CHAPTER TWO - A DIFFERENT WAY OF UNDERSTANDING TIME, SPACE, LIGHT AND GRAVITY. THE NATURE OF TIME

THIS IS THE MOMENT OF OUR CREATION

CHAPTER TWO

A DIFFERENT WAY OF UNDERSTANDING TIME, SPACE, LIGHT AND GRAVITY

THE NATURE OF TIME

“ Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can ever suppose.” J. B. S. Haldane

It is a great loss and a great handicap that modern science has turned its back on the philosophy and metaphysics of the classical world of Greece and Rome. Unlike our civilisation, the ancient world did not progress very far in technology, industry and above all in experimental science, but its greatest minds, in thinking deeply about the nature of existence, obtained insights that have been handed down to us and yet forgotten, except among classical scholars and historians of philosophy.

One of the greatest of these philosophers was Anicius Manlius Severinus, known by the name the Goths gave him of Boethius.

He was born in 480 AD and during his lifetime the Western empire collapsed and the Gothic successor kingdom replaced it in Italy. His family was wealthy enough to obtain for him the best education possible at that time, and as a scholarly prodigy he became one of the most learned men of his generation. He became a favourite of the Gothic king Theoderic and eventually chief of his civil service at Ravenna.

In 525 he fell from power, suspected (probably unjustly) of conspiring with the Eastern Roman empire. While he was in prison awaiting execution he wrote the last great philosophical work of the Roman era - `The Consolation of Philosophy`. His great insight into the nature of reality is the central idea of this book.

He wrote: `Whatever lives in time exists in the present, and progresses from the past to the future. There is nothing set in time which can embrace simultaneously the whole extent of its life. It is in the position of not yet possessing tomorrow while it has already lost yesterday. In this life of today you cannot live more fully than in that fleeting and transitory moment. Whatever therefore suffers the condition of being in time, even though it never had a beginning and never has an ending, (as Aristotle taught was the case with the world) it is still not eternal. It does not embrace and comprehend its whole extent simultaneously. It still lacks the future while already having lost the past. But that which embraces and possesses simultaneously the whole fullness of everlasting life, which lacks nothing of the future and has lost nothing of its past, -- that is eternal. Of necessity it will always be present to itself, controlling itself and have present to itself the endlessness of fleeting time.

It is one thing to progress, like the world, through everlasting existence; and another thing to have embraced the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present:

TOTA SIMUL OMNIUM POSSESSIO.

“The complete possession of everything at one and the same time”.

The central concept of this book is the Tota Simul. It means that the Universe is simultaneously and always extended in space and time and multitude, as we see it to be, and yet its infinite extent and its limitless duration and its endless multitude is all One, perfect in its action, in a timeless instant.

The Universe is not in time as we are. Whether in our past, in our present, or in our future, (as we see it) it is all present together in the eternal moment of the Universe. It is because this is so that it is a coherent functioning whole, with its natural laws in full operation. It is all complete, but we must see it from within, in the midst of its activity, and that sets us in a moment of time and a lifetime and a place.

The fundamental reality behind the appearances of the Universe is that in itself it is altogether as One, and all that happens is one Act. The past is the tota simul all complete and unalterable as seen from our view point; the future is the possibilities upon which we can act; the present is the moment of creation in which we are participating now.

Past, present, and future are not like countries we can enter, they are aspects of the creation of the ordered cosmos, as seen from our point of view. Reality in itself is altogether in an instant.

Because it is not in durational time but is altogether present to itself; past present and future in their entirety are in that timeless instant. Although we can conceive of this intellectually, we cannot experience it. It is that species of Being that transcends us completely. It is impossible for us to comprehend it or experience it.

This is the infinite and the eternal and let me say at the outset that this is not a book about God but about the reality underlying the Universe. This is a book of natural philosophy, and what Boethius called everlasting life, I prefer to call eternity. Our own existence as finite creatures is a sequence of events which we experience as time continuing onward to further events. The greater reality of the Universe is one Event encompassing all finite events within it. For us and for all finite creatures and things, the tota simul `is open to us as extended space and durational time and multitude. What is in reality spaceless, is for us a cosmos of innumerable particular things spread about over vast distances; and that which is eternally an instant, is for us an endless succession of events which we, upon entering into existence within it, experience as our present moment in which events succeed each other in endless succession.

The present moment endures for those that are conscious of their existence and have memory enough to know they have existed before the present moment and expect to live after it. We live within the tota simul.

Boethius was contrasting the finite localised timebound condition of our existence with the eternity of the infinite Universe, without beginning or end or centre or locality in space and time. Its perfection and completeness is not that of a work of art that cannot be perfected any further; it is more like an immortal organism whose creative power, rationality, purpose and infinite energy means that its infinite energy endlessly generates possibilities for creation, and this will go on for ever. It is not a perfection and completeness of form but of power to exist and self create for ever. An eternally whirling wheel; a perfect and never ending Act.

THE TOTALITY OF NUMBERS.

There is a distinction to be made between the infinite and the finite. The term `infinite` is often used to mean that which is so large as to be beyond our capacity to measure it or give it a definite number or even an estimate of a number. This is incorrect. The term ‘infinite’ does not apply to very large numbers in the far reaches of the total array of all numbers. Instead it applies to the total array taken as a complete whole. This is, of course, impossible to visualise, for we realise intuitively with certainty that numbers go on for ever. That is how we must see them in our finite existence, but in the infinite it is tota simul. It is no longer an endless progression, but a totality instantly one.

I argue that it is because the array of all numbers is tota simul in reality, that mathematical logic can exist for us to use. We can explore the array of numbers as far as we like, as if it were the far reaches of the cosmos, and we always find it to be ordered and coherent. We discover its complexity, we don`t create it, it must always have been there. The mysterious laws of prime numbers turning up unexpectedly among the vast multitudes of the divisible, in places we cannot predict, are not of our making, but like remote stars, they are already there for us to discover. If eventually we do understand the laws that place the prime numbers among all the rest, would this not show that the array of all numbers was coherent and not a tumbling jumble of cards falling into place ahead of us?

In the infinite it is all there – tota simul – but for us as finite creatures it is an endless expanse of finite numbers. Therefore I distinguish between the infinite which is all there at one blow, and the vast, the Immeasurable, which exists in our cosmos as multitudes we cannot count to an end.

The array of whole numbers, positive and negative can be considered to be a very abstract analogue for the observable cosmos, and we can use them to count the finite things of the cosmos.

We can glimpse the immeasurable in which every finite thing is set, for in the gaps between all the endless line of whole numbers, we can insert another endless line of fractions – the ratios of all the whole numbers.

Even greater than these, there is, in the gaps between the fractions and whole numbers, an immeasurable continuum of irrational numbers, which are not exact ratios, and in decimal form have an endless expansion.

PI is the most famous example of an irrational number, and like all of them it has a progression of numbers beyond its decimal point which never ends. Yet it is coherent and lawful, for it is the product of a real relationship in our world between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. This can be generated by well tested algorithms of calculation, and so far has reached well beyond a millionth decimal place using powerful computers, and shows no sign of ever ending. Its numbers keep turning up unpredictably as the algorithm generates them quite lawfully. This is no random tumbling of numbers, and this applies to all irrational numbers of which there is an endless immensity.

Irrational numbers are not finalised, as whole numbers and fractions are. They are numbers in process of being finalised but not in our finite existence. In them we glimpse creation at work where order is being established.

In the tota simul all irrational numbers are fully finalised, which is why Nature can use them; why circumferences have no difficulty relating to diameters. There are no unfinalised decimals in the tota simul. But for us finite creatures in space and time, we have to labour on and on with calculation to find and explore them. We are trying to do what is done instantly in the tota simul and established from everlasting.

In the array of whole numbers and fractions we have an analogue of the cosmos of innumerable finite particular things, and then of the irrational numbers, which fill the interstices between them and show forth the immense endlessness in which the cosmos of finite things is set. It is set in the immeasurable, and because it is coherent it means it IS all reconciled and finalised tota simul. It is perfect and complete; it is infinite.

The Act of creation, continuously gives existence to an ordered cosmos in three dimensional space and a one way sequence of events that we exist in. That Act is not in time so there was no particular instant for the beginning of the cosmos, and there can be no ending to it.

STANDPOINT AND EVENTUM.

We, who are finite and individual observers, find ourselves in a cosmos of finite things, at a particular local place in it and at a particular moment in time.

This is given to us and is our STANDPOINT.

We cannot alter it. Obviously we cannot alter the year of our birth, or where we were born, or the century we have to live in. Our past is over and done with; we can only remember it and await our future. Our standpoint is always in our present moment. The past is unalterable:

“the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, and all thy piety and wit cannot cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

Our standpoint should not be confused with our postal address or the chair we are sitting on. Wherever we are is our standpoint, it is the place of our existing and we cannot alter it, any more than we can leave the present moment of our existing. We can appreciate this most clearly if we are in trouble or danger, and we wish we were somewhere else, but we cannot dematerialise and reappear somewhere else. For better or worse we are always where we are, and that is our standpoint even if means being trapped in a dark alley and mugged. Travelling at high speed is still being at our standpoint.

Every finite particular in the cosmos has its standpoint and it can be thought of as its unique relationship to the act of creation of the whole ordered cosmos.

Every conscious observer and every sentient creature, and every inanimate stick and stone and dust mote has its standpoint, where it is a receiver of radiation and actions bearing information about the cosmos around it.

In the astronomy textbooks, a lot is made of the time it takes light to reach us from distant stars. When we see a supernova in a distant galaxy, they say that it actually detonated when apes roamed the savannah and human beings had not appeared. I argue that all the light we are receiving from our cosmos takes no time to reach us. It is all simultaneous news whether near or far. That is our EVENTUM.

The time we think it has taken to reach us is a mental concept based on our belief that light has a speed, and must cover the distance from that source. However, it must be remembered that no observer can receive light that goes past on the way to somewhere else, (and if we do receive it, it hasn’t gone somewhere else). We only know of light we actually receive. Astronomers cannot stand in space observing light travelling about from here to there as if watching a show, for we cannot depart from our standpoint and take a god like view of the cosmos. We can only exist at our standpoint and receive our personal eventum.

If we say that the light from the Andromeda galaxy left there two million years ago, and has just arrived here; from what standpoint are we observing this journey?

The radiation from all sources, as we receive it at our standpoint, is our own personal relationship to the events of the cosmos. We have no other share, no other place, no other time than that which is given to us. It is what is RELEVANT to us, and it is our eventum. It is not from the past, it is in our immediate present moment.

Every standpoint originates within the tota simul and finds a universal cosmos all around it. The tota simul is without origin; it is only finite standpoints that come into existence and change within it. The tota simul can have no standpoint in space and time, and nor can the universal cosmos, for it is everywhere and has always been. The cosmos exists not because of a single originating event but by a timeless act in every present moment that ever was and ever will be. I will call this the Act of Creation.

For every standpoint there is a cosmos centred around it and sending events relevant to it which is its eventum. What I term “our cosmos” is that part of the infinite ordered Universe that is observable from our standpoint and is centred on it and is sending light and other interactions to us. `Our cosmos` is set within an immeasurable universal cosmos we cannot observe but only infer.

THE FUNDAME NTAL DIMENSION.

The act of creation operates along the Fundamental Dimension.

We are all familiar with the three spatial dimensions by which we orient ourselves on the surface of a planet – front and back, left and right, above and below. But there is another pair of directions no one seems to mention; and that is inwards and outwards. You can imagine it as going inwards into yourself, and outwards into the whole world in every direction. If you were far out in space only in your space suit, with no landmarks or reference surfaces, then inwards-outwards would be the only dimensions you could be certain of, and you would be disoriented and very alone. This is the fundamental dimension along which the act of creation acts into the cosmos; the many from the One – the Totaa Simul that is simultaneously separating and uniting.

Unification and individualisation exactly balance and the Universe can neither collapse nor disintegrate.

Individualisation produces the fundamental ACTIONS we study as particles and tend to liken them to material things. These fundamental actions are being unified into atoms and molecules of the ordered cosmos.

Gravitating mass and inertial mass are the same in power but act oppositely. Gravity pulls all things inwards towards union, and inertial placement sets all things outward into separate motions, resulting in a balance where bodies orbit around each other. This is their placement in the ordered cosmos, the enduring of their standpoint dynamically through time.

Although orbits appear to an observer outside them to be motion endlessly going on, they are really a placing where everything is in motion.

Motion is the result of the tension between gravity drawing bodies into union and inertia placing bodies in their standpoints. Inwards into the One outwards into the many.

We look inwards into the unity of our self, and outwards into the world around us; our standpoint is in the fundamental dimension, while our body is in the three spatial dimensions.

THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

The universal event, altogether one in the tota simul, is individualised as quanta of actions which we receive as quanta of light. Light acts at the ultimate `speed` possible in the extended cosmos, and this has a feature that is one of the great discoveries of physics and a key to the nature of the Universe.

At the speed of light there is, as far as the photon is concerned, no extension and no duration; so it reaches its destination instantly. We have Einstein to thank for this insight. This implies that emitter and receiver of the photon are together in that action; that they are CONTIGUOUS in that instant.

In the tota simul the entire Event of the Universe is all in an instant, immediately present to itself. Within that event atoms are emitting and receiving light and are all in interaction instantly; they are contiguous. But from our point of view at our standpoints in space and time, the photons appear to travel across distances at constant speed. But photons are actions not things and have no standpoint, are not in space and time and are always in the tota simul where emitter and receiver are contiguous.

We say a photon took a billion years to travel, but for that photon it took no time at all. The atom it left and the atom it arrived at were together in the one event. The light we are receiving from all over the cosmos centred on our standpoint represents that aspect of the cosmos RELEVANT to our standpoint and to no other. We can, if we like, analyse what we receive from our cosmos and translate it into an historical picture, an evolution, but it is only theorising, it is not the cosmos as it is in itself.

The photons we get from the far flung cosmos, whether from a nearby star or a far distant galaxy, all arrive at the same instant giving us a moment by moment snapshot of `our cosmos` –which is affecting us now.

We do not have a god`s eye view across the cosmos but only what the cosmos sends to us relevant to our standpoint. That defines our cosmos, but not the universal cosmos which we can never see because it is infinite and beyond the horizon of `our cosmos`. Every standpoint is the centre of a cosmos relevant to it, and the universal cosmos is all of them together.

The Universe has no wider context than itself for there is no time or space it can be set in. To assume that it has, is a great source of error that has bogged down contemporary cosmology. It is only standpoints that have a time and a place, and each one has its own NOW, and that succession of events and information relevant to that standpoint is its passing of time. There is no universal time common to all standpoints across the universe. Each standpoint has its own unique share of the universal event, separated by distances from all other standpoints as the cosmos EXTENSIONS, yet all are in one event connected by a web of light.

The best way to explain the nature of light is to think of the Universe as simultaneously EXTENSIONING into space while remaining unitary and all contiguous. I must explain at this point that extensioning is not expansion of the cosmos causing the redshift in the light of distant galaxies. Instead it is the continual establishing of extended space, which sets all its entities into relationships. It is a continual Act in every present moment. It is not the explosion of the Big Bang for it is establishing space not expanding it.

The emitting and receiving atoms are always contiguous and exchange energy immediately and as they do so the Universe is simultaneously extensioning at c, (the speed of light, 300,000 km per second ), and that is separating them.

THE PHOTON DOES NOT TRAVEL.

There is a puzzling feature of light I have never heard anyone fully explain using orthodox physics. Their picture of it is as follows: when an electron falls to a lower level in an atom, it releases a quantum of energy which takes the form of an electro-magnetic wave of a certain length and frequency proper to that quantum of energy. The wave propagates outwards as an ever expanding sphere, as it must do if it is a wave. Yet it is always pictured as a tiny magnetic field induced by the movement of the electron producing an electric field inducing a magnetic field and so on and so on… This is assumed to undulate across space at the speed of light in the straightest line to its ultimate destination.

How wide is this rapid wriggler, a metre wide, a kilometre wide, a micron wide? Meanwhile, what happens to the ever widening sphere of disturbance expanding outwards across the field of the electron?

What happens when it finally reaches its receiving atom, imparting enough energy to raise an electron there up to a higher level? Does all of the wave collapse instantly on the receiving electron? (and it would all have to move a lot faster than light to do so) How do photons find their receiver from such distances? Are they destined from the start to find them, or is it pure random chance which one they finally land on? Considering their immense speed, how do they land on the electron with the delicacy and precision of a ballet dancer landing on her toe? How many of them never find a landing and just keep going into empty space for ever? Above all, how does this alternating wave maintain its immense and constant speed for so long with so little initial energy imparted to it? This is especially puzzling as general relativity theory maintains that the photon is influenced by the gravity of stars it passes close to.

The only physicist I know who has openly wondered about all this is Thomas Phipps in his book `Heretical Verities`, 1986. He did indeed take a heretical view of many of the current dogmas of physics, as I do.

I quote: “Special Relativity maintains that light acts across distances at c, and the distant absorber has no influence upon the photon until it arrives. This is the Dick Whittington model of light propagation.

“The sturdy young photon trudges forth resolutely into the world to make its fortune, without the slightest idea of what awaits it there, whether it will ever find an absorber. Each step of the way is a new adventure, a sequence of improvised experiences to the unfolding vicissitudes of the journey. Yet Einstein`s own equation of photon propagation -`distance times time equals zero`, dt=0. suggests that, far from being unaware of finding an absorber, Dick, once committed to a definite departure, in fact gets to his destination before he is rightly aware of leaving home, it happens in zero proper time. In the propagation of light, emission and absorption are closely linked and seemingly foreordained”.

Others have speculated about this. In the 1920s Focker wrote, “If the Sun were alone in space it would not radiate”.

In other words – you have to have a receiver in order to emit light.

In 1949 Wheeler and Feynman in a journal article “On the absorber as the mechanism of radiation” speculated that distant electro- magnetic reactions arose out of a symmetric mixture of half advanced and half retarded potentials” what they meant was that they realised there had to be a destination for the photon, and the only way they could envisage it was as a simultaneous emission of a photon from the emitter (retarded radiation) and a photon advancing to meet it from the distant receiver (advanced radiation) and, as it were, informing it where to go. The two photons together constitute an exchange of energy between two linked electrons but still separated in space. But what arranges this link in the first place? Their idea didn’t catch on and they later abandoned it, but at least they saw the anomalies in the orthodox view.

Arguing from the concept of the tota simul, I can offer an answer to these questions.

THE COSMOS IS EXTENSIONING.

First of all, the speed of a light photon is not its own, it is the extensioning of the cosmos which gives it a finite `speed` as the observer must see it. The cosmos is being spread out as transactions between the atoms are occurring, so we `see` the instant transaction and the long drawn out journey both together.

The value of that speed is set by the balancing of extensioning against unity, a balance that enables the cosmos to exist without collapsing or flying apart. c is really the constant of cextension. The number we give this `speed` depends on how we choose to measure distance and time. The numbers depend on our culture, but their ratio is absolute and any race on any planet would calculate it.

Extensioning is incessant and instantly establishes the separation of finite things. Then how they move and orbit in that separation is the result of gravity and inertia and electro-magnetic forces attracting and repelling.

Extensioning has a physical cause. The matter of the cosmos is being amalgamated into structures now, continually now. This means atoms are being formed from protons and electrons, and molecules are being formed from atoms now. This structuring all over the cosmos sets particles apart into permanent spatial relationships, which constitute the structure of atoms and molecules. This is one of the causes of extensioning which sets the standpoints of all finite things in the cosmos apart from one another in an endless continual act of structuring which is establishing the cosmos in space and time now. It is not the Big Bang blowing everything outwards just once. It is continuous structuring of matter already present.

Extensioning affects the whole cosmos equally regardless of distance. The speed of light is the same everywhere and is the constant of extension. Extensioning is also the cause of the inverse square diminution of illumination and of physical forces as distances are being established between standpoints.

The first evidence for expansion of the whole cosmos outwards was observed in the 1920s and led to the false cosmogony of the Big Bang.

The first evidence for extensioning was found in the 17th century when the speed of light was first measured.

In 1676 Olaus Roemer was timing the way Jupiter eclipsed its four major moons, hoping that it might provide mariners with an accurate measurement of time. He noticed that the intervals between successive eclipses became longer when the Earth was on the far side of its orbit from Jupiter, and shorter when it was on the side of its orbit nearer to Jupiter. The difference in the distance of Earth from Jupiter could not have altered the way the moons orbited Jupiter, their orbital motions were well known by Roemer`s time. It could only mean that the news of the eclipses was delayed by the extra distance. From the then known estimate of the size of the Earth`s orbit and the distance to Jupiter, together with the maximum discrepancy in eclipse timings, Roemer was able to calculate the time it was taking for news of the eclipses to cross that extra distance. He found it meant a speed of 132,000 miles per second; not bad for a first attempt, although few of his contemporaries could believe it was so high. Since then, the speed of light has been measured in several quite different ways, and is now established at 186,282 miles per second or 299,972 kilometres per second.

What Roemer discovered was not just the speed of light but the fact that ditant standpoints do not share a simultaneous now. Each standpoint has its own now, just as it has its own place.

This is why there are delays in communication times with spacecraft. Extension sets the cosmos apart in time as well as in space. The text books of optics are full of diagrams of light in straight lines always following the shortest distance and least action. In a fully reconciled Universe that is inevitable. They are shown bouncing off surfaces and being refracted in dense materials. However all of this is inference for we never see light crossing space. When we see light beams crossing a dusty room, we only receive the light that was reflected from the dust motes and then stimulating molecules in our retinas. We only see light that actually reaches us. I am not saying that the science of optics is wrong, far from it, it is the correct set of inferences we are bound by logic to make in a cosmos continually extensioning space. It is the most practical way but isn’t the deep reality of our cosmos which is simultaneously extensioning and contiguous.

That is why, for light there is no distance and no duration and it acts at a constant speed, and follows the path of least action. It doesn`t have a speed because there is no distance and no time. It is the Universe tht acts at c to establish extension distance and time. Extensioning out of contiguity inevitably results in least action

RECONCILIATION INTO ONE COSMOS.

Starting from anywhere within the cosmos, you can busy yourself measuring it, even though it would take you for ever.

It can be numbered and counted, and that would take forever. It is individualised as particles and bodies. It is in principle comprehensible, it can be focused by our senses, it can be reduced to general laws and algorithms, it can be predicted at least approximately, and above all it acts as a coherent whole, not a phantasmagoria of random events.

This is not a theological argument, I write only in terms of natural and universal necessities. All the cosmos in all its limitlessness is at one instant in the tota simul. I then argue (with no chance of proving it), that it is reconciled in one way only, and that is the order from which the cosmos occurs in space and time. There is only one cosmos infinite and eternal.

The reconciliation I speak of can be likened to a political and social turmoil and many conflicting views out of which a compromise can be brokered, that reconciles all the parties and allows society to go forward coherently again. This happened in South Africa.

Or consider a complex mathematical problem of many variables and simultaneous equations, out of which a solution is found that reconciles it all to one answer.

So the cosmos is being reconciled to an order and this is the Universal Event that we are all living in now. There is only one reconciliation occurring and only one order will ensue, and from it the ordered cosmos becomes actual in space and time.

At the deepest level of particle and quantum physics, we glimpse the universal reconciliation sorting out possible and probable into what actualises. Until it happens, (as we must see it,) the probabilities are superposed and entangled and constantly shifting and not in our space and time.

I may speak figuratively here and say that the quantum realm as seen from our standpoint seems inchoate; its possibilities are not yet actualised, not separated, but all superposed. It is an immensity of events only the Universe can reconcile. Yet within this immensity we could surmise that there is a unique possibility of universal order. Out of all the infinity there is one upon which an immensity of events can relate and coordinate and set together. It can be likened to a seed in a supersaturated solution which triggers a crystallisation. There is a RATIONALITY that relates all of it together, which is what we understand to be the laws of nature, logic and maths. Its unity is the cosmos that we can exist in, and its activity is what we call CREATION or the UNIVERSAL EVENT.

One can speculate that there is one supreme possibility of universal reconciliation; there is only one, and all the events and possibilities that it unites comprise the universal event within which we live. This profound problem will be discussed further in later chapters of this book.

Reconciliation drives the Universe with purpose, rationality and power of creation. We see its product as the star filled cosmos and the burgeoning of life and consciousness. In the central act of reconciliation the Universe confronts itself, acts upon itself, and is one with itself.

Thus we can say that the Universe is rational, purposeful and conscious at an infinite and eternal level. We finite creatures share these powers at a finite temporal level.

To be eternal means there is no origin. Succession and sequence of events only affect finite creatures who must exist event by event. Creatures within the cosmos see it in time and sequence as they are being created. For us the reconciliation is in progress now and far from complete. For us it is an endless multitude, a deluge of unpredictable events. We experience it in progress, yet we can deduce it is perfect because it is coherent and its procedures are unfailingly effective (what we call natural law). Those who believe that the Universe has an origin a certain number of eons ago, have to believe that the laws of nature preceded that origin and were in full operation, otherwise how could it all have got started and produce anything lasting? But In an eternal Universe there are no origins, no initial conditions and it is in full working order, and it does not evolve for it is complete as a working system. For us in the midst of it, it appears to be evolving for it is in progress and we have to fit in to its tumult as best we can. We are limited to a standpoint at which we receive an infinitesimal share of the universal event relevant to our standpoint. (In an infinite Universe, every finite thing is infinitesimal relative to the Universe and cosmos, but not relative to itself or other finite things).

There can be only one universal reconciliation of all possibilities, and so I do not believe there are multitudes of other universes that could exist. If the Universe is unlimited in extent, number and duration, I cannot see how there could be any other.

The totality of whole numbers is individualised and countable but it isn’t limited and it certainly isn’t small, yet there is only one mathematical order in it, which makes it coherent and unitary – it is an INSTANTANEITY, an individual tota simul all present to itself. Living organisms are also instantaneities all present to themselves.

As a logical argument, and a mathematical calculation, proceeds by steps to a conclusion which reconciles all the factors involved, so the Universal reconciliation when opening out into space, time and multitude proceeds by those logical steps, to only one cosmos.

It would seem that the reconciliation is under a necessity to be coherent and consistent, but why that should be so is quite impossible to answer. To seek to know why there is anything rather than nothingness is to stare into a bottomless abyss.

Possibilities that never actualise are not part of the reconciliation and do not exist in the cosmos. They only exist as notions in human minds or memories of what might have happened or what we might have done but did not.

The children not conceived, the deeds not done, the decisions not taken, are now irrevocably gone. They approached actuality once and then fell back into nothingness. Possibilities only appear among the welter of events occurring around us and which we recognise as possible courses of action; they are not things in themselves. They only actualise when chosen and acted on. That is what human beings do, acting as agents and co-creators, but what we do has to be reconciled into the ultimate order of the cosmos either in this earthly life or in the life to come. There is no nothingness outside the Universe for nothingness is not. There is only the Universe; and sentient and deliberate creatures who can see and act upon whatever there is in the universal event around them that can be acted on. There are h0 possibilities outside the Universe, and the laws and necessities of the Universe, set limits on what is possible to actualise and what is not. When we look into the future, (our future) we are not looking into nothingness, out of which possibilities emerge. We are looking at the Universal Event occurring but which we have not yet entered and taken part in.

The Universe has no future or past, only an eternal infinite present. We act within it and see a past we cannot alter and a future we can freely act to alter. This is our moment of creation and it is part of the universal event of creation.

CONSOLIDATION INTO UNITY.

All the past of our lives is consolidated into our present condition and we experience it as a whole. We can reminisce on this and that incident, or we can experience the whole of ourselves as what life has made us. As we go on living we are always consolidating our lives into what we are experiencing now in one blow as ourselves as an instantaneity. This consolidation into unity is what the Universe does with its universal event, for the Universe is an instantaneity, but we see it in progress from the midst of it, and what is past for us is tota simul and impenetrable. We can only pick it apart in our minds and then only imperfectly. It is absolutely impossible to re-enter the past because our standpoints are immovably in the present where the cosmos provides our eventum. It defines our present moment in the midst of a universal event without beginning or end. (If you place anything in an endlessness it is always in the very `middle` of it, for it cannot be nearer to an origin or a terminus.)

From every standpoint each observer will see a cosmos opened out in a present moment with the past closed up, and the future opening into possibilities provided by its eventum. The Universe doesn’t have a present moment with a past behind it and a future in front of it, it always is.

The cosmos contains as many present moments and eventa as there are standpoints in it. How then can the cosmos have a single present moment in passing time? There is no supernatural clock outside the Universe telling the time while it is evolving. It cannot evolve for it is perfect in its working.

Our cosmos centred on our standpoint is finite within its horizon of observability, but it is set within a Universal cosmos which has no limits. We are in the midst of the universal event that creates the universal cosmos and for us it is occurring now, and so our lives are a constant activity of actualising some possibilities and rejecting others. The reconciliation we do is part of what the Universe is doing. We are co- creators in the universal reconciliation even though we act ignorantly and incompletely.

The universal reconciliation has an ultimate finality that gives an unalterable direction to the stream of events that we experience as time. The past closes up for ever, the future opens to reveal further possibilities and this fixes us in our present moment unique to ourselves. It follows from this that time travel is quite impossible. You are where you are, and when you are because of the universal reconciliation which sets the direction of universal events, and therefore of our experienced time.

We have to distinguish between the past as recorded history – a human enterprise incomplete and imperfect - from the actual past as consolidated and absolutely unalterable and impenetrable. We are used to books plays and films about history which allows us to wander about in it in our imagination and pretend we are in another century, a kind of mental time travel but only as accurate as the historical record.

Limited to our standpoint we cannot see the cosmos in its entirety, and we cannot see it from the `outside`. It has no origin, no history and no evolution. What we are studying is the working of the natural laws. Individual stars and galaxies may change but the cosmos does not move towards something different. The laws of nature work because all is reconciled worked out and complete. When we study the cosmos what we are seeing is the reconciliation up to the point when our standpoint appeared and it is all consolidated into the present state of the cosmos as we see it. What we see is not an ongoing evolution but the logic of reconciliation, and we can grasp it because we possess a share of its rationality.

Stars and galaxies may form, grow and decline within the infinite and eternal cosmos, but it remains for ever, a limitless host of shining stars. It was so a trillion years ago and will be so a trillion years hence. This is the moment of creation; it is happening now and always will be happening now.

THE EXPANSION OF THE COSMOS.

Why does the cosmos appear to be expanding in size? The prevailing view in cosmology today is that the wavelengths of light from distant galaxies are lengthened because the space they are undulating in is expanding, and that is because the Big Bang expansion is not yet over.

There has been, for years, a contrary argument that space is not expanding but the light waves lengthen by being sapped of energy as they traverse the vast distances. This is the tired light theory. It has never caught on because it can`t explain how light could lose energy across all wavelengths equally. Light passing through dust and gases can be weakened and reddened but it is always a selective weakening of those wavelengths that molecules and atoms in space are absorbing. There is also the cogent objection that when we receive light from the centre of our galaxy it has passed through more dust and gas in a few thousand light years than it would in a billion light years of inter-galactic space, and yet it shows no cosmic redshift. Both these theories assume that light is an undulating wave that travels across space.

If I have given the impression that light comes direct to our retinas from distant sources, I must correct that. It never reaches us directly for it is always relayed via many intermediate atoms and molecules, trillions upon trillions of times. This explains why it can be filled with the absorption lines of many chemical elements. Light from the stars passes through their atmospheres and it always passes through the Earth`s atmosphere. It is extraordinary that we can see so clearly out into the distant cosmos. Molecular oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, very widespread in space, are extremely transparent and relay without distortion. It comes to us across a transparent contiguity.

If redshifting is not due to Big Bang expansion or tired light, what causes it?

The answer will be given in the chapter on plasma cosmology and the electrical nature of stars and galaxies.

In brief: it is because of the growth of the cosmos as it generates new galaxies from older ones, which are producing quasars which develop into new galaxies. This is a continuous and widespread process all over the universal cosmos. The cosmos accommodates to this endless growth by expanding to maintain the balance of space and matter. We see this in our cosmos as the redshifting of light from all normal mature galaxies, similar to our own. (Younger newly forming galaxies have extra very high redshifts for a different reason, and are not reliable indicators of distance).

When we plot the redshifts of immature galaxies and quasars we find no coherent pattern but just a scatter.

But for mature galaxies like our own there is a clear progression of redshift value s increasing in step with increasing distance in light years.

(Halton Arp, ‘Quasars Redshifts and Controversies’)

This expansion of distance affects the contiguity of emitters and receivers as they are interacting, and reduces the energy of their interaction and lengthens the wavelength. It is a Doppler shift for the distant sources are actually moving outwards from us. It is growth from incessant creation of new matter now, for this is a Universe of unceasing creation. Not the Big Bang but the Cosmic Growth.

The universal cosmos keeps growing in relation to the particular cosmos of any standpoint, which, being finite, can see the expansion in its fading horizon. The universal cosmos is infinite and growth does not alter its infiniteness.

Expansion due to growth is different from the Act of Extensioning which sets the cosmos in space and time everywhere and does not cause redshifting.

Expansion due to growth can be measured very approximately if we know the distances to remote galaxies. As we try to measure the redshifts at ever increasing distances, the expansion rate increases for it is not a constant as cosmologists have laboured in vain to pin down. It is instead a value that increases with distance towards infinity, as we approach the horizon of our cosmos where we cannot obtain accurate measurements.

The Lorenz formula to prevent redshift values from exceeding c masks this escalating increase towards infinity as redshifts are measured.

It is the redshifts of normal mature galaxies that show this, not the quasars and active galaxies. This is the expansion of the infinite cosmos as a whole, not the motions of galaxies. Our own cosmos grows as a whole as the infinite cosmos accommodates to its endless growth. We see it as a fading of light from the horizon as our cosmos expands into the greater cosmos.

Extensioning has a fixed speed but expansion has an escalating one.

The Unity of the Universe is instantaneous, for it is the tota simul. It manifests to us as gravitation, as charge attraction, magnetic attraction, and the constant consolidation of present events instantly into an unalterable past. None of these have speeds, they are instantaneous despite popular belief.

Extensioning manifests as inertia, and individualisation and charge repulsion, magnetic repulsion, and as separation into distances and sequence of events. The distances between emitters and receivers, causes the light to diminish in intensity by the inverse square. Double the distance and the light falls to one quarter as the number of photons received falls. It doesn’t alter the individual photons as long as they are in vacuum. They can be weakened by being relayed by gas and dust, and by cosmic redshifting. Otherwise they are just as energetic as when they were emitted, which is to be expected if the emitters and receivers were contiguous.

The reader may have noticed that I have reverted to photons crossing space in order to explain how distance affects light. In a Universe acting simultaneously while extensioning a contiguity, it is practical to treat light as photons in space, or as instant interactions in the contiguity. Physics does this when treating light as either wave or particle, depending on what it is doing while in space, or at its destination.

Receivers are spared the full radiation of the cosmos by the inverse square law due to extensioning, and by the recession of the distant cosmos due to growth. The Universe balances the finite and the limitless. If it wasn’t for the recession of the distant cosmos we would face the limitless universal cosmos and its limitless radiation. Extensioning plays its part but expansion from growth completes it. The outer edge of every cosmos of every standpoint is receding and this insulates it from the surrounding universal cosmos.

We don’t know how far away that boundary is because of the great difficulty in measuring intergalactic distances, but I would say it must be at least 10 billion light years. We exist in a limitless multitude of finite cosmoses in an infinite universal cosmos.

To anticipate what I shall say in a later chapter: fundamental particles are being drawn from the vacuum and organised into the structures of the nuclei and atoms. This structuring results in them standing apart as particles making up atoms clearly show. Nuclei and atoms are not formed once only but continually, and this maintains them in existence as the multitude of standpoints.

It is this structuring that causes extensioning by a Universe that is continually creating.

The cosmos is being opened apart as the transactions of the cosmos are occurring. A cosmos without structures would have no space.

But creation also increases the material cosmos by drawing fundamental particles from the vacuum under huge electrical potentials exerted by the galaxies, which act as a load upon the vacuum. Fundamental particles straight from the vacuum pour into the centres of galaxies where there are concentrations of electric and magnetic fields and forces which fashion the incoming particles into protons and neutrons, nuclei and atoms.

Quasars are formed in these centres of creation, which are called PLSMOIDS. The quasars move out of them and develop into nascent galaxies which gradually grow into mature galaxies as they are supplied with particles from the cosmic vacuum and then spread out away from their parent galaxy. This incessant creation expands the volume of the cosmos as it accommodates to the new matter and maintains the balance of matter and space. It is a creative infinity – the infinite cosmos increases and remains infinite, but any finite cosmos, such as the one centred on us, expands into the surrounding universal cosmos so its distant light sources are redshifted.

TO SUMMARISE:

The standpoint is at the opposite pole of being from the tota simul of oneness for it is the ultimate individualisation.

The creation of the cosmos of standpoints is the universal event which unfolds to each one and gives to it a perpetual present moment of events following on endlessly. The source of these events is its own cosmos from which the standpoint receives its eventum. There is a cosmos centred on every standpoint, they all overlap across the universal cosmos. The limits of each are set by the attenuation of light with distance. At great distances, eventually no observer, no matter how powerful the instruments will be able to gain information.

There is no sharp cut off, just an inexorable dimming until it can`t be made use of. It confines and protects us, but we can imagine the universal cosmos of stars and galaxies stretching beyond it forever. If it were possible to go beyond our horizon we would still be at the centre of a star filled cosmos centred on our standpoint.

The multitude of possibilities that living creatures can actualise is a generative infinity. This means that as possibilities are actualised out of the events of creation, other possibilities become discernible and could be actualised. This applies to the possibilities we deal with in our lives.

POSSIBILITY AND FREEDOM.

The universal event, all one Act of the tota simul, can be thought of as the eternal fashioning of order out of the possibilities that emerge from its activities as it creates itself. This order is lawful, rational and coherent and can be grasped by our intellect. It is the subject of all our sciences, mathematics, philosophy and arts. Our natural languages are founded upon our innate grasp of the logic in the order of the world, and is available to infants as a gift of Nature. This is the context of all our lives as order and possibility are resolved.

In living our lives we are faced at almost e very moment we are awake with possibilities we could act on. Shall I make a cup of tea? Shall I go out shopping? Or more important ones: shall I chuck my job, emigrate, or run away with the woman next door? Shall I start wring a book about life, the Universe and everything?

Some things we feel we ought to do, like caring for a sick spouse, or helping someone in danger, but we know we don’t have to, we could always turn away. Unless we are bound hand and foot in a dungeon we can always do something unexpected, out of character and out of order. We know we are free to choose the various possibilities that are always lurking around us, latent in the events, or flitting about in our minds, and there are always many of them. Besides the obvious ones that come to mind, are the outrageous possibilities we could do if we were impulsive enough, or carried away by folly, drink, or mad desire. It does happen to some people, the papers are full of it, and we wonder what got into them, why did they do that? But they did it, they made a possibility actual and changed their lives and that of others. These innumerable possibilities of which only a small number are discernible at any one time, only come into existence if we act to make them exist, and then other possibilities that are lurking behind them come into view and could then become actual. Activity generates possibility. In some sense they are real enough if we can know of them and know that we can choose them if we want to. They are real enough to be brought into actuality as long as they are not impossible.

What sort of existence do possibilities have? They are not in existence like you and me but they are potentially so. In living our lives, we fashion an order from the events of this world, and the possibilities that are latent in them can be made actual. That order is the life we make for ourselves, and the sort of society we all help to make by our myriads of decisions and actions. Within it we can enjoy order, safety and predictability.

We are doing now in our infinitesimal way what the Universe is doing. All our activities as we fashion our lives, generate further possible actions we could take.

Action generates further possibilities; this is the nature of creation. All the agents of the ordered cosmos can generate possibilities from their actions, and creation of the cosmos works through them.

Whenever we make a decision to do one thing and not another, what we decide to do becomes actual when we do it, and that shapes our lives and that of others. What we do not do has no existence but is remembered as having once confronted us. It was then a possibility, and two roads we could have taken were definitely there.

Being conscious we can recognise and choose the possibilities we can act on. We are doing what the Universe is doing in the creation of the cosmos. But we are finite and cannot see the cosmos ass a whole, or know how it must be reconciled into order

In the physical realm of particles, atoms, molecules and inanimate matter the universal reconciliation drives all its activities to that end, and natural law and logic is supreme.

Not so for finite creatures with autonomy of action but no universal viewpoint. For us, possibility is wild and limitless and we must choose among it as best we can. We must dispel ignorance with knowledge; wickedness with moral law. Possibilities have no power to do anything until chosen and actualised. That choice can lead to good or evil, because with us the reconciliation of all things is not complete, as it is for the purely physical realm.

GRAVITY

Gravity is instantaneous; it does not act at c for it is not generated independently within each body but is the UNITY of all things which individual bodies only exhibit. Gravity is the universal unity which seems to us to act from bodies as if they had a self-powered force, but in fact is the power of the entire Universe.

It is not a finite discrete event like the transfer of a photon from one atom to another, with a start and a finish and a date. Gravity is not a lot of separate events; it is the way the Universe operates as One. It is the stage not the play. The way that extensioning is acting against unity is seen in the attenuation of gravity by the inverse square with distance. What gravity is uniting, extensioning is simultaneously separating.

The pull of every standpoint upon every standpoint to close up and remain tota simul, is why gravity is universal in extent, always attractive between all things and cannot be cancelled or insulated against.

If the Universe were finite in number of gravitating bodies and spatial extent, and given that gravity is unceasing, Newton realised that eventually every mass would attract every other mass and they would all fall together ultimately into one great mass. Because he could see no signs of this occurring and all the stars were standing apart, he concluded after much thought that only the power of God the Creator could set all the stars in perfect balance everywhere. God was needed as the power to control gravity.

Einstein in his turn needed to invent a cosmological constant to keep the Universe from collapsing.

(I argue that extensioning balances unity exactly).

In the 20th century the attempt to explain the origin of the Universe collided with the problem of gravity. The Big Bang theory crams all the Universe into a point and then can`t disunite it against gravity, unless space can expand outwards against it. Not by a central explosion of matter, they hasten to say, but simply an expansion everywhere affecting everything equally.

My theory is the opposite of the Big Bang. Standpoints infinite in number are set apart in an infinite Universe that has always existed and is a unity and not a host of scattered isolated bodies. It extensions because of incessant structuring, and expands from continual growth, and is always in balance and every standpoint is within its own finite cosmos.

The inertial mass of a body and the mass that exerts gravity are exactly the same to at least one trillionth, so the inertia due to extensioning and the gravity due to unity balance exactly. Not a divine act but a natural necessity.

As long as we think of the Universe as a lot of isolated bodies acting from their own powers, and the Universe as the inert background, we will never understand either gravity or inertia. That is the state of contemporary cosmology. We think we see gravity acting from every standpoint but no one knows how it can operate in such a continuous and inexhaustible way as long as that mass exists, nor why it is always attractive and can`t be insulated against.

When the aether was in vogue in the 19th century it was thought to be the medium transmitting gravity, perhaps by the way it was distorted and tensioned, but no one knew how it worked in detail.

Einstein abandoned the aether because there was no observable evidence for it. He proposed another mystery. Masses bend and distort space itself and this causes other bodies nearby to move along curving paths around the masses because they are following the shape of the bent space and can do no other. If space is like that then they have to move like that, it is just geometry. This is Einstein`s General Relativity and is the current orthodoxy. It is believed to have had several observational confirmations, and its mathematical argument is powerful, but it does not explain why or how masses can bend space around them, and what it is about space that can be bent. The analogy that is used to help us visualise it is not an explanation. Space is likened to a rubber sheet which a gravitating mass deforms into a hollow, and a smaller body encountering it is forced to follow a curving path around it. Apart from being a two dimensional picture of a three dimensional world, it assumes the gravity it is seeking to explain. What causes the larger mass to press down into the sheet to form a hollow?

If the smaller body were placed at rest in the depression what would cause it to move, if gravity is only the curvature of space and not also a pull along as well as a pull downwards? Einstein`s explanation is not dynamic, it is completely static and cannot initiate motion.

Since the advent of field theory in the mid-20th century there has been an attempt to explain gravity as a stream of massless particles. Following the prevailing idea that light is conveyed by massless photons and the electro-magnetic force within atoms by massless virtual photons, so it is argued that gravity is propagated by massless gravitons.

I have always thought this was a quite preposterous idea. Consider: every single particle and body in the entire Universe attracts every other without ceasing, so all of them must be pouring out gravitons in every direction to encounter every other body without ceasing. How many gravitons is that? Do they all find a target or do they just mill around? No shielding constrains them so they can penetrate any material. Why do they only attract and how do they attract? They are as impossible as the aether, but at least the aether was laid down once and for all, whereas the gravitons in their zillions are pouring out of everything unceasingly. There can`t be a cubic millimetre anywhere that isn’t full of then, yet there is no sign of them. I argue that gravity is the oneness of the Universe, pulling in everywhere. It is what the Universe as a whole does because it is tota simul, while simultaneously it is particularising and extensioning into a cosmos.

THE SPEED OF GRAVITY

Although it is widely believed and taught that gravity propagates at the speed of light, a view derived from Einstein`s special relativity, it was never proved to be so by that theory. All the evidence supports the view that gravity acts instantaneously and has no finite speed (and that is the way it should be if it is the unity of the Universe.) Newton believed it was instant and Einstein`s general theory assumes it is instant if it is a shaping of space and not a force. But he also stated in his special theory that nothing can propagate faster than the speed of light and that has become a dogma.

The astronomer Tom van Flandern in an internet article, (the only place these days where heretical views can be aired.) writes:

“The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous”. “we had all been taught that Einstein`s special relativity, an experimentally established theory, proved that nothing could propagate in forward time at a speed greater than that of light in a vacuum. As astronomers we were taught to calculate orbits using instantaneous forces; then extract the position of some body along its orbit at a time of interest and calculate where that position would appear as seen from the Earth, by allowing for the finite propagation speed of light from there to here. It seemed incongruous to allow for the finite speed of light from the body to the Earth, but to take the effect of Earth`s gravity on that same body as propagating from here to there instantaneously. Yet that was the required procedure to get the correct answers.” “Anyone with a computer and orbit computation numerical integration software can verify the consequences of introducing a delay into gravitational interactions. The effect on computed orbits is usually disastrous because conservation of angular momentum is destroyed.”

This is not a recent discovery of van Flandern. Sir Arthur Eddington explained it ninety years ago. “ what it means is that if the Earth and Moon attract each other instantaneously, the two forces are in the same line and act together as one, but if Earth is always attracting the Moon towards the position it occupied one and a half seconds ago, and the Moon attracts the Earth towards the position it occupied one and a half seconds ago, then the two forces give a ‘couple’ for they are not acting in the same line but at an angle and this will alter the orbit by turning it”

Van Flandern again: “light requires about 8.3 minutes to arrive from the Sun; during which time the Sun seems to move through an angle of 20 seconds of arc. The arriving sunlight shows us where the Sun was 8.3 minutes ago. The true instant position of the Sun is about 20 arc seconds east of its visible position. In the same way, star positions are displaced from their average positions by up to 20 arc seconds depending on the relative direction of the Earth`s position around the Sun. The fact that light from the Sun, and the Sun`s true position are not the same shows that light takes time to reach the Earth, but the Earth`s position relative to the Sun which is governed by the Sun`s gravity is achieved instantly.” This results in

Aberration of light and it can have physical effects on dust particles in circular orbits in interplanetary space. As they orbit they are bathed in light from the Sun which very gradually pushes them outwards. Their orbit is governed by the Sun`s gravity acting instantly inward, and the radiation pressure acting outward at an angle relative to the gravitational pull, and this forms a couple. This slows the orbital speed of the dust particles and causes them to slowly but inexorably spiral into the Sun. This is the Poynting-Robertson effect and it sweeps up the comet dust.

If gravity did act only at light speed the Sun could not hold its planets together. Their inertial speeds, which are their own and keep them out of the Sun`s clutches, would form a couple with gravity pulling inwards and inertia pulling outwards not simultaneously but at an angle because gravity would have had a finite speed. The solar system would disintegrate in a few thousand years.

This has been known for 200 years. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Laplace, in 1825, taking into account that gravity has no aberration, set a speed for gravity of not less than 100 million times c, but this seems to have been completely forgotten.

How do we actually know the Earth`s instantaneous position relative to the Sun so that the Sun is known to be 20 arc seconds east of where we actually see it? It is because we can measure how the Earth is being accelerated by the Sun`s gravity. Van Flandern again; “Such measurements of Earth`s acceleration through space are now easy to make using precise tuning data from stable pulsing stars in various directions on the sky. Any movement of the Earth in any direction is immediately reflected in a decreased delay in the time of arrival of light pulses toward that direction, and an increased delay toward the opposite direction.

In principle, the Earth`s orbit could be determined from planetary radar ranging data, and is checked with pulsar tuning data and found consistent with it to a very high precision.”

Van Flandern using far more accurate data than Laplace had available, has calculated the speed of gravity can`t be less than 20 billion times c, which for all practical purposes is instantaneous, and actually is if gravity is the unity of the Universe. Gravity and light are quite different and there is no a priori reason why they should have the same speed.

Light is an event, a quantum of energy exchanged between two electrons usually in atoms. It has a start and a finish, a cause and an effect, and appears to have a duration for the exchange as we see it.

Gravity is not an event; it is the way the Universe acts continuously. A gravity field may change but it never begins or ends for the masses that are attracting are always there whether aggregated or dispersed. A gravity field can strengthen or weaken with changing distances but it cannot switch off and on. We see the effects of this every day in the tides of the seas as Sun and Moon change direction and distance as they both pull on the waters, but their gravity does not stop or start.

However, it is now widely believed for theoretical reasons that gravitational events can occur in brief disturbances that ripple across space as gravity waves. Examples offered are implosions of large stars during supernova detonations, and dense collapsed stars orbiting close together, assuming these exist. It is argued that, as these disturbances, start across space in a way analogous to an electro-magnetic wave, they must move no faster than c. They would be very brief and faint effects, and despite very expensive and prolonged satellite experiments in space only very tiny brief disturbances in the satellite positions has been detected. In my view they are probably electromagnetic waves of disturbance in the interplanetary plasma.

All astronomers learn celestial mechanics and encounter the instantaneous nature of gravity if they want their calculations to match reality, yet there is hardly any mention of it in the text books. In Van Flandern`s own experience both as student and teacher, the question of what the speed of gravity really is, often cropped up in students questions. Many teachers and most text books head off the question by referring to gravity waves which must move at the speed of light, and thus leave the impression that gravity must always propagate at c, but there is no need for this dodging. In his special relativity theory Einstein insists it is the speed of light which is c, while gravity was dealt with in his general theory and was the instant conformity of motions to the deforming of space by masses.

THE LAWS OF MOTION.

If two objects of different weight, say a tennis ball and a cannon ball, are dropped from the same height, they always reach the ground at the same instant. The usual explanation for this strange fact is that gravity and the inertia of the bodies always compensate. Gravity is the one and the same force pulling at both equally, but the greater inertia of the larger mass makes it slower to respond and this slowness just matches the alacrity of the smaller mass, and so they both fall at the same rate. It seems contrary to our everyday experience of picking up weights, for you exert more muscular effort lifting a heavier weight and you would expect it to fall faster.

The orthodox explanation considers this exact equality of gravity and inertia to reside in the objects themselves, but I argue that the equality resides in the Universe as a whole extensioning into a three dimensional cosmos out of unity. It is one act and is in balance; - gravity acting inwards, inertia outwards.

If you hold a heavy weight and let it go, it will fall instantly under gravity, it doesn’t hesitate; it doesn’t need to be pushed. This shows the profound difference between gravity and local and particular forces. If you let go a cannon ball and a tennis ball but push down hard on the tennis ball it will reach the ground first, for you have added a local and particular force to it. If the cannon and tennis ball were far out in space away from Earth`s gravity, they would be at rest and sit side by side indefinitely unless a force moved them. If it was gravity they would move together equally, but if it was a local and specific force with a direction, such as a collision then the masses would respond differently, the heavier slower the lighter faster but they would respond immediately, and maintain their motion and its direction until the force altered or another force acted.

As gravity unites matter into greater masses they exert more powerful gravity, but it is not their own local power, they only manifest the eternal unity of the Universe.

The Sun`s powerful gravity swings the planets around it and they cannot resist no matter now large they are. The closer they are to the Sun the faster they move. They orbit at the speed the Sun ordains, and so great Jupiter moves in its orbit 480 million miles out, and at the same speed as the tiny asteroids only a few miles across, called the Trojans, that move in the same orbit, but millions of miles ahead of it or behind it, and far enough away to escape Jupiter`s pull.

It is an analogous situation to that of a feather and a cannon ball in vacuo falling together under gravity. Size and mass make no difference in a gravity field.

However, the planets are all moving fast enough to stay out there indefinitely and will never be pulled into the Sun. They have their inertial speed which they have retained in the frictionless inter planetary space since their birth from the Sun as the Solar System formed and struck a balance between gravity inwards and inertia outwards. The planets inertial motions follow from Newton`s second law: that all bodies persist in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled by an external force to change that state.

If the Sun disappeared its gravity would cease and the planets would instantly move along the path of their inertial motion at a tangent to their former orbit and head off into interstellar space.

To put it in more general terms; extension incessantly places things in their standpoints with inertial mass, while unity is drawing them back together as the Universe acts as a whole. Throughout the cosmos a balance is being struck which creates a multitude simultaneously separate and united.

Gravitational force increases with size and mass. On Mars, which is a quarter of the Earth`s mass, two differently weighted objects will fall together and reach the ground at the same instant but they will fall more slowly than on Earth. Every planet will show a different rate of falling, a different time to reach the ground.

Why don’t falling objects reach the ground instantly, why do they take time? It is because extension opposes gravity and the rate of falling is the balance they strike.

In the orthodox view, the energy involved in falling belongs to the body as its kinetic energy, which it takes from the gravity field where the energy is stored. As it falls its kinetic energy increases and the potential energy available to it from the field reduces. It has mass and this gives the falling body momentum, (which is mass times velocity), and that measures its energy. It is the interplay of unity and extensioning that provides the energy not the mass itself.

B K Ridley in his book ‘Time Space and Things’ treated the subject of motion in the orthodox way but was aware of the strangeness. “If we were not so used to things dropping when we let go of them, it would seem quite magical that motion appeared out of nothing. That bodies acquire motion from a palpable push is utterly familiar, but things in a force field start to move without anything visible pushing them. Space surrounding a charged sphere acquires the extraordinary property to move charged things.

We speak of its force as though it were a material push of one body in contact with another. We assign to every position potential energy – a potential for providing motion. We can describe what happens quite accurately and we think we understand, but we do not. The invisible influences of gravitation and electro-magnetic fields remain magic, describable but never the less implacable, non- human, alien. Potential energy is a measure of the strength of this magic.”

That is how it must seem if you see only the particular bodies and their motions and you think of the Universe as an inert background instead of the main player.

THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT.

Towards the end of his life, Einstein remarked that “Every Tom Dick and Harry thinks he knows what light really is, but he is mistaken, - nobody knows. Absolutely central to physics is the understanding of what light really is. The quest for this understanding is the line along which physics has grown these past three hundred years. Along the way light has baffled and fascinated us with its contradictory and paradoxical nature. It is still not understood.”

In 1666 Isaac Newton let a beam of sunlight enter a darkened room through a tiny opening, and fall upon a triangular glass prism. The beam was bent as it entered one side, and bent again as it left the other side. This refraction produced a spectrum of the rainbow colours on a white screen. He deduced that sunlight was a mixture of all the colours, but he also believed light crossed space as particles, like bullets of different colours usually mixed together. As space was a void, as everyone then knew, light couldn`t possibly be waves, for there was no medium out there to wave in.

This was giving him a problem as regards gravity. How that force reached across the void was so baffling that he could offer no explanation at all, and indeed how gravity propagates is still unsolved to this day.

If light is a stream of particles, it explains why it travels in straight lines, and casts sharp shadows and is reflected off a mirror like pebbles would bounce off a wall. But there were puzzles; why should the different colours be bounced off at different angles so that a spectrum can form? How can two beams of light cross without the particles colliding and scattering? In 1678 Christian Huygens looked at light the other way round, and suggested it consisted of tiny waves and the amount of refraction depended on the length of the waves, so that every colour had its own wavelength. As they were waves, the beams of light could pass through each other without interference, just as sound and water waves do. But, (the story of light is full of buts), if there were waves why are shadows so sharp, and why didn’t light bend round obstacles as water waves can? Above all, how can waves travel through the void?

Until 1801, whether light was a wave or a particle was debated without result, although Newton`s authority was very influential; but then Thomas Young performed an experiment that still profoundly affects physics today. He shone a narrow beam of light of one colour through two very closely spaced slits in a barrier and then onto a screen. If light consisted of particles then the two beams from the two slits should produce a bright region on the screen where they overlapped, and fainter regions on each side where only one beam was shining on it. But instead, the screen showed a series of bands of light and darkness; an interference pattern such as only waves can produce. The bright bands were the result of waves from one beam coinciding with the waves from the other beam and reinforcing each other because they were in phase. The dark bands were places where the waves of both beams were out of phase and cancelled each other so that that the light energy there was zero. This occurs with sound and water waves too, but it is quite impossible to explain if the beams are particles. Particles can only collide and scatter.

Measuring the width of the bands and the distance between the slits enabled Young to calculate the length of the light waves. They were only millionths of a centimetre, and that explained why they cast sharp shadows and did not bend around obstacles; even bacteria are huge compared to wavelength of visible light.

The wave nature of light carried the day and was supreme all through the 19th century. It led on to advances in spectroscopy and the analysis of light as wavelength and frequency. This explained how all the chemical elements each had their own unique effect on the light they emitted and absorbed, and this enabled us to understand for the first time what the stars were made of.

But, how was light transmitted across a vacuum if it was waves? There had to be a medium for them out there. How can you have sounds if there is no air, or water waves if there is no sea?

The 19th century saw a great advance in the study of electricity and magnetism. Faraday had visualised these forces as acting through `fields` that the charged bodies produced around them and these could be seen from the way that other charged bodies acted in those fields. Iron filings scattered around them showed a pattern of curving lines and these could be considered to be lines of force and organised like contour lines. These were thought of as elastic distortions in the aether. What the aether really was, no one knew, but it was a very useful concept to explain the transmission of light, electricity, magnetism and gravity.

In 1864 James Maxell, using the findings of his friend Faraday, unified the whole subject of electro-magnetism into a set of four equations, which in modified form, is still in use today. These equations prove that electricity and magnetism are like two sides of the same coin – where there is one there is the other. Where a changing electric field exists there will be a magnetic field acting at right angles to it. In effect they are one field exerting the electro-magnetic force. The relationship of these fields is of necessity dynamic and they drive each other onward. Maxwell`s equations clearly show that a changing electric field will induce a changing magnetic field which in turn will induce a changing electric field - and so on… The magnetic field is at right angles to the electric field as both go forward, one alternating with the other, and both at right angles to their direction of motion. So it can be imagined as two fields alternating upwards and sideways, upwards and sideways to the direction of motion forwards. Each field drives the other onwards, and from the values of the charges and forces in the equations it was clear to Maxwell that the speed of forward propagation was the speed of light. (Note; that the speed of light was obtained statically, not by timing light travelling.)

So light was electro-magnetic fields propagating across distance by their own power. At last we knew what light was, or we thought we did.

THE AETHER.

These light waves are transverse waves; they undulate at right angles to the direction of travel. Energy is conveyed through solid material by transverse waves; earthquakes move through the Earth that way, and that is what light resembles most. Space cannot offer zones of rarefaction and compression as in air, nor a surface held down by gravity as on the sea. Instead light behaves as if moving through a solid when crossing space, but that meant the aether had to be solid. Yet if had to be so intangible that it did not interfere with the motions of the planets. Despite all that it had to be most exceedingly elastic for the e.m fields had to distort the aether in order to move, but had to be snapped back almost instantly by the aether so that they could rapidly alternate. The invincible opposition of the aether holds the light-waves together and leaves it only a forward direction to move in. The rate at which a transverse wave travels depends on the power that snaps back the distorted region. The greater the force the faster the snapback and the faster the speed of the wave forward. As they move at 300,000 km per second the snapback must be the next thing to instantaneous, immeasurably better than the hardest steel.

So it had to be intangible, solid, elastic, hard and completely transparent, and it was obviously not the emptiness between atoms and between planets and stars. Furthermore, whatever the weird properties of the aether were, it was not a conductor of electricity. Vacuum is an exceedingly good insulator or dielectric. This makes it an obstacle to the e.m theory of light, as Maxwell realised. A moving e.m field propagating light is a current, but how can it flow in the vacuum? Ampere`s law which relates current to the magnetic field that it induces, did not allow a current to move onward in a dielectric where there was no conductor. It could only be made so by a purely mathematical modification. Maxwell performed this and then assumed that it must be physical and actually exist.

Professor Herbert Dingle in his book ‘Science at the Crossroads’, points this out; one of the few physicists to do so. I quote: “accordingly he (Maxell) assumed that this modified form was the actual physical law, but he was too conscious of the true relation between maths and physics not to be aware that this was quite unjustifiable unless there was an actual physical relation which was represented by his proposed equation, and since he knew of none, he made the assumption that what he called a “displacement current” could exist in a dielectric.

“Now a physical conductor can carry a current but a dielectric cannot, so this was quite inadmissible on observational grounds, but Maxwell assumed that a displacement current of electricity could occur in a dielectric which had some physical effects, like a current in a conductor ( so far as these were required by the equations). If that were so he could proceed to build up a general dynamical theory of the e.m field, so that it could drive itself forward. This was an electro-magnetic interpretation of light, and was so beautiful and comprehensive that he could not refrain from postulating the actual physical reality of his displacement current as a justification for his maths.”

This invention did not go unnoticed. Mathematics was supposed to be the servant of physics and not the inventor of physical realities in order to suit the maths.

Lord Kelvin remarked sniffily, “I want to understand light as well as I can without introducing things that I understand less”

And yet Maxwell`s equations worked wonderfully well and still do.

As Dingle concluded “experiment has more and more confirmed the deductions that were made from the theory, when the symbols in the equations were given certain physical meanings, while the justification giving these symbols these meanings eluded everyone.”

I support Maxwell even if he fudged to make it work. That has been done before in physics because you have to start somewhere. You have to put up temporary scaffolding, as it were, to get the edifice up, and then tidy up afterwards. Einstein was quite frank about it: “unless one sins against logic one generally gets nowhere. One cannot build a house or construct a bridge without using scaffolding which is not one of its basic parts”; (well that makes three of us in agreement).

We understand, more or less, how atoms interact and transfer energy, but how do they do it across space and time is something we have to invent as best we can, for we have to reconcile universal interaction with universal separation. This is another example of a dilemma that has occurred many times in the history of philosophy and science. How does the Universe operate when all its agencies are separated by the void? Maxwell`s invention of the displacement current enabled an alternation of e.m fields to maintain itself as it crossed space between emitter and receiver.

This is what we are obliged to assume in a Universe that is in continual extension, in order that the interactions between entities in the one universal event can connect across space and time. But there is no space and time in their interactions in the tota simul where the emitter and receiver are contiguous and instantly present to each other. There, the alternation of electric and magnetic actions occurs only once between contiguous electrons. This is why they appear to cross a vacuum without loss of energy, wavelength or frequency, and why the receiver is always in phase to receive it perfectly. While that interaction in the contiguity is occurring the cosmos is extensioning at c while remaining a unity.

It is why light waves act as if they were transverse waves in a solid. The emitting atom and the receiving atom are contiguous, just as the atoms of the Earth`s interior are contiguous and interact once as the wave of disturbance passes through them.

So there is abundant evidence that light acts across distance as a wave.

But there is abundant evidence that it acts across distance as a particle. Physicists in the early 20th century settled for a compromise view that light behaves both as particle and wave depending on how you measure it, but what it was in itself was a mystery. It seemed to have the potential to be both. This is to regard light as a thing having its own attributes, its own powers of action. The other way of regarding it is as a manifestation to us of the way the Universe works.

LIGHT IS INSTANTANEOUS.

There is abundant evidence that light is an instantaneous interaction between distant electrons, and relativity theory confirms that photons endure no distance or delay.

The riddle of what light is leads us to the heart of what the Universe is.

It is simultaneously closed up tota simul, and it is opened out into a spacious cosmos. It is both at the same time, not an alternation however rapid but a simultaneity.

As an extended cosmos, its underlying unity is shown by light continuously acting between everything. The information it gives is the ongoing sequence of the universal event as we see it.

That electrons in atoms act contiguously is shown by ‘radiation resistance’.

When electrons in radio transmission are accelerated along a wire, they will radiate away energy as radio waves. But they do not radiate as much energy as that which was expended in accelerating them. When you push electrons along a wire (this being an electric current) there is always resistance depending on the quality of the wire, but radiation resistance is extra to that. It occurs because the electrons must be interacting with something immediately, but what? It couldn`t be empty space, and how could it be interacting with electrons miles away? So they are said to be interacting with themselves, though how that can be possible if electrons have no structure has never been explained.

I argue that electrons interact instantly with distant electrons which are their receivers.

We also know that electrons emitting radiation, recoil in the direction exactly opposite to the destination of that radiation; but if light takes a long time to reach that destination, how does the electron ‘know’ the direction to recoil in?.

Light, which is agreed by all to be massless, is yet agreed to possess momentum so that it can exert radiation pressure on dust and gas in space. As momentum is mass times velocity by definition, how can something massless impart momentum to something else?

The answer is, that it can if light is not a thing that travels, but is the direct interaction of electrons in atoms in contiguity.

The invention of the aether and the dual nature of light are the latest episode in the centuries old attempt to understand how a Universe that is sundered apart can be united as if one.

THE NATURE OF THE VOID.

Parmenides in 400 BC could see the overwhelming reality of that which existed, and could not accept that it could be separated by that which did not exist at all. Reality for him was all One, and space was non-existent and not there. If people didn’t see it that way it was illusion and the true wisdom enabled us to see past it.

His contemporary Democritus saw it the other way round. Reality was Many, it was a world of ultimate irreducible atoms which in their interactions made the world we see, and all these atoms exist in a void which also exists. They were all in perpetual collisions which provided the unity.

It must be said that this view of things is more practical and closer to common sense than Parmenides extreme view, but no one has ever been able to answer the question of what the Void could be if it is empty. How can nothing exist, how can it do anything, how can it keep everything apart?

The Christian view which succeeded classical philosophy was that God made the Universe and set it as we see it, and matter and space are all His making and that is that. All is One in God, past present and future, but spread out as we see it. Newton who was a deeply religious Deist, had no doubt that the Universe was created and set in order and perfect balance, and could not collapse together under gravity. The space in which all the stars were set was, in some way, the presence of God – the ‘sensorium of God’ as he put it - wherein the laws of nature reigned. It followed from this that space and time had to be absolute, being God given. This meant that space was the absolute, immovable and universal background at rest relative to everything that moved. Against this background at rest, the laws of motion could be set. This, later on, became synonymous with the aether. If the aether was motionless then the motions of bodies could be compared with it and then with one another. This needed to be proved.

In 1887 Michelson and Morley performed a conclusive experiment. If space itself - the aether – really was motionless and therefore the standard of rest for all things, then, as the Earth revolves about the Sun, it will be constantly changing its direction relative to the aether. As that is the medium in which light propagates then there will be times when the aether will be carrying light-waves towards us as the Earth advances through it, and that should increase the speed of light as we receive it by a further 30 km per second. It would be as if there were an aether wind blowing past the Earth.

However, despite using exceedingly accurate interferometers, and a year`s work doing it over and over in every way they could think of, they could find no evidence at all that light arrived at different speeds as the Earth moved relative to the aether that carried the light. Either there was no aether, and it was after all a weird chimera of a concept, or else there was an aether but we could never detect it.

After this experiment, sometimes called the most important experiment that never found anything, George Fitzgerald and Konrad Lorentz independently suggested that bodies contract in the line of motion and the oscillations of their atoms slow down when they are moving relative to the motionless aether. Consequently they are shortened in length and their oscillations slowed down. This is really a mechanical explanation for relativistic effects. This would explain the failure of the Michelson Morley experiment, because every instrument they used would foreshorten in the direction of motion. Distances between two connected bodies moving together, such as the mirrors of the interferometer would likewise shorten in the direction of motion since the forward ends of the instrument would be pushed back by the aether wind. The amount of foreshortening would increase as the pressure of the wind increased with it. At ordinary speeds such as those of planets and stars, the Fitzgerald Lorentz contraction is extremely small. Earth moves at 30km per second, only one ten thousandth of the speed of light and using the Lorentz formula gives a contraction, which even for the 12000 km diameter of our planet is only 62 metres. But we can`t measure this even in principle as long as we remain on Earth, for all the instruments we could use would share in the Earth`s motion and share in its foreshortening. Nature, it would seem, has an aether but will not let us see it.

“but I was thinking of a plan to dye my whiskers green, and use a fan so large that they could not be seen”.

RELATIVITY THEORY.

There have been several attempts to find experimental evidence for relativistic fore-shortening of size but with no success.

The other relativistic effect is mass increase. Using the Lorentz formula it is barely measurable at ordinary speeds, but at half of light speed mass increases by 15% and at seven eighths it has doubled. At the speed of light the mass of the speeding particle is infinite – obviously a speed limit. As their mass increases, periodic actions within atoms and molecules would slow down due to the inertia of their increased mass, and at c would stop – another speed limit.

Lorentz` theory is called Lorentzian relativity, but it is really an aether theory, for he accepted the aether as the unmoving background to the Universe which by its opposition to motions compressed atoms and produced relativistic effects.

Einstein approached the problem from a different angle. Light moves as an alternation of electric and magnetic fields moving through space at c, he was founding his thinking on Maxwell`s equations which require that light must travel across space.

Einstein could ask questions no one had ever thought of. Suppose he was travelling at the same speed as a ray of light, riding on top of the wave, as it were; what would he see? The physics required that the e.m fields would alternate as they travelled, but to Einstein actually on the wave, it would not be seen to be alternating because it would not be going past him, so it should be motionless, but if it were motionless it would not be alternating and it wouldn’t be light. At the speed of light what was light actually doing?

He asked another question. If he rode on the light wave while holding a mirror before his face, would he see his face? Presumably not, for if he was moving with the light, the light could not pass him to reach the mirror and reflect back to him.

All this reasoning assumes that light is waves alternating in a motionless medium, but supposing there was no aether, suppose light travels at c relative to everything, relative to his face, his mirror or to an observer on the ground. Then as he travelled at c he would see his face and his mirror and so would any observer anywhere whatever their speed.

But that produces a paradox, for if light is leaving Einstein`s face at c as it must do, then to an observer on the ground past whom Einstein is moving at c, he will see the light leaving Einstein`s face at twice c, but light cannot move at more than c , as Maxwell`s equations decree. No observer can ever see light exceeding c whether it is an observer standing on the ground or Einstein riding on the light wave. The conundrum is how can light be moving at the same speed for everyone regardless of their own speed?

Speed is distance divided by time. Einstein then argued that as light speed has to be the same for all observers whatever their speed, therefore the distances and times would have to be different for different observers, and for different things moving at different speeds. If light speed is unalterable, then everything else must alter to fit in with it.

I argue that this tangled up and contradictory chain of reasoning is wrong on several counts.

Firstly: light does not cross space and cannot be seen doing so, it can only be received.

Secondly: when Einstein was riding on the light wave he was no longer in extension, he was motionless with emitter and receiver together in the contiguity.

Thirdly: it is not light that has a speed, it is the Universe that extensions at c, establishing a cosmos in space and time.

Einstein got it the wrong way round; it is the Universe that acts at c relative to all thigs and causes distance and time.

Einstein did not discover the relativistic effects of time dilation, length contraction and mass increase, for Lorentz had proposed them several years earlier and he had relied on the stationary aether to explain them. Einstein relied on the fixed speed of light in a vacuum to explain these effects, and although he accepted the Lorentz formulae and used them, there was no place for the aether in his explanation.

In his famous 1905 paper, he wrote: “the unsuccessful attempt to discover any motion of the Earth relative to the light medium suggests that the phenomena of electro-dynamics (light) as well as of mechanics (motions) possesses no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest and also introduces another postulate – namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a single consistent theory of the electro-dynamics of moving bodies based on Maxell`s theory of stationary bodies. The introduction of a lumeniferous aether will prove to be superfluous, in as much as the view, here to be developed, will not require an absolutely stationary space provided with special properties.”

Although Einstein`s theory is called Relativity, it should really be called the theory of Invariance, for it is founded on the invariant speed of light, the same for everything regardless of their motions.

This has led to confusion about the speed of gravity, which is undoubtedly instant, because gravity is the action of the whole Universe, whereas light is a specific local interaction between just two atoms. Einstein argued that if everyone is to see the same speed of light, then the time elapsed between events has to alter to take account of the speed of the observers receiving that light. This can mean that differently moving observers will see events in a different sequence so that they are not simultaneous for both.

To make sense of this we have to assume that spatial extension and duration of events changes with speed. To give easy to grasp examples of these arcana involves flights into science fiction and fantasy.

A spaceship is going at 99% c while observers on Earth are watching It flashing by, Experiments are being carried out on board to show that what is simultaneous for the crew is not so for those on Earth. Plenty of text books will show you pictures and cartoons and diagrams. I won`t; because in my opinion discussing spaceships at such speeds is as irrelevant as arguing about the physics of Aladdin`s magic lamp. The same textbooks will have already explained the huge mass increase at such speeds, so trillion ton spaceships don’t go anywhere. The point they make with such labour is that we can`t share the same moment if we are separated by very high speed. But we can never share a simultaneous moment anyway if we are all at our own unique standpoints receiving our own unique eventa.

The physicist and colleague of Einstein, David Bohn, once asked, “suppose you on Earth ask your friend on Mars `what is happening now`? Because of the time needed for the signal to reach Mars and the answer to return to Earth, the reply will not come for ten minutes or more. By the time the answer is received, the information will refer, not to what is happening now but to what was happening when the signal left Mars. So we cannot know what is happening now on Mars.”

There is no common `now` throughout the cosmos. Every standpoint has its own now and they cannot be linked faster than light for specific signals. This is not a problem while we all dwell on Earth well within one tenth of alight second of each other. Even so, we can see lack of simultaneity when we watch TV reporters on the other side of the world telling us the news relayed by satellites thousands of miles out in space. When they are asked a question you can see up to two seconds delay in their reply. In the case of spacecraft visiting distant planets the delay can take hours and they have to be designed to function without moment by moment instructions. Each one is in its own standpoint with its own now.

The relativistic effects are realities observed and measured in particle accelerators at CERN and in cosmic particles speeding in from deep space at over 99% c. Their mass is definitely increased and the duration of their decay times, as we measure them as stationary observers, is considerably lengthened. What causes these effects? Lorentz thought it was aether compression, but Einstein abandoned the whole idea of an aether. This came as a welcome relief to most scientists, and well within a generation had been abandoned by all, but that did not solve all the problems.

Einstein confirmed the constant speed of light, he accepted relativistic effects, but he left relativity theory hanging unsupported by any absolute frame of reference. He gave no explanation of how the e.m waves could propagate across a void, and it is still unexplained. He gave no physical reason for the relativistic effects at near light speed. For him, the reasons for them lay in the maths of the Lorentz formulae, while the fixed speed of light lay in the maths of Maxwell`s equations.

If there is no fixed background to the Universe against which we can measure and compare speeds, then one can only compare them with those of other bodies all moving in their own way and all with speeds relative to each other. That principle of universal relativity of speeds is one of three central tenets of Einstein`s theory, which is why it is called Relativity.

The speed of light in vacuo is always a constant whatever the speed of emitter or receiver. In order to maintain that invariance, their speeds are added in such a way that the sum of them never exceeds c; (there is a formula for this). No physical experiment has yet found any evidence that violates this limit. However, light can be slowed down if it passes through gas liquid or transparent solids, in these the light is being relayed innumerable times by the atoms, each taking a tiny length of time and may be reducing the frequency as well. But in between the atoms light must move at c.

There is evidence for mass increase and slowing of decay times at near light speed, but no evidence has been found for contraction in length. In any case it is only particles and small nuclei that can be accelerated to near c, and as they have scarcely any size or shape, they do not show contraction. For larger structures the question is only academic as they can`t approach c because of escalating mass increase.

At a more general level, how do you define high speeds, what do you compare them with if there is no fixed background? In default of the Universe providing one we have to define a standard of rest ourselves, agree on it, and measure all speeds relative to it. This is easy when we are all on the surface of the Earth; the ground under our feet becomes the obvious standard of rest for cars and trains and planes and everything that creeps and crawls. But this is only a human convention; if you want to be a stickler for relativity, it is open to anyone to proclaim himself to be at rest and everything else to be moving relative to him, for nature provides no final static background to contradict him.

Consider the situation of a train rattling through a station at a hundred miles an hour. As far as special relativity is concerned the passenger on the train and the porter on the platform have the same right as the other to claim to be at rest and it is the other who is moving past. “Excuse me but does Manchester stop at this train?”

This situation is often stated or implied in the textbooks though usually for ships out in space where there are no landmarks and it doesn’t seem so ridiculous. But the theory is not confined to space, it applies to everything moving. This is theory in the abstract as the maths is in the abstract. Theory tells us we are free to choose, because the theory hangs unsupported by any absolute background, no absolute floor to the Universe.

Here on Earth we do base our coordinate system on the Earth`s surface to suit our convenience. In studying the motions of the planets it is better to consider the Sun to be at rest rather than the Earth. In studying the Galaxy we use a system of galactic latitude and longitude and poles, with the centre of the Galaxy at rest. In a Universe where nothing stands still we can choose our reference frame, but if we are seeking an absolute frame of reference, we need to know how the Universe functions.

Following the abandonment of the aether, special relativity has nothing to relate to, (rather ironic that.) and Einstein`s basic assumption then follows: all motions must be considered relative to some object or system arbitrarily chosen by us. All motion is taken as relative motion in a Universe where everything is in motion. This is the core concept.

Now this would produce no serious problems if there were no relativistic effects, but since there are, and no aether to explain them, what is their cause?

This gap within special relativity has never been filled. All the motions that cause these physical effects are all relative to one another, yet some of these motions must be different if they cause real effects. Or are we to say that they are not real but differ from observer to observer? That they only exist while we are at different speeds but as soon as we match speeds and slow down, our measurements will show they have gone like an optical illusion? But common sense enters in here. If atomic oscillations in the equipment on spacecraft are slowed down, this must affect clocks and timers and that must have a cumulative effect on the duration of time registered on those clocks. So when these craft are brought together there should be a permanent record of relativistic effects on the clocks, and comparing them should show which ship has the most slowed down clock. Also, because the mass of the ship increases, this makes it more expensive in fuel to increase speed and that difference must show in fuel consumption.

To leave science fiction and return to earthly affairs, experiments with exceedingly accurate caesium atomic clocks in orbiting satellites above the Earth have proved that they do slow down relative to similar clocks on the ground. Although the speed difference is only a few miles per second, the clocks are sensitive enough to show the difference. But what causes it? Einstein never offered an explanation, he seemed to have considered it to be the way Nature worked and the maths proved it. This is the way it has been viewed ever since. The maths is there but not the physics, and it all hangs in the void unsupported.

Mathematics for over 300 years has had enormous success and esteem among scientists. As a language in which to express and analyse scientific findings, it has been so productive that the idea has crept in that whatever it says must be true. A physical hypothesis is necessarily sound if it has a mathematical argument to back it up.

To quote Dingle again:

“But mathematical truths are far more general than physical truths, the symbols that compose a mathematical expression may, with equal mathematical correctness correspond to both what is observable and that which is purely imaginary or even unimaginable. Mathematical solutions offer more than one answer. Quadratic equations often give a positive and a negative answer; we discard the one that is not in accord with our experience and keep the other. The maths, in itself, cannot distinguish them. We do it by stepping beyond maths into human worldly experience, by reasoning outside maths. “

THE QUEST OF HERBERT DINGLE.

Herbert Dingle was an eminent British physicist and an expert on relativity theory; he used to provide the article on it for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his book `Science at the Crossroads` 1972 he recounts how he came to see that the theory he had taught and promoted was flawed and incomplete. He went about the scientific establishment in Britain in the 1960s and 70s trying to find anyone who would agree with him but without success, rather like Diogenes with his lantern looking for an honest man in Athens. He became quite bitter and critical about the state of science, that it had allowed the mathematicians to lead and dominate physics, and that it was too deferential to high authorities like Einstein, and was not prepared to be led by observation and physical evidence as it should be. He challenged the scientific authorities of his day to answer one simple question about special relativity, which he thought showed up its weakness.

His question was: “according to relativity theory, if you have two exactly similar clocks A and B, and one is moving with respect to the other, they must work at different rates, which must mean that one works more slowly than the other. But the theory also requires that we cannot distinguish which clock is the moving one. It is equally true to say that A rests while B moves and that B rests while A moves. The question therefore arises, how does one determine consistently with the theory, which clock works the more slowly? Unless the question is answerable the theory unavoidably requires that A works more slowly than B, and B works more slowly than A. A theory that requires an impossibility cannot be true.”

Dingle could never get a plain answer to his question. Of those who replied to his letters, it is extraordinary how many physicists, astronomers and philosophers confessed that they could not oblige him with an answer because they had never really understood relativity theory, but had always assumed that it must be true because the mathematicians said so and Einstein was a genius.

He engaged in persistent acrimonious correspondence in the journal Nature, The Times and the Listener, but he never got a satisfactory answer. It is evident that it cost him his reputation and the scientific community came to regard him as a bit of crank and a nuisance.

He wrote personally to many of his fellow scientists. It is hard to believe that someone as learned as Sir Julian Huxley FRS, who used to be a member of the BBC Brains Trust program should reply: “I feel I really cannot intervene in this matter. I am so unmathematical that I cannot begin to understand your preprints, and I have never tried to follow the theory of relativity because I knew I could not.”

Dame Professor Kathlene Lonsdale of University College, London confessed that she had never been able to make sense of it as a student or since, but had put it down to her own incompetence. “It interested me so little that I forgot it as quickly as possible. The whole of Einstein`s theory just seems esoteric nonsense as far as am concerned. My mind simply does not care whether clocks go at the same rate or whether they don’t, and it refuses to work when I try to make sense of it.”

(I wonder how many feel the same way today).

Dingle said that the experimental scientists with almost complete unanimity replied that they did not understand the theory at all, although they used it in their experiments. Some regarded it as nonsense but took it to be true none the less because their experiments depended on relativistic effects. If they were using it and needing it, it showed that the relativistic effects were real but the theory explaining them was incomplete. They assumed that it was understood by the mathematicians, and therefore all questions should be referred to them.

The mathematician J L Synge wrote back saying “I cast my vote for the special theory and the abandonment of Dingle`s concept of clocks, because the latter is equivalent to Newton`s concept of absolute time, and relativistic physics appears to me to represent Nature more closely than Newtonian physics does.”

In other words no one wants to go back to Newton`s absolute space and time, but Synge did not answer Dingles question or explain why Einstein`s view of the Universe was better than Newton`s.

No one ever did answer Dingles question. Dingle concluded that experiments settling this problem were not possible then - “but surely one does not need an experiment to prove that one clock cannot at the same time work both faster and slower than another? How is it possible that such an obvious absurdity should not only ever have been believed but should have been maintained and made the basis of the whole of modern physics for a century?”

Since then, whole fleets of space satellites have been put into orbit bearing accurate clocks—the GPS system in particular – and they all use the surface of the Earth as their common reference of rest as an agreed convention. No one bothers their head about any alternative reference of rest. All these clocks show relativistic effects depending on their speeds, but they can all be compared to clocks on the ground and reset to agree. It works fine, and if we ever manage to establish stations on the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Ganymede, we can easily co-ordinate clocks and make allowance for signal delays, for we know how all the planets and moons move, and their distances, and the speed of light. The whole Solar System is only a light day in radius and it can all be referred to the Earth. We can always make practical arrangements to suit our needs, but it doesn’t solve the problem of what ultimately causes the relativistic effects. What does a high speed body come up against that a body at rest on Earth does not?

As clocks actually are slowed down, what about human beings moving fast? This brings us to the well-known and much discussed twin paradox.

One twin stays at home, the other travels out to the variable star Algol 100 light years distant (as we measure distances from Earth) in a space ship that can reach 95% of c, and can do the journey in 105 yrs as we see it from Earth. Astronomers on Earth can track the ship`s signals all the way to Algol.

Because of relativistic effects, the outward journey for the ship and crew is only 32 years. Algol of course is still 100 light years away for observers on Earth. If the ship is sending signals back to Earth, now long do those signals take? Will the ship on its return journey be overtaking those signals? Is it the case that the twin who boldly went will arrive home after 64 years of his lifetime and find 210 years passed on Earth? So many paradoxes involved in a fiction. Nothing larger than an atom can get anywhere near the speed of light. It only concerns high speed particles, and they definitely take less time to cross space. An electron travelling from here to Algol at 95% c would take 32years, and this is because the distance to Algol for that electron is reduced in its forward direction and only for it and nothing else. This is hard to accept if you think of space as static and only a background for the motions of bodies.

THE NATURE OF SPACE.

I argue that space is not static; it is being created continually by the Act of the Universe which is extensioning and individualising. It is a dynamic activity of constant extensioning out of the unity of the Universe. Because there is a constant balancing going on, there is nothing anywhere that is absolutely at rest, and nothing larger than dust can move at more than a few hundred km per second and relativistic effects are negligible. This provides a `floor` to the cosmos of continual slow motions all relative to each other but set in an extensioning at c that is the absolute background and the cause of mass increase and distance reduction as particles approach c. Talk of spaceships moving at near light speed, which is the speed of extension, is fiction. If it were possible, the human crew would not survive the mass increase; the increased mass of all their atoms and molecules would slow down their biochemistry due to increased inertia and seriously alter the molecular interactions of their enzymes and proteins and all their physiology and neurology. I venture to guess that even 1% of c would be fatal.

Particles and the structures that they form are continually being created and are being placed in their standpoints. What relativistic speed alters is their relationship to extensioning at c. Space is a dynamic act. As you look around you at distances and dimensions they are coming into existence as you look because the Universe is extensioning at c. It is not a movement that is going anywhere, it is the act of creation and it places all things in their standpoints, and that placing at c endows them with mass continually, and that is their rest mass. It is not a motion it is just being placed into the cosmos, so it isn’t a motion in the cosmos among other bodies. But when they are moved by the forces in the cosmos, that motion is additional to extension at c, and their mass is increased. Mass is the result of being placed into the cosmos continually. Mass increases as the moving body adds its own individual speed to the constant of extension.

Then there is another relativistic effect that alters a moving body`s spatial relationship to the rest of the cosmos. What it obtains from its placement at c gives it locality and relative distances and directions from other bodies. An increase in its individual speed (in addition to its placement at c) will alter its placement in the cosmos in relation to other bodies, and will reduce distance to its destination in its forward direction only. This only affects particles t0 any measurable degree. Individual relativistic speed alters the relationship to extensioning which has given rest mass and spatial relationship to the particle. So mass increases beyond rest mass, and its spatial relation in the cosmos alters along its direction of motion. Only the particle is affected in its individual relation to the forces creating the cosmos.

Very fast moving cosmic particles coming in from interstellar space collide with atoms in our upper atmosphere and disintegrate them. A common product is very high speed Muons, which are a heavy form of electron. Muons are unstable and break down to electrons or positrons and several neutrinos, in two millionths of a second. This is not supposed to be long enough to enable them to reach the surface where our instruments can detect them, but they do, and in large numbers, before they can decay.

The orthodox explanation is that time duration within the muon is lengthened, but that does not provide a physical cause.

I argue that the physical cause is reduction in distance along the direction of motion as its acceleration approaches the constant of extension c. That reduction intensifies as speed increases until it is almost zero, (but can never reach that limit because of escalating mass increase.) For the incoming muon the distance to the surface reduces to at least one ninth.

To summarise: my theory proposes a dynamic Universe which balances outward extensioning with inward uniting, and establishes bodies in slow moving orbits and gives the cosmos a slow motion floor where nothing is still. A reference of rest can always be agreed on, and all speeds can be related to the constant of extension. That dynamic offers an explanation for relativistic effects.

Particles actualising out of the vacuum into the cosmos attain rest mass and locality and these can alter with increased individual speed from local causes. Their speeds are added to the constant of extension thereby increasing their mass and altering their placement in the direction of motion. Electrons, positrons and protons definitely have reduction of distance and it is vital to the operation of the cosmos.

As will be explained in a later chapter, the cosmos is powered by electrical and magnetic forces 39 orders of ten more powerful than gravity. Only these forces can accelerate particles close to c, and enable them to move through interstellar space in vast currents gathering material for stars, and powering their radiance and imparting rotation. The galaxies of stars act as `loads` upon the immense electrical potential of the cosmic vacuum which we know is teeming with an immensity of potential electrons and positrons. Charged particles in these currents moving at near c can cross galactic and interstellar space, not in millions of years, as it seems to us on a slow planet, but for them it is just a few years or even less, and this enables galaxies to operate as wholes or instantaneities.

One of the strange features about this Universe is how empty it seems to be.

It is estimated that the proportion of space to matter is 1027to one, and this is not just the space between the stars but the space within every atom and molecule. As I have already argued, the space is dynamic, acting to extend apart the unity of the universe, but why so much of it? If it wasn’t for the relativistic distance reduction the cosmos wouldn’t work. The vast spaces are the realm of the vast forces that create and power galaxies and stars. The near light speed of the particles involved in these forces and currents reduces the space for them, and so the emptiness is a human opinion not the reality they exist in.

THE MANY AND THE ONE.

The Universe is One-Many, Many-One.

Considered as One it is the Universe; considered as Many it is the cosmos, and because they are as one, they are the Universal Cosmos. There is nothing beyond. The cosmos is as we observe it from within; the Universe is as we think of it as a whole with our intellect.

The activities of the cosmos generate all possibility, all self- generated from within it, and as it does so it makes further possibilities possible. The universal cosmos draws on itself. It is eternal and infinite and there is nothing else.

The universal cosmos is Many and One; extensioning and yet contiguous; in creation and yet perfect. These are not contraries. The cosmos is obviously many and it is plainly one with abundant evidence for its unity. One and many are complementary like left and right.

There can be no oneness unless there is a manyness for it to be a oneness. Otherwise how could we exist within a multitudinous cosmos which was not a coherent functioning whole?

Living organisms are unities of many parts which act as instantaneities; they reflect what the cosmos is; many-one.

The tension of gravity and inertia shows nature attracting into unity and remaining separated. We also see it in the attraction and repulsion of charged particles.

One and many are continually in a dynamic balancing tension. The One is uniting, the many are remaining apart. The One pulls the many together on the large scale into one cosmos and on the small scale pulls all individual particles together into atomic structures. The many hold the actions apart in extended structures, whether they are atoms or galaxies, and holds all the structures of the cosmos apart. This means that the many extends the One apart into universal space. The dynamic tension of One and many is creation - the activity of Nature –which we measure as energy at work.

The many and the One work together to bind actions into increasingly complex structures. The universal space is the One set apart by the many, while the many are bound together as the universal cosmos in a network of light by the One.

The cosmos creates itself, and through its own activities creates its own possibilities by which it self-creates.

The contiguity we infer from the way light behaves does not mean a cosmos of total contiguity. It is because we can`t see it as a whole and at an instant but only event by event that we must see a cosmos of momentary contiguities in a universal space. Those momentary contiguities for us are the reception of light bringing our eventa.

This is another aspect of many and One, together and apart. A manyness setting itself apart within the contiguity of the One, a limitless universal space united in a web of light.

But in the contiguity where emitters and receivers are not separated it is their relevance to each other that matters. Spatial distance translates into relevance in the contiguity, and as distances in space increase, relevance in the contiguity reduces. In other words, as distances increase, the contiguity of receivers and emitters relevant to each other diminishes. This is the inverse square law as it applies in the contiguity.

How do the One and many coexist?

In an infinite cosmos, we have to assume an infinity of emitters and receivers relevant to each standpoint, and such an infinity of radiation would cause their destruction. (Olber`s law). But we know that the cosmos is increasing as creation generates more galaxies, and that the balance of space and matter is preserved. Consequently each standpoint has a radiation horizon which keeps its reception of radiation at a finite level.

The universal cosmos as a whole increases to accommodate the growth of the galaxies. Infinity can increase infinitely and remain infinite. Its increase is internal to itself not an expansion into a ’space’ around it. It is meaningless to talk of the size of the infinite, it just accommodates to its creativeness. In an infinity there is no reference point, no beginning or end or centre; only finite standpoints can have them relative to each other.

The universal accommodation to growth causes the energy of distant radiation to reduce exponentially to zero in relation to any one standpoint. This cosmic expansion is a movement of emitters away from any receiver, and this movement can be considered to register in the contiguity as a reduction of relevance.

All the motions of the cosmos are in the contiguity Atoms in motion relative to each other will be altering their relationships in the contiguity, as well as in space where we see them. Cosmic redshifting shows that the atoms contiguous to each other are altering their relation to each other as they are interacting in the contiguity, and this reduces the energy of the interaction.

The falling electron in the atom emitting, and the rising electron in the atom receiving, are not fully contiguous, so their full energies cannot be exchanged. At the limit of cosmic redshift the two atoms moving apart in space do not coincide in the contiguity and cannot interact. That is the horizon for the particular cosmos of every receiver and saves them from destruction.

THE UNIVERSAL LOGIC.

I argue that there is a universal reconciliation of all actions according to a universal logic. We understand this as natural law, logic, mathematical reasoning, and our natural languages, and even common sense uses it. As long as our thinking is in accord with it we are approaching truth and morality and we remain sane.

In the physical inorganic realm the universal logic reigns supreme. The logic of creation draws fundamental actions into unitary structures standing apart in a space where the many exist within the One.

Creation is open ended. What it creates makes further creation possible. Once the fundamental actions are drawn from the One by the many, they can form nucleons and then atoms and molecules and with each step in the creative process further possibilities appear. The logic leading on to the reconciliation draws creation on ward. Seen as a whole, there is no randomness or chance; but we do not fully understand the logic, nor can we hope to comprehend the reconciliation. For us, living within creation as it is occurring, we see a bewildering mixture of inexorable logic and the unpredictable frolic of events.

The universal cosmos is eternal and infinite and never began; it is an unbroken circle of action, - an OROBOROS.

It is self-creating and all its possibilities are from within itself.

For instance; the atoms of the ninety stable elements interact to form a vast number of compounds, and they can interact with each other to form enormously more. A seemingly endless progression of possibilities generated from the creative process directed by the logic that defines what is possible and what is not.

There is one logic for all particles, atoms and molecules, but as they go on acting they increase in their variety.

Two fundamental actions – attraction and repulsion actualise as electrons and positrons which then coalesce as the three constituents of the atom. From those three the 92 stable elements are built up and they can combine into a vast array of different molecules.

I use the word `vast` with care.

In an infinite Universe there are infinite quantities set one within another. For example: the totality of all number is infinite and unlimited, yet the totality of even numbers or of odd numbers is unlimited yet they are obviously subsets of the totality of number. I define such unlimited subsets as immensities to distinguish them from the infinite.

In the infinite universal cosmos the number of galaxies, or the number of stars or the number of dust grains, are all different immensities. But the number of stars in our own observable cosmos is only vast, for they could in principle be counted to an end, and the same goes for all the sand grains on all the beaches of the Earth. The word infinite is often used carelessly and applied to the vast. The number of different molecules would be vast but not immense because the base for them is 92 not infinity.

The number of different molecules that nature can form depends on the conditions of interstellar dust, or the interiors of stars, or the planetary surfaces, oceans and atmospheres. This means there will be many different sets of molecules which will define the planetary environments and the biological molecules they can sustain. The one logic expands into many environments with different biochemistries and evolutions. Creation never ceases.

The cosmos grows as its stars and galaxies multiply, so it grows in complexity as creation produces greater and greater structures of actions. Each of them is a one-many, an instantaneity.

We are in the midst of the Act of creation and our lifetime is our experience of it. For us it is in process with the building work still going on. We must experience it as we land in the midst of it and endure it for a lifetime. Our share of the Act of creation is our eventum, our moment of creation in which we can participate as co-creators.

There is nothing except the Universe, so all that is possible emerges from its activities; it is self-creative. All of possibility is involved, but only what can be reconciled into order, coherence, rationality and the Good will endure.

Although we are finite creatures existing in time and space within the cosmos, we also live within the eternal Reconciliation all perfect. We glimpse this in the perfect operation of the physical world. (That it may inconvenience or injure us does not alter its intrinsic perfection).

We glimpse the Reconciliation in the impenetrableness of the past, which constitutes the present state of our world for us. It continually closes up behind us complete and unalterable. What we intelligent creatures do which is not in accord with the Reconciliation is corrected either in this world or the next.

TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER TWO.

ABOUT TIME LIGHT GRAVITY AND SPACE.

THE NATURE OF TIME 62

THE TOTALITY OF NUMBERS 65

STANDPOINT AND EVENTUM 67

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIMENSION 69

THE SPEED OF LIGHT 70

THE PHOTON DOES NOT TRAVEL 72

THE COSMOS IS EXTENSIONING 74

RCONCILIATION INTO ONE COSMOS 76

CONSOLIDATION INTO UNITY 79

THE EXPANSION OF THE COSMOS 81

POSSIBILITY AND FREEDOM 87

GRAVITY 88

THE SPEED OF GRAVITY 91

THE LAWS OF MOTION 94

THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT 97

THE AETHER 100

LIGHT IS INSTANTANEOUS 103

THE NATURE OF THE VOID 104

RELATIVITY THEORY 106

THE QUEST OF HERBERT DINGLE 112

THE NATURE OF SPACE 115

THE MANY AND THE ONE 118

THE UNIVERSAL LOGIC. 121