Alan,
I'm somewhat of the opinion that we don't really appreciate the nature of ordinary matter. Physics seems bent on finding some mystery buried down in the most elemental nature and goes to extremes of smallest, largest and most abstract, but this everyday reality we live in is a balancing act of forces and properties, of which we tend to focus on one side of, or see the two sides as somehow distinct. A good example is the whole Big Bang cosmology, where the universe is a singular vector from beginning to end. What seems to be overlooked is that galaxies are not inert points of reference, but 'space sinks,' which do balance the expansion of the measure of inter-galactic space, resulting in an overall flat space, as is measured. Logically this would imply some sort of cycle and we know radiation expands, while mass contracts and they do emerge from one another. Yet our intellectual model is to focus on the distinctions, rather than the connections, so its a search for what we are missing, but it may be what we are missing is not hiding, we just are not looking at it the right way.
This is something I wrote for another discussion and it was ignored, but it's an idea that keeps nibbling at my brain;
"According to increasingly accurate measurements, the overall universe appears flat, with gravity balancing the expansion. While the space between galaxies appears to expand, these galaxies are not just inert points of measure, but 'space sinks,' collapsing measures of space in proportion to that which expands between them. Given this balance it would seem to me some form of convection cycle, of expanding radiation and collapsing mass, would better explain the entire process, than just the current focus on the expanding inter-galactic medium creates the impression of an expanding universe.
The contraction of mass and the expansion of energy would then constitute opposing directions of time, as structure forms on the perimeters of galaxies and becomes increasingly complex and dense, until apparently collapsing into the center and being ejected out the poles, if not previously radiated away as light. Meanwhile the radiation is constantly expanding away from prior forms and coalescing into new forms. Keep in mind that a clock has two components, the face and hands and they go in opposite directions. To the hands, it is the face going counterclockwise. The form of classic clocks evolved from sundials and the hand(s) originally represented the sun, or conversely, the shadow created by its light, moving around the dial. As such it represented the present, while the marks on the face represent the units of time. So the hands/present moves from past to future units, while these units go from being in the future, to being in the past. Such as energy is constantly manifesting form, expanding in out, until it becomes rigid, then breaking it down and going onto new forms and growing them. So we have these galaxies, composed of physical forms that are constantly coalescing out of more basic forms, expanding out as they accumulate energy and mass, then radiating it away, eventually to where the last of the energy appears to be shot out the poles as cosmic jets. All this energy goes to create the effect of an expanding inter-galactic space.
Gravity, then, is not so much a property of mass, but the vacuum effect of energy coalescing into mass and ever more dense forms after that. Given dark matter cannot be detected, but there is excesses of unexplained cosmic rays on the perimeters of galaxies.
So there are two directions of time. That of the physical present, as the energy, moving onto the future and expansion, while the forms it manifests coalescing and eventually dissolving, ie, going future to past.
Now when we measure something, we convert energy into information, which is form. So in an elemental sense, our very effort of measurement converts energy into mass, that of a stabilized state of the energy."
So, in a sense, matter is stabilized energy and when we measure anything, we have to balance it with another force, so we are creating mass by measuring energy. This then gets to the issue of the 'observer generated' reality.
Sorry I'm wandering off topic, but the brain tends to wander off while I'm doing other things. I think that on a deeper spiritual level, we have some primal sense of this, For example, the primitive assertions that cameras and taking a picture are 'soul stealers.' That some tiny measure of the person takes some of their energy. On a personal sense, I seem ever more suspended in the interpersonal and organic web of consciousness and any thread I pull, causes lots of different effects, so my sense of the material becomes ever more tenuous. It's all about balance.
Regards,
John M
