By John Cryan – November 11, 2024

As described in the longest of the previous ten white papers presenting implications and extensions of the Chaon-Convolution Theory, entitled Creating New Science Out of the Old (now affectionately known as ‘Big Imps’), the biggest obstacle to doing good science (which is science that lasts, that sticks with the general public, because it is broadly replicable) is science’s hallmark empirical activity: taking measurements. At the root of this so-called Quandary of Measurement is the continuum-node paradox.

The reason for this is that a measurement is but a single node in spacetime. This fact was illustrated in ‘Big Imps’ by using a photon, which has the added metaphorical value of disappearing on contact with anything that’s not a free chaon. [Actually, it disintegrates and transfers its energy to the object it hits.]

But that photon’s travel, and all of its TTT cycles as it diminishes racing through the spacetime free chaon matrix, is a compound continuum. A continuum in space and time. As are all continua.

It just so happens that the photon’s travel continuum has a clearly definite beginning and an end. In the universal scheme of things, all continua do, even when they seem endless or cyclical. But their lengths, the paths they trace (shapetime! or, temporal topology), and what happens along them, vary, a lot. The aggregate of all that variation adds up to the sum total of our physical, and also metaphysical, Universe.

Everyone now assumes that all measurements are numbers, but for most of human history, that was not true. It is still not the case, to this day, for the vast majority of humans in their daily activities. Most measurements done by humans are the same as those done by other animals, and for that matter, most other life forms: they are estimates, often made on the fly. And their units can be colors, shapes, forms or masses, sounds, smells, tastes, feels – even ‘sixth,’ ‘seventh,’ or for that matter, ‘tenth’ or even ‘twentieth’ or more sensory receptions. Our ‘intuition’ is the sum total of our perceptions of the variety of physical inputs we receive, which vary from moment to moment, and include things like heat, electricity, pressure, texture, movement, and impact. Intuition, or instinct, is the evolution-honed stimulus-response networks all living things come endowed with. It is our ‘first draft’ of empiricism. These gifts are why we all are scientists, whether we know it or not. And whether we develop it or not.

Intuition seems magical at times because we are unaware of just how many, and how many different, inputs we are continuously receiving. Many of them operate completely subconsciously most of the time. A few adepts among us can train themselves to perceive some of the more esoteric ones, and end up revered as teachers, yogi, shamans and gurus, among other titles. And modern scientists can seem terribly prescient at times using ‘enhanced senses,’ or instruments created by science, to perceive things Nature did not endow us to (though other organisms may have some of these gifts).

We have reached the point, unfortunately, where modern science has found a way to convert all of these original forms of measurement to numbers alone. This mathematical (and now, digital) world has warped science beyond recognition, sundering it almost completely from normal, everyday life. It has also greatly enhanced the dangers of drawing ‘conclusions,’ or ‘solutions,’ or ‘results,’ all of which are singular nodalities, from ever increasing aggregations of of what naturalists used to call ‘observations,’ now almost universally converted to streams of often heavily-interpolated and processed numbers, reducing ‘measurements’ to ‘data.’ And to make the situation even more fraught, more and more of these ‘observations’ or ‘measurements’ are made by machines, not humans, often layered one over the other, with a master machine, a ‘supercomputer,’ guiding the whole process.

Is it any wonder that more and more people feel alienated from modern science?

The trends outlined above, including the basic notion that there is something continuous about a photon particle’s travel, predate 2020. Now add all the complications presented by the Chaon-Convolution worldview. What has changed, and what does it mean for science going forward?

The short answer is, of course, a paradoxical statement. Everything has changed, and nothing. The world has not changed, but our view of it has, radically.

The reason is because science has as its biggest unstated goal the elimination of all paradoxes. For scientists, a paradox is nothing more than a problem to be solved. And every problem can be solved.

If you are a professional scientist doing a thought experiment, you must use standard, or linear, logic to reach a solution. There can be no tautologies, no contradictions. Ambiguity does not produce ‘Eureka!’ moments. The same practices hold for real experiments to prove the results of the thought experiment.

So a big part of the answer to the question of how to move science forward in light of the paradox conundrum is simply to accept that paradoxes exist – everywhere. And in everything. They are built into Nature by the paradoxical nature of free vs. bound chaons. Oppositional forces acting together simultaneously, at all times and most places, to form, shape, and dissolve the Reality we experience. The Mirror of Life in action, mediated and moderated – made livable – by the ameliorating fact that those dualistic Binaries, and even the most extreme Oppositions imaginable, including all the Platonic Forms and their mirror opposites, are bound together by the continua between them, and further influenced, modified, transformed, or otherwise complicated by all the other continua that affect them.

This means we must move beyond one- two- or even three-dimensional logical Forms, the ones we have always relied upon, and still do, even as we electronically press them into pseudo-‘service’ as primitive AI ‘algorithms.’ We must treat Reality as the ever-shifting, megadimensional web it is.

And how do we accomplish this? Abandon nodalism, and adopt, expand, and apply mock-continuous thought.

Does it mean we have to chuck all that’s gone before? For three reasons, no. First, nodal processes and procedures have gotten us pretty far toward uncovering aspects of Reality. Second, the continuum-node paradox means we can project and extend continua out of any nodal result, calculation, conclusion, solution, or even assumption. We can then put those expanded entities into further context by cross-connecting them with any other continua which they encounter, in time, space, or both.

Finally, and this is vital: We have been engaging in precursors to mock-continuous thought all along.

In other words, by exponentially increasing our measurement capabilities, we have gotten better at stringing together enough measurements, of sufficient types and qualities, over ever longer continuous periods of time, that we are getting better at sampling actual operating continua of Nature, in real time.

We have been subconsciously striving to overcome the Quandary of Measurement in this fashion.

And there have been some extraordinary triumphs. The most recent include our successes at piecing together major evolutionary, including most likely, Convolutionary, events in the Covid-19 virus, almost as they have occurred. Another was the assembly of a single image of a giant black hole (‘active galactic nucleus’) from the coordinated observations of radio telescopes scattered across the globe.

With all this said, there are other limitations holding us back from advancing science. We must be clear-headed and open-eyed as we press into them. Some of them are daunting. Some plain dead ends.

So what’s to prevent us from doubling down on measurement enhancement tech, then tripling, quadrupling, etc., it, until we have created an AI-powered, continuously operating, mega-measurement machine, custom-fitted to ‘solving’ whatever problems we deem important enough to spend all that time, money and material on, in not just a nodal, but at least a partially mock-continuous fashion?

The very short answer is, of course, Chaos. The slightly longer term quantum physicists use is Decoherence. The first is caused by those pesky free chaons. In turn, that chaos causes the second.

Decoherence is the breakdown of physics equations, the math physicists use to track what they think is going on in Nature. The most famous example is Schroedinger’s wave function, which always decoheres at the end of a calculation. This shows two vitally important things about measurements:

first, that the act of measuring always affects the thing being measured; and second, that no matter how clever or elaborate the measurement technique is, it is limited by the oppositional-to-order, or chaotic, behavior of the free chaonic spacetime matrix.

That same chaos, or decoherence in mathematical terms, is also responsible for the decay pathways and decay rates of the tools, or tools aggregated into machines nowadays, used to do the measurements, as well as the bound-chaonic objects being measured.

And all of this is further complicated by what quantum physicists call Superposition, or the fact that any so-called ‘quantum state,’ which is the mathematical description of a particular, nodal, physical condition of an orderly, or bound-chaonic, object in spacetime, can be broken down into additional component quantum states. This is a moving equivalent of the fixed Mandelbrot patterns or fractals which can be created and manipulated mathematically to infinitely large or small scales. Superposition is a demonstration not only of free chaonic existence and power, but also of Big Bang Momentum and all the other, derivative (e.g., TTT and classical relativistic gravity-powered), constant movement of the free chaonic spacetime matrix and all bound-chaonic objects formed and carried along inside it.

Superposition, therefore, proves there is no locality in Nature, because everything is always moving; this is also the only way you could have physical ‘superposition’ in its standard dictionary definition. If there is no locality in Nature, ‘quantum states’ are the most fleeting of nodal properties, and, in fact, do not exist as such; rather, they are one infinitesimally small (in space and time), unique, nodal portion of interacting continua. In other words, the ‘quantum states,’ or underlying mathematical descriptions, of everything in Nature are constantly, or continuously, changing, and our attempts to measure them, or nail them down, are nodally misleading.

Likewise, Entanglement, or the formation of mirror particles, dualistically reflects the constant motion of both free and bound chaons. Recall the descriptions of these motions in the Order from Chaons implications paper, especially the collapse of three-dimensional motion into or toward two dimensions, described mathematically by physicists as symmetry breaking, and associated with both increasing order (chaon binding) and stability (timelessness, or the durability of all bound-chaonic particles and structures, supported and driven by gravity, or free chaonic pressure and motion, even as those same free chaons are breaking down those bound structures, their atomic and molecular bonds especially).

Those mirrored bound-chaonic particles come in many sizes and forms, up to the size of atomic components. One characteristic some share is Annihilation: they destroy each other if they come into close contact. This has been observed with particles of mirror, or binary, charges, generally attractive-repulsive, such as the electron or proton, and their corresponding opposite electromagnetically charged antiparticles. Annihilated particles reduce to smaller bound constituents or sometimes to free chaons.

All of these phenomena are ephemeral, and therefore, also unstable. They require relatively high levels of energy to generate, and, in the lower-energy environments they end up in, quickly degenerate and disperse, often back into the free-chaonic spacetime matrix itself. Familiar examples of relatively high-energy environments in Nature include the electromagnetic fields generated by spinning planets like ours, the fusion- (and therefore pressure- heat- and electromagnetically-) generated ‘solar winds’ around the Sun (and don’t forget the Sun’s corona, the hottest part even though it is an ‘outer fringe’ star layer, because that’s where the outward pressures of all those generated photons and charged subatomic particles are finally able to escape the dense confines of star-scaled free chaonic gravity), and finally, those most massive, energized, and, up to now, mysterious entities we call black holes.

We humans discovered these ‘exotic’ phenomena by creating artificial high-energy environments using particle accelerators. You don’t see such events just walking around in the woods, or even the streets of a big city. Even big telescopes cannot fathom the small-scale details of what’s going on in outer space.

This hidden system of Oppositions, or mirrored opposing forces, at the base of Mother Nature (see, Universal Spin) explains why we can never know if Schroedinger’s famous cat is dead or alive, just as my Mom never knew if our cat Chester was dead or alive once he went outside (which he did often), which proves quantum physics operates at all scales in some fashion. Moreover, these constantly contesting forces are rarely seen to destroy (or cancel out, to use a less violent term) each other, or break the Mirror, in most of our humdrum everyday existence. A spectacular exception I once witnessed was an overly aggressive male robin smashing our slider window to smithereens in a kamikaze attack on his opponent in the glass. Needless to say, he got a warrior’s burial.

Violence is a sudden, high-energy transformation that creates chaos, entropy, and therefore a much lower energy state in its wake. There is always a potential energy buildup before any violent release.

Violence can be harnessed to do work. You do it over and over when you start your fossil car every day. But it stays inside the cylinders. Warfare is the use of violence to lower your enemies’ energy states ’til they cry ‘Uncle.’ Or, in the worst cases, until they are gone altogether.

The regions around stars and black holes are seats of the greatest regularly-occurring violence in the Universe. These super-massive objects (the one creates the other and vice versa) have the most energy, potential and kinetic, packed into the least space. The violence they produce, whether continuous, or one-offs like supernovae, is diverse, occasionally spectacular, and often hidden. It is in the smothering hearts of black holes that the greatest acts of decoherence occur. Decoherence followed by Recoherence. Reconstruction. Rebirth. This is the fundamental Paradox of the Duality. The ability of the Universe to reproduce, and therefore maintain Order in the face of Chaos.

Black holes eat Order, in the form of bound-chaonic objects as big as stars, solar systems, and even other black holes, turn them into free-chaonic mush, then spit out new bound-chaonic microparticles that rebuild eventually into new stars, solar systems, galaxies and black holes. Of course, they also eat an even greater amount of the actual matrix of spacetime in the process. All of this is the workings of Chaonic Gravity. So the biggest Decoherence of all is Relativistic, not just Quantum. The point where Relativity and Quantum, the two shining cities on separate hills of physics, meet is the Dualities at the centers of big, or ripe, or mature, black holes. This initially massive Decoherence on the way into the Duality paradoxically produces the greatest amounts by far of fresh Order in the Universe, which puts our own piddling efforts here on Earth, like city-building (also shockingly wasteful) to shame.

Our accelerators are actually quite tame, orderly little environments compared to the maelstroms of monstrous streaming and colliding forces surrounding black holes, stars, and even little planets.

They have to be, or there’d be no way to get any usable measurements out of them.

Let’s leave the violence of the cosmos and return to the subquantum nanocosmos. It is there we need to search for Origins. Using the powerful tool of severe inductive reductionism, we can begin to make the limited quantum knowledge we think we hold point to the foundational layer of subultimate causes.

That, of course, would be the chaons.

Before we go any further, we need to take heed of the unavoidable caveat in the Order from Chaons implications white paper. And that, of course, is chaons as the mediating element between the Numinous and ourselves. The supernatural and the natural. Metaphysics and physics.

Only God knows how many chaons came out of that Singularity. Their numbers have been diminishing ever since, at faster and faster rates, signs of a temporal Universe fated to someday vanish altogether.

Chaons are the closest thing there is to perpetual motion machines. They also are blank slates. They carry no information. They just are.

It is bedrock quantum dogma that particles have three, and only three, qualities: mass, spin, and charge. Chaons, which compound to form those particles, themselves have only one: spin. Mass and charge in particles are outcomes of chaonic spin. Or more precisely, chaonic spin and orientation.

Because of Big Bang Momentum, extended and enhanced by Temporarily Transformative Transport (TTT-E BBM for short; see Order from Chaons), the power behind speedy photons, the Universe was bestowed with a Chaonic Compass. Someday, if we are lucky, we’ll figure out which way it points, and literally find God. Meanwhile, because as chaons spin up they become polar, they also become the tiniest of gyroscopes. This allows them to orient to each other and the expanding Universe at large.

And to hold relatively stable orientations for a while, sometimes a very long while if they are spinning very fast. How they do these things in bound-chaonic particles determines those particles’ qualities.

The free chaons of spacetime are intensely unisocial in an antisocial way. If they are parted too far from their peers, they spin up rapidly and extend their reach to grab onto the nearest ones and return to the fold. Then they spin down again and go back to mildly repulsive sleep. The neighboring chaons are awakened by that energy transfer, but eventually the energy disperses and dissipates through enough of their neighbors, replenishing the original lost chaon’s as well, that everybody can go back to sleep separately together, secure that all is peaceful again in their little corner of the universe.

But it is when chaons are bound for longer than a photon cycle by increasing amounts of the divine energy that things begin to segregate and diversify. Continua of spinning chaonic clumps of varying orientations, and thus configurations, form. These are the tiniest of subparticles, the beginnings of a compound-compositing process powered by ever-increasing amounts of pure energy as yet unguided by the segregating forces of structure into the force manifestations we can detect. This can happen only inside the event horizon of a black hole. The process intensifies as the particle primordia are pushed to the center. At the Duality, the finished parts are over-formed, then pushed by excess pressure out the polar vents in dual ejection jets that take them far from the hole’s center, where they cool and assemble into atomic nuclei and pick up their waiting electrons (most already freshly formed in the outer parts of the black hole) in the powerful electromagnetic swirls orbiting the hole the particle jets pass through.

All the various chaonic spins and orientations necessary to form the ‘zoo’ of particles ultimately comprising atoms are ‘fixed’ in time inside the black hole to resist the forces of free chaonic decay.

And that returns us to our start, leaving unanswered the question that propelled this quest: How do we proceed science in a world we now know is temporary and subject to powerful forces of temporal subcreation and decay we still do not understand?

The answer is, very gingerly, very carefully, with extreme discretion, and our eyes – nay, all our senses, wide open.

We need to build out the fundamental science behind both subquantum physics and chaonic decay.

And we need to avoid the many temptations of throwing large sums of good money at projects lacking any chance of succeeding because of our almost utter ignorance of both of those vital topics. The money and effort should go, instead, to advancing our knowledge of those two foundational fields enough to be able to make smart decisions about where to put our limited research efforts in practical applications. I have already given examples of several questionable endeavors which should be back-burnered until we know enough truly fundamental physics to see if they are worth pursuing.

The stakes for not taking this advice are very high. Multiple cascading calamities, spawned by our industrialized, fossil-fueled population explosion, rapidly accelerating global warming, and the final stages of biospheric destruction, are autocatalyzing an impending disaster that will end civilization as we know it and drop our population almost instantaneously by famine, disease, and war.

With the time we have left, we need to use our existing science to modify our technologies (energy and digital, especially), reduce our populations voluntarily worldwide as rapidly as possible while keeping everyone alive and able to function, and most importantly, remove ourselves as destroyers from most of the biosphere we depend upon for basic life support to facilitate its recovery.

In order to do that, we need to fix our political failures and conflicts. That means creating as much self-government as possible, especially in places that have never had it or have backslid. The popular will and technologies are there to do this; they just need to be summoned by good leadership.

We need many more people, of all cultures, to join the sciences. To support that, we need the average level of basic science literacy to grow, rapidly and exponentially. We can make this happen if we clean up the internet. It is literally full of garbage. That’s not what the scientists who invented it intended.

We, individually and collectively, also need to get deeply in touch with our human strengths and limitations. Our strengths are real, obvious, and generously bestowed. We see them every day in ourselves and others. They are what inspire us to keep on.

Our limitations are equally visible, but we do not understand them. The Chaon-Convolution Theory, if it is rapidly and properly built out by good science, will remedy that. It will give us the proper humility to balance our pride. It will also motivate us to try harder. Much harder.

There is a scene in Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman series, widely regarded as the greatest comic ever written, that sums up what we must do in this moment, and what the reward will be if we do. It is found in the prequel, done years after the series ended. In it, Morpheus is tasked to breach Destiny by dragging a mystical ship containing the representative inhabitants of the entire Universe through a Dream Portal of his own devising, and into a new future+. It takes every last bit of his powers to do it.

If we Earthlings can do this in microcosm, our reward will ultimately be to meet those inhabitants.