For a brief moment, I'd died to this life, with no idea what I would wake to. A low, rumbling thud of completion echoed behind me and no turning back, for the past is closed. I stepped forward trembling, like a fawn crossing its first meadow - the floor an icy, dappled surface reflecting a strange light from above. 
I looked up. 
A thousand particles, energies and forces tumbled in alien equations from a ceiling that had no end - some of them I recognised. I'd been studying this array for sixteen years, no stranger to its charm, its elusive essence of beauty and truth. My eyes watched the quantum dance as time lost meaning, loving it, learning it even as I knew I knew nothing of its heart.

"Have you pledged allegiance?" a dark voice echoed from the shadows. 
Into the dancing light stepped one I knew from another world, a world I had only ever seen through a screen, a world unreal and real at the sa. The elegant figure of the Galaxy's most feared System Lord drew nearer, studying me. I shivered. Here in my personal realm was a killer, a tormentor, an enslaver of souls. What would he want with mine? 
I looked back at the floor, but the floor, yielding nothing but dancing light, remained unforgiving.

"Allegiance, My Lord? Is that not what brought me here?"
"DO NOT PLAY GAMES WITH ME!" His voice, hard as gravel and cold as steel, demanded absolution.
I thought of something sensible to say. I thought about fear, remembering when life had been tough and illusions had played deadly dice with my intentions. Then my mind flicked sharply to 1997, a year enslaved by a love so dark it bred a snake in my head whispering insistently that I seek information, driving me to realms I didn't understand. The serpent had sent me across the European continent in a quest to learn of cosmology and deep physics, and I had followed blindly, naively, absorbing a sense of what was real as I travelled, finally breathing life into the birth of Quantumology.
"My Lord, I have loved..."

"Ba'a!" he snorted with contempt, "I read your mind. You partied with idolatry!"
I laughed, instantly thinking that was probably a bad idea, despite the vast gulf between assumption and reality. But Apophis held a steady gaze I could not read. Honesty, in this situation, was probably the best policy.
"Some, like the moon when she is full, believe the light which shines upon them is their own. There are more self-made statues on the altars of false gods than questions begged by universal law, My Lord," I said quietly, lowering my eyes back to the rippling marble. 
"And so?" he snapped, clearly unmoved.
"I believe that allegiance above all should cleave to the truth, wherever it may be found."
He was silent. He turned his back. I studied the jeweled tapestry of a beautiful cloak and wondered what my words would mean. For a moment I thought he would step back into the shadows and say nothing more, but instead he walked to a wall inscribed with ancient symbols. His hand swept slowly over them, tapping at indentations in the stone. 

I felt fire run through my mind - the lights tumbling from the endless ceiling joined me as I hit the floor.

Daybreak. My world shone under a golden dawn, hawks waiting patiently to be brought to the lawn while dogs watched intently, expectant of a walk. The day would shine on while it lasted and as I moved through its early hours I remembered the symbols on the stone wall; his words rang through my memory like a bell as I saw the image of a kind and thoughtful man in a beige room with a mirror and was reminded once more that the suspension of disbelief is just part of life's rich tapestry. 
"Ahhh, the power of the singularity...."
99 people were following the corridor to see where Quantumology would lead. 
Then Peter Williams laid his cloak over the threshold, 
pledging his name to the hundredth number, 
and I kissed the ring as my heart replied in kind;
"The power of singularity is legion, My Lord. That makes a million of us." 

An article Tweeted today by Dr. Phil Metzger, originally published on 9th August, has captivated my imagination; it's just a hint that Higgs could be opening a door to Dark Matter via a route I have long hoped would be available to physics. 
New Physics promised a vague allegiance, but stopped short of publicly admitting an association. This article suggests that, having reluctantly adopted a number of dimensions and the strong possibility of multiple universes, Physics might just be teetering on the brink of something big.

On the trail of dark energy, physicists propose Higgs boson 'portal'

is the unassuming title of the fascinating paper you can read by clicking on it.

Now I've long been sceptical of SUSY and heavily inclined to slate Standard Models. I don't like constants being applied to cosmology simply because I feel it's disrespectful to assume that a Universe we know practically nothing about is going to buckle itself into some kind of cardboard box-shaped parameter we precociously put in front of it, and then allow us to declare that it's Flat. "Here, Universe, there's a good Universe, in you go," is not the sort of language one should use for the Universe. Best reserved for your new puppy. No wonder Dark Matter has proved so elusive. There in the Dark, we are going to find some real gems of information we had no idea were there, and the Universe is not going to hand those gems over on a plate to a bunch of scrabbling children.

That might sound very schoolmarmish, but I can get really excited when a scientist starts meddling with interdimensional doorways. When a scientist comes along whose mind really IS open enough to be ignoring the box altogether and getting on with the job of assuming him/herself to be an intelligent being with some kind of universally-bound intellect that isn't tied up tightly in constraints, I'm inclined to breathe a sigh of relief. They are rare, these people. I know, I've mixed with the prizewinners, the freshers, the lecturers and the puritans. I've had conversations with cosmologists and partied with particle physicists. A race apart scientists may be, but they are people first. There are flocks, and there are those who refuse to follow flocks. I've met a few wildcards, and some of them might call me a friend. At least on the quiet.

Krauss and Dent, the authors of this exciting new paper, are suggesting the existence of 'another background field' which in itself is going to demand of us to peep round the dimensional corner. We might find all those other dimensions aren't curled up in the corner at all, but wagging their tails and looking just the same as our very own pet dimension here at home. We might find we don't have to do some strange trick with right-angles after all, but can just move forward a couple of steps and hey, there's the interdimensional doorway! Who knows?

One thing, I think, is for sure. While the bets are still even on WIMPs and Axions are coming in at 66-1, my money is on the only solution I saw presented at Durham this summer that made any sense - the possibility that photons can oscillate, light to dark. Only we don't know that yet, cos we're still getting to grips with neutrinos, and why a neutrino has to be sterile before we can even think about it getting close to Dark Matter is just another clue as to the lengths we will go in order to assert our authority over the way we think things ought to be.

There is a book by Amit Goswami called The Self-Aware Universe which explains why it can't possibly not be. To demonstrate, I'll open the book at random (trust me, there's no point in sifting through for a good bit because the exercise itself is a trust in what the book says) and quote a line from a page in front of me;

I realise that the data suggesting the parallels between the mind and the quantum - uncertainty, complementarity, quantum jumps, nonlocality, and finally, coherent superposition - may not be considered conclusive. They could well be indicative, however, of something radical: That what we call the mind consists of objects that are akin to the objects of submicroscopic matter and that obey rules similar to those of quantum mechanics.

From page 167, this quote establishes Goswami as a forerunner of Quantumology and reminds me exquisitely why I loved his book so much. The italics in the quote are his, not mine. I read The Self-Aware Universe many years ago, and only had occasion to bring it out of the bookcase today because I was completing the final edit for my own book, in which he is of course quoted. If you're a scientist, read it to prove to yourself that these links really matter, and if you're not a scientist, read it to learn the science behind the facts of what we are.

This transcript of a discussion in July 1930 between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore, an Indian philosopher, is much older than the discovery of Beauty and Truth quarks. Unfortunately it's rare these days to see the descriptions Beauty and Truth ascribed to the B and T quarks, which they now call 'bottom' and 'top'. Apparently the scientific community thought the initial naming was too ambiguous, which is interesting in itself. But the possibility that this particular pair of quarks may have a connectivity with what we actually perceive as 'beauty' and 'truth' can't really escape the definition of Possibilities, because the chances are that they of all the three quark pairings may resonate most closely with the consciousness field.

With absolute delight, Quantumology welcomes Dr. Phil Metzger from NASA to our cosmic array of star followers!Not only is he devoting his life to advancing our technologies and paving the way for better ways of living, he's rather dashing too! More information on Dr. Metzger and his work can be found on his own website,  http://www.philipmetzger.com/ and the biography at http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.philip.t.metzger 

Quantumology is thrilled that Carl Sagan, in the guise of his publicly adopted Twitter persona, has chosen to follow in the footsteps of living supernovas Corin Nemec from Stargate SGI and LeVar Burton from Star Trek, further strengthening the presence of Science Fiction icons on our journey beyond known frontiers.

Although the great man is no longer with us in real life, Carl Sagan's legacy of popular scientific interest was hugely influential during the latter years of the last century. He was a man of paradox. Openly critical of idea-based conjecture, he even attacked Pluto whom he considered to be 'artisan', yet in considering the moons of Saturn he was one of the first to suggest that Europa could possibly support life and that oceans may exist on Titan. His popularity was earned through publication of the book Cosmos and successful documentary of the same name, and the subsequent science fiction novel Contact which became an award-winning film.  

Carl Sagan was a supporter of skepticism and wary of any bridge between science and art, but he was nevertheless ambivalent on the subject of faith. His beliefs seemed to extend to a reluctant acceptance that some form of creationist intellect was likely to exist. In terms of spiritual connections with scientific quest, he made his case clear, saying, "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual." 

In the course of his notably public career Carl was influential in modernising the public perception of science and bringing the expansive universe to our attention. He worked with Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke, writing an introduction for A Brief History of Time, and advising on extraterrestial reference in the making of 2001- A Space Odyssey. Carl Sagan was extremely skeptical concerning the existence of UFOs, again illuminating the juxtapositions of this man of eternal paradox who brought the light of science to so many lives. He died in 1996, a year before his film Contact was released.