OC408: A Seamless Universe
David Noel
<davidn@aoi.com.au>
Ben Franklin Centre for Theoretical Research
PO Box 27, Subiaco, WA 6008, Australia.
This is Number 8 in a suite of web articles about the Oort Cloud, the volume of space immediately outside our Solar System.
Complexity in the World
It is a truism that we live in an increasingly complex world. When this increasingly complexity comes from advances in scientific knowledge, this is by no means a bad thing.
But increasing complexity, or growth in the corpus of scientific knowledge, comes with a difficulty -- it may become more and more difficult for the interested person to navigate through the vast accumulations of data and opinion which fill the World.
We owe a debt to the brilliant scientific minds of the past who have opened the doors to such treasure-houses of delight and inspiration. In this suite of articles, a very few of these are named and honoured -- Lucretius, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Planck, Oort, Zwicky, and Einstein are among them. But following these giants has brought us to more and more densely occupied landscapes.
Making simplicity out of complexity
It has been one of the aims of the present book to open up lanes of simplicity through some of these landscapes, particularly those which concern the cosmos, the Universe, stars, planets, and space. Some of these lanes of simplificity have led to what might be called a Seamless Universe -- in several instances, objects formerly regarded as distinct in class have been shown to be merely marker stones along a singular, comprehensive continuum. An example is that of bodies in space -- everything from dust and gases, asteroids, moons, planets, stars, black holes, and AGNs, all these fall into place along a single, if extensive, scale.
Another very pleasing outcome of putting together this work has been the number of mysteries and points of uncertainty which have been cleared up, almost in passing, by applying the simple principles derived. These include the puzzle of why the Planets lie in a plane (which Newton brought up some 300 years ago), through to more philosophical aspects such as how the galaxies and stars which we see all around us evolve and change in an infinite Universe.
One of the overriding themes explored in this work is the huge influence of Vortexes, at every scale from atoms to AGNs, in the operation of the cosmos. So much of what we see is either a vortex, or an element in a vortex. And to understand how these vortexes frame and define our World, we need to consider physics beyond some of the basic concepts such as mass, energy, and position, and invoke Spin Gravity, which includes the interaction of rotating bodies -- an area of physics which goes beyond the laws laid down by Newton, and turns out to be one of the consequences of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
William of Ockham
Most of the great scientific minds of the past, such as those listed above, opened up bigger and bigger mounds of scholarship in the landscape of knowledge. But there was one outstanding figure who did not open up more knowledge, but instead developed a tool to process this knowledge, His name was William of Ockham.
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Fig. OC408-F1. William of Ockham. From [H1].
William of Ockham was born around 1287 in the village of Ockham, in Surrey, England. This village is still on the map, but only just. William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age [H2], and is believed to have studied at the University of Oxford. He became a prominent Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian, and is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought, who produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology.
As a little background, it should be remembered that in mediaeval Europe, universities were essentially the only places of scientific study, and were an integral part of the Church, with Latin as its common language. Also, at that time people did not normally have surnames, but were known from the place where they lived, their occupation, or their parents -- still the case in some Arab or Muslim countries.
William of Ockham is best known for for originating the methodological tool called "Ockham's Razor". In English, this selection technique more or less says, "If you are presented with two or more alternative explanations of something, you should always choose the simplest".
This suite of articles contains many examples of natural phenomena explanations which are simpler, sometimes very much simpler, than older but still common ideas. The most obvious is probably the explanation of Dark Matter, and of the origin of CMBR. The articles have shown that what has been called Dark Matter is simply ordinary matter --- the small, cold bodies of the Oort Soup -- which is distant from stars. While CMBR is just the normal black-body emissions which would be expected from this situation.
Contrast the concepts presented here against some commonly accepted ideas, such as that that dark matter is made up of hypothesized particles with properties different to those in the real world, or that CMBR comes from a hypothesized event some 13.7 billion years ago, and you should find the choice easy. And William would approve!
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References and Links
[H1]. Daniel Lattier. William of Ockham: The Man Who Started the Decline of the West. https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/william-ockham-man-who-started-decline-west .
[H2]. William of Ockham. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham .
Go to the Oort Cloud Home Page
Go to the previous article in the OC suite
Version 1.0 published November 2019 as Segment H of the book "The Oort Cloud: Almost all the Universe". AOI Press, ISBN 9798614884314.
Version 2.0 conversion started 2022 Jun 29, placed on web at "AOI.com.au", 2022 Jun 30.
