This site provides a glimpse of emerging new paradigms in economy, physics and new energy technologies ... divining where we are headed with this spaceship earth of ours. My earlier site, hasslberger.com, is still available although not active. If you are into health, check out my alter blog - Health Supreme.
The World Economic Forum is being held in Davos, Switzerland. Until Sunday, 31 January, the economic powers-that-be are meeting in the secluded ski resort town.
The Growing Influence of Social Networks is one of the themes to be discussed in Davos this year. Public input was invited, but the request was somewhat hidden in a brand new Ning group with little more than a hundred members, and it reads as follows:
Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:
1. "How are social networks changing society?"
2. "What are the most important implications and risks for society?"
3. "What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?"
Are social media going to change the world?
A big question to be hidden away in a group with very few members. Still, some great comments and suggestions were made. To get the whole conversation, see the posting
And indeed, how do social media influence and change society? I tried to answer those questions, and was surprised at my answers. Social media are more important than we might believe. We are having conversations, mostly for fun, and sometimes with the intention of changing things we perceive to be going in the wrong direction. Yet, the implications of what we are doing are profound, indeed world changing....
Shifting the paradigm of physics is what Vertner Vergon would like to do. Using quantum theory, Vergon proposes an actual mechanism for how gravity physically works, something neither Newton nor Einstein could quite bring themselves to do.
And talking about Einstein ... Vergon is one of the few people who clearly point out what are special relativity's logical inconsistencies and how they will de-throne the theory as logically inconsistent. There goes a mainstay of physics.
Vertner Vergon's introduction to his paradigm changing notes:
A PARADIGM SHIFT
GRAVITY, RELATIVITY, ENERGY, QUESTIONS
Three subjects are in the forefront of today's research.
The present paradigm cannot present solutions to them. The four Attachments present solutions and can be considered a paradigm shift.
"Gravity" is actually Quantum Gravity.
By way of analogy, one can read the face of a clock, but that does not tell him how the mechanism works.
Newton mathematically described the face of the clock but he did not have a clue as to HOW it worked. So you could say he mathematically described the laws of gravity, but that is certainly not the whole story.
Einstein refined the mathematical description -- and then ATTEMPTED to describe the workings, the HOW of gravity.
To me, curved space (empty or not) with geodesics is NOT a PHYSICAL description of how gravity works.
By contrast, I have developed a quantum gravity thesis that tells HOW the force of gravity is created, HOW it is transmitted, WHY the quantities are what they are, and shows why the mechanics of gravity creates an ILLUSION of action at a distance and mutual attraction.
If you will read it (QUANTUM GRAVITY) you will see the difference between Einstein's "explanation" and mine. Judge for yourself.
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Einstein developed his special relativity in typical mathematical physicist style - and made a grievous error in the interpretation, a typical problem in mathematical physics often leading to bizarre conclusions.
The second attachment clearly and definitively explains this error and defines the result.
(will be uploaded soon - Sepp)
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Gamma ray energy is bad enough, but cosmic ray energy dwarfs it. Tesla, the discoverer of cosmic rays (protons), said they travel faster than the speed of light, but he was not able to say just what that was.
The answer is in the third attachment. (will be uploaded as soon as I can get a server bug fixed - Sepp)
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The fourth attachment is "questions". They speak for themselves.
(Questions are reproduced below)
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A more recent addition is a short paper describing a common mistake made by proponents of a mass less photon.. They (mis)use the energy/momentum 4 vector equation to establish their view. Vergon points out their mistake -- and shows why the photon has mass and is not mass less.
Comments are welcome (provided of course you have read the attachments through).
Vertner Vergon
vertvergon (at) scientist (dot) com
(substitute the proper symbols to write Vertner Vergon an email)
For those of you who want to get deeper into the argument, there are two books written by Vertner Vernon that can be downloaded as PDF files:
According to facebook, the site has more than 350 million active users, half of which log on in any given day. On a recent facebook press release, these and a number of other statistical details show how traffic on the site is increasing. This means many users spend more and more of their online time on facebook.
I am not sure whether this is a positive development or something negative that should be balanced out, in some way.
Privacy has become a major issue on facebook, but it seems that the important privacy issue that facebook use brings with it, is glossed over in those discussions. By interacting with our peers, we permit the servers of facebook to construct online social profiles for each of us users that go WAY beyond anything we would normally dream to put in public view. Who then has access to that kind of data? It's anybody's guess.
Again, is that a bad thing, or is it part of a new openness that we consciously choose to engage in?
On the other hand, facebook is the first online service that, along with a few others, allows us to open up and explore a new dimension of networking. I almost feel as if we're constructing a global mind, each one of us being similar to a neuron and learning to interact with other neurons. Where that could lead, is not quite clear as yet.
Some friends of mine have a rather strongly negative reaction when I invite them to join me on facebook and recently, I received an email from a friend and fellow blogger who says he started to use the service but was banned.
He brings up some interesting perspectives from which to see the expanding phenomenon of on-line social interaction. Here is what he said:
You may have heard of a great accumulation of plastic garbage in certain areas of the oceans. It's all stuff we throw away and it keeps accumulating because plastic does not easily degrade. Birds and fish eat it, mistaking the pieces of plastic for food.
"The dangers of these garbage patches are great in both quantity and quality. Marine animals of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, mistake the plastic for food. Some organisms become entangled in the mass and die", says Meg White.
We can of course combat the continued accumulation of that garbage by controlling what we throw away, but that is a slow process, and it does nothing about what's already there and which will continue to float where it is for decades if not centuries to come.
As for the trash that's already there, many throw their hands in the air nihilistically. "There's just too much, and the ocean is just too big," said one expert about the possibility of cleaning up the garbage patches.
No one seems to have a solution for what's already there, other than waiting for it to magically disappear or kind of nebulously suggesting that the stuff should really be collected and brought to land, a truly Herculean task to say the least.
But there is a solution, and it isn't too difficult either:
BIBO - Bounded-Input-Bounded-Output is an engineering term. It comes from Control Systems Theory and signifies that any system, to be stable, must respond to a bounded input with an equally bounded output.
Our system of bank currency - the money we are using every day - has a fatal design flaw - it violates the BIBO principle. Economic instability is built in to our money right from the start. This leads to the imperative that the economy must keep expanding endlessly. We are unable to achieve sustainable economic activity, to preserve our planet's finite resources, lest we face financial collapse.
This, in short, is the situation as argued by Marc Gauvin and Sergio Dominguez of bibocurrency.org
A formal stability analysis from the standpoint of control systems theory has shown that the mechanism of interest inherent in money creation and in everyday lending practices must lead to monetary instability (inflation) and eventually to the collapse of economic activity. Adding interest to the principal of any loan to be repaid creates an excess debt that, within the confines of the economic system, can never be fully paid off, resulting in an inherently unstable economic situation.
Financial System walkthrough
1. Wealth is generated by ingenuity, human effort and resources made available through past investment of units of currency.
2. Through the process of asset evaluation, a fixed amount of existing wealth is attributed a fixed collateral value in the form of a sum of units of currency.
3. The fixed collateral sum is used as the basis for the creation of new currency in the form of a second fixed value i.e. the principal sum of loans issued into circulation through current account entries. Since both the collateral and principal loan sums are fixed, they maintain a constant ratio to the wealth pledged.
4. Current account units are distributed back to wealth producers through purchasing transactions or may be saved or stored (at a compounding interest rate) or used to cancel debt thus reducing the total amount of money in circulation.
5. Total debt due is the principal sum entered as a negative number in a loan account to which interest is added such that the debt grows as a function of time.
6. Because the total debt created always exceeds the amount of money available to satisfy it, the system produces a minimum residual debt that must be refinanced in subsequent cycles thus compounding it.
Global Warming or Climate Change is a reality, we are being told, it is something we must deal with if in the near future we don't want to see the earth become inhospitable to life. And Global Warming is being brought on by humans burning oil and coal. It is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a gas that transforms our planet into a greenhouse, destined to warm up until we stop burning those fuels.
"Cap and trade", is the way to reduce emissions to levels that will stop the inevitable warming up of the planet. No more increase in fossil fuel burning except ... if a country can pay for the right to continue emitting carbon dioxide.
Leuren Moret, examining global warming in the context of geological history, comes to a different conclusion. In her interesting and immensely readable examination of Global Climate Change, the whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons lab, and former
Environmental Commissioner in the City of Berkeley, lays out for us the reasons for global changes in temperature in the context of "deep time", the long term geological history of the earth, and some of the behind-the-scenes manipulations that have led to a rather hysterical campaign that sees us concentrate our attention on one of the minor causes for the changes that doubtless are afoot.
Large parts of the economy appear set to go to hell in a handbasket. The banking system, which should be of service to production and the economy, is itself on the verge of collapse. Yet the speculators who brought down those banks are being lavishly rewarded - bailed out with huge gifts of our hard-earned money.
Unless we want to spend the rest of our lives working to pay off those huge debts, we must understand what exactly has been happening and why - where things went wrong. And we must figure out how money and banking can be re-configured to support, rather than ruin our economic efforts.
We can't leave this to corrupt politicians. In our search for answers we can't even rely on the economists. They did nothing to warn us of impending disaster. The only way out of this mess: we must understand for ourselves. Thomas Greco's new work The End of Money and the Future of Civilization is an encouraging book in this respect. Amongst all the confusion, it provides a stable foothold, a starting point for our quest to understand.
Greco reduces a complicated subject down to the very essentials and, after providing an overview of historical developments and an indication of the reasons for our current trouble, the book points to a future where our currency will be at the service of individuals' economic activities rather than being a source of easy profit for bankers and speculators, who have been gambling with what wasn't theirs.
A rattleback, also called a celt or wobblestone, is an interesting little piece of material with a roundish bottom and an unbalanced distribution of weight. When spun, it will soon start to rock and then, as the rocking motion subsides, it will settle down to spinning in the reverse direction. Rattlebacks do not work well on a slippery surface, which means that a certain amount of friction is a necessary condition for it to work...
There are several videos on YouTube that show the spin reversal we see in a rattleback. You can start with this one and see below or check the "related videos" on the YouTube page for more.
Wikipedia about the rattleback: "This spin-reversal motion seems, at first sight, to violate the angular-momentum conservation law of physics. Moreover, for most rattlebacks, the motion will happen when the rattleback is spun in one direction, but not when spun in the other. Some exceptional rattlebacks will reverse when spun in either direction. This makes the rattleback a physical curiosity that has excited human imagination since prehistorical times."
I was first made aware of the existence of this curiosity by David Tombe, who mentions rattlebacks in some of his article and tries to explain their spin reversal with reference to the coriolis force. In the latest revision of one article titled The Cause of Coriolis Force (http://www.cartesio-episteme.net/ep8/vorticity--new.pdf) Tombe's treatment of the rattleback starts out like this:
The rattleback is the most mysterious of all the mechanical devices. A spinning rattleback undergoes a complete 180 degree reversal of its angular momentum without any apparent source of reversal torque. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some rattlebacks can work in both directions. Modern physicists cannot explain the rattleback mystery because they deny all three of the vital ingredients that are necessary for its full understanding. We first need centrifugal charge followed by axial Coriolis force. We also need the electric sea in order to induce these convective effects, and also to give the reversal torque something to kick off against, as per Newton’s third law of motion. The rattleback is very obviously tangled up in a very subtle elastic medium, but this medium along with the centrifugal force and the axial Coriolis force which are the basis of the interaction with this medium, are denied in modern physics.
My take on the "mysterious" reversal of spin of the rattleback is that it is due to the interplay of known forces - inertia, gravity and friction. How exactly? If you check on the net, several people say they understand how the rattleback works, but I have yet to see a clear and simple description of the mechanics and the forces involved.
So here is my attempt to give a point for point explanation of the process of torque reversal in the rattleback ...
The original experiment of Michelson and Morley was performed in 1887 in order to confirm the theory that says earth exists in an unseen sea of pre-matter called the aether, and that the daily rotation of the earth around itself and the constant travel of the earth around Sol, our sun, would expose any instrument on the earth's surface to what was called an "aether wind". The concept is that the aether, conceived as the medium that allows light waves to travel from one point in the cosmos to another, would influence the measurement of the length of a path of light, depending on whether the path is in line with the expected "wind" or is oriented perpendicular to it.
The experiment did not find the expected result but rather than looking for a reason the aether wind might not be measurable in this way, the idea of there being an aether in the first place was questioned. Einstein then declared that an aether was "not necessary", and since Einstein's theories gained widespread acceptance, any further investigation into the subject of the aether was relegated to the fringes of science.
Many attempts have been made to explain why the physical configuration of the measuring apparatus of Michelson and Morley was improper for showing the aether wind, but no one has repeated the experiment in a different setting, such as in a satellite orbiting the earth.
Now recently Martin Grusenick, an experimenter in Germany, has repeated the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment with a rather simple laser set-up and has found - to no great surprise - that rotating his apparatus horizontally, no shifts in the interference fringes are observed. Grusenick however had another idea. He modified his apparatus to make it possible to rotate in a vertical plane ... documenting his results in a video that was uploaded on YouTube:
Why did both NASA and the Russians suddenly abandon the idea of colonizing the moon, even after several successful landings and extensive surveys of Apollo and the Soviet Lunar probes?
Ingo Swann, a researcher into telepathy and remote viewing who worked for about two decades with the prestigious Stanford Research Institute, has found out. He details his own research into the question and he connects it with a broader problem - the suppression of telepathic and related human capabilities. His research has been published in a hard-to-find book titled: "Penetration - The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy".
The paper version of the book is quite hard to come by. There seem to be a few used copies around but they go for a proud price. However, you can find a scanned copy - without the illustrations and photos - on Scribd. The book can be read on line or downloaded as a PDF file. Here's the address:
If any of my readers here do have the original, please consider scanning the illustrations and photographs and sending them to me. I promise to make them available on this page.
