[Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

As always, we are on the same wavelength, Joel.  This article has Ur  
Patterns written all over it--patterns that show up on multiple level of  emergence, 
patterns that metaphors can capture.  
 
Why are these patterns so easily graspable by metaphor?  Because  metaphor is 
one concrete example of an Ur Pattern that repeats itself on  multiple 
levels.  Meaning that metaphor is not just a literary trick.   It is a way of 
capturing something deep and repetitive in this cosmos--a deep  structure if you 
prefer to use Noam Chomsky's vocabulary.
 
Not all metaphors are valid.  But when you find the right one for the  
phenomenon you're watching, you've hit gold.
 
And never forget, math is metaphor in disguise.  Onward--Howard
 
In a message dated 6/9/2005 2:23:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes:



Plasma in reactors echoes distribution of galaxies
11 June  2005
NewScientist.com news service
Mark Anderson

NUCLEAR fusion  reactors could be used to study what the universe was like 
just after the  big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma 
created inside  these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way to 
galaxies in  today's universe.

Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology does not normally 
concern himself with events in the early  universe. Instead, he studies 
turbulence in the plasma created in fusion  reactors. But when he chanced 
upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) -  which is mapping a quarter of the 
sky in detail - he noticed something  uncanny. The mathematical equation 
governing the distribution of voids and  galaxies looks remarkably like the 
one describing the millimetre-sized  knots and clots of plasma in the 
Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion  reactor in Garching, Germany (Physics 
Letters A, vol 340, p  456).

Basse argues that the distribution of galaxies today could be the  result of 
variations in the density of plasma after the big bang. "I think  it all 
comes from turbulence in the very early universe," he says. "[The  galaxy 
distribution today] is just a blow-up of what was going on at that  point." 
This suggests that stellarator reactors could serve as models of  the early 
universe.


But cosmologist Daniel Eisenstein of the  University of Arizona in Tucson, 
who works on the SDSS project, disagrees.  He points out that the kind of 
plasma that Basse describes existed only  for the first millisecond after the 
big bang, and that epoch ended too  soon to influence the large scale 
structure of today's universe.  Eisenstein calculates that the largest 
structure that could have arisen  because of any such primordial density 
variations would only stretch a few  light years across today.

“The plasma created inside fusion reactors is  distributed in a strikingly 
similar way to galaxies in today's  universe”Eisenstein also says that 
Basse's claim is difficult to reconcile  with the results of the Wilkinson 
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which  has mapped the distribution of the 
oldest light in the universe dating  back to some 380,000 years after the big 
bang. This "baby picture" of the  cosmos yields markedly different density 
fluctuations to the SDSS map. "I  don't see any way to get turbulence into 
this mix without throwing out all  the [WMAP] data," Eisenstein says. "And 
that's very powerful  data."

>From issue 2503 of New Scientist magazine, 11 June 2005, page  8







----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A  Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution  of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Recent Visiting  Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; 
Core Faculty  Member, The Graduate  Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder:  International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution  Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango  Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the  Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, 
Academy of Political  Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human  Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; 
executive editor -- New  Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology  Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer  Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see  www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of  Mass Mind from the Big 
Bang to the 21st Century, see  www.howardbloom.net

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