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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">dear colleagues, let me know what you think of this.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><div><p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNoSpacing" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.02em;"> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">This cosmos is an enigma wrapped in a mystery.<span> </span>Among other things, it is replete with
immaterial forces that have power over material things.<span> </span>Yes, immaterial forces.<span> </span>Forces you and I can’t see.<span> </span>What in the world do I mean?</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">At the very birth of the universe in a Big Bang 13.7 billion
years ago, the elementary particles to beat all elementary particles were
born.<span> </span>And they were born by the gazillions.<span> </span>In a truly random universe when a gazillion
things are slammed into existence in the same instant, there should be a gazillion
different kinds of those things.<span> </span>But
there weren’t.<span> </span>There were only thirty
six different kinds of quarks.<span> </span>Born all at
once, simultaneously, all across the face of this fresh stuff called time and
space.<span> </span>So this is not a random
universe.<span> </span>Not at all.<span> </span>It is regimented.<span> </span>It is constrained.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">How in the world could these regularities of quarks come to
be?<span> </span>What was keeping the number of quark
forms to such an astonishingly low number?<span>
</span>An immaterial disciplinarian.<span> </span>Not
a god.<span> </span>But a form-shaper behind what
Herman Melville called the pasteboard mask of material reality.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Those first quarks gathered in groups of three, driven by
something else immaterial—a communications, compulsion, and propulsion system
we call attraction and repulsion.<span> </span>And
where did these attraction and repulsion communiques operate?<span> </span>In the empty space between the quarks.<span> </span>And what did they consist of?<span> </span>Nothing.<span>
</span>No thing.<span> </span>They were made up of what
Albert Einstein called spooky action at a distance.<span> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Today’s particle physics has managed a workaround.<span> </span>It says that particles are held together by
something material, gluons.<span> </span>In other
words, every mystery comes down to a material particle.<span> </span>Please.<span>
</span>Give me a break.<span> </span>Haven’t they
heard of the immaterial force called gravity?</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">After the birth of elementary particles came the mass dance
of what science calls pressure waves, waves that crossed the face of the cosmos
like the waves that travel thousands of miles across the sea.<span> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Waves are far more mysterious than you might think.<span> </span>In the ocean, water molecules circle up and
down.<span> </span>When they circle up, they make the
peak of a wave.<span> </span>When they circle down,
they make a trough.<span> </span>And when they circle
back up, they make the peak of guess what?<span>
</span>Yet another<span> </span>wave. Yes, a wave
with another distinct identity. <span> </span>But
aside from rock and rolling in place, those water molecules do not do any
traveling.<span> </span>Yet something does travel. An
immaterial force grabbing hold of material things.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Let’s take it from the wave’s point of view.<span> </span>You are a wave moving across the face of the
Atlantic.<span> </span>You have a distinct identity.<span> </span>And yet every minute you are made up of a
different team of water molecules.<span> </span>You
are never made up of the same constituents from one instant to the next.<span> </span>You are literally nothing.<span> </span>You are no thing.<span> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">And yet you are real as real can be.<span> </span>You are so solid that when you come near the
shore of Maine, a good surfer can position his board on your back and ride
you.<span> </span>You are so solid that if I go out
to the very tip of a rocky outcrop in Maine to get a better glimpse of you and
I slip, you can smash me to smithereens.<span>
</span>Yet, remember, you are not the same team of water molecules from one
instant to the next.<span> </span>You are no
thing.<span> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">You are a pattern grabbing hold of one fistful of things
after another.<span> </span>You are a process.<span> </span>Switching its team of things from moment to
moment.<span> </span>Yet retaining an identity so
powerful it can kill me.<span> </span>So what are you?<span> </span>An immaterial procedure recruiting solid
material things.<span> </span>Yes, an immaterial procedure.<span> </span>An immaterial pattern.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Now let’s switch back to minutes after the birth of the
cosmos.<span> </span>You quarks have ganged together
in threes.<span> </span>One form of threesome makes a
proton.<span> </span>Another form of threesome makes
a neutron.<span> </span>In other words, from your threesomeness,
from your social gathering of three quarks, something immaterial arises, a
higher property that can’t be predicted from mere quarkness.<span> </span>It’s the ghostly identity we call proton or
neutron.<span> </span>And that emergent identity will
be the very essence of what we call material things.<span> </span>It’s material as hell.<span> </span>Yet, in a sense, it doesn’t exist.<span> </span>It is a strange higher personality summoned
from the nothingness by a trio of mere quarks.<span>
</span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">The higher personality of quark threesomes, like the wave,
is nothing.<span> </span>It is no thing.<span> </span>And yet that higher identity stamps itself
into being all over the universe.<span> </span>An
identical personality appearing everywhere at once.<span> </span>The strange identity of a proton or a
neutron.<span> </span>Where does that higher identity
come from?<span> </span>How does it come to be?<span> </span>It is yet another example of the material
power of immaterial things.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Cognitive scientist and literary theorist Bill Benzon
recalls an experience that helps explain the strange ghosts that are summoned
into existence by the social interaction of quark trios.<span> </span>In addition to his science, Benzon is a jazz
musician.<span> </span>He explains that when all four
members of his jazz quartet are grooving together, at a certain point something
higher arises, something with a personality all its own.<span> </span>It is a melody no individual is playing but that
all four musicians can hear.<span> </span>And instead
of performing to each other, these musical virtuosos now play to the melody
that no one of them is producing and that technically does not exist.<span> </span>Another instance of the material power of
immaterial things.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Which brings us back to another mystery of the early
universe. Ten thousand years after the big bang, the cosmos is a thick soup of
particles, particles in a bump-‘em car smash.<span>
</span>Moving at superspeed, colliding with others of their kind, ricocheting
off those others and smashing into yet more fast-moving neighbors.<span> </span></p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">Despite the explosive forces of those smash and bangs, the
particles participate in a common enterprise.<span>
</span>First they squeeze together.<span> </span>Then
they move apart.<span> </span>In the process they do
what the water molecules of the Atlantic will someday do.<span> </span>First they come together and make the peak of
one wave, then they pull apart and make a trough.<span> </span>Then they come together again and make the
peak of yet another wave.<span> </span>And those
waves cross the face of the cosmos like a sound vibration crossing the face of
a cymbal.<span> </span>They make one more thing that
does not exist—music.<span> </span>In fact, music in a
very low B flat.<span> </span>Fifty seven octaves
below middle C.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">And what is that music?<span>
</span>Another ghost-like reality bringing forth material things.<span> </span>Or being brought forth by them.<span> </span>Another hint at the power over matter of
immaterial things.</p>
<p class="ydpf835f16bMsoNormal">For those of us in science there is a lesson. <span> </span>Move beyond our obsession with particles.<span> </span>Move beyond our slavish focus on material
things.<span> </span>Move beyond the science that
insists that you can’t understand anything until you break it into bits.<span> </span>The time has come for science to look up, not
down.<span> </span>The time has come for science to
study the mystery of the ephemeral, the mystery of the transcendent, the
mystery of form without substance, the mystery of immaterial things.</p></div><br></div><div><br></div>
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On Friday, March 7, 2025 at 02:45:39 PM EST, Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky@gmail.com> wrote:
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<div><div id="ydp94c5b417yiv2106416695"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Dear colleagues,<div><br></div><div>The slides presented today at Lou Kauffman's talks on topology are uploaded to ResearchGate.</div><div><br></div><div>The DOI is: <span style="color:rgb(82,82,84);font-family:Inter, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;">10.13140/RG.2.2.14429.12003</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(82,82,84);font-family:Inter, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(82,82,84);font-family:Inter, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;">Karl</span></div></div></div>
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