bonds like other drugs, they bind only by very weak Van Der Waals London forces. One or two gas molecules per protein do the trick.

Proteins normally dance back and forth between different forms and shapes to perform their functions. And what controls the dancing are quantum-mechanical forces in these pockets. The pockets are like the tiny brain within each protein.

What choreographs them all together is quantum coherence. The 'brain' proteins dance synchronously due to coherence among quantum actions in the pockets throughout wide regions of the brains. So by forming their own quantum interactions in the pockets, anesthetics inhibit normally occurring quantum-mechanical forces necessary for consciousness.

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A Tubulin is one of several members of a small family of globular proteins. The most common members of the tubulin family are a-tubulin and ß-tubulin, the proteins that make up microtubules.

The tubulin protein turns out to be a dimer consisting of two monomers that are almost identical in structure. Each monomer is formed by a core of two beta sheets surrounded by helices, and each binds to a guanine nucleotide. In addition to a nucleotide binding site, each monomer also has two other binding sites, one for proteins, and one for the anti-cancer drug taxol.

Interest in tubulin structure heated up intensely in recent years when taxol, a natural substance found in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, was shown in clinical tests to be an effective treatment for a number of cancers including ovarian, breast, and lung. Cancer occurs when cell division runs amok.

By binding to tubulin and causing the protein to lose its flexibility, taxol prevents a cell from dividing.

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Microtubules are one of the components of the cytoskeleton, the cell's framework. They have a diameter of 25 nm and length varying from 200 nanometers to 25 micrometers. Microtubules serve as structural components within cells. They are essential for a variety of biological functions including cell movement, cell division (mitosis) and establishment and maintenance of cell form and function.

In neurons, microtubules self-assemble to extend axons and dendrites and form synaptic connections.

Microtubules interact with membrane structures and activities by linking proteins and 'second messenger' chemicals.

Biological cells typically contain approximately 10^7 tubulins. Nanosecond swithcing in microtubule automata predicts roughly 10^16 operations per second, per neuron. As the human brain contains about 10^11 neurons, nonosecond microtubule automata offer about 10^27 brain operations per second.

Unlike chemical synapses which separate neural processes by 3050 nanometers, gap junction separations are 3.5 nanometers, whithin range for quantum tunneling.

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Today it is understood that 99% of all the species that have lived on the earth have since died out.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp222

... Because the world is constantly in a state of change, nature favours the varied - a community of predominantly white moths is better off if it contains a few dark moths, against a smoggy day - and the geographically dispersed, those who do not keep all their eggs in one basket.

T. Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, pp238

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The simplest cell contains 10¹¹ atoms in very complex structures.

Each chromosome contains a long coil of DNA. If all the chromosomes were unwound, the DNA in just one of our cells would stretch 2 m long.

The finest cells in the retina measure about 2 microns accross. Current (2009) household digital cameras have about 7 to 8 microns resolution.

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Avogadro's law: Equal volumes of all gases contain equal numbers of molecules.
E.g when it takes 0.1 gram of Hydrogen to fill a balloon, it would take about 1.6 grams of oxygen to inflate the balloon to an equal size, but both balloons will contain the same amount of molecules.

Isaac Asimov: Atom

See also Red Dye Example

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• David Bodanis: e = mc2, ISBN: 0-330-39165-8
• Fritjof Capra: The Tao of Physics, ISBN: 0-553-26379-x
• Michael Talbot: The Holographic Universe, ISBN: 0-246-13690-1
• Roger Penrose: The Emperor's new mind, ISBN: 0-19-286198-0
• Timothy Ferris: Coming of age in the Milky Way, ISBN: 0-09-980050-0
• D.Blair, G.McNamara: Ripples on a cosmic sea, ISBN: 1-86448-503-5
• Oliver Sacks: Musicophelia, ISBN: 978-0-330-44436-1
• Isaac Asimov: Atom, ISBN: 0-452-26834-6
• Ervin Laszlo: science and the Akashic field, ISBN: 978-1-59477-181-1
• David Lindley: Where does the weirdness go? ISBN 0-09-974751-0
• Kevin Frank: Stuart Hameroff's theories regarding microtubules as the seat of consciousness. Magazine: Rolf Lines

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