Thinking about Dark Matter and the trail which seems at present to have gone cold, my suspicion is that all the foraging in the dark for particle candidates has come up against a brick wall. The Amplituhedron came along and lit up the scene almost complacently, arriving as it did out of somebody's head rather than out of a billion dollar experiment. Just as I'd written that, questions were asked on Twitter as to whether the human mind was capable of computing universal questions and why it was that we were still referring to atoms and molecules as ‘particles'. Yes, we've a way to go. Opening doors to further flights of imagination rather than clipping wings with mathematical rhetoric could lead to heights we haven't dreamed of yet.

Time is something we take totally for granted. We bind our lives round packages of time in conformity to the clock and think nothing of what we are actually doing in it. In time, yes. That's exactly what I mean. Like the beating of drums and the songs of strings and the beauty that surrounds an orchestra when it is played well.

The Universe takes short cuts all the time, which is why of course we are driven to seek them. Most commodities don't come out of the Dark, so we don't go looking for them there. We look instead at the bright lights of entertainment and wonder why we don't see things as they really are. Shuttered down by advertising - commercial, scientific and spiritual - from the possibility of Dark being any good at all goes against the grain of Establishment. So what happens when suddenly we're confronted with a home comprising over 70% of it? Hell, you can imagine how hard it is to find your way out.

Quantum mechanics told us about waves and particles and the fact that everything is both at the same time. Then the mechanics went on to discover through Strings that everything oscillates and vibrates all at the same time. Nature, meanwhile, had given us neutrinos and quarks to tell us that everything that is and moves is oscillating and vibrating at the same time. Then suddenly, SUSY strutted in, and Nature said, "No, it's not time," and left. Carlo Rubbia ruffled his feathers, annoyed yet again.

Now it seems we have Time on our side, if we think about it. Imagine you're a wave form - come on, it's not that difficult, it's just that you're stuck in a particle body. Cool. So now all you have to do is know where you are on your wave form. If you're down, or up, it doesn't matter, because the peaks and troughs of life will just keep going while that heart beats and that brain is there to feed it information. Keep oscillating, wh - that's your right, your god-given privilege, the thing we can all do that we share with every thing else in the Universe. We are, It Is. 

Being stressed and depressed, as many people believe they are, is fighting against the wave form. Forced by a particle body to absorb external information, we've been cauterized from our senses - those senses that the quantum world gives us. You tend to call them flavours and colours but what the hell, it all means the same thing. We're just dogs, sniffing for something.

Waves of Time (which as I wrote in a Blog is perfectly allowed to be flat) push us up and down constantly, but gravity is a strong pull, and we live in a negative Universe. Electrons are our only physical contact with everything around us and they're damn negative, so when we get into a negative state it's like being glued to the floor, which is literally what's happening. We know about Gluons. That's why we named them. And so on, through the whole exhibit. Yep, bring out the Winos. They'll tell us some interesting stories. (Ask him about tornadoes. I missed that one by nanoseconds.)

Is it any surprise, therefore, that we are groping with illusions which need some kind of determination, some kind of link between the physical and the metaphysical which every academic institution on the land is built to look for? Not really. We've got all the tools, and the people from all walks of life roaming around looking for answers. They're here. Deep is where the Dark is. Somewhere else, I wrote that, too. Tick....tick.....tick......tick

Alternatively, you could listen to a beach.

Once upon a time, the Standard Model was born. This phrase, popularised by first attempts to visualise the atom, became synonymous with ideals around which our views of the Universe were created. In the early 1900s, a number of leading scientists spearheaded a campaign to delve deep into the heart of the atom and dig from it profundities which baffled many eloquent minds, including that of Einstein (who was one of them). He loathed the implications of uncertainty and non-locality, famously claiming that "God does not play dice".
Quantum mechanics was a revolution. Not just a new kind of science, but a new way of thinking about the Universe and how it was made. As classical physics faced heavy fire from its findings, scientists scrabbled for ways to constrain the uncertain and improbable, to conform the concepts they were forced to compute by means of certainties and probabilities they could conceivably work with.

The tools of the particle physicist's trade are equations. These jumbled sequences of signs and numbers are seen by those who understand them as being 'beautiful'. To those of us who haven't a clue, they are all very well, but they don't explain the esoterics of nature, they only explain the mathematics of what nature, to scientists, ought to be doing. 

If you know what this equation means, you're reading this with a scientific mind. That's the kind of mind which has got us to where we are today. There's no doubt that mathematics, algebra, geometry and quadratics have given us a language which decodes natural law into a framework which can be fragmented into understandable chunks - by those who understand that language. But every language has its limitations. Every language takes words from other languages to make better sense of things it struggles in itself to define. Even then, definitions can be muddied in the attempt to pin down logic when the true intention is to describe a situation. As President George Bush put it, "The French don't have a word for entrepreneur".

Let's just recall for a minute that we inhabit the Milky Way, and the Goldilocks Zone is the bit we live in. Subatomic particles have colours and flavours and spin (when in fact not a single one of these descriptions has anything to do with the behaviours they seek to describe). When I hit the mainstream particle physics scene with a vengeance born of a drive to understand it, Supersymmetry was the new kid on the block. SUSY (for short) was the donkey to which all particle reactions should pin their tail. Busily stuffing SUSY into every lecture on quantum conundrums up and down the farthest reaches of the globe, scientists were sure this was the grail from which the GUT (grand unified theory) would emerge. Only, despite their stringent efforts to force symmetry upon the Universe, the Universe wasn't playing ball. 
As Dr Ben Still put it on the evening of Thursday 18th October, "Supersymmetry is dying a death."

On this chart, you'll find some (but by no means all) of the inhabitants of the Particle Zoo. Some (by no means all) of those missing are the Axion, Gluon, Neutralino, Wino, Positron,  and Tau. The article linked behind the picture explains more. The Quark and Neutrino have at least three different types within their own species - all this is, bear in mind, a catalogue drawn from particles that can't be seen. The entire Zoo is comprised of entities which are visualised from equation, experimentation, and guesswork. 
These days, the hottest totty cruising the scientific streets is Dark Matter, cloaked by the equally mysterious Dark Energy. When the Higgs Boson hit the catwalk (recently earning its namesake the Nobel Prize), a new buzz of excitement and speculation murmured around the Halls of Academia. 
New Physics, they claim, is born.

I'm interested to discover that science and art is forging an alliance, if a somewhat uneasy alliance, in following a trend to make physics 'accessible' to the public (see previous Blog on this site). Exhibitions and collections and creative liaisons are breaking the surface tension which has always existed between academia and the artisan. Yet still in deeper waters, covetousness lurks. Household hero Prof. B. Cox has yet to abandon his edict that "The Uncertainty Principle is a doorway through which all kinds of charlatans and purveyors of tripe can force their philosophical musings."

The fact is, the Universe thrives on playing dice, entertaining itself with the notion that every question answered by a miniscule mind will merely present a more difficult question. Everything in the Universe is unique - getting our heads around that is hard enough. Every possibility of everything that is possible has an equal chance of being actualised, and probably will be somewhere, for our Universe is not alone. This dimension sits cosy and warm in a multitude of other Dimensions, and all are melding themselves into the fabric of what is now called the Multiverse, a term describing the many and varied Universes of which ours is merely one.
Are we really seeing the emergence of New Physics? Or are we seeing a new seasonal collection of equations ready to strut their stuff into the halls of fame? Whichever way you look at it, progress is unstoppable, and we really are going where no-one has gone before. "Hold tight, Robin, there's a damsel in distress. Her name is SUSY, and if we don't get to her soon....."

Suddenly, it's mid October. All of a sudden, top physicists are coming out with ideas which break ground way beyond Standard Models and constraints and constants, digging into depths of what might actually be beneath the surface of quantum quandaries with a realisation that the underlying truth could be very simple. Exposing complications as a ruse to encourage less psychologically advanced life forms not to bother looking too hard at the mechanics of the Universe, these blue-sky scientific thoughts signify a major shift in the way things are seen. Not before time. Advancement is necessary, if we are to survive the abyss of self-destructive doom. But it could be, given the evidence yet to come, that our entire fate is predetermined, and that we have as much to do with turning social and environmental tides as the Yaxley switch on your washing machine has to do with getting clothes clean. 

Image credit NASA, Hubble and @TheUniverse1981

Gerard t'Hooft is a Nobel prizewinner who has come out in support of quantum undertow. He believes that the plethora of paradoxes and particle spins is a surface commotion covering a deeper magic, a simplicity we have yet to consider. Physics has an unhappy habit of throwing out babies with bathwater and then rummaging about in the sewer for them later. In the 1960s a scientist named John Bell questioned the fact that particles operate in co-ordination with each other over universal distances (non-locality, or entanglement, are the laws at work here) and postulated that this would not be possible without some form of communicative mechanism between them. 

Since the arrival of the Higgs Boson, there has been a lot of excitement about a Higgs Field, and we've only to go back to Tesla in the 1930s to find that he and his contemporaries called this field ‘the ether'. This is where the term ‘ethereal' came from. Gerard t'Hooft has leaned towards superdeterminism to explain the non-locality problem. Superdeterminism pulls tight the ‘sum over histories' mechanism popularised by Richard Feynman, and claims that the ordination - or pre-ordination - of every event is traceable to its history in the early formation of the Universe. This means that each non-local happening (every time two particles separated by distance respond in tandem, in other words) is simply the playing out of a game mapped indelibly a long, long time ago.

Frank Wilczek is a true bluesky thinker who's come up with some radical new takes on what spacetime looks like. The connection he's made between crystal lattices and time is revolutionary, and underpins the sense we instinctively have that time is a malleable commodity. On the surface it appears to be regular and flat, so regular and flat in fact that we can measure it to incredible precision. But what we are really tracking with the clock is the movement of the earth around the sun, and this is only a small portion of what time actually is (the easy bit, as far as measurement is concerned). Hidden aspects of time will doubtless conform to the Uncertainty Principle (the one universal constant we can positively rely on) and Wilczek's work with crystalline lattices shows that sub-atomic structures are indeed illustrating this very supposition.

T'Hooft says that, "Everybody in our universe has a common past, and so they are correlated. The photons emitted by a quasar are correlated with the photons emitted by another quasar. It's not true those quasars are independent." This view of universal photons is akin to the way water systems work on our own planet. There's only so much water within the Earth's atmosphere and it goes round and round in constant motion. The molecules in your bath may once have coursed down the Amazon, and the chances that two or three of those molecules in your bathtub actually did so are rather high. Water holds memory, so on its travels it's picking up information about the planet all the time. This, standing things to reason, is how we instinctively know what it going on at the planetary level and why we are panicking about ‘the state of the world' while news channels are determinedly trying to secure our focus on Afghanistan, or Syria, or wherever else they want our attention to be rapt at the time. We know there's a bigger picture - that while we're forging battles with each other our greedy over-consumption represents a battle of its own against a passive opponent. This makes for a vast amount of stress and guilt in society that can't be accounted for by taking surface snapshots, and while all this is going on in our own backyard you could rightfully ask why we should be concerned about the Universe at all.

The reason why we need to be concerned about the Universe is that the Universe is stuffed full of very useful information, and the more access we gain to that information the more we learn about ourselves. As the photons, electrons and neutrinos course to and fro across its expanse, they are gathering information which at present we are not collectively party to. If we are to gain ascension from the measly egotistical claim that we are ‘higher forms of life' and start to be able to actualise that claim with any kind of reasonable conviction, we have to start with a deep understanding of how our minds operate in collusion with the forces at work on a larger scale than Planck and stop harping on about ‘mental illness' as though people who think with more than the sum of their brain's parts are somehow misfits of society who don't belong in the grand equation. John Nash became a very public living proof that the mind is more flexible in stature than physicians would have us believe.

The man who painted this picture is dead. His name was Edward Bawden and he was born in Braintree, Essex. Among his collection of works, which aren't noted for their cosmic content, this one amply illustrates the black and white nature of the Universe we live in.

While I bang on about the Universe and its laws (which I can't afford to do in Empowerment programmes if I'm to keep great feedback scores) I can almost hear people thinking, "All very well but I'm here, and that's out there, and it doesn't affect me and MY life." They switch off to go think about something more meaningful, like what kind of dog food to buy. 

Mind, life, thought - they all need foundations in physics before we can confidently account for them. The longer physics keeps these sentient qualities out of its equation, the more time we waste in thinking it's got nothing to do with us.
We are given eyes to see, and most of us can see colour. Colour is a marriage of light and dark. Black and white are both made of all colours - white reflects, black absorbs. Colours in between are variants based on wavelength, something else we now understand a little about. We know that electromagnetism and colour are connected, because scientists rely on this fact to conduct their cosmic surveys. Colour is given to our field of vision so that we can make more sense of our surroundings, inside the atmosphere and outside it. We appreciate Beauty through seeing colour. Beauty is a Quark, married in Quarkdom to Truth.  
<This is an impression of atomic movement in Bose-Einstein condensate.
The article linked refers to it as 'quantum spin'.

There is Light and there is Dark. Both these essences have manifestations which bring complications to science. Photons (light particles) are 'known' to be massless, and yet they behave like particles under certain conditions, as here where light sabres are joked about while quantum computing is referenced in earnest. Dark 'particles' are eluding all attempts to find them, which may be because what we're up against here is a matter of consciousness, rather than a matter of matter.

The Universe is not interested in what we do, or choose, or think, or care about or cry over. The Universe is very black and white in its arrangement of things, in order to keep things simple. Fractals make for enough complication without adding to the ingredients. The Uncertainty Principle engages everything in a mass-generation of completely unique moments and bodies of existence. Non-locality ensures that everything is in touch with everything else and polarity keeps everything in balance. Simple. Light and Dark are polarities.

This has turned into a helluva long blog, so I hope it's sprung some things to mind that are worth the reading time. We have a long way to go, or a short trip over the road, depending entirely on how we choose to view our Present and whether we are prepared to say Yes, we are responsible for what we do, and some of the things we've done haven't been great. 
The Universe really isn't cut out for political agendas or religious doctrines or moral arguments, it is quite simply set up to ensure that life has the best possible opportunity to further itself, so that the Universe can answer its own questions through its life forms. Quite possibly this Universe is a rarity among Universes, one which has established a framework of parameters to specifically create life as we know it to be. Whatever the truth behind universal intellect, we are part of it. 
Not separate, disengaged observers, not hopeful outsiders waiting for a chance to peek, but Parts. Parts with a job to do.

Inside us, we crave. We crave, so we carve. Meats of all kinds. Meals on the hoof. Fast food, there in less than an hour from scratch. 20 minutes if we're lucky. Glass of summit? Yeah, why not. Civilisation has become a seething mass of maggots drowning in a sea of chocolate delights.
Out there in the big wide Universe, they've found Dark Matter. Not only have they found it, but they've also found that it makes up the bulk of everything that is. Everything, that is, except us, For some reason, we are said not to have any Dark Matter round here, it doesn't belong in our immediate neighbourhood. Because universal constants don't apply here inside this feeble little Atmosphere. Sorry? What was that? "Of course they do." 
Well, then, what's your problem? Let's get down to business. 

The Dark is, let's say for argument's sake, 80% of everything that is. To alleviate any credibility issues, let's just say that 80% of everything we are and everything we encounter is Dark too. Would that make sense? Ok. Good. So now we've got Dark Energy to think about, haven't we, because there's quite a lot of that around too, isn't there?

Having got that far, let's assume that there is less Light than Dark. Safe? Great. Well, to top that, we've also got to consider all those Negative Electrons floating about everywhere (yes, everywhere, everyone, let's not put too fine a point on it), in us, out there, in everything we see. Haven't we?
Recent years have put Positive and Negative in the equation of mood and state of mind. This is a fairly new development. Is it telling us something? Are we telling ourselves something, perhaps? Because if we are, this is going to be a big shift. We can understand much better how to play the game we're dealt if we know what kind of dice we're dealing with.

Above is a computer generated impression of Dark Matter in a box, courtesy of New Scientist. The strange chrystalline structure (typo left for effect) is what we live in. So, may the Force be with you.