Super Phaneron

Super Phaneron

I had one physics thought- perhaps a speculative or science fiction thought last night. Tyson was on national public radio and he seemed to relate a lot of the astronomy and other physics news that I posted links to in the last few blogs.


By Phaneron I mean the term much like Martin Gardner used it- an objective background- and yet it means that of the universe in the background that can be seen. My thought was to assume that what is perceived it the actual reality from some perspective (after all there seems so much confusion these days as to what is subjective and objective in the reality of this world.)

Tyson was describing Penrose's new concept of seeing beyond the big bang- and remarked it was more like a Hindu vision of cosmology. He tried to explain that We have to step outside the thin crepe plane of our galaxy to see its structure, or since the discovery of other galaxies out there we can see that the band of the milky way is such a disc.

But maybe, in some intelligible ultranscontinuum (higher than our small boundless but finite continuum, higher than perhaps the irreversible motions and direction of the transcontinuum) this phaneron, this what Tyson said amounted to a multiverse with the one we are in as one if its bubbles. But in the question as to if there is only a surface of things like on a black hole- he suggested that we cannot see beyond that surface and you would not survive the passing beyond the event horizon- but the mass has to go somewhere!

Now, in our simple pictures and geometric analogies to higher spaces of the natural dimensions- would not gazing into the WMAP sky be only our thin view obscured in our tree dimensions? Would not a multiverse give us perspective?

I do not agree with Him that we only see the past at some distance from us, across the room someone in a chair or at the dawn of light- from where one is in the perspective there is only zero time as the present.

Now it can be argued in a more general space and concept of time that once upon a time the universe was exactly like our perceptions of it, somewhere. Einstein imagined the whole universe as our Milky Way (which is enough actually for life to arise, entropy wise). Perhaps it was literally like that, and some ideas when the universe's galaxies expand apart perhaps beyond the source of light, our Milky Way may be evidently the only thing in the void of universe.

Of course the gods evolved likewise, there was once a Zeus and his antics, there were wars of the tribal volcano and fertility gods, there was Aton the one god the vision of the Pharaoh who had water on the brain and moved the capital of Aegypt deep into the desert heat of Sudan as it eased his head.

And the belt of he milky way was a belt and cloud, a ring world of gases, evidence of some former antics of creation and loving by the first few gods.

The Super Phaneron I suggest as a general term that as absurd this speculative fiction is that seems to describe some things, perhaps there is an intelligible unity to be found. When I told my Buddhist roommate there with three times as many stars discovered, so said Dyson, he said the number of stars were infinite. I said in a sense that is right if a fixed number of them or of particles were counted in each universe (but we do not know the shape of each one, how rigid and deterministic its extent, how relevant to the phaneron, perhaps as thin as a crepe and photon packet like as it spins or shifts or dances between the dimensions of super time.





* * *
You Were No Angel 7 ( Globe in the Magic Shop )

Minnie, there is no light, but I guess there is not pain. It has gone into the night along with gentle rain your drank from your rain barrel. You were alone those last few months but for your son the goon, and no one has seen him since he walked the streets. You always were his shadow moon

This morning one of my old songs came to mind; Minnie there is No Light which refers to what Hank Williams said to Minnie Pearl before he died of drugs and liquor in the back seat of a car on the way with her to play music. Of course I am thinking of this as it applies to the last post (where George is Eugene's Minnie). I am not sure it is easy to do both a physics and a literary project at the same time- usually poetry and numbers give me a well balanced perspective.

* * *

Ever since I was a child I have tried to make images of things around me- not the least of which was the Globe in the Magic Shop. George would drag me along her selling artificial flowers and crepe paper dressed Kewpie dolls to the sailors on leave from the Norfolk Navy Base.

George was an indulging god to Eugene, and she moved freely through the streets of Nickelodeon which is what Eugene called Norfolk, a magical place which had its own seven wonder of the world. The greatest one was the celestial Globe in the travel agent's window next to the shop of masks and magic tricks. Eugene would beg George to stop by it when they were making their rounds to the amusement park and theaters.

"What is wrong Eugene?"
"Grandma, I am afraid that you will die."
"Hwo, ho," she smiled, "that will be a very long time from now, don't worry about that."
"When were you born, grandma?"
" I wasn't born, I wasn't hatched...they say the buzzard shit me."

Somewhere in a cartoon of imagination Eugene saw the storks in flight and the buzzards harrying them.

Eugene gazed into the globe, he had already learned to draw most of the nations of the earth and the seas. He had tried to trace the continent on a sheet of paper from a ball. He asked once what held up the moon and was told a very long rope- many a night he tried to figure out where that rope was tied at the other end. He thought that the globe had all the stars and constellations but could not see how all of them could be put on a ball. Then, thinking of the string he had a vision of how it was done and he felt comfort in his solving the question on his own.

But to see the globe in the light of day, not in the fluorescent light, all the magical and fantastic figures were traced on it for the constellations in soft blues. Beyond the stars were the lesser gods and dragons, the lyres and vultures and eagles. And the great belt of milk that ringed the sky.

* * *