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<DIV>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. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>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.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Not all metaphors are valid. But when you find the right one for the
phenomenon you're watching, you've hit gold.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>And never forget, math is metaphor in disguise. Onward--Howard</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 6/9/2005 2:23:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
isaacsonj@hotmail.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
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size=2><BR><BR>Plasma in reactors echoes distribution of galaxies<BR>11 June
2005<BR>NewScientist.com news service<BR>Mark Anderson<BR><BR>NUCLEAR fusion
reactors could be used to study what the universe was like <BR>just after the
big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma <BR>created inside
these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way to <BR>galaxies in
today's universe.<BR><BR>Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology does not normally <BR>concern himself with events in the early
universe. Instead, he studies <BR>turbulence in the plasma created in fusion
reactors. But when he chanced <BR>upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) -
which is mapping a quarter of the <BR>sky in detail - he noticed something
uncanny. The mathematical equation <BR>governing the distribution of voids and
galaxies looks remarkably like the <BR>one describing the millimetre-sized
knots and clots of plasma in the <BR>Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion
reactor in Garching, Germany (Physics <BR>Letters A, vol 340, p
456).<BR><BR>Basse argues that the distribution of galaxies today could be the
result of <BR>variations in the density of plasma after the big bang. "I think
it all <BR>comes from turbulence in the very early universe," he says. "[The
galaxy <BR>distribution today] is just a blow-up of what was going on at that
point." <BR>This suggests that stellarator reactors could serve as models of
the early <BR>universe.<BR><BR><BR>But cosmologist Daniel Eisenstein of the
University of Arizona in Tucson, <BR>who works on the SDSS project, disagrees.
He points out that the kind of <BR>plasma that Basse describes existed only
for the first millisecond after the <BR>big bang, and that epoch ended too
soon to influence the large scale <BR>structure of today's universe.
Eisenstein calculates that the largest <BR>structure that could have arisen
because of any such primordial density <BR>variations would only stretch a few
light years across today.<BR><BR>“The plasma created inside fusion reactors is
distributed in a strikingly <BR>similar way to galaxies in today's
universe”Eisenstein also says that <BR>Basse's claim is difficult to reconcile
with the results of the Wilkinson <BR>Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which
has mapped the distribution of the <BR>oldest light in the universe dating
back to some 380,000 years after the big <BR>bang. This "baby picture" of the
cosmos yields markedly different density <BR>fluctuations to the SDSS map. "I
don't see any way to get turbulence into <BR>this mix without throwing out all
the [WMAP] data," Eisenstein says. "And <BR>that's very powerful
data."<BR><BR>From issue 2503 of New Scientist magazine, 11 June 2005, page
8<BR><BR><BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>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<BR>Recent Visiting
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty
Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>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.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology
Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>