Issue 64: The Holistic Universe

The Holistic Universe

In this bumper edition we collect together the most important cosmological writings of Marxist philosopher and physicist, Jim Schofield: his work on the nature of the Universe.

In his ongoing application of Dialectical Materialism to the many disciplines of science, Jim has increasingly turned to Holism as the answer to the persistent crisis in Physics. But this ancient philosophical stance isn’t what most people think of when they hear the term “holistic” science.

Reclaiming Holism

Much like the rampant misuse of the word “quantum” by quacks and snake oil salesman the world over, the word “holistic” has been dragged through the dirt for several decades, becoming synonymous with the worst kind of pseudoscientific drivel, in the minds of many scientists, and in the popular consciousness too, particualrly when it is applied to the field of medicine.

For the team at SHAPE Journal, it is high time this vital word was reclaimed for those who use it deadly seriously. While holism is often used as an exuse by some to abandon analysis and scientific rigour in favour of some questionable belief system - the rational always subtended by the spiritual - the philosophical concept itself, implies no such thing.

The dictionary definition of the term doesn’t suggest this either.

Holistic is posited as the antonym of ‘atomistic’, as the study of wholes rather than parts, or an acknowledgment that parts cannot be understood without reference to the whole (and vice versa), that contexts and the changing relations between entities, are as important as the entities themselves. That holism is oppositional to reductionism doesn’t entail an abandonment of analysis, but a crucial acknowledgment of what analysis actually is; the limitations of all analyses and the necessity for examining the real material contexts in which any findings occur.

To really understand what Holism is, it is important to understand it in terms of its opposite, the currently dominant Priniciple of Plurality, and Jim spends much time explicating the differences between these two philosophical approaches. As he states in What is Holism:

“Plurality saw Reality as being determined by a set of eternal Natural Laws, which simply summed in various mixes and proportions to deliver everything that there is. The task of studying Reality (in all its diverse forms), therefore, had to be to reveal what these Laws were, and any means that could be used to reveal them more clearly was considered a legitimate method for finding such clearly defining things. For, as they were eternal, they could not be changed by context. So, if the context was significantly adjusted to most clearly display a given Law, that would in no way change the sought-for Law. Context would still determine what was seen normally, but merely due to the summing of a set of eternal laws in a given set of proportions.”

This is contrasted with Holism in the same paper:

“This was most carefully defined by The Buddha in India, about the same time as Plurality was being revealed in Greece. And, in a nutshell, it was defined as, “Everything affects everything else” or alternatively as, “Everything is always in constant change!” You can see how very different this premise made the process of understanding Reality. Instead of the pluralist assumption of the addition of FIXED things, there was instead the holist assumption of the mutually-affecting combination of easily changeable and hence constantly CHANGING components.”

Holism is most vitally different in how it sees time rather than space - it’s not just about looking at wholes rather than parts, but looking at changing properties over the assumption and manipulation of fixed laws that we see in all the sciences. Hopefully you can begin to see the relevance of this to Dialectical Materialism and to our understanding of the evolution of the Universe.

The tendency in Physics is to assume the laws that control the Universe have always been the same, but there is no evidential reason to assume this - the flaw is an unspoken philosophical assumption - and it has lead to a very skewed view of Cosmology.

This set of essays begins the task of looking at the Universe and its history holistically - the Universe as an interconnected and evolving Everything.

Mick Schofield
SHAPE Editor

One Global Economy, Two Giants

The Casimir Effect and Substrate Theory

Explaining "vacuum fluctuations" without quantum field theory

"Any medium supporting oscillations has an analogue of the Casimir effect. For example, beads on a string[3][4] as well as plates submerged in noisy water[5] or gas[6] illustrate the Casimir force" 

(my italics)

The quotation above is significant, even if it is just from Wikipedia! It allows us to consider a very different explanation to the consensus one usually adopted for the actual Casimir Effect, and it allows us to compare them.

The Casimir Effect (between two conducting plates in a vacuum) presents an excellent phenomenon for contrasting Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory with a new alternative account, suggesting the effects of an undetectable Universal Substrate composed of units consisting of mutually-orbiting pairs of Leptons (Substrate Theory) which replicates the idea in the quote in the exact circumstances of the actual Casimir Effect.

Clearly, that quote makes such a comparison absolutely necessary, for it immediately suggests an undetectable medium (though extremely fine-structured perhaps) as potentially delivering exactly what we observe, rather than QTís disembodied ìvaccuum fluctuationsî.

If composed of appropriate Leptons, these joint-units could be completely undetectable (cancelling-out all observable effects), while delivering the necessary properties of such a medium, and possibly also being capable of the propagation of electromagnetic energy, and fluctuations required to deliver the observed Casimir Force.

Such an invisible and connected medium has been fully theoreised by this researcher - termed a Paving and formed from Neutritrons (units composed of the mutual-orbiting of two Leptons - one Electron and one Positron) it presented significant suggestions that, in spite of the neutrality of such joint-units overall, that they could on very-close-approach, produce an affecting oscillating effect of alternating attractions and repulsions created-entirely due to cross-influences between the sub-units in different adjacent Neutritrons, which would loosely-link the joint-units together, to form that Paving, with the involved overall units constantly oscillating about equally spaced positions, and thus enabling a means of EM propagation, due to the demotion of energy from the orbit of one unit, and its promtion to the orbit within the next, immediately adjacent unit, thus delivering a bucket-brigade-transfer, and consequently propagating a quantum of energy, at a fixed speed - giving us C.

A Neutritron

Now, if such an undetectable Substrate permeated the universe, especially as it is composed of oscillating units, it could also be a real alternative to the so-called Quantum Field of empty space. It would, for example, be capable not only of propagating energy, but also of holding and delivering it in appropriately conducive contexts. And the point about the Paving also shows how at tiny separations similar linkages with the orbiting-electrons and relatively static nuclei in the atoms of a sheets of conducting material, would also be possible in the same sort of way.

Now before the vast majority of Physics academics succumb to damaging heart attacks, may I inform them of the alternative explanation of Quantized Electron orbits in atoms?

As soon as even the remote possibility of an undetectable Universal Substrate was suggested, its necessary composition and consequent properties were required. Particularly as the sole composition by Neutritrons had already been able to remove every single one of the anomalies of the full set of Double Slit Experiments, without any recourse whatsoever to the Copenhagen Interpretaion of Quantum Theory.

And, an extension of the Theory of the Universal Substrate composed only of Neutritrons immediately revealed that the devised Paving was by no means a stable form. For fairly low applied energies would dissociate the Paving into individual units, and they could either thereafter act like a released random gas, or be driven by moving energetic interlopers into streams, or even into vortices, and though forms like the latter would usually be temporary - that would not be the case when caused by orbiting Electrons - for the orbits would cause the Electrons to constantly traverse the very-same-route, so the Vortices could be maintained by the returning electrons. And, remarkably, energy could also be passed back to the orbiting electrons by these vortices! For the overall energy available, only certain orbits would be possible: a physical explanation for quantization.

It soon became clear that if appropriate different extra Substrate Units were available, Electrical, Magnetic and even Gravitational fields could all be features of a heterogeneous Substrate. After all, it would explain why the supposed causes of the Fields were never diminished by the energetic actions of those Fields.

Magnetons theorised as part of the Substrate

The required new units appeared to also be possible as mutually orbiting pairs of Leptons, but now with differently sized components, so that Magnetic Dipole Moments would be unavoidable. And the involved Units could both propagate and indeed subtend actual Fields, due to retained energy in the Unitsí internal orbits.

Even the required undetectability could be achieved by equal numbers of mirror-image joint units, which as a ìrandom gasî would be undetectable, but as statically formed areas, associated with their initiators, could easly subtend the appropriate Fields.

Read the rest of this paper on ResearchGate

SHAPE blog 10 years old today!

This was our first ever post in March 2009. Expect further celebrations and special issues as we approach the 10 year anniversary of our first issue of SHAPE Journal.

 Once my new website "E Journal" is up and running, I'll post up here the latest news, papers and articles etc. I will also add anything that I think may be of interest to E Journal's readers...

Who is to Blame?

Billionaires. Whether we blame them directly, or the system that creates them, they still have to go....

Who do we immediately identify as the perpetrators for our despair?

On studying the evolution of Capitalist Economics today - some 140 years after Karl Marx's magnificent effort to explain it ended with his death - the many major crises, the World Wars and the increasing acceleration of mounting state and personal debt, have elicited various (although always temporary) "solutions", that simply defer, but never solve, the ever-mounting problems with the economy. And these "solutions" constantly construct innumerable extra barriers to ordinary Workers being able to see any kind of solution of their own!

And, the protectors of that System, have compounded the felony, with their Divide-and-Rule policies, involving their loudly apportioning blame to some different, and hence easily-identified, section of the population, as well as diverting the problem, again purely temporarily, by facilitating a vast increase in the Debt Mountain, to finance some kind of apparent alleviation.

In consequence, the real causes of these crises become ever more opaque and impenetrable, and an increasingly worried population begins to look round for identifiable culprits, which, in addition, to the everywhere identified "foreigners" which are blamed (use Brexit and Trump as case studies, if you must), they were also directed to other targets, much-closer-to-home, such as their own personal inadequaces, for example, or those of their spouses! For, a brief check upon the men of their extended family, by financially-harassed wives, could reveal the severely curtailed abilities of them all to provide what is needed for their respective families: "they become the problem, and are told so in no uncertain terms!"

Families are decomposing everywhere! But, in doing so, it only compounds the difficulties, multiplies the problems, and hides the real causes ever more effectively.

These problems are not due to the personal failings of workers. Ordinary people are not to blame.

In the past, the immediate causes-and-consequences used to be much more easily identified, and the solutions were equally obvious: workers were organised in Unions, and could act together in a Strike. In some circumstances a whole Industry could be involved, or even a nation-wide General Strike of all workers.

But successively, every Capitalist downturn was cleverly used by employers and their political allies, to dismantle, bit-by-bit, the power of the Unions, by both exporting jobs abroad, as well as bringing in various Anti-Union Laws, so that today, what jobs are available are low-paid and usually un-organisable by Unions.

The situation is rapidly becoming insurmountable economically.

And, the old ways of fighting against this exploitation no longer work. 

Even the British Labour Party, in spite of its current Left Wing Leadership (AND Party Membership) is being dismantled by the pro-Capitalist Labour MPs in Parliament, who increasingly side with the Tories against their own movement.

The only old way left is agitation in the streets!

Bring the People out in Mass Demonstrations - BUT crucially they must be well-armed with an understanding of what is really wrong, along with a supported programme to end it!

There will be very strong opposition to this but

WE are the MANY

&

THEY are the FEW

The time has come to go onto the streets

The Significance of China in the Global Economy