The Vanishing Skylines of Quantum Cosmology is an accessible primer in advanced modern cosmology, and a fascinating, quirky science history for all ages. Its central story breaks new ground toward the unification of physical science with holographic neuroscience, combining all the natural principles that stem from the geometry of perspective as the basis of measurement. That sounds hard, but from the familiarity of your own point of view right there on the page, you can see or visually imagine the physics, how it works with your brain and, with some proof, your mind. It is a tale by nature so rich with creative insight that it almost writes and reads itself.**
The unifying idea of this book is a person-centred re-examination of the Continuity Principle, which can be seen and heard, literally, in visual and aural perceptions of the world. You don’t need to do the maths of geometry, you can see it all around you, and the laws of physics work the same. The result is a compelling, fully illustrated and musical/lyrical introduction to modern physics, from the subatomic to the cosmic, via the quantum intelligence of mind and the rules of visual perspective.
Continuity is a deep foundation not only of the laws of physics on Earth (along with the principles of harmony and balance) but also in the correspondence of quantum mechanics to holographic cosmologies, a concept that free-falls from any local point of view to the cosmic event horizon, like a black or white hole at the edge of time. Holographic principles also apply to actual black holes, pretty much exactly as we have now seen them. Even more incredibly, the robust sense we have of geometric sight in four dimensions leads to a holographic idea of the human mind.
This is a profound unison of human knowledge across the arts and sciences. The idea that we can imagine the future, that is the end, as a holographic image in complete detail of the atomic state of our immediate self, if not our mind and local space, is an incredible challenge to the normal idea of ‘reality’. This is now regarded as a principle, a proven or true idea, which should ring a warning.
Fortunately the author is a scientific generalist and multimedia artist, an articulate champion of the consilience project, and very occasionally an Australian symbolist poet of Welsh-Dutch descent. So you are in good hands.
If you’re looking for a way into modern physics with useful imagery in plain language, or if you’ve read the entire popular physics literature and are somewhat jaded at the failure of the genre to convey the more abstract and especially recent ideas of science, or even if you’re a curious artist, eclectic musician and/or pleasantly relaxed neuroscientist, then this book is for you.
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The unique approach that this book takes is to go further than science, seeking a way around the impasse that professional physicists themselves are the first to admit: that even they don’t really understand their theory. Beyond the conventional idea of cognition or understanding, physicists engage with nature mathematically by internalising and then generalising the patterns, leading them to indirect, partial experiences of complex abstractions, imaginary geometries, which remain inaccessible at deep levels that you have to get used to even if you give your life to it.
Studying physics is not like learning a language to read for meaning a work of literature in the original text. The natural language of physics remains only partly decipherable, a system of ancient and modern hieroglyphics that often remain literally imaginary even as you write them out in full. You may only follow the allowable steps of mathematics and hopefully arrive at results that agree with experiments and/or observations, which themselves have no particular meaning outside of those necessarily incomplete interpretations.
Must we conclude that the entire project of popular physics is simply impossible? Can we ever develop a casual, public appreciation of abstract ideas that underlie the apparent non-reality of the physical world? We may justifiably insist that there has to be some realistic context of experience, at least in the process of observation and experiment, and yet we struggle in any case when the resulting explanations go almost immediately to invisible or unavailable ideas.
How do we accurately picture the indefinably tiny electrons that supposedly explain why it’s hard to thread a needle, or the vast curvatures of spacetime that explain why the planets orbit the sun? The origins of physical knowledge are ideas that can be experienced, usually by constructing instruments that amplify some natural signal, but almost always the very next steps go beyond direct experience and become hard mathematics that won’t take us to understanding even if we know how to do that.
The question becomes, how can we retain the direct, native experience even as we penetrate the mathematics? The original fable of science is the experience of Archimedes, the Eureka moment when one of the world’s first and greatest scientists felt the weight of displaced water in a bathtub subtracting his own relaxed weight, and suddenly understood why some things float while others sink. That moment is a rare chance in a world where even the most obvious and visible forces are hard to understand: like, why do weights fall with the same acceleration regardless of weight? Why is lightning fatal in a wet kite-string but not a dry one? Why does a neutron star lose mass as it vibrates in orbit around another star? Is there a level of experience that can carry us through these explanations? Can we find some sensibility to explore the maths and make sense of the theory, to go further than merely deriving or worse, just memorising it?
The surest route to truth, suspect though that is, is to see it, followed at some distance by semi-truths that you may have heard, and at even greater distances by the very suspicious sensations that we merely feel. The senses of sight and sound are the most direct route to experience in a world that is extended beyond ourselves, parallel to sensations of heat and weight that can be direct or indirect depending on whether you touch a hot engine with your hand or drive it at dangerously high speed. You can lift a heavy weight, or if not then you can tackle it with a lever or a pulley, by the same rules. In all of these sensory learnings, the rules of geometry bear down on the mathematics that we need to give birth to an idea. Geometry is something we can see in almost everything we notice at a distance, with applications in sound, light, heat and weight as the main experiences of reality.
The central argument of The Vanishing Skylines of Quantum Cosmology is that we can see the laws of physics by their direct and mathematically exact correspondence to the rules of visual perspective, which derive from one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the Continuity Principle. We see this ideal in the effects of diminishment with distance, foreshortening at indirect angles, and occultation or eclipsing of almost all of the physical aspects of a thing behind itself and others, even as you study it as closely as you can. The same laws of sight appear in the sensations of weight and balance, which are the abstract idea of acceleration, and in heat and pressure, which are diffuse subatomic motions with reflective changes in direction. The mathematics of geometry, even in abstract visual forms such as cubism or expressionism, are deep ideas that we experience directly through our eyes, in almost constant contact with a unified continuity, especially if you don’t try to understand them on a symbolic level.
Visual forms, or the subjective momentary experience of observers restricted to observation from only one point of view, are aspects of physics that physicists are well aware of, but which somewhat frustratingly they tend not to mention. There is a very good reason for this, namely that the abstractions of physics (such as continuity and all its effects) are more powerful when you refuse to visualise them. Most teachers start with simple visual or active thought experiments to convey the impression of an idea by one means or another, then almost immediately go beyond imagination by plunging into the abstract.
This book, which I hope you will enjoy, keeps the visual mathematics in mind as it gazes at the physics, ending in all finality at the real and literal horizon. We can see this in one form or another wherever we look, a powerfully exact model of the holographic edge and observable volume of our universe. It’s a viscerally mind-boggling abstraction at the leading edge of science and a new chapter in the genre of popular physics, because we can see it and experience it even as we work to understand it, an idea that is everywhere and at every depth in almost the whole of science.
One illustration should suffice for this short history. Ever since Isaac Newton discovered or invented gravity in or around 1666, we have failed to understand how that elusively obvious force reaches out and pulls us down without an obvious agent or action to that reaction. This is despite Newton’s own slightly glib notion of action-at-a-distance, which are the four words he came to by boiling down the inconclusive argument. His critics protested in their own refined Royal Society way, but had to agree because of the stunning, epoch-making truth of the results.
Three hundred and sixty years later, we still largely fail to understand Albert Einstein’s explanation (in 1915) that mass-energy and spacetime influence each other directly, not at a distance, to move and warp in orbits. Most of us are still asking, as of Newton, well, how? Even the earliest and most enduring popular science, due to Carl Sagan whose animated picture of planets drawn into the deep hollows of a spacetime grid, doesn’t help much even when presented as a physical model with marbles rolling around a bowling ball’s hollow in a trampoline. The problem is, a model like that only works because the Earth exerts gravity on the model, so the balls just roll down and around the sloping grid as you expect because of, well, gravity.
To clarify this picture, Leonard Susskind offers a powerful science fiction, an astronomical giant whose stick-figure limbs are agonisingly bent by the lumpy shapes of spacetime around a planet or star, seeming to explain the force of gravity due to a kind of colossal ergonomics, the bending of the giant’s limbs to follow hyperbolic and elliptical orbits. Until we realise that this really doesn’t explain the core step of this new view, which is exactly how spacetime is bent by mass-energy even though the mass is concentrated in lumps of planets and stars that are not connected to anything else (or are they?) at least certainly not by a tensile fabric of absolute space or medium of any kind, just a continuity of logical comparisons from one location, speed or density to any other.
Sagan and Susskind had really only shifted the off-hand notion of action-at-a-distance from effects on a moon to other effects at a distance in an abstract logical continuum. The continuum flexes and joins up the differing curvature at every point, even though there is nothing to connect but the logic that nearby and sequential events must have in order to make sense to any observer.
There are many other ways of thinking about this outside of the mathematics, all insufficient. Bernard Schutz, author of the unusual textbook Gravity from the ground up, plausibly explained time dilation due to gravity by the one effect we know for sure, that things rising upwards must always slow down, including the frequencies and colours of light escaping into space that then look and work exactly like a time warp; but this still doesn’t ‘explain’ how time dilation leads to an attractive force downwards and vice versa. We’re still asking, well ok, but … ?
The ultimate truth may be that we can’t understand it, but I would argue that we can see it in perspective, which may be enough if you can allow time to operate in the same idea. A planet’s gravity diminishes with distance in exactly the same way that its appearance in the sky decreases in apparent area, i.e. it looks smaller by area, and its gravity is smaller in the same proportion. If mass has effects on other bodies when they bump into each other, given a continuity of spacetime-mass-energy-momentum these effects have to be anticipated as they approach each other, which works in the same way that they grow into view. Newton mentioned this perspective simile in passing, because the square-law expressions of his theory are ideal for making that conceptual step, but like any good physicist he made nothing of it, a mere visual distraction from the abstract.
What Newton didn’t know is that not only apparent space, but also time are diminished, both these physical effects being analogous to perspective, via continuity. Time and its gradients have no meaning unless there is change. In the case of gravity, the change we see is movement with balance, not just falling but travelling in a combination that leads to an orbit, or with no balance an inexorable downward free fall. These spacetime-warp processes act against the distance-diminishing profile of time and area in the same way that one half of an action-reaction pair acts against the other. As a result, by following the action of a spacecraft descending we can draw the curve of a planet down to the flat spacetime of a horizon, even the holographic information horizon of a black hole or a universe, as though an unstated goal of the universe is to come together and lie flat against itself without waiting for opposites to attract.
Of course we can still ask how, but I hope you find this visual and non-cognitive explanation reassuring. You can see a bird in flight and appreciate the deftness of its mechanics without ever understanding them. You can see gravity, and many other laws of physics that the book will examine, whether or not you can explain them to a child. And indeed you might see for yourself if Einstein’s mind-child General Relativity, and his other less beloved child Quantum Mechanics, are the final answer when they can’t both be right. We don’t yet understand how they can ever line up to agree, but more surely, we will know it when we see it, and maybe we already do.
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This long idea and the resulting book are the end result of a train of thought spanning most of my life, in alternating stages that I understood first in visual art, then as science, then back again over many cycles. You could call this the journey of a mildly poetic child whose early instincts for musically pigmented light and atmospheric effects were never eclipsed by an interest in physics.
In an otherwise not unusually* peculiar childhood I saw the two sets of harmonic laws unite in the living curvatures of circles and spirals, seeming to point the way forward for mysterious attractive forces and expansive cosmologies. It became more real as I went through life as a seemingly perpetual student and much later a teacher of many subjects, after a long search among the mundane rocks and occasional gems of science and engineering, though I did not forgot my roots in visual art.
A major turning point for science, completely ignored by the fragmenting world of modern art in 1989, emerged from the cosmic background explorer satellite, one of the most advanced remote-sensing missions ever launched and the first with high-precision cosmological instruments. COBE provided the first detailed glimpse of the patterns in the microwave background, the thermal signature of the early universe. Maybe you remember, even if you don’t necessarily read scientific journals it was big news. The visual effect is still surprising, a complex and intricate abstraction that Janet Sobel or Jackson Pollock might have dashed off at monumental scale in an afternoon:
As well as all that amazing structure, those lacy archipelagos of warm and cool, 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 satellite is moving in that direction, with an effect that the sky is spectrum-shifted towards blue because radiation energies in that direction are higher. The actual velocity worked out at about 600 kilometres per second, which was very 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, the Milky Way galaxy and the local galaxy group, including all the orbiting elements of the sun around the galaxy and the galaxy within the group, and still left a very large speed of the local group seemingly going somewhere:
This mystery of directionally driven motion was never the main issue with the COBE data; scientists were and still 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 speed.
The better evidence now is a velocity of 368 km/s of the solar system in the direction of Leo. If you subtract the rotation of the milky way, the galaxy’s motion including that of the local group is closer to 630 km/s. So 368 km/s is just the motion of our average observation point, in seemingly absolute terms relative to the CMB, yet we still don’t actually know why we are moving so fast. At the galactic scale, 630 km/s is well over six times faster than the average drift speed of galaxies such as ours. All the nearby galaxies might be in motion together by attraction to distant intergalactic superclusters, except that the densities of matter and distributions of other data are not in the right places to explain it. The poles do not align, in a technical sense that means exactly what it sounds like: a lopsided axis of energy that severely warps the standard model of the universe.
Whatever the speed, it was the observation itself that most surprised me, the idea that we could detect by any means a velocity relative to something so universal as the cosmic background. The CMB is everything, in a real sense. It is a frame that includes the entire cosmos in one snapshot, working as a complete point of reference which includes all possible points that we might ever want to refer to in any moment, all at once – every galaxy and everything in them, as they stood at the beginning of time.
So I had to ask, as many scientists did at the time: isn’t that a universal reference frame, by which we mean a very wrong and outdated old idea? It takes a while to get used to this but it’s completely true by Einstein’s relativity that there is no absolute state of rest or motion in the universe, so you can’t say for certain that we have some specific velocity relative to empty space: just that there is no such thing as an empty space of absolute zero velocity; that is, no universal reference frame, only our mundane individual relative motions. All those hot gassy clouds have no claim to be actually motionless. They could all be in some coordinated motion towards and away from us, as though we ourselves are stationary at the centre of the universe. Fortunately there is a powerful principle due to Copernicus that this cannot be the case at any scale. There is no “stationary”.
The CMB cannot be overestimated as a source of questions such as this. In a different reality of alien physics it’s possible that the background might be perfectly uniform, as smooth and featureless as a clear blue sky, but in this world, that’s not the case. Though almost perfectly uniform, in fact smoother than a billiard ball, it is a flickering furnace of radiation from the entire universe at its earliest stage of evolution, and even then the world is diverse and articulate. It is a pattern of such precision that the structures it reveals are filled with intelligible echoes, not an afterglow so much as a blaze of coded physical signals still burning in full view of our times.
This is all the more incredible as the gravitational process had only just started forming the clumpy gaseous regions that later became galaxies, well before the stars were born. There was practically zero net motion in any direction, other than the random motion of hot particles in all directions. There is still today an overall uniformity of the distribution of matter, with no gravitational attractors sufficient to explain our apparent fall at high speed in one direction. There should still be no significant local-to-general motion. So we have to ask, why that particular velocity? Especially one so far from any random small speed that could just be an approximate zero, the drift speed of galaxies due to only local forces.
The CMB is not a failure of relativity. It is not an absolute or even universal image but a relative and local one, our view of the microwave background radiation as seen from this vantage point. As with any forest of trees seen in the distance from different directions, 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. Regions with any significant persistence in time, say over the cooling period from around 4,000 to 3,000 Kelvin degrees during the recombination, the great cool spot for example, would appear similarly in all views of this observable CMB within similar horizons.
Extragalactic observers far from our local group would see a different mapping of the CMB, but only as different as a view in perspective from another time-place that is in relative motion. All observers within a given observable universe would see a time-varying image of a similar CMB, with no preferred direction but a persistence of the structures that can be seen.
It’s a small step to realise, as I suddenly did, that the concept of visual perspective neatly resolves this crisis of relative cosmological spacetime. Our view of the CMB is like a four-dimensional star in action whose mapping we see partially from our location and state of motion. Other parts of the CMB, perhaps visible to observers in distant galaxies, would be eclipsed to us, and the relativities along with the visible temperatures would be slightly different for everyone. This universe-scaled abstract impressionism has depths, hidden facets, and cross-sections through a distant but still-present time that we can see in a particular frame, the one we hang in our galleries.
But we’ve seen this before. There is a powerful confluence of principles, the laws of physics and the rules of perspective, that periodically engages art with science in history and reveals yet again that we are still learning this. As a young artist who later enroled in science, fascinated by physics, I saw the same geometric patterns as in a Renaissance landscape or cityscape. This is not a new idea, but one that became crucial to understanding the later Holographic Principle as an effect of shape, a hologram at the edge of time, in the laws of geometry and even deeper Continuity Principle. The short preface above this history explains how this works in enough detail to begin with.
I had to wonder even then, long before holographic cosmologies first appeared in the literature, if perspective is a factor more generally in the theory of relativity. This turned out to make a lot of sense: the directions and distances that particular observers measure towards objects in motion, spacecraft or particles or objects of any kind, and the diminishment of their effects such as electromagnetic force and gravity, are the core ideas of special and general relativity. In the simple cases these reduce to trigonometric expressions, exactly as the rules of non-linear perspective: natural to the eye and best analysed in more advanced cases with tensors, complex tables of directional values. This provides analytics that stem from comparisons of observer and observed, that we plot as mappings of multi-dimensional actions, as abstract as you might imagine General Relativity to be, but visible to the eye even if you don’t understand it.
In much the same way the linear perspective guidelines of Brunelleschi and others in the Renaissance are analytics of the space around an observer mapped onto the flat plane of a painting. This was a very late discovery in the history of art and architecture, and was revolutionary in its effects on human cognition of the world, perhaps even more so than relativity. At the end of the Middle Ages, when graphic art in perspective first appeared, whether we understood it or not we suddenly saw so much more in the world. Since that brilliant reawakening of human curiosity we have all grown up with easy 3D images of all kinds, and the only way to recapture the enlarged sensibility is to learn again how to draw in perspective. Not at the level of an exercise book (I wouldn’t ask you to work so hard!) but you might draw some diagrams.
As a science, perspective lacks only the dimension of time to capture motion, and a sense of scale in an expanding process dominated by light and everything else that behaves with the same perspective-like continuities, such as gravity and electromagnetic forces. When I added those, as a third year and later student, I found a plausible wave-particle model and a cosmology popping out of the different ways I could look at it in terms of perspective.
You have to understand that I was still pretty young, and doing a totally different course of study well outside of mainstream physics, let alone cosmology. I couldn’t take the idea very far. I saw what I’d done as a kind of wind-up toy in an interesting triangulating frame, and I didn’t think that it was particularly earth-shaking. For the next twenty-four years or so I thought about it 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. This is of course no mystery in a science based on geometry, almost always built out in measurements around an observer. Hard-working physicists tend to make very little of the visual side of their science, for the practical reason that abstract concepts are powerful enough whether or not you have a diagram to scale, let alone in correct perspective, and they teach it that way so as to develop abstract thinking in their students.
As an artist, I went full visual with it. I have no regrets if my mind is the poorer for it, as I never wanted to be a professional physicist as such. I had a whole other artistic and practical career in mind. On the practical side, I used technical drawing techniques to dissect a 4D model of an expanding spherical cosmos on paper. I smuggled in what I now knew about dimensional analysis from fluid mechanics. I built in harmonics from the natural (i.e. physical) theory of music, and slowly but surely I came to see that it was giving the right answers.
This was all in loose notebooks, in no particular order after so many years, and I still had so much else to do before I could learn the language I would need to develop a cosmology. It was in my fifties that I finally had all the tools, contacts and time, so I sat down, doing the science and in particular, the maths. You can’t do physics without maths. It took me four years, with annual seminars, casual supervision and an international examiner. And I think it went as well as can be expected considering I was coming from a different academic planet, an environmental fluid mechanic making the leap to cosmology, where the stakes are very high.
I had essentially built an abstract soft clock based on the expansion of a gravity wave in 4D, a wave that carries a secondary radiation wave in 3D like a minute-hand in the surface of spacetime. This is light that is carried upon a process defined by gravity, moving at the same speed in an expansive motion of waves of heat and force at constant velocity as though radiated from a central star, the CMB. The combination of the two effects, constant outwards expansion and constant lateral radiation, in simple polar coordinates produces a logarithmic spiral; an ‘infinite line’ discovered by German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer in 1525, then analysed by the master geometer René Descartes in 1638 and often known since those times as the marvellous or miraculous spiral:
The spiral curvature of a nautilus shell is the natural archetype of this shape, for the natural reason that that surviving ancient cephalopod grows steadily in equal increments outwards and laterally around itself, adding new shell in both directions at every stage of its growth. The curve itself is of finite length, but extends macroscopically into a theoretically infinite number of turns, or angular coordinates. This useful adaptive pattern and its relatives recur in everything from vine tendrils to galaxies to black holes to bathtubs. The proper name for the involute polynomaly of the shape is the growth spiral.
Gravity, or rather geometry, expanding outwards as a nonlinear wave, and light or radiation radiating laterally around within the geometry at the same speed, follow a growth process with a constant light speed but decreasing light coordinate velocity, exactly a Hubble parameter of the finite age of the universe. In polar coordinates the outwards entropic radius (labelled with a capital S=ct) is the distance that light or gravity can travel in the age t of the universe, and the around-wards radiative distance is a co-moving ‘infinite’ coordinate ψ producing R=Sψ=ctψ that radiation passes at constant speed in 3D around the circumference, imagined as the volume of observable space. The nonlinearity of gravity produces a four-dimensional wake following in the particle’s past, a delayed wave that interferes onto the observable wavefront near that time at the same phase, for example a particle and its dilated twins P’ and P, showing time dilation to correct scale.
Certainly both marvellous and miraculous it seemed to me, because by following the contours of that spiralling universe, deep into time, I could extract a geometric solution that reduced the CMB dipole to a more manageable speed of 46 km/s. which is close to the expected drift speed of galaxies in our region of intergalactic space. How? Peculiar velocity on primary redshift dipole has an extra Doppler effect in the index of the scale factor, deriving that small correction from the curvature. You can solve it in a non-linear equation that might occur to you if you know these terms.
Not only that, but other solutions I could find by integrating and differentiating in various ways along the curvature kept coming within a hair’s breadth of the accepted though still controversial standard model, using the now very precise data of modern observational cosmology.
I found the right functional Hubble constant, and redshift in the form of a scale factor, that is the right colours of radiation for the size of the universe at those times. It had the correct general relativistic critical density, with graphs that fell right along the sinuous curves of the standard model. It even had the correct dark mass-equivalents, that is to say kinetic and potential energies that added up to the standard measurements of unknown dark energy and dark matter, as direct proportions of the total critical density in the observed spatially and energetically flat universe:
So I knew it was worth reading in one form or another, and I must admit I was totally dissatisfied with the academic style guide. The book evolved from an essay exploring holographic thought patterns as analogies to perspective views, with the geometric origins of those patterns taken seriously as physical laws that, like the laws of perspective, can be seen or imagined. The turning point came with a curved-spacetime cosmology and particle physics of the same laws; the effect being to see it all in perspective, often enough shocking even me. You can imagine my poor wife finding me clinging to the kitchen table over a pile of calculations, in vertigo as I suddenly saw the universe contract from infinite to finite towards me. “I can see it!” I whispered, in a moment that I have attempted to convey in less personal terms in the book.
The actual maths are visual ideas that you can experience for yourself when you get your head around them. This is no harder than first year university maths, which really just revisits the more advanced high-school subject, with radiating lines that point beyond that easy level. I admit this still sounds incredibly difficult, but I can promise you that I do know how to explain it. Relaxing away from technical language after so many years in the ivory tower has been a joyful process, genuinely leading to a incredibly enlightening global view that has to be conveyed in language of occasionally epic-mythical yet objective and sceptical proportions.
I wrote this as an artist with scientific background, carefully and at best gracefully avoiding the reductive risks of being too literal with the art or too dense with the science. It would serialise in a popular science and/or art magazine, but I aim higher: The readership is not just art, or science, but something that must be much larger as it also stems from music, which incredibly enough follows the same laws, the laws of continuity that underpin physics, art, music and the mind.
I walked from one end to the other of this big idea, setting out my own descriptions of quantum mechanics and relativity and all the rest of that amazing stuff, and in the process rediscovered my one great idea for what it is: a profound humanist 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.
If you’re reading this you may well be looking at my blog, so welcome and feel free to have a look at the artwork, music and other writings as well.
I once explained to a friend, 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.
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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 – Obvious 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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* From “unusually peculiar childhood“: This book is in many ways an homage to children, so when I introduce it without that part, people often demand to know what happened to me, and then say that’s the best part of the story:
To someone trying to live in the real world, art is more usually a frustration than a useful talent. Nevertheless it carried me along with the profound and almost constant inspiration of one early moment, the idea I had in childhood, a geometric idea I had of infinity with continuity of large and small. This had to do with the shape of a bathroom nautilus shell and the edge of the universe, which I could see expanding in the bathtub if I stared into it for long enough. I knew the bath could inflate without limit and come to a crisis. Slowing it down revealed fine details in the meniscus at the rim, which sucked out particles of soap like distant spiral galaxies, forming a ring like a horizon.
This was all I needed to get me started on a very long creative and intellectual journey. The spiral puzzle stayed in my mind with the art, and I never lost it. Have you ever tried to work out the geometry of a bathroom shell? I was that kind of peculiar child. I followed the Taoist tai-chi of Yin and Yang, in lost juvenile eras of landscape, portraiture, cubism, the blue four; working in pens, oils, dyes, glass, broken mirrors; seeking weird perspective effects in corners, attempting astral travel and finding it only slightly harder than talking to girls. In the same life I struggled through several early careers and periods of homelessness aiming for my own choice of uni enrolment.
The multiple flaws in a creative-for-its-own sake approach to a scientific idea should be obvious. The fuzziness of art, the freedoms of expression and abstraction, seem to be inventions not discoveries. Yet it’s true that the principles of continuity, balance, harmony, perspective, laws which we discovered from geometry, are the same laws of physics emerging as effects that diminish with distance and deflect away at an angle. Art is a Science, or so it seemed to me; in fact it’s all science, by a broader definition that I had to discover one alternating step at a time.
For much of my childhood and youth the process was a tough weekly decision between art box and chemistry set, multimeter and guitar, with often strange results. My journey, having chosen four different fields, became four times longer. Then at last in early adulthood by intense study on what seemed almost exactly the same page as recent artwork I noticed something odd about a new satellite dataset, something unusually peculiar in a technical sense, which by that stage I thought I knew should not be possible, needing explanations that I felt I could almost see…
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** Other than direct and complete quotes (exc. repetitive parts) attributed to the “Turing test” interview with ChatGPT in chapter 3, no AI tools or generated text were used in the writing of this book.
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(these long rows of ellipses serve to push all random advertising material well to the bottom of each page)
M Gaelen Evans 