For a long time, so we were taught, people thought the Earth was flat - a quaint, almost pitiful example of oft-cited ancient idiocy. But lurking in the literary undergrowth is strong evidence to suggest no such thing, that the Flat Earth belief system is itself a myth, and in truth (at least in civilised terms) nobody ever really doubted that the Earth is round. Except for the Flat Earth Society, of course.

Cosmologists all over the world pontificate devoutly that the Universe is flat, a fact brought home to me at the Paris Cosmology Colloquium in 2009. 
At first I thought the presenters were joking, but of course they weren't.
My incredulity at the echo of ancient naivete cost me a lot of points among the eminent scientists there, who all assured me that I didn't understand the topography. Today it seems a few forward thinkers are leaning to the strong possibility that the Universe isn't flat after all, so five years on I'm relieved to be counting some friends on Twitter who share a similar sense of humour at what is hopefully a passing phase. This time, however, it was no myth, and history will have it for the record that a Flat Universe was a genuine, bona-fide belief shared by an awful lot of highly respected people of the Earth.

This is what NASA has to say: "We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error." 

Later this year, bearing in mind that there isn't much left of 2013, Comet Ison will blaze across our skies, riding a wall of death past the Sun which could prove fatal and puts this celestial beauty in the wistful category of Sungrazers. There are stories abounding that Ison has companions, but these claims are unconfirmed and being argued as I write. Comets Lovejoy and Elenin slid past relatively unnoticed in 2011, while Hale-Bopp notoriously enjoyed far more recognition in 1997. David Dickinson writes for Universe Today; here a compilation of comet capers can be found among his frustrated efforts to debunk the collection of current myths. Comets can, in truth, destroy planets at a year's notice.

Now I don't know about you, but the fact that comets contain a lot of organic compounds and orbit the solar system in a kind of deep-frozen state seems to me at the very least to be intriguing. That all the celestial bodies we have ever discovered are basically spherical with orbital motions suggests to me that there is a case for the very small (electrons, for instance) mirroring the very big (like, for example, the Universe). We have no idea what shape an electron might be but whatever it may look like, it certainly demonstrates motion around the atomic nucleus. Bohr's model of atoms portrayed the arrangement looking very much like a solar system. Yes, it seems we were wrong then, too, and that atoms don't really look like that after all, because there are newly found parameters which need new explanations. At the end of the day, the shape of the electron and the Universe is all very interesting, and I'll be following avidly. But I think on the whole, as a social matrix of thinking people, we care more about how to live our lives in peace and find some inner contentment, how to make Earth a healthier planet and what we can do to stop our species from destroying its celestial home. If a comet comes along to do that for us, then we won't have to take the blame for our unending ignorance after all.

Somewhere out there is the one who watches me, whose world is far from mine, his spirit intent upon its' own course to seek success and absolution at the same time, as was ever the dream of the intrepid explorer. He seeks answers and questions trends. I know he watches, because we are all connected, and what he thinks when he thinks of me potentially connects to when I think of him as friend.
His dreams are legion. Of ruling the world with his own fashion of sanity, riding upon a creature of high price. The process of his dreaming and its discourse with humanity has led to wars of nations underground, where the mighty prey upon the weak in a twisted parody of Dante's dice. In his heart, he knows I know he watches, even though I do not see him, for he watches from afar.
There is a power in the world which rides on a false god, and the price is far too high that we must pay for the unlearning. Metal birds screech overhead to subdue the truth of what is cried. One day we may wake mystified to learn that we are subjugated, forced unto our knees for fear of the terrified.

He waits, to come when opportunity calls him. He knows who he is. And one day, the minds upon the planet may turn and ask him why, and whether the answer was worthy of the forfeit.

​I love my Audi A4. He reminds me of you.

Somewhere in the sunset of our evolution, we have to know what brought us so close to what we prayed would never come.

This year sees Voyager, the intrepid space module sent to investigate the Solar System, touch the outer reaches of the stellar space in which we live. A chance eruption of energy from the Sun convinced most cosmologists watching Voyager's adventures that the module had stepped beyond the boundary of our Solar System into the galactic unknown beyond. Others are less convinced. Absence of a detectable change in magnetic field direction leaves them wondering whether Voyager has crossed the bridge.

Whatever the actual position of Voyager may be, it is certainly farther away from Earth than any exploratory device has ever been before. 12 billion miles is a long way to have travelled. In its wake, Voyager ll has covered just 9.5 billion miles, having nosed around the vicinity of Uranus and Neptune. Voyager l used Saturn's gravitational field as a catapult to sling it past Pluto ahead of its twin.  

Plutonium powered it may be, but Voyager has determination on its side. 36 years have passed since it was built and sent off with a hearty slap into the outer regions of space. The technology it carries is relatively archaic. Yet it diligently sends back data, on a 17 hour time lag, to the team waiting here on Earth to receive its updates. Something tells me that something of the spirit of V'Ger abounds in this small-car-sized technological marvel. That it has learned what it is for, and wants to do its job to the very best of its ability. We know from our domestic appliances that some do a great job for decades, while some never seem to get the hang of what they're supposed to do at all. Even paint brushes have to learn the art of the craft they were intended for, before beginning to perform as they ought.

The more we learn of quantum reality, the more obvious it will become that mind and matter cannot be divorced from each other. Recent developments have encouraged scientists to throw away (if reluctantly) the well-worn and vastly out-of-date concept that everything has to conform to symmetrical boxes and flat constants. My belief is that Voyager wants to seek out those strange new worlds where no man has gone before, and that it will surprise the skeptics with incredible longevity in determinedly meeting the needs of its Creator, on a quest to discover what its Creator actually is. 

"During its journey, the probe came to think of itself as V'Ger after the only remaining legible letters from its original name (the "O", "Y", "A" and "6" on the nameplate being obscured from encounters with previous spatial hazards) and amassed knowledge to such a degree as to become self-aware."

Once upon a time there was J.J. Thompson, and in 1897 along with his intrepid team of laboratory explorers he discovered the electron by playing about with cathode rays. For a long time, electrons were thought of as little balls which orbited the nucleus of atoms, as in the picture here. 
Then the electron cloud model came trotting in on the heels of Thompson's discovery, but as you can see from this forum at Ask Jeeves, there is a bit of confusion as to how it actually came into being.
Universe Today gives a rather clearer picture of what the electron cloud model actually is, and explains how and why it does away with the orbital-balls idea. 

The electron cloud model went so far in taking the scientific imagination away from billiard balls. But without any clues as to alternative 'shapes', the electron remained a complete mystery. The mid-1900s saw other concepts come in, such as zero-point, linking Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to electron behaviour, and thus to quantum behaviour at large. Uncertainty for the scientist is another word for 'fuzzy', meaning that you can't tell where it is precisely, you can only guess where it might roughly be. Thus the human and the electron reached an empasse, with neither sure what the other would do next.

Suddenly, very suddenly indeed in fact, things have started to get really interesting. Blame the Dark Matter hunt if you like - I can happily blame it for almost anything happening in physics at the moment. 

Here in this new landscape, there are butterflies instead of billiard balls. This is an image of Hofstadter's Butterfly, a fractal representation of electron movement in a magnetic field. The problem is, nobody can quite get a handle on netting this butterfly, and in true human spirit, they won't be sure it exists until they've got it under a glass case. 

Bate your breath, because slamming in out of nowhere, all of a sudden, enters the Amplutihedron, which blasts the dust off our explorer's bush hat and flicks the calculator right out of his hands. The Amplutihedron is big potatoes. I'm choosing to quote from Quanta Magazine because I think this paragraph neatly sums up the reason why 
I'm likening this beautiful object to a quantum rail gun:

"The new geometric version of quantum field theory could facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. 
The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: 
locality and unitarity.
Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature."

Murray Gell-Mann is a legend in his own lifetime. He is responsible for much of our current insight in the quantum fields and has proved to be a flexible thinker, helping to keep String Theory in sight when the physics community wanted to lose it under the carpet. He teamed up with another philosophical physicist, Richard Feynman, to unlock a whole host of other particle phenomenae spilling through the door from these modes of thinking. Reading an excerpt of Murray's book The Quark and the Jaguar, I found that, like me, he's a lifelong birdwatcher and lover of the natural world.

String theory was unpopular because it was complicated. The nature of the laws described by it are entirely energetic, they have no definable form - no telling how deep the rabbit hole goes in terms of where strings can lead. Strings are pieces of energy, and they vibrate (oscillate) in and out of an undefined number of dimensions. Literally everything comes down to being energy when we get to the most fundamental level of what the Universe is, while extra dimensions offer mathematicians no favours. Getting addicted to constraints and constants is very much part and parcel of relying on mathematical formulas to work things out - hence the physics community wanted to tuck string theory into the annals of history as a quirky idea that didn't come to anything. Much better for everyone that it wasn't probed too deeply. Gell-Mann and his co-thinkers thought otherwise. and String Theory is with us as a reluctantly swallowed pill of quantum dynamics.

I've no idea what this formula means; hopefully someone will tell me. It was tucked in a corner of Google Images when I searched for Beauty and Truth Quark. Beauty and Truth were the original names for the Bottom and Top Quarks, and today I find joyfully that my consternation at the dumping of their birth certificates is shared by international research facility SLAC in the USA, home to the longest linear accelerator in the world, who tweeted to me that they too prefer the original Beauty and Truth labels for these vitally important particles. With SLAC's support, I feel that a resurrection of Beauty and Truth may be imminent, and not a nanosecond too soon.

We need a renaissance of thinkers like Gell-Mann and Feynman to help us out of the Dark. The advent of Dark Matter Hunting has proved too much for theorists whose faith rests in symmetry and standard models. This represents a new world of physics to come closer to the nature of who and what we are - a Physics that means something to humanity at large. I know from my attendance of many conferences just how closely scientists like to guard chests. The time has come for a new wave of exploration to emerge, one we can take part in by finding out how deeply physics applies to life. Two of the most basic needs in human nature are Beauty and Truth - however inconvenient, such quarkish synchronicity means that the laws binding together the sum of our parts are laws we, too, need to understand. When we do, we can equate the sum of our histories more logically, so that the strange charm of beauty and truth can show us new ways of being that just might be enough to turn our planetary future around. Miracles are there to be had in quantum physics.
​We, and the planet we live on, need one big time miracle right round about Now. We can make our own miracles here.

We can see through history that mankind tends towards linear thinking. The language and maths we use to communicate is structured in linear format to accommodate this form of thinking. If we interact with the Universe, as logic suggests we must, then the information we receive is likely to come from photons, electrons and neutrinos. These particles (which are also of course waves) travel in straight lines. There is no need for them to do otherwise en route to us from our primary source - the Sun. This is a set-up that panders to linear tendencies quite nicely - yet another of those plentiful perfections the Universe allows in its quest to create (and evolve) life.

At the moment we are stuck in an evolutionary pit and don't seem to be able to struggle out of it. Einstein predicted our evolution towards the truth of being 'beings of light' but he had no hope of it happening in his lifetime. Perhaps there is no hope of it happening in ours, either. Or perhaps there is. I guess it depends on how intently we are prepared to listen to the Universe instead of our personal gremlins. Stephen Hawking discovered a radiation emitted from black holes, now known as Hawking Radiation, proving Information to be as much of a constant in our Universe as matter and energy.

Hartle and Hawking got their heads together in 1983 and came up with a theory to explain 'inflation', which got into hot water over whether the Universe was open or closed. Perhaps it's petulant of us to speculate the nature of the entire Universe in the first place. Much more could be achieved by solving problems of detail behind facts already established, to push us towards evolution of our thinking. For one thing, if we dropped arguments over the shape of the Universe and concentrated instead on the bit we actually live in, we would perhaps find that linear constraints only apply to certain things. Time might well be one of them.

Reading Wikipedia's explanation gives a clearer insight of Hawking and Hartle's wave function proposal, which fits with those decent parameters already established in science and allows for history to be proportional to the scale of universal developments. Water, a substance well known to us and critical to life as we know it, has a propensity to adopt a wave pattern. We comprehend the surface of water as being 'flat', when clearly it is in constant random motion. We also now know that water has memory, along with knowledge that quantum processes are interrupted (indefinitely) by observation. Water takes many forms, from rainbows to polar ice. In the brain, water is coherent, meaning that it aligns with itself, unlike tap water which is a random jumble of particles. Water, a continually moving and changing form of matter, also seems, as seen here, to have various metaphoric and physical connections with time. Moon and tides spring to mind.

Our conscious process operates through waves. Associations between waves and water are given here to demonstrate the simplicity of concepts which are right there at our fingertips, waiting to be sewn together into a tapestry everyone can readily understand. The GUT is not the privilege of the scientific community, to be stitched up with language no Muggle can translate. Unified information is the right of every living thing to imbibe, digest and pass on, and its quite possible that our dogs have a much better handle on it all than we do.

The extract above is from the Oracle ThinkQuest foundation, which unfortunately no longer exists in this time dimension, but most probably does somewhere else. Time, as the fractal image demonstrates, is not confined to singular dimensions - that would be impossible, for if it was, there would be no future options available other than one. Clearly, options are open to us all the time, and even the most passionate determinists of fate would be hard pressed not to concede that the existence of multiple dimensions and/or Universes gives Opportunity an open pathway no matter which way you look at it.

Time is perfectly entitled to be flat, here in this Universe, so that the bumps in it can give us an idea of where we are in relation to everything else. Without flatness and bumps, the distance to stars and the outer reaches of the Universe would be impossible to define. Most of the cosmic high-energy particles travel in straight lines, so they travel through flat time without any trouble at all. We see curvature from our perspective because of the way gravity and light converge to illuminate time. The more curvature, the more time has lapsed.

The Universe, on the other hand, is full of round things. Everywhere we look, things are round. Orbits keep the Universe in motion. An entity which contains mostly round things and loads of energy, ranging from ground state to light speed, has no business whatsoever in being flat. It would be out of sorts with itself in no time. 

Time is not bothered about ranges of speed and energy, it just is. Time is so damn reliable we can measure it with clocks. We can put our puny parameters on time and it doesn't mind in the slightest. Time does not plague us with paradoxes and uncertainties; it has polarity, as everything must, and it has a tiny secret relationship with infinity. Infinity, as we know, is the scourge of the serious physicist.

I'm rather excited about Hawking-Hartle Wave functions, and will pursue the matter later.

The electron is the thing that makes atoms energetic. Electrons were thought to orbit the nucleus of the atom, the nucleus being a tight bundle of protons and neutrons. Their form has been theorised in many ways, from tiny billiard balls to points of nothingness, but the fact remains - electrons are so small and so active that we cannot tell what they really are. What we do know for sure is that they are negatively charged, and that the atoms of elements (an element is a substance that can't be broken down into any other substance) have a fixed number of electrons within them. 

In each atom, the number of electrons remains constant, unless or until the atom interacts with another atom. But the energy level of the electron is not constant. Electrons gather round the nucleus in a cloud, like the outer arms of a galaxy gather round the galactic centre, and this cloud is known as the electron shell. Atoms have various levels in this shell which its electrons can occupy. To visualise this, it is said that the further away from the nucleus an electron is, the higher its energy level - the closer it is to the nucleus, correspondingly, the lower its energy level. According to physicists, electrons share an all-time goal - to be close to the nucleus, at the lowest energy level possible, and the lowest energy level possible for a physical system is called the 'ground state'.

Unfortunately for the lazy electron, which by the way is negatively charged, there are a lot of photons around. Now it seems fair to say that despite the assertions of physicists, not all electrons are lazy. Some are probably quite adventurous, and for them the presence of photons is a positive boon. Because in order to change its position in the shell, to move from one energy state to another, the electron relies on photons. To lift up to a higher level, it has to 'take up' or absorb a photon, and to drop a level, it has to shed one. The photon is a particle of light. Not necessarily a visible particle of light, for photons come in many packages - from gamma rays to infra red, the entire electro-magnetic spectrum is made of them. It seems that electrons are not fussy about the kind of photons they throw around. 

We have a similar relationship with light. When we are feeling glum, it's a good idea to get out in the sun. We have bright moods, dark places, sunny dispositions and black looks. Our language asserts this relationship with light because it is as real to us as it is to the electron, and funnily enough it does very similar things. We have one body, which we might call a shell. Within that shell we have a number of energy levels to play with. Some people have more variations in their energy levels than others - we might be tempted to call people with the greatest variants 'bipolar'. But the similarity doesn't end there, with our absorption or loss of light. Oh no. 

We also have a tendency to use the words 'positive' and 'negative' to describe these moods we get ourselves into. We know, even though we don't always like to admit it, that we have some control over these moods and can get ourselves out of dark places if we really want to. But the trouble is, very often we find we don't want to. There's some reason why we should stay there, feeding ourselves with negative thoughts. (And if we think hard about that, we find another correlation with that negative electron busily busting a gut to get close to ground state.) We might use all kinds of excuses for this, the most common one being that it's somebody else's fault we're in the horrible situation causing us all this stress.

When an atom gets excited, it's often because an outside influence - usually another kind of atom - has come along and disturbed its equilibrium. Then the electrons are zipping around wondering what to do with themselves and they jump from atom to atom, sometimes getting lost altogether in the process (this is called 'ionisation'). But at the end of the day, they are still the same electrons, whatever state they may find themselves in, and they have an existence to be getting on with. We still don't know very much about the existence of an electron, and one bright spark named Richard Feynman even suggested that there is only one electron in the whole Universe, running rings round time and being everywhere at once. Whatever the truth may be, our relationship with electrons is perfectly clear - its a relationship of behaviours. This, and many other synchronous correlations our beings have with quantum particles, is at the heart of Quantumology.

Butterflies have long been associated with fabulous myths. From the metamorphosis of caterpillars to the incredible colours found on their wings, the nature of these creatures have inspired legends and metaphors throughout history. 
One of the more recent concepts woven around this amazing insect is that a butterfly's wings flapping in the Amazon can cause a hurricane in the West, due to the cumulative nature of cause and effect - describing an unseen and largely unconsidered natural framework which ensures development and change at all levels, from molecular to universal.  

The 'Butterfly Effect' is now a popular principle in Chaos Theory, attributed to mathematician Edward Lorenz. The origins of his theory can be traced back to his interest in weather disturbance but apply equally to social events, meaning that all the things we do in life have potentially significant consequences on a global scale. An issue of Social Alternatives published in 2012, The Sustainability Prism, explores social sustainability and language development from these foundation principles. 
Science has discovered that butterfly colours are produced from cells in the form of gyroids, complex shapes which contain no straight lines and can never be divided into symmetrical parts. Remarkably, the gyroid was only discovered in 1970 and was used in scientific applications prior to the knowledge that nature had got there first.

Knowing that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin, just as all polarities are, the Butterfly Effect puts a firm stamp of reality on our actions having far-reaching consequences. We can all trace random events in our life history to personal systems of huge significance. For some, a meeting on a train may lead to marriage, or a hobby turn into a multi-million enterprise. The more enthusiastically we embrace change, the more energy we put into pursuing opportunity, the greater our chances of creating important consequences for ourselves and others. Care and consideration of others is key to the nature of the effects we produce, and each small change we make for the better in our own lives has the potential to impact positively on the world we live in as a whole. This clarifies our responsibility as adult life forms in an expanding universe - the potential we have to ensure our survival and sustainable progress, and the importance of knowing that we do make a difference, both as singularities and as parts of a global community.

Some time ago, @815wrldtrvlr posted an article revealing recent discoveries in the Amazon; Fifteen New Species of Amazonian Birds 

From this article we may deduce one of two possibilities. Either no serious researchers have been looking in the Amazon for new birds until now. Or, evolution continues unabated where the process is left to occur in pockets of the planet which remain undisturbed.

These pockets may be very small; fortunately the Amazon is a big place. At the moment it's under serious threat from companies, governments and desperate farmers grubbing for more of those unsustainable resources we know to be less important than the welfare of the planet as a whole - National Geographic puts the case succinctly here: Rain Forest Threats 

Evolution happens, it's not a myth and it's very necessary to the universe as a whole. The discoveries we make across all spheres of science may be linked to it, and in some instances we may create new opportunities for evolutionary process inadvertently, as in the growth of the Particle Zoo. But in the natural world, the last thing an evolving process would need or want is to be caught in the midst of transformation by a species with a global reputation for whimsical destruction.

We really don't need to be rocket scientists to work out that the human race hasn't made a very good name for itself on the universal level. We still, as the Asgard put it, have "great potential", but we are yet to awaken that potential by respecting the planet on which we exist. This fact alone may have arrested our own evolution, allowing technology to race ahead instead, a situation we should be wary of propagating. We are watched - whatever is observed is noted. We don't have a singular right to debauchery, nor do we have the authority to condemn other species at the whim of our wills. While most of us would love to be listening, those who would rather not are continuing to corrupt the system. How many of us think that corruption, political or environmental, is a crime against Nature? Does that make a million of us? Or more?