This is the end result of a series of small ideas that I had as a student about 36 years ago. The ideas followed from some then-recent work on the cosmic microwave background, which spread into the problems of consciousness and cognition, all of which are almost completely unrelated to subjects in environmental engineering that I was supposed to be studying at the time.
I think I knew I was just playing with these ideas; I was having an extremely creative fun time doing a combined degree in science and engineering at uni and this was more or less a hobby to me, playing with theories and mathematics, not thinking of a research career, knowing I would not be taken seriously in my second year at a small university. I was, as you can probably tell, interested in pretty much everything but not trying too hard.
The research I’d picked up on was a map of data from the cosmic background explorer (COBE) satellite. COBE provided the first detailed glimpse of the patterns in the cosmic background, the thermal signature of the early universe or “afterglow of the Big Bang”. Maybe you remember, even if you don’t necessarily read scientific journals it was big news.
As well as all that amazing structure, the map showed a small and gradual variation in temperature from one end of the sky to the other, which was interpreted as a Doppler effect due to the satellite’s motion: the effect is that the warm end of the sky is spectrum-shifted towards blue because the satellite is moving in that direction, so light frequencies in that direction are slightly higher. The actual velocity worked out at about 600 kilometres per second, which was surprising. A huge velocity like that (0.2% of the speed of light) had to include not just the satellite’s motion around the Earth, but also the entire relative motion of the Earth, Sun and Milky Way galaxy.
At the time there was an idea that this high velocity indicates that our galaxy and the entire local group of galaxies are falling gravitationally towards a nearby supercluster of galaxies, an immense collection of individually vast objects known as the Great Attractor. The better evidence now is that we don’t actually know why we are moving so fast; possibly it’s part of the extra accelerations associated with dark matter, but it remains an open question. It’s not part of the overall redshift pattern of the expanding universe.
This was never the main issue with the COBE data, rather scientists were and are more interested in the grainy texture of the background, indicating the beginnings of structure in the early universe. It was our first evidence that the background was not perfectly uniform in every direction, there was a pattern in the early distribution of energy and matter, and overlying it almost incidentally there was this 600 km/s relative velocity.
600 km/s is pretty fast, but it was the observation itself that surprised me, that we could detect this velocity at all. We’re talking about radiation from the entire universe at its earliest stage of evolution. It is so smooth and uniform that the structures it reveals can be regarded as almost perfectly homogenous, at a time when the gravitational process had only just started forming the clumpy gaseous regions that later became galaxies, well before the first stars were born. It is a lasting image of the entire universe before its differentiation into the relative motion of objects such as planets and satellites. To a very high precision it is flat, empty and on the large scale almost motionless overall.
With a figure of 600 km/s of the Earth relative to the COBE blueshift, we no longer had to talk in relative terms of our motion compared to the Earth, or the Sun, or the galaxy: we now had a near-motionless reference frame that included the entire universe at its earliest stage. Like the old schoolboy game of writing a street address to include the Country, the Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe, suddenly the ultimate location had a valid postcode, 600 km/s, and it seemed strange.
I had just gotten used to the idea that there is no absolute state of rest or motion in the universe, so you can’t say that we have some specific velocity relative to empty space: according to Einstein’s relativity, there is no such thing as empty space of absolute zero velocity, because there is no universal reference frame, only our individual relative ones.
Through the COBE data it seemed we now had a reference frame against which we could compare our motion to the motion of any other object (a distant galaxy say) and so determine its motion relative to the background as well. You can do this with anything you choose as a reference frame and it’s always supposed to be just purely relative, but the COBE blueshift, for the reasons of its uniformity and stationarity, as well as its profound originality at the beginning of time, could easily be regarded as a universal reference frame. It’s just that this is not supposed to be possible.
This is not a contradiction of relativity. The CMB is not an absolute or even universal image but a relative and local one, the image of the microwave background radiation as seen from this vantage point. As with any forest of trees in the distance, Earth-based observers see events (such as particular thermalised gravitating regions) that align with our physical location and correlate the time-distance to such events. Alien observers far from Earth would see a different mapping of the CMB, but only as different as a view in perspective from another time-place. Regions with any significant persistence in time, say over the cooling period from 4000 – 3000 K during the recombination, the great cool spot for example, would appear similar in all views of this observable CMB within similar horizons. All observers within a given observable universe would see a time-varying image of the same CMB, with no preferred direction but a persistence of the structures that can be seen.
So, suddenly realising that the idea of perspective neatly resolved this question about relative cosmological spacetime, I had to wonder if perspective is not itself a factor in the theory of relativity. This makes sense: the directions and distances that particular observers measure towards particular objects in motion, spacecraft or objects of any kind, are the core ideas of special and general relativity, which provide analytics that stem from comparisons of observer and observed, that we plot as maps of multi-dimensional actions. In much the same way the linear perspective guidelines of Brunelleschi in the Renaissance are analytics of the space around an observer mapped onto a picture plane. As a science, this lacks only the dimension of time to capture motion. When I added those, I found a plausible particle model and a cosmology popping out of the different ways I could look at it in terms of perspective.
For the next twenty-four years I thought about that occasionally, as a curiosity, and spent some time writing it out when I returned to finish my environmental engineering PhD, with what I also knew about quantum mechanics by then. Struggling with particle physics as a kind of hobby it occurred to me that I was seeing perspective ideas recurring, and then when I started teaching physics I realised there were perspective-related physical laws at all levels, including the earliest foundations. As an artist and poet I saw this as an aspect of the human condition, completely bound to consciousness in the way that it limits and conditions our experience of reality. I used technical drawing techniques to dissect a 4D model of the expanding spherical cosmos on paper, I smuggled in what I now knew about dimensional analysis from fluid mechanics, and slowly but surely came to see that it was giving me the right answers.
Finally, the book evolved from an essay and a series of papers, with alternating reflective and technical chapters which can be read as a primer into the mysterious worlds of cosmology, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence / neuroscience that I was by then reading in my attempt to understand the measurement problem in quantum cosmology. The measurement or observation problem is a technical paradox which among other things requires the existence of conscious observers to explain the existence of fundamental particles, implies multiple parallel universes at the other end of the scale, and generally calls into serious question the nature of observation. I walked from one end to the other of this big idea, setting out my own explanations for quantum mechanics and relativity and all the rest of that strange, amazing stuff, and in the process rediscovered my one great idea for what it is: a profound cosmology, I am not too modest to admit, which makes a kind of strange sense and is actually a lot of fun to think about.
I’m still taking a very personal approach to this, and I’m not worried about academic conventions. If you’re reading this you may well be looking at my blog, Backlogue, so welcome and feel free to have a look at the artwork, music and other writings as well.
I explained to a friend just recently, as a child I had two of the great old Time-Life books, The Universe and The Mind, and I’m still trying to read and understand them. This book, like The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra or almost anything by Paul Davies, tries to explain these mysteries in terms that highlight the paradox and yet allow a deeper way of relating to it: Capra by his eastern parallels, Davies through the sheer clarity of his explanation, and in my case by an idea of the limitations of human perspective, that can be re-imagined to see the mind of a creative universe and to hear, as the source of all energy, the enormous voice of a dynamic space-time.
Preface:
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Peer-reviewed Theoretical Research Papers I – IV
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Original essay: Cosmology (2003 – With all the raw elements of the eventual 2026 book)
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Appendix 1 (1992 – pseudoscientific juvenilia but a useful record of how long I have been working on this witness the clumsy student all-caps handwriting, and all my early mistakes).
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Relativity from Scratch (2012 – my first draft of a set of relativistic and astrophysical derivations for private study and the remotest possibility of a job teaching those subjects)
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(these long rows of ellipses serve to push all random advertising material well to the bottom of each page)
Michael Ifans 