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Hey all, i know this is super long winded, but some of you may enjoy it, especially those who love attention to detial like Rag, this is copied from the Liber Cyber and i make no claim to it being my work, but definately worth the read.

CHAOS AND COSMOS
A paper by Frater Choronzon
"We are Stardust" - Joni Mitchell (Woodstock)
"Every man and every woman is a star" - Crowley/Aiwass/Nuit (AL)

Neither of the writers here quoted necessarily expected their words to be interpreted literally, but in the course of this paper I would hope to impart a rational sense of meaning to both statements. Human attempts to understand and make predictions about events in the cosmos are rooted in classical antiquity, and have been addressed briefly in my papers on 'Paganism and Heresy' and 'Secret Societies' in this series. Particularly significant events were Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope in 1610, Newton's formulation of Calculus and the Laws of Motion as a means of explaining what was observed, and the inauguration of the Royal Society of London. At this point 'Science' became respectable, and its practitioners breathed a sigh of relief; at last all the alchemists, wizards and mathesists, who had made such a valuable contribution to keeping the spirit of enquiry alive through the dark centuries of intellectual repression, could be forgotten about.

Today Newton's writings on magic and alchemy are quietly ignored; that material is even omitted from respectable volumes for which claims are made that they present his 'complete works'. The fact was that science had reached a point where it was able to offer a model of the movement of bodies in the Solar System which could be defended by reference to the Axioms of Mathematics, as stated by Euclid, which gave the right answers, and which even predicted irregular events like eclipses with impressive accuracy. The final 'proof of the pudding' occurred in 1768 when Captain James Cook was commissioned by the Royal Society to convey "Gentlemen of the Society" and their assistants to Tahiti, in the South Pacific, to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun - he continued west to discover New Zealand and Australia, and completed a circumnavigation back to Blighty in 1771.

Since that time scientific orthodoxy has been as zealous as clerical orthodoxy in its attempts to debunk and deny any vestige of validity to those subjects which were lumped together as the 'Occult'. Although the scientists still had their own squabbles with the Christian view of the universe, they thought that they had the means completely to explain the workings of the cosmos, and very negative attitudes were (and still are) struck towards any dissenter who should dare to present evidence to suggest that phenomena existed which could not be explained by the established Laws of Physics.

As regards observations made on objects and events within the normal scale of terrestrial perception, there were few problems. The difficulties arose when scientists, with the benefit of improved instruments, started to examine very small things, or to try to explain events observed at very large distances, or to consider what happened at extreme velocities. Newtonian physics simply gave the wrong answers, and the first reaction of scientific orthodoxy was to castigate the new-fangled instruments and/or accuse their protagonists of fraud. Einstein and the early Quantum Mechanics, Schrodinger, Heisenberg et al, had few friends in the scientific establishment when they first published material in the domain of what is now termed 'Modern Physics'. Even today it is possible to find people teaching science in schools who have not properly taken on board the fact that Newton's Laws simply do not hold true in anything but the most ordinary situations.

Relativity started to gain some respectability when it was appreciated that it provided an explanation for anomalies in the orbit of the planet Mercury; specifically, an advance in the perihelion (the point of nearest approach to the Sun) of 38 arc-seconds per century. Previously this had been attributed to the postulated existence of another intra-Mercurial planet; i.e. one even closer to the Sun.

Unlike Quantum Mechanics, the new ideas in Relativity were largely the work of a single individual, Albert Einstein, aided, abetted and perhaps inspired by his wife, Mileva, who was also a talented physicist. Although Einstein's first published work on the subject was in 1905, while he was working as an examiner in the Swiss patent office, it was not until November 1919 that any general accliam was accorded to his theories. This occurred in the wake of another eclipse observance expedition organised by the Royal Society of London, this time to Principe Island (adjacent to Fernando Po, for Illuminatus! fans) in the Gulf of Guinea for a solar eclipse. The resultant calculations verified predictions made by Einstein about the bending of starlight rays by strong gravitational fields, and although few could understand what relativity was about, he was acclaimed as a genius, and awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

Despite the fact that his work, and specifically the famous equation
e = mc2
provided the impetus for the development of the atomic bomb, Einstein was a lifelong pacifist, and strongly influenced by Judaic concepts of the cosmos. He did not like the philosophical directions in which Quantum Mechanics appeared to be leading - "God does not play dice", he is reputed to have said in a comment on the Uncertainty Principle developed by the theoretical physicist and Quantum Mechanic, Werner Heisenberg.

Quantum Mechanics is in essence the physics of very small objects. Although the Electromagnetic theories of Faraday and James Clark Maxwell relied on classical (Newtonian) concepts, when researchers started to inquire into the fine structure of the particles involved, and into the nature of matter itself, the results were quite unexpected. When light or an electron beam is directed through a pair of narrow slits onto a screen, for example, instead of two thin lines of light on the screen, the experimenter sees an interference pattem of alternating light and dark areas. When a particle beam is directed at a very thin sheet of gold foil, peculiar scattering patterns result (commonly termed Rutherford scattering). These results were quite at variance with the predictions of classical physics.

The earliest model of the atom to attempt to explain this behaviour, put forward by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913, suggested a compact nucleus with a number of smaller electrons in orbit around it. It was basically a 'sun and planets' model where electrons could jump from one energy level or orbital radius to another. Although this representation held some appeal, if only on the basis of micro/macrocosm self-similarity, the maths simply did not give the right answers.

The Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger developed some ideas on probability put forward by a Frenchman, Louis de Broglie, and by fudging together terms for the total energy, potential energy and momentum of a particle according to classical Newtonian rules, he came up with an equation which yielded solutions which were compatible with what was observed. To a non-mathematician (and quite a few mathematicians) Schrodinger's equation resembles a distastefully arrayed salad with ingredients drawn from the Greek and Roman alphabets and dropped randomly on a plate:

Many physicists found the consequent conclusions about the nature of matter equally unpalatable. At the nub of it, nothing was fixed or certain about the structures described. The matter was summed up in the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg, which can be loosely stated as follows:
A particle can have velocity and no position, or it can have position and no velocity, but it is uncertain which of these conditions may obtain at any point in time.
The situation was made worse by the impossibility of devising any experiment to test the state of a given particle at any moment in time, since to carry out the experiment would irretrievably modify the particle. This difficulty was summed up in the quaintly named paradox of 'Schrodinger's Cat'.

Two conclusions deriving from Quantum Mechanics were held up, by Einstein among others, to be so ludicrous as to render the entire theory invalid; these were mentioned briefly in my previous paper in this series, 'Chaos and Gaia'. The first is Bell's Theorem which was derived mathematically in 1964 by Dr John S Bell on the basis of work on the production of particle pairs by Paul Dirac (of whom it was once said "There is no God and Dirac is his prophet"). Bell showed that if Quantum Mechanics is valid, any two particles, having been simultaneously produced, will continue to exert an instantaneous influence on each other no matter how far apart they subsequently move. This, of course, violates Special Relativity which asserts that energy cannot travel faster than the speed of light. More recent refinements suggest that Bell's Theorem applies only the particle 'spin' parameter, which may be considered to be in the domain of 'information' rather than 'energy'

The second bizarre conclusion is developed as a generalisation from Bell's Theorem and implies that every particle in the universe must at some time have been in contact with every other particle. These concepts can be combined into the notion, perhaps familiar to magicians and Zen Buddhists, that an influence exerted on any single particle will induce some echoed or resonant effect, however infinitesimal, on every other particle in the universe. In my previous paper I surmised that the Mandlebrot Set might provide a model by which such processes could be understood in terms of the transfer of system structure and control information. Items of this class of information were categorised as 'Cyber-Morphs'.

While the arguments were raging between the adherents of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as to which represented the 'ultimate truth' regarding the structure of the cosmos, a young American named Edwin Hubble had been deciding what he wanted to do in life. He majored in Maths and Astronomy at Chicago University, and also established some reputation as an athlete and as a boxer, before deciding to study Law as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He became a barrister in 1913 in Kentucky, but got bored with that and went back to Chicago to do a PhD in Astronomy. He finally settled down to a job at Mount Wilson Observatory in California.

Here ends part one