Thursday 6 November 2008

Sloppy Philosophy

It's sloppy philosophisng I know, but I've been copying and pasting stuff together that I've unearthed online:

Astronomers have assembled the first definitive detection of a background infrared glow across the sky produced by dust warmed by all the stars that have existed since the beginning of time.For scientists, the discovery of this "fossil radiation" is akin to turning out all the lights in a bedroom only to find the walls, floor and ceiling aglow with an eerie luminescence.
http://www.spacetoday.org/DeepSpace/Universe/InfraredGlow.html


Background microwave radiation, a relic of the primordial big bang, invokes concepts of ''supersymmetry'' that attempt to explain ''the never-ending hum of the universal sounding board that permeates the universe,'' as the authors of ''Longing for the Harmonies'' express it.

And on the level of the infinitely small, physicists and astronomers training supersensitive detectors on a water-filled cavern 1,000 feet underground in a Michigan salt mine seek evidence for the decay of protons -a phenomenon that could help confirm the seminal theory of grand unification, which seeks to link all the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic forces of nature. This world of theory and experiment in physics is what Frank Wilczek, a distinguished physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his wife, the freelance writer Betsy Devine, describe in ''Longing for the Harmonies.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFD6123CF937A25751C0A96E948260


The present theory of the creation of the universe, the Big Bang Theory states that the universe is expanding. It is expanding in such a way that everything is moving away from everything else.
If you imagine a deflated balloon and you draw lots of dots on this balloon. When you blow the balloon up, the dots get further away from each other. If you imagine that each of these dots is a galaxy, this is what is happening to the universe.

There is another important effect which is matched with this balloon analogy. If you measure the size of the dots when the balloon is blown up the dots are much bigger suggesting that the galaxies are larger, which is true.

This process can be taken to even smaller scales. Imagine looking at a photon of light, which is a wave packet. If you drew this on to an inflated balloon and then blew it up, what happens? The length of the wave increases which means that the wavelength increases, which means that it shifts further to the infra-red side of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This results in all the photons that were released at the time of the last scattering being stretched to the infra-red side of the spectrum.

Back in time to just before the last scattering the gravitational instabilities were fluctuating as they had been for thousands of years before that. Each gravitational instability creates a force around it which means that to get out of the 'potential well' you have to expend energy.

The particles that are in this potential well oscillate as if they were stuck to either end of a spring. The greater the potential well (the more photon-baryon particles there are around them creating a greater gravitational force) the more tightly forced together the 'spring' between them is. This is effectively a sound wave. However, to oscillate in and out the particles need energy and expel energy in the form of photons.
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/submm/CMB1.html


Pranava means "Cosmic Sound"- Om - the sound that everything in the entire of existence makes if one hears it all at once in totality...

Mystics, when they have cleared their minds of all thought that preoccupies the mind, therefore preventing it from hearing this background hum of the universe, have traditionally indicated that it is beyond recounting, it is an indescribable experience.

They say that the verbalization "Om" comes the closest of all sounds to what this hum of the universe is.

Action is vibration - movement in time/ space/ thought - whatever dimensions or parameters of existence you perceive. Vibration is energy (hence the "prana" in "Pranava" we suspect), Vibration is light, vibration is heat, but for humans our sense perception can most easily see the vibratory nature of energy when it is in the form of sound because our hearing faculities can perceive sound to a frequency slow enough in vibration that we can begin to see (as the rate of vibration slows) it's transition into repeating oscillations of air (for all the dolphins reading this "air" does not apply- please substitute "water", thank you) in the range of vibratory rate of about 20 vibrations per second - where humans perceive the vibrating air transitioning from auditory experience to ( as the vibration is gradually slowed down) to tactile experience.

Stand with loose clothing a few inches from a subwoofer (don't have it too loud at your ears or you may not be able to hear anything externally afterwards) and have an oscillator ( on an analogue sythesizer or ...?) progressively go lower in frequency. When it gets down below 40 HZ it will become less audible but at below 20 HZ you will start to feel you loose clothing (remember that part- good for doing yoga afterwards too!)- move back and forth with the vibrations of the air from the subwoofer This will work only if all the sound system is capable of reproducing sounds this low (be carefully - it takes a lot of amplifier power and speaker capacity even at moderate volumes- much equipment is designed to not reproduce lower than 20 HZ.

So what's the point about sound being vibration?-
Well, if all action is vibration, and vibration in a certain spectrum of vibratory rate is discernable to the human as sound - then everything that exists, everything you do, everything you think - is part of OM. It is the fabric of the play of existence. Understand it (by direct thoughtless perception) and you understand the essence of your being.
http://www.pranava.com/pranava_whatis.html


In the 1970’s, scientists discovered the background radiation left from the big bang, and calculated it’s frequency. The universe, it seems, still reverberates with a note that, when put into our standard system, is between a B and a B flat. In 2003, scientists working with the Chandra x-ray observatory detected the deepest note ever found in the cosmos. It is a B-flat that is 57 or so octaves below piano tuning. I read online that the gyuto monks chant on this note, and a quick trip to youtube confirmed this for me.
http://people.tribe.net/wil/blog/cf6b8efd-9d1d-40a3-bfc1-241ec3187ebb


Each one of billions of nerve cells creates the precise amount of electricity that it uses to transfer its particular code. The nerve cells create the electrical signals that they use by sending sodium and potassium ions in and out of the cell wall at rates varying up to 1000 changes per second.In 1/1000 of a second, the cell changes from a negative charge to a positive charge and then back again. In this way, nerve cells "hum" with electricity.
http://www.creationdesign.org/english/codes.html


There is never any real silence; I think it was John Cage who, when visiting a sound-proofed, anechoic chamber, heard two distinct sounds: the technician later told him that what he had heard were the sound of his blood going round and the electric hum of his own brain.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2001/jan/12/artsfeatures

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