Introduction (continued)

The basic reason my books aren’t that popular with the alternate scientific community is, they stick to the subject matter. Nothing here about magical dates where humanity will be transformed, star children, extra-dimensional interchanges, visits to exotic worlds, saucer crashes, ancient mysticism, spiritual uplift, nothing in the line of philosophy. That’s not because I don’t mentally play with such subjects, it’s because the purpose of The Copernican Series is to relate the mechanical nature of the universe and the life that occupies it.
However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn quite a bit along the way, or let’s say, came to view the universe in a unique philosophical way. The glimmerings of this philosophy emerged vaguely writing the last four chapters of Atoms, Stars and Minds, chapters that outlined the structure of the mind, why we couldn’t physical identify it, but still allowed us to perceive reality. Parallel with writing the volumes of the series, I had been writing very long volumes of fiction in which I would test out some of the inevitable places that the single EP (I’m going to call the elementary particle with two properties the EP from now on) and field replacement took me. In those overly long books, I kept having the characters and situations explore the question of whether this mind, this structure created so that we could navigate reality, survived the physical entity that it occupied. After all, as we will see, it is just as durable as an atom.
While I finally put that discussion to rest for the simple reason that it belongs in the sphere of religious belief, working on the 2nd volume of the series, The Cooling Continuum, dealing with evolution, how life forms (a subject, not surprisingly, for which science has no answer but a lot of verbosity pretending it does), my entire viewpoint about the universe changed, and changed drastically.
I had already faced the problem about where the EPs came from without success, another parallel to science, which has no scientific explanation for the source of atoms so uses billions of incomprehensible images to cover its ignorance. But when it came down to the question of how matter formed, the EP and field replacement explained precisely how matter could form. This then showed the picture of a cycled universe. Matter forms, it combusts as in stars burn, planets ignite and then start to cool in space, all of this produces expanding electromagnetic emission fields made up of the same stuff that is combusting, those fields expand until they begin to break down into their individual EPs, and those EPs in turn recombine into matter.
Not only did the EP and field replacement show how matter formed, it showed how matter formed into galaxies that contained solar systems. Further, an examination of the expanding fields revealed how planets rotate and orbit as they move into the approximate plane of a star’s equator, all of which we will be covering in this book. When I was working on the book on evolution, I realized that life formed as a result of a planet's rotation in front of the sun. The Cooling Continuum turned out to be the longest book in the series simply because I was so amazed at how this worked and described it in excruciating detail.
But that wasn’t the revelation. Up until then, I viewed the universe darkly, the stretches of space deadly, I still thought science wasn’t totally wrong, and therefore life was a chance happening, although not so chancy that it didn’t fill the universe. But overall, I looked at things as running down, heading in one direction and one direction only, death and darkness.
Now I saw the universe as a continuous cycle. Not only was it a continuous cycle, it had produced an EP that was precisely designed to move the matter, once it was formed, in such a way that life was the inevitable result.
The universe wasn’t designed for darkness and death, it was designed to produce light and life!
In fact, because the cycle of the universe involved matter formation, and then matter ignition, producing electromagnetic emissions that both controlled the movement of the matter and, through its ability to move matter back toward the source of emissions so that all matter would eventually participate in the cycle, and because the movement of matter inevitably produced life, it seemed that the entire purpose of the universe is to produce life.
But to what end?
Life, like matter, comes into existence, it exists for a period of time (the definition of life developed by the EP and field replacement is the organization of atoms and molecules of atoms around electrical flows), and then the life dissipates (the electrical flows stop, and the atoms and molecules of atoms go somewhere else in the environment). What was the purpose of the cycle of matter formation and destruction if it just led to the formation of life that dissipated?
One of the early questions I faced, and to be sure, we all face this question at one time or another, was, where is the end of space? We can think until we get to the end of space and then there’s always something outside that. Most of us give up on the question for religious or philosophical beliefs, or even for absurd scientific conclusions, the universe is curved and therefore endless. But I have a philosophy that if I can’t find an answer to a question, I’m asking the wrong question, and here I was clearly asking the wrong question. I was asking what was outside of the universe instead of defining what the universe was. The universe was clearly matter in nothing. When it comes down to it, matter is all there really is, and that matter exists in the absence of matter, in space, in nothingness.
When I figured out how the mind worked, that in order for us to be able to navigate reality, we have to have a picture of reality in our recall in order to compare reality with recall, I started to review all the instances for which we have recall. When we see a falling object, we can’t see what is making it fall, so we have to make up something to put in our recall to compare with reality. Our religious systems are basically a shared recall of all those things for which we don’t have answer, where did we come from, where are we going, why is there evil in the world? In order to understand something, our minds need something in recall with which to compare with reality.
What can our minds compare, what can we put in our recall, to understand nothing, because that the absence of matter is and that’s what contains the matter we see as the universe? We can’t put “nothing” in our recall because nothing is just that, nothing, it doesn’t exist. We can't understand something for which we have no recall. Thus, we have to understand it as the opposite of something. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that the only thing that defines the nothing that is all around us is matter. If there were no matter, there would be simply nothing, and nothing is simply that, nothing.
This means that at some point, there must have been no matter and therefore nothing. With nothing, there’s no time and therefore all the time in the world for something to come into existence. We can never know how that something came into existence, reference the great religions of the world, but the fact is, it did, and it was the EP with the precise properties to produce field replacement and the universe as we measure it, going through apparently useless cycles producing apparently useless life.
But if there was, at one time, nothing, and now there one heck of a lot of particles making up matter that fills that nothing, then there must be two things that are obvious: First, there must be a way that the cycle of the universe, formation, ignition, dissipation back to formation, produces EPs and second, there must be an edge, an area where there starts to be no matter, and therefore an area that simply doesn’t exist, that is nothing. As the EPs increase, the area of nothingness defined by matter increases, and because nothing is just that, nothing, the process of the cycle creating EPs to increase the area of nothingness defined by matter can continue forever, and because, with nothing being nothing, there’s no end to the ability to define it with newly created particles.
A second thread developed in The Cooling Continuum as a result of my approach to the subject matter. Unlike Darwinists, and indeed, everyone else dealing with evolution, I didn’t approach evolution as a species process, but as a process of evolving characteristics. The first question I asked is, what characteristics do humans have and why do they have them?
Having worked with the mind’s operation, I realized that our main characteristic is that we are ambulatory, able to move from one place to another. This requires some sort of process by which we can form pictures of reality, store those pictures for later recall, then when we are confronted with reality, recalling those pictures for comparison. Why? So we can move safely in reality, not bump into trees or fall off cliffs. (It also required the mind operate in a way that can warn us when recall doesn’t agree with reality, but we’ll get into that later in the book.)
It didn’t take long for me to realize that evolution was actually a progressive process. We start out with non-ambulatory matter, matter that exists in existing electrical flows and can only survive within those existing electrical flows. The obvious example of non-ambulatory matter are trees. If a fire comes along, the trees are stuck in place, helpless to flee the inferno. They are also dependent on the food sources available at the location.
Ambulatory matter, the next state of evolution, involved the evolution of a mechanism that could sense the environment, in its simplest form the heat an amoeba senses to move away from, and then actually form a picture of the environment, allowing the animate matter to which the mechanism is attached to move purposively within the environment. Ambulatory matter can flee the forest fire and roam the environment looking for food sources.
The final phase of evolution is the development of sentience, which is the ability to produce a picture of reality when reality isn’t present, or even combines disparate elements of reality to produce an entirely new reality. Instead of digging holes in the ground for shelter, we, with our sentience, can create shelters, build houses against the elements, control our food supply and, if necessary, put out the forest fire.
Having this progression in mind for several years, it began to dawn on me that each stage of evolution increased the survivability of the animate matter involved, which is the animate matter that came into existence on this particular planet. That gave evolution a purpose, to increase the survivability of life, to extend its chances of existence. When put up against the cycle of the universe, where within each individual cycle (there are untold numbers of cycles occurring simultaneously), the development of life was as inevitable as the eventual destruction of the planet on which it evolved, I started to rethink where the EPs came from.
The result of sentience is technology and the result of technology is to allow us to extend our survivability. The result of evolution is animate matter that, if it has an accurate picture of reality, can produce technology that will allow the animate matter to survive the demise of the planet that produced it. Life formed and evolved to extend life beyond the life of the cycle in which it had evolved.
But why? For many years I contemplated the answer to this question, and when it finally occurred to me, it was so simple that it was, and is, an embarrassment to even put words to, although I have and I will with the strict understanding that it has nothing to do with the rationality of the explanation for reality contained in this book, but merely puts the operation of reality in some sort of context.
The purpose of the cycle is to produce life, the purpose of life is the evolve sentience, the purpose of sentience is to create, and the purpose of creating is to bring into existence the EPs that make up the universe.
The purpose of life is to survive so that it can produce more EPs that produce more cycles that in turn produce more life, the entire process encroaching on nothingness, defining that nothingness with the existence of matter.
I’m not so sure we have to have an accurate picture of reality in order to contribute to the expansion of the universe. However, I know that we have to be alive and kicking to do so. If we want to outlive this planet, we have to have as accurate a picture of reality as the facts and objective testing will allow us.
Right now, our picture of reality is a mess, incapable of producing a technology that approximates reality.
It doesn’t bode well for our ultimate future. I don't hold out much hope that science will open its eyes and start to see its memes explain nothing.
Fortunately, the universe will go on. It probably has as many successes as it does failures like us.