for your fun -- Murray's Law: Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science: CSICON, Rich Murray 1997.04.05 2001.06.22 2008.06.04

[Rich Murray]

Murray's Law: Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science: CSICON, Rich Murray
1997.04.05  2001.06.22 2008.06.04
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/message/76

Rich Murray   April 5 1997  CSICON
Communion for the Subjective Investigation of Claims of the Normal

Room For All  1943 Otowi Road  Santa Fe, NM 87505
rmforall at comcast.net    505-501-2298
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/

          Murray's Law: Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science

     Millennia of worldwide commonsense traditions have culminated in a
recent few centuries of exponential scientific work.  Since 1660, the
number of scientists has grown from about 100 to about 10,000,000.
Likewise,  the volume of accumulated scientific literature,  both
doubling unstoppably every twenty years,  rather like Mickey Mouse's
hordes of relentlessly marching brooms in Disney's "The Sorcerer's
Apprentice".

     This global orchestration of thought and practice has been firmly
founded on certain principles,  rarely questioned and widely held to be
unquestionable.  Experience is held to be entirely based on and derived
from a basic reality, itself "external" to experience: physical,
or more abstractly, time-space-energy.

     This base reality is universally assumed to be impersonal,
consistent, orderly, lawful, causal, uniform, single, measurable,
describable and communicable, continuous, contiguous,
inherently simple, and based on a small set of unchangeable (in
themselves) logical-mathematical operations.
Therefore this reality can be modeled
and predicted by the self-qualifying global society of scientists,
based solely on communication by the external senses.

     In short, the primary reality, and its derivative, conscious
experience, are absolutely normal.  The primary image of this paradigm
is that of the machine, or the modern embodiment, the computer:
well-defined elements interacting in three-dimensional space along a
single one-way track of causality to produce utterly normal results,
however marvelous, varied, valuable, or unpredictable they may be in
practice.

     This towering structure of established normality paradoxically
both hides and makes even more significant any hints of "nonnormality".
Hitherto, "anomalies", such as random variations in offspring,  the
fogging of sealed photographic plates by uranium ore,  or slight static
in sensitive radios, have become mere fodder for the assimilation
program of science, leading to vast extensions of the range of the
normal, including evolution, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang.
"Resistance is futile.  You will be assimilated"-- the implacable
marching song of the Borg juggernaut.

     Willem of Occam proclaimed, "Thou shalt not multiply entities
needlessly." Indeed, hordes of angels, demons, ghosts, spirits,
influences, and innate qualities have been relegated to that final
dustbin of our race's mythic heritage,  children's Saturday morning
cartoons.  Mature minds, entranced by ever more lofty and subtle
theoretical visions, fed feasts of observation and experimentation on
every level, constrained by principles of parsimony, generality, and
elegance, have exuberantly, soberly created in a mere century:

at the ever tapering tail of the dragon, atoms that are .999999 empty
space,

said empty space as a fully occupied negative energy sea of prodigious
density, with incessant particle pair production-annihilation within
that good old vacuum,

the equivalence of mass and energy,

the relativistic variation of observed time,
with irreducible randomness, fuzziness, discontinuity,
and, feh!, nonlocality at the very core of reality,

the weird phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity,

the ever fecund  boson-fermion zoo of baryons, mesons, quarks, gluons,
neutrinos, WIMPs, gravitons, Higg's, magnetic monopoles, and their
antis, and their superpartners, all cascading into actuality as
infinitesimal loops or membranes vibrating within that most spacious
crystal of abstraction, E8XE8 Group (The Monster) Symmetry,  while
now 7 additional dimensions of space are parsimoniously mandated.
Whew!

meanwhile, at the ever bigger end of said dragon,
suddenly the galaxy!,
sprinkled with pulsars and quasars,  oh!, then an expanding universe of
galaxies,  salted with gamma-ray bursters,  oh!, that all sprang into
being as a space-time bubble with zero total energy as an infinitesimal
quantum vacuum fluctuation in "something",  oh!, our bubble of galaxies
extends 10E+25 further than the present observable size after 13.7 billion
years
expansion (that's 10E+75 greater volume, folks),  oh!, might be untold
zillions of universe bubbles, forever disconnected, each with unique
intrinsic properties, effervescing cheerily within "something",   just
the facts, Mam, heh, heh.  Funny what the principle of parsimony leads
to...

gee whiz,  I near forgot,  black holes, them's weird nuff, huh?  Lot of
'em, too, all sizes!   Oops, they evaporate!   Blow up too!   Wow!
Gravitation radiation, anyone?  We can plain see gravitational lensing!
How about cosmic string  and cosmic texture, frozen phase changes in
space-time itself?

remember, if it ain't prohibited, it mandatory.  Yep!    (Is anything
really prohibited?)  .

     I'm not complaining.  It's surely wonderful.  We taxpayers are
getting our money's worth, and then some.  But do you see any sign of
convergence?  Any saturation? Any deceleration?  In empirical fact,
isn't what we see in a mere hundred years an unstoppably exponential
avalanche of proliferation of creative subtleties?

     Isn't the most obvious outcome for the next century a continuation
of this inexhaustibly creative weaving of this coat of many colors,
worlds within worlds, without end, without any possible end, not in a
hundred billion years of sentient evolution, not ever, forever?  Isn't
this, ahem, trend, amen,  the primary observational fact of the whole
hundred years?

     I say so.  I hereby dignify this empirical law by a suitable
appellation:

     Murray's Law:  In the overall exponential evolution of the
scientific process, the scale of reality available for consideration
and the diversity and subtlety of its entities and interactions all
increase exponentially, forever.

     In 1660, the linear grid of Cartesian coordinates comprised the
primary paradigm for scientific reality.  On its empty black and white
board Newton drew alike the falling apple, the orbiting Moon.  Now, the
archetypal image is the Mandelbrot Set, brilliantly and arbitrarily
colored, forever inexhaustible in timeless infinity of subtle detail.
*******************************************************