Wobbly Universe

As early as the 1970s, astronomers such as William Tifft, Halton Arp and Geoffrey Burbidge began to report a very strange phenomena. Pairs of galaxies and small groups or galaxies had redshifts that tended to differ from each other by whole multiples of 72 km/s which implied that galaxies could only travel at certain quantized velocities. This made absolutely no sense because we look at the galaxies presumed orbital motions about each other from a variety of angles, so such quantized velocity differences would be destroyed by our perspective. Therefore most astronomers ignored the results as statistical flukes that would soon go away.

First of all it is best to look at what is a redshift and what it is taken to mean. When the light from stars and galaxies is split into different colours there are many lines present at certain wavelength which are due to the composition of those stars or galaxies. Each element produces a unique pattern of lines that depends on how hot it is and whether it is emitting or absorbing light. We can measure the same thing in the laboratory on Earth. However if a star or galaxy is moving towards us or away from us, then the spectral lines are moved due to the Doppler effect, which is often described with the example of a train whistle which sounds higher pitched when approaching us and lower pitched when going away. So redshift can be used to measure velocity, although there are several other causes of redshifts. They are called redshifts because for most galaxies the wavelengths are moved towards the red end of the spectrum which is why the idea of a big bang came about because it seems that everything is flying apart.

Redshifts are measured as a fractional displacement in wavelengths. If a galaxy has a redshift of z=0.02 then all the spectral lines are moved upwards in wavelength by the same proportion of 2%. Astronomers are so sure that galaxy redshifts are caused by velocity that they generally do not quote z=.02 but they say the redshift is 6,000 km/s. They arrive at this by the formula v=z*c where c is the velocity of light.

Therefore when someone says that redshifts are quantized by 72 km/s it is self-evident that we are talking about velocities isn't it? After all we did quote a velocity didn't we? Well, a correct statement would be that redshifts show a quanta or periodicity of z=.00024 as that does not assume velocity and might possibly make some sense. But before we look at the possible causes of the redshift, let us look seriously at the evidence.

After a lot of reports that indicated something weird was going on, William Tifft published a series of papers in the Astrophysics Journal in the late 1970s that looked at the details of the phenomenon and showed it to be even more weird. He found that not only the difference between nearby galaxies showed 72 km/s multiples but if we adjusted our calculations to what things would look like at the centre of the galaxy then the entire sky was organized around us in 72 km/s steps as if we lived in the centre of a huge series of glass spheres that held the stars. Maybe the ancients were right after all! (For the benefit of diehard astronomers who are big bang believers, should they be reading this, I am being sarcastic). Astrophysics Journal took the very unusual measure of saying that although they found his results to be very hard to believe, they couldn't find any mistakes in his work. Tifft went on to find further periodicities in smaller galaxies at 36, 24, 18 and 12 km/s just to make the puzzle stranger.

So time went by and Tifft and Arp and others made more reports and generally got ignored. Then a few other astronomers decided to test Tifft's claims using new data, expecting to find them wrong. Guthrie and Napier were suprised that Tifft was not wrong when one by one they reported that each of Tifft's claims stood up to the new data. Finally they found his whole sky pattern based on the galaxy centre also.

It is worth looking at one graph from Guthrie and Napier because it shows the result so clearly.

No-one who impartially looks at this very regular rising and falling wave is going to say that it is due to random events. To prove that it is not, Guthrie and Napier generated some random data 10,000 times and didn't even get close to anything like this. Only a person blinded by their beliefs could deny the result is really there. The big problem is the interpretation because it seems that precious long held beliefs will have to go.

Another person who tested Tifft's methods was Martin Croasdale who not only did similar analysis but also looked deeply into the statistical probabilities. His finding was that many of the papers including his own show that such patterns would not appear randomly 1 time in 1000 or 1 time in 10,000. And yet, as far as I can tell from the papers published, every single investigation has found the same thing!. So the odds now are at least 1 in a trillion that it didn't happen by chance.

It is important to add that not every analysis that looks for galaxy distance periodicity finds it. I say distance now because astronomers take redshift as a measure of distance and so often look at this as an issue of distance. Many surveys publish results that say there is no small scale distance periodicity. So let us look at the reasons why that is so.

1. Many of the surveys use data that is not accurate enough. Tifft has shown that statistically (and I am a trained statistician and can confirm this) you cannot find a 72 km/s periodicity if the data has typical errors of more than 18 km/s. I would say that it is highly desirable that the data be more accurate than 10 km/s. I have been told that you will not get these results when you use the newer, bigger surveys of galaxies. That is correct, because the 2sF survey has accuracy of +/-85 km/s and the SDSS survey +/-30 km/s, both insufficient to detect a 72 km/s periodicity.

2. Most of the astronomers do not use the reference frame of the centre of our galaxy. We are moving around the galaxy at something like 220 km/s and so depending on which direction in the sky we look, this affects each measurement by anything from -220 km/s through to +220 km/s, which would obviously totally destroy the delicate pattern. Actually, later Tifft reported that the periodicity was also present in the rest frame of the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) and we have a 370 km/s velocity relative to that.

3. Most of the astronomers do not do analysis using only redshift data, but work on a distance basis by calculating the distance between all pairs of galaxies using pythagoras theorum and combining the redshift calculated distance with the other two observed dimensions seperating the objects in the sky. If the big bang were true, and redshift was really velocity, and distance was highly accurately correlated with distance, and there were no random motions of galaxies then this would be a valid operation. So it is best to just say that they prove the big bang is correct by assuming that it is correct.

Recently I debated all this with some astronomers in the BAUT Forum. It was a very worthwhile thing to do, because I was forced to give references and to check out all the other results. It is now very clear to me why only some analysis shows the period and not others. It is also clear what the solution to the difficulties is. But many astronomers are going to have to spit tacks.

Larger scale periodicities in galaxies have also been found, and with bigger surveys these show up even more clearly. It seems that at least some of these periods are now accepted by a majority of astronomers and they do show up in distances calculated in the way that astronomers do them.

In fact we can even see that galactic super-clusters are arranged in huge matrix, just like atoms in a crystal.

If astronomers would stop turning redshifts into velocities then they might be able to make some sense of these periodicities in redshifts. Narlikar and Arp have proposed that there are no velocities involved. They have stated that instead, all particles of matter change their mass at times by sudden discrete steps. The change is to get a small incease in mass at intervals which will be measured in millions of years. Narlikar has developed the maths of this which is the same as general relativity except that no assumption is made that particles have constant mass over time. I actually arrived at this same idea myself independently before I found out that Narlikar and Arp had done the same thing before me.

So how does this work? The distant galaxies are seen as they were long ago when all wavelengths were longer due to the lower mass of particles. The further away something is, the longer ago its light left to reach us. So this gives the same redshift relationship to distance as is observed. Except for one thing - when we get to the nearer galaxies, they have either made 1 step or 2 steps but never 1.782 or 1.379 steps. So the redshifts come only in those steps. But they can only be observed if we look from the galaxy centre reference as otherwise our motion around the galaxy gets mixed up with the redshift.

This proposal of variable mass particles fully accounts for all the facts in the case. There is not a single published paper that I am aware of that contains any data, analysis or logic that in any way discredits these findings of Tifft, Arp, Narlikar, Burbidge, Guthrie, Napier and Croasdale. That is not to say that I am saying that all people have agreed with them. It is to say that anyone who has disagreed has made an error in relation to the above description or to logic.

If we reach this conclusion about blueshift steps in time, then what else can we say about the galaxies? We can say that they do not move! If there were real motions of galaxies about each other of even 20 km/s then these results would not come out as they do. So galaxies are just sitting there like strawberries in a great cosmic jelly (that's jello to you Americans). But they are rotating strawberries. That motion is real.

That means that the calculations that astronomers do concerning the mass of clusters of galaxies (using the virial theorum) are based on false assumptions. That means that the calculations that first suggested there is missing mass in galaxy clusters is deeply flawed.

All these things mean that the whole of modern cosmology is a stack of cards built on an infirm base. The bottom cards were pulled out over the last three decades but the majority of astronomers still have a great big blind spot.

The BAUT Forum thread on Quantized Redshifts revisited. In this thread you will find a big list of links on redshift periodicity provided by another person, plus a list of papers that I refer to in order to justify all my conclusions. My final conclusion stated there is the same as above, expressed like this:

The facts remain:

1. Every paper that has been published that has sufficently accurate data (as described by Tifft) and looks for smaller scale redshift periodicity in galaxies has found at least one of the quanta 72, 36, 24, 12 km/s and often more than one. There have been many replications and not a single negative result. This is called the scientific method and criticizing sample sizes is not an adequate response because different samples have been used by different researchers.

2. Papers that use the correlation function in 3D do not show these shorter period variations. That proves that they are not spatial structures and that the interpretation of redshift as totally a velocity measurement is wrong.

3. Most papers that have looked at large scale periodicity have found the 12,800 km/s period (z=.043 or 128/h Mpc) and often fractions of this also (1/2 and 1/3). These periods are found using either redshift periodicity or looking for 3D spacings. There are papers that I referenced showing the clear 3D structure as a type of lattice.

4. A number of studies have been performed in special frames to investigate the whole sky synchronization of smaller scale (~72 km/s) redshift periodicities. All published studies confirm the presence of such frames. New data continues to support that conclusion. This totally undermines the conventional interpretation of redshift. If it were correct then the whole universe would be a huge conspiracy to make the centre of our galaxy a very special place. I don't think that anyone believes that.

5. The inescapable conclusion is that Arp and Narlikar are right and that these 72 km/s and such periodicities are changes by steps in redshift over time, and nothing to do with distance. Because the time taken to travel a distance by light is a linear one, it just looks like a distance relationship. However at the distance scale of galaxies the relationship breaks down because there are traveling wavefronts where the redshift of a galaxy will suddenly change by 72 km/s. So you cannot use that information to calculate distances at that scale.

6. In general galaxies cannot be moving even by 20 km/s. If they were, the whole sky periodicity would be destroyed. And it is there for all to see. In fact, it would be destroyed in even galaxy pairs because of the different orientations that we see them at and the 72 km/s difference between them is prevalent.

7. The virial theorum is not a valid basis for anything because it uses the assumption that redshift measures velocity, and it clearly does not.

I have commented before that some of the material about climate change does appear to have ulterior motives. Now it is clear that this is true and that the scientific world is being seriously compromised and needs to be on guard. It is essential that governments make laws to punish very seriously companies and individuals that are involved in campaigns of disinformation. This applies equally to climate research and medical drugs and medicines and anywhere else that people act from greed.

Last night, 16th August 2007, I was reading the 13th January 2007 issue of New Scientist, and I came across an article on page 14 that explained at least some of the things that have caused me problems in investigating the facts of climate change. The article states that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil spent US$16,000,000 on funding research at 43 bodies that were critical of claims of climate change, such as Frontiers of Freedom in the apparent expectation that these groups will propagate disinformation about global warming even when what they are publicising has been shown to be wrong.

In 1998 ExxonMobil-sponsored promoted a report that said that carbon dioxide emissions posed no warming threat. The report was authored by, amoung others, Slly Baliunas, an astrophysicist affiliated with at least nine ExxonMobil funded groups. In 2003 Baliunas published a review paper in Climate Research (vol 23, p 89) claiming that the climate had not changed significantly in the past millenium. Her conclusions were challenged by 13 scientists whose work she cited, but ExxonMobil-funded groups have continued to promote it.

Based on this my previous quotations of articles by Sally Baliunas should be treated with great suspicion.

Mira shows 30,000 years of its history in its tail.

In an article Star with vast tail astonishes scientists World Science mentions the discovery of a huge tail from the star Mira which is traveling fast through the interstellar medium. This tail effectively gives a history of the stars fluctuations much like we get on Earth with tree rings or ice bores showing past climate.

I have added what looks like a cycle in Mira's tail with the red notches added to the photo.

Mira with possible cycle added.

Using the information in the article that the tail is 30,000 years of history, and the fact that there are at least 6 full cycles present, this means that the cycle will be a little less than 5,000 years. I am picking that it will turn out to be a 4,600 year cycle. Such a cycle has been found in the solar system as major alignments of the outer planets and also suggested as a climate cycle. In maps of the galaxy spiral arms I have also seen wave like structures which are repeated at about 4,600 light year intervals. These things are not well established, but are interesting areas for further study.

The manner in which the tail is formed is demonstrated in an artists reconstruction movie at NASA which is interesting to watch.

Mira is a variable star and is the classic case of its type of oscillating red giant star with period about 11 months. That type has rather irregular cycles with huge variations in brightness, from invisible to the naked eye through to a quite bright star. Individual cycles vary considerably in the limits to these extremes also. Actually there is also a companion star which orbits in around 400 years, so it has many different forms of cycle present.

Recapping the story so far ...

In part 1 and part 2 of how to make a universe I looked at the history of physics and the parts of it that are relevant to my thesis of how it works. This part is the main act.

First we saw that solid material which is deformed and then released behaves according to a wave equation. Exactly the same wave equation was shown by Maxwell to explain all of the workings of electromagnetism and light, and in lesser known work, various physicists have shown that matter also can be explained by the same equations. Importantly, all physics including relativity is consistent with these vibrations of an aether, and although most physicist have been taught otherwise, Einstein and others that were the one's that were supposed to have proved there is no aether were actually believers in the aether.

But to the physicists who do not believe in an aether, just keep transposing what I say into electromagnetism. To all others, the description of the universe that I give can be reasonably easily understood by wobbling a bowl full of jelly (that's jello to you Americans). When the jelly is deformed by wobbling it tends to return to the initial shape but its momentum makes it continue in motion and go into a series of oscillations. Because of stretching in the jelly in places, the tension increases and causes the smaller waves to travel faster in the stretched area and slower elsewhere. This is exactly equivalent to general relativity where higher energy content is said to alter the amount of space, which is equivalent to changing the speed of light.

This type of medium that has the velocity affected by the waves in it is said to be non-linear. It simply means that when two waves are present, they do have some effect on each other. If we throw two pebbles in a pond, the sets of ripples pass through each other with very little interaction. Light waves in space are very much the same. If it were not so then we could not see distant things because all light that we see has been criss-crossed by other light travelling in every direction at every part of its path from its source until it reaches our eyes. And yet we see distant objects quite clearly under most circumstances.

However when light travels through matter it is affected so much that most substances are opaque. When it goes near very massive objects the light is also known to be distorted. Even two very powerful lasers passing through each other will have some interaction. So it is known that there is interaction but physicists usually can and do ignore this.

However we are interested in what happens over extremely long periods of time in the universe and so the non-linearity of electromagnetic waves is important. Also, the special type of electromagnetic waves that are matter are much more prone to interaction than is ordinary light. From the aether perspective, the vibrations are so strong, especially near the centres of standing waves, that the aether is locally stretched affecting the speed of light.

Standing Waves make Harmonics

Any standing wave that exists for a long time will evolve over a period of time due to this variation in tension and speed of light. This evolution must lead to the formation of harmonics. Harmonics are simply vibrations that are some multiple faster than the original vibration. If our blob of aether were vibrating with a single vibration only once in a billion years, then it would get new vibrations starting up that vibrated 2 times in a billion years and 3 times in a billion years and so on.

Although I have taken some time to arrive at this in my description, I am now going to say, whether you are convinced about this or not, please suspend any reservations and just consider what would be the consequences if this were true. From this single axiom I will show that many things can be deduced which were previously not predicted by any scientific theory and furthermore can be shown to be true about the universe that we live in. What is offered is an axiom that simply says:

The Universe consists of a standing wave which develops harmonically related standing waves and each of these does the same.

The idea that in a non-linear system a wave produces harmonics is not new. This is known in many physical systems, such as musical instruments and vibrations of many objects. The important thing that I am proposing that is different is that these new waves are themselves the seeds for further harmonics. So there is a cascading effect which produces great complexity from a very simple premise. There are similarities in this harmonics theory to things like the Mandelbrot set, chaos theory and other non-linear systems dynamics. That is not surprising. But there are differences and the results are found to bear a remarkable similarity to the Universe that we find ourselves inhabiting.

When we study oscillations in the universe they naturally have very long cycle times, and it is common practice to use the period of a cycle for this sort of thing. However for harmonics it is much easier to understand if we use frequencies. They are exactly equivalent, except that instead of saying a cycle is 500 million years we say there are 2 cycles per billion years. When we express the universal oscillations this way the mathematics of the harmonics theory is within the grasp of even young children.

At this point in the discussion we do not know what the fundamental oscillation period of the universe is, but we will simply make it our starting point and call it 1. Later on we can find out 1 what. We do know that if the universe has a fundamental frequency of 1 then its harmonics are simply 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. This is why I say that it makes things easy.

Now this little table is the essence of understanding the harmonics theory. It simply shows for each oscillation of the universe what its harmonics are:

1  -->      2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13 ...
2  -->            4     6     8     10      12
3  -->                  6        9          12
4  -->                        8             12
5  -->                              10
6  -->                                      12
...etc

We see that the universe's fundamental oscillation of 1 produces oscillations of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ... which simply means that these harmonics oscillate 2, 3, 4, etc times every time the initial oscillation does 1 oscillation.

But remember that each of these does the same. This means that the wave of frequency 2 produces harmonics also. They therefore have frequencies that are multiples of 2, namely 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. And the wave of frequency 3 makes harmonics of 6, 9, 12, 15 and so on. The pattern is very simple and we can see which waves produce which others. It is just a slightly rearranged times table. It is rearranged so that we can see how often each different answer occurs.

Immediately we may notice that some of the columns, like 12, get answers in them many times, while others like 11 and 13 only get produced in one way. The harmonics that are produced in many ways are therefore many times stronger because that wave is receiving energy from many others. Actually the effect is even a little more extreme than that, because some of the waves that produce 12 were themselves already produced in several ways.

When all of this is allowed for, we find that the 12th harmonic can get produced in 8 different ways compared to the 11th and 13th harmonics getting produced in only 1 way each. That means that the oscillation in the universe which is 12 times as fast as the fundamental universal oscillation will be much stronger than the ones that are 11 or 13 times faster. It turns out that the universe quite likes the number 12 and that dozens and grosses are some of natures preferred units.

Although these calculations can be done by hand, computers are wonderful for doing such calculations fast, accurately and to very high numbers. So I have written simple programs to calculate these harmonics for moderate sized numbers and somewhat trickier programs to do the calculations for very large numbers. These calculations have been checked up to pretty large numbers by my friend Mountain Man who wrote his own program so that we would know that when the results were the same we would also know that they are accurate.

The thing about the results is that although the calculations are very simple, the structures that result are not able to be predicted by a human being without actually doing it. It turns out that the early harmonics that have a lot of energy (that is have many ways of being formed) have exactly the same structure as the musical scale. Major chords are the strongest ones, with the scale of white notes (plus two black notes) as the next strongest. All the subtleties of musical notes and musical rhythms are found.

It is appropriate at this point to mention that the very reason that I began to look at non-linear systems is that when I was doing a study of economic trends in order to do forecasting, I had been surprised to find a number of economic cycles present in all the variables I studied. These cycles I eventually realised had exactly the frequency relationship to each other that a major chord has. At the time, in 1977, it sounded quite bizarre. Now I just accept it because I understand the cause.

Although I discovered the existence of harmonically related economic cycles myself, I was not the first to do so. A number of people, using different data from different countries and studying it over different time periods had all independently discovered the same set of economic cycles. One of the most famous of these was Joseph Schumpeter who put forward the suggestion that a number of observed economic cycles appeared to be exactly harmonically related to each other. Another economist turned cycles researcher was Edward R. Dewey who over a life time dedicated to cycles research established that the pattern of cycles relationships suggested by Schumpeter included many non-economic cycles as well and extended to much longer and shorter cycles also.

Unfortunately this knowledge depends on interdisciplinary knowledge and with modern specialisation it does not get passed on from one generation to the next. However in various different fields of study parts of the pattern are found over and over again. In the study of animal populations it has been found that certain cycles keep getting discovered in populations that often seem to have nothing to do with each other. Extremely long cycles that are a series of doubling harmonics have been reported by a geological conference.

The harmonics theory predicts a particular pattern of energy by frequency. That pattern has many characteristics the same as music such as many ratios of 2 and 3 as Pythagoras and Dewey observed, but much more also.

(Note that some of these large graphics do not totally show on my blog. To see the full graphic right click and press show image, or save it and look at it later.)

One of the extra things in the harmonic structure are especially strong harmonics at ratios of the order of 34,560 which explain the sequence of observed strong structures: Hubble scale, galaxies, stars, planets, moons, ... atoms, nucleons. In addition, secondary peaks are observed that explain the splitting of planets into terrestrials and gas giants, and of galaxies into spirals with accompanying small irregular galaxies.

Some of the common cycles in the range that are well explained by the harmonics theory. Below about a week, the pattern has the general form of the harmonics theory but have not yet all been definitely linked together.

Multiple harmonically related cycles in a variety of solar phenomena have been reported. These include cycles of around 155, 77, 52 and 26 days, the last also being the Solar rotation period, although it is often observed as 28 days because of our motion around the Sun. These periods are in the proportion 6:3:2:1 to each other. The 155 day cycle in solar flares is called the Rieger cycle after its discoverer. Also a longer period of 1.28 years is 3 times the 155 day cycle and is found in the interplanetary magnetic field and in geomagnetic activity. In all cases no reasons are known for these seemingly strange behaviours. These solar cycles were discovered long after Dewey made his table which I later extended and which is presented above. The fact that additionally discovered data fits so well is a good confirmation of the theory. For example .4237 years is 154.7 days, in good agreement with the typical value of the 155 day cycle period.

But because this whole picture is only put together by a small number of dedicated cycles researchers, it remains in the category of well-established but almost unknown knowledge. With the discovery of the harmonics theory, all of these previous discoveries are no longer strange and anomalous results. They are confirmations of the pattern of vibrations in the universe.

Each different type of thing that exists is affected by certain vibration frequencies that happen to resonate with it or with something that affects it. For crops it might be the rainfall, the temperature, insect or animal populations that influence abundance. For temperatures it might be effects from the Sun, the wider cosmos (it is now shown that cosmic rays affect cloud formation on earth), the Moon (which affects tides and atmospheric tides). For the stock market it might be affected by various economic indicators as well as human moods which are in turn affected by various geomagnetic phenomena.

All life, all non-living things are a hugely complex web of interactions that we have only touched the surface of. Any vibration in some part of the system automatically passes into many other parts and may be reduced or amplified depending on resonance. In extreme cases a modest signal may produce powerful effects such as the singer who hits the frequency of the wine glass and shatters it.

But seen in another way, all the things that we know exist are actually only composed of matter that is itself nothing but vibration. In a human being we have so many cycles and oscillations that it is impossible to list them all. We have rhythms in our lives with daily, weekly, monthly and yearly periods, all derived from astronomical configurations. We breath in cycles and our hearts beat in cycles and even those cycles have longer cycles of fluctuations in activity. Our brains have various wave type rhythms and communications thoughout the body are by means of chemicals and hormones which interact with other materials due to their special vibration rates.

We see light by its colour, determined by the frequency of oscillation of the electromagnetic field. We hear sounds and each different frequency has its unique character, and we listen to and enjoy music, the most harmonically ordered sounds. Our taste and smell also depend on the oscillation rates of chemicals and touch also has a vibratory basis. There is nothing that comes into our senses or goes on in our minds that is not based in vibrations.

I am not 100% happy with this page. Please feel free to ask some questions or make some comments and I will try to clarify anything that I have not presented well here.

In step 1 (which I recommend reading first) I explained that the universe may be understood as a blob of stuff that has high tension inside like steel only stronger, but which is continuous inside, having no atomic structure whatsoever. From this beginning, I will show that what naturally follows eventually leads to something that looks just like our universe.

The important thing that I mentioned was that a self-contained blob of stuff will vibrate according to a wave equation which is well understood physics. Also it was mentioned that stretching the blob quite naturally increases the tension locally and leads to a change in the velocity of the waves.

Although we are told by physicists that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum we are also told that space is not Euclidean, that the metric of space time is affected by the presence of energy. By this they mean that there is more space near a massive body like the Sun than there ought to be. Having the amount of space vary all about while keeping the speed of light constant is exactly equivalent to having regular Euclidean space and a variable speed of light. This is obvious if you think about it. The difference is that my mind, and I think roughly 100% of humanity, finds thinking in Euclidean terms much easier. Also, understanding the reason for a change in the velocity of light as being varying tension of the fabric of space is in keeping with all previous normal physics.

One little aside here is that I think that Einstein looked at such a model but did not find it workable. I believe that was because he did not allow for the possibility that the speed of light at any one place would be different in different directions. But we will later find that it is so. So, you should understand that what I am telling you is not inconsistent with Einstein and relativity, but is a simpler way of looking at the same thing, and more naturally leads to insights.

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I now propose to illustrate my argument with actual pictures of real matter in real physics experiments to illustrate clearly where I am heading. I want to give you an appreciation of the sort of things that can happen when vibrations cause motion in matter. There have been several famous people over the years who have looked in this direction.

The first is Ernst Chladni who studied the vibrations in solid plates subjected to forced vibrations by using a violin bow on them. To make the vibrations visible, he scattered sand on the plates and wherever it vibrated a lot it got kicked about until it settled in the nodes, the places where there was not much movement. Examples of vibration patterns.

Although Chladni was recognised for his work, no-one really took it further for almost two centuries when Hans Jenny began a study of vibrations in powders and fluids which he called Cymatics. Jenny was a doctor and was interested in the healing properties of sound, but he found much more. He found examples of simple combinations of tones that caused powders to make formations that look remarkably like living creatures. The beauty of the forms that he found and the great variety is of utmost importance in helping us to understand how vibration is the basis of everything that exists.

Having studied cycles, another name for vibrations when they are slower, and having then found out about Hans Jenny, I was keen to do my own experiments in cymatics.

Actually the thing that gave me the final impetus was an experience that I had with a cup of tea. I noticed that when I put it down on a hard table, a circular pattern of waves came from the outside of the cup towards the centre where it got stronger through being concentrated by focusing as it came to a point. I experimented with jiggling the cup on the table top to try and get the right frequency for the wave. Well I succeeded and was rewarded with a hot jet of tea in my eye!

So the decision was made to make an apparatus that could make controlled vibrations so as to understand what happened with these waves. A computer speaker was turned on its side and a little platform made to hold sand or water in a small circular dish. Then a sound could be played through the speaker and I could control the volume and frequency and even play several notes at once if I wanted to. These experiments have confirmed my suspicions that all properties of matter arise from vibrations. They show a possible basis for electric charge. They show a basis for chemical bonds to form at various angles and much more.

When I played a sound into this system, the first thing that appeared was a set of circular rings just as I had seen in my cup of tea. No surprises there, until I increased the volume a bit. Then suddenly the central circle was surrounded by six more circles all touching it, and a set of ladder type waves came out from these six circles towards the edges. If I gradually reduced the sound the pattern suddenly reverted to the original set of concentric circles. Gradually increasing caused a sudden switch back, there were never any in between states.

Increasing the volume still more caused another sudden transition to a more complex state. Actually, state is an interesting word here because we refer to states of matter, and the transitions were very much like the changes of state of matter between solid, liquid and gas.

This is a photo taken from a video of water being vibrated by sound using the apparatus shown above in the third state when things really broke loose from rigid structure. Note that the light source reflects into the camera only when the water is horizontal, so it shows the tops and bottoms of waves as light. The sloping sides of the waves result in darker areas in the pictures. There are a number of centres in the wave forms, and in particular there are four arranged in a square pattern with three wave steps between them.

Actually, because the light patches may be tops or bottom of waves these centres are 3/2 wave lengths apart. These waves are standing waves, existing for many hundreds of oscillations although moving about slowly while maintaining a similar pattern. Being 3/2 or 1.5 wavelengths apart meant that when one centre was up the other was down and vice versa. To make this clear I have marked the diagram with red and blue to show the alternate half waves. Whenever the red centres are up the blue ones are down, and then they swap over. All the red circles are up together when the blue circles are down together and then again they swap over.

The seemingly remarkable thing is that every wave supports every other wave. By this I mean that all other red centres lie a whole number of wavelengths from any given red centre and all blue centres lie something and a half waves from a red centre. Again all blue centres lie a whole number of waves from other blue centres and red centres lie something and a half waves from blue centres.

I have called this "seemingly remarkable" because it is initially very striking. However as we think about it more we find that it makes perfect sense. Every one of these waves is supporting every other one in its continued existence. All the energy that leaves any wave arrives at every other wave with the correct phase timing to sustain that wave. All waves are sustained by all other waves. Therefore as fast as the energy in them dissipates it is re-established again. This is the principle on which all the standing wave structures in the universe are sustained.

Not only do the waves sustain each other by their unique patterns of distances apart, but they also have unique arrangements in certain directions in space. In the diagram above showing the waves in the circular dish there are also visible wave patterns that look like ladders running away from the circular patterns to the circular dish at the side where they reflect back again.

This diagram shows that in the direction of one of these ladder patterns the whole thing is again totally phase synchronised with each and every one of the wave centres. The red and blue alternating lines show the pattern of wave tops and bottoms which are standing waves. Whenever the blue lines are up the red ones are down and then they swap over so that the red ones are up and the blue ones down.

So again the pattern is self sustaining. The reflected waves from the side of the dish return energy to all of the wave centres in the correct phase to sustain them. These ladder like sets of waves travel out in eight different directions from the central active area of the dish. The eight directions result from the symmetries of the four central wave centres arranged in a square.

There are no things in the universe. All things are illusions. Everything is really made of waves which are continuous processes and not things, every moment dissolving, every moment being recreated. Those that say that everything in the universe is connected are speaking the truth.

The two colours that I have used here may be considered to represent the two charges of positive and negative found in matter. However we should not take the comparison too far at this point, because we live in a 3 dimensional world and not a 2 dimensional one like this dish of water. In the 3 dimensional world the centres can be arranged in much more complicated patterns in space, but the essential principles remain the same. There are centres which try to remain at distances apart that are whole numbers of wave lengths for like charge and something and a half wavelengths for unlike charge.

Also, one aspect of this experiment is rather artificial, that being the circular dish. We do not know the shape of the universe. However what has been demonstrated by Chladni and physicists that followed him is that all shapes have a unique set of different vibration modes that they can contain. These modes are all characterised by lines that represent nodes running through them where there is rotation but no movement, and centres where the vibrational movement is strongest and where there is no rotation. We may understand rotation as being like magnetism. We may understand movement as being like electrical charge.

Also, the dish reflects back some energy from the sides and we have to keep feeding more sound energy in to keep the process going. In the real universe, there is nowhere that energy can leak out to, so those problems goes away and it sustains its vibrations for extremely long periods of time.

There is one other thing that is worth noting about the circular wave patterns which is most evident when the volume is lower and the pattern is simply concentric circles. That is that the central waves are slightly further apart than the outer waves which are more regularly spaced. Actually this same pattern is observed in the orbits of the inner planets, where the distance from the Sun to Mercury is a little larger than the distance to Venus and then to Earth is a little less again.

This variation in wavelength is not surprising in standard physics, it results from the variation in wave speed with the depth of water and the surface tension of the water which changes near the centre due to the greater energy concentration there. I simply note that this explanation matches with the arguments that I gave for the tension of the aether varying around energetic bodies. If you are a physicist and can handle non-Euclidean space, then by all means think of it that way, but I find this way less brain strain.

Well, we have seen that material under vibration can lead to interesting structures in space that are more complicated than we are likely to imagine if we just start thinking about it. Already we can see the possibilities of explaining electric charge and magnetism as properties of motion. Charge relates to centres which may come in two polarities. Magnetism relates to local rotation about a point. Anyone who understands a little physics will recognise that this rotation of the magnetic field does explain the behaviour of charged particles which curve when travelling through a magnetic field.

We have seen that the our potential universe blob of matter may indeed be able to sing. The next exciting installment will show that it can in fact sing in tune. And once that is established, it will be shown why the universe has all the different structures from very large to very small and how they relate to each other. Click at the right to subscribe via RSS and get the future installments.

Move on to step 3.

It is my contention that present day cosmology as proposed by many physicists and cosmologists is totally lame. They laugh about Ptolemy and his epicycles. Yet the big bang theory with its various add ons such as inflation, dark matter, and acceleration the opposite way to gravity, is a system that keeps adding new features to explain every new observation that does not fit the predictions. The big bang is bung. You can tell when the physics went utterly silly, because they no longer teach it to people in school or popular science magazines. Instead, they write articles about it without ever actually saying how it works. The ultimate in this regard is string theory.

This is intended to be the first in a series of articles which will explain how the universe works in a way that flows from a very small number of premises and explains many facts, including well documented ones that cosmologists and physicists pretend are not true because they cannot explain them.

While I am saying who was wrong I might as well mention Democritus. He started the idea that matter is made of indivisible units which he called atoms. In modern times this idea has been retained after being revised a couple of times to make the indivisible units be electrons, protons and neutrons and later quarks replaced the protons and neutrons.

My contention is that although there are things which might be loosely called "particles" these are no more fundamental units of the universe than is the share market cycle. That might sound a very strange things to say, but eventually I hope to convince you that it is so.

To make a universe ...

First, take a blob of stuff that is totally uniform throughout, which has high tension inside it like a piece of steel, but which has no internal structure whatsoever (that is, is not made of atoms but is uniform).

The physics of blobs of stuff is reasonably well understood. If you deform its shape and let go, it tends to return to the original shape. However when bent and released, it doesn't just bend back to the original shape but overshoots it because of the momentum gained in springing back.

All this is well known and described by a simple equation known as the wave equation. No matter what strange and complex distortions of a blob are made, the simple wave equation will tell you all the twisty and springy motions that will ensue once you let go of it.

If our blob of stuff like steel but uniform inside were in a vacuum and was set vibrating, then it would continue to vibrate indefinitely. At first it would seem to repeating certain vibrations repeatedly and exactly, but eventually something different would happen. The reason for this something different is the really important thing about what I am telling you that makes it different from what physicists have generally considered to be important, but it is not unknown.

The fact is that if you put some steel under tension, for example a guitar string that is tightened up, then that extra tension means that the waves in it travel faster, so that the guitar notes get higher frequencies. Our blob of universe is just the same, even though we have let go of it, some parts are at times under more tension and sometimes less. This variation effects the local speed of sound waves in the blob so that the speed is not a constant but a property of local conditions.

Now I want to go back to this blob and the wave equation. It is a fact that in the nineteenth century a number of physicists worked out how electricity and magnetism worked and this culminated in James Clerk Maxwell presenting some equations that brought it all together. These equations were wave equations just like the ones that I mentioned for a blob of stuff like steel but continuous all the way through.

There were multiple equations and not just one. But the various equations all had the similar wave property and could be understood as certain derived properties of the local motion of the blob. For example the local rotational aspect of the blob is the property that relates to magnetism and indeed that property of rotation of the material was even called curl. All the properties of Maxwell's equations were understood as motions of a blob which was considered to be made of a substance called aether. Maxwell was able to deduce that the properties of electricity and magnetism and this wave stuff would mean that there was a type of electro-magnetic wave that would travel through the aether at the speed of light. So this completed the combined understanding of electricity, magnetism and light as all being aspects of the same thing

If you ask a physicist today about the aether theory they will tell you that it was discredited. They will say that the Michelson and Morley experiment searched for the motion of the Earth through the aether and showed conclusively that it did not happen. But there was an accident of history that meant that a wrong interpretation happened and it never got put right. By the time the other facts had come along the wrong turn had been well and truly taken.

The problem was that this aether, which was actually much higher in tension even than steel, so that its sound waves travelled at the speed of light. And yet physicists could not understand how such a solid stuff could allow bodies such as the planets to pass through it without resistance. This was a huge mystery.

There was one man who had the answer, William Clifford, who understood that matter itself was not a different thing, but was also a type of wave in the aether just like light. That type of wave is what is called a standing wave. The difference between a travelling wave such as light and a standing wave such as matter is the difference between flicking one end of a rope and getting a ripple to go along it and plucking a guitar string so that it vibrates in place. But poor William, a recognised brilliant mathematician died at the age of 33 without publishing much of his work and his idea never caught on.

So physicists had this weird idea about matter as being something made of solid particles called atoms and could not work out how they passed through the aether which was so solid without any resistance. And after Michelson and Morley's experiments and Einstein's general relativity they decided to abandon common sense and say that waves travelled in nothing. It was nothing that waved about and transferred energy from one place to another.

Actually, there were people like Lorenz and others who understood that if an electron had an electromagnetic wave nature then it would suffer the same effects as light when moving through the aether and so the Michelson Morley result would be expected. Initially Einstein disagreed with this, but later he made a speech in which he acknowledged Lorentz, and with general relativity he actually spoke in favour of the aether again.

Other famous men such as Schroedinger and de Broglie also understood that matter was made of waves and not particles, but somehow, although their famous equations were adopted their ideas were not. And physicists continued to say that matter is not made of waves and that there is no aether.

But I have jumped a way ahead of where I wanted to go with my first part of making a Universe. The way that matter comes about is much later in the story. But it is much easier to talk about an aether when describing how the universe works. However if I say aether without mentioning all of that, then physicists will say not to believe me because I am a crackpot. Now, I have given you the evidence that proves it is not so. In fact, all of Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Lorenz and other famous physicists died believing in an aether. And yet today we are told those very same people disproved the existence of an aether. Isn't that just bizarre?

But back to the main story. I mentioned that when you stretch some part of that blob, which we can now call aether, then we increase the tension in that part and make the wave speed greater in that region. So the wave speed, which we have now found out is the speed of light, is not actually a constant but depends on the local tension. Oh no! I have said another bad word according to the physicists, wash my mouth out!

Well I will have to detour again to explain why the constancy of the speed of light is not right even though everyone says that Einstein proved it. Well, the constancy of the speed of light is most certainly not a fact. If you ask why light refracts in glass or water you will be told that it is due to the different refractive index. If you ask what that is and why it bends you will get a little diagram that show that this really means that light travels at a different velocity in glass or water to what it travels at in air.

So the speed of light is not constant. It varies with many things, but what Einstein assumed is that it is the same for people in motion as for people at rest. This is confirmed by the Lorenz transformation equations which in turn follow directly from Maxwell's equations. And Maxwell's equations are the equations of waves in an aether. So go figure that. It was explained by Lorenz and is still referred to today as LET or Lorenz Ether Theory. It works and proves that an aether has no problem with producing relativity equations despite what most physicists believe but cannot prove.

It is these little blind parts of physics that prevent anyone who is educated in Universities today from being able to think correctly about fundamental physics. So they have to invent 10 or 26 dimensional spaces, little strings and weird big bang epicycles in order to try and make things fit. If intelligent youngsters were given the correct facts during their early education they could solve the quandaries of physics and cosmology quite easily.

So we have this blob of aether and we now know that it is very big and very high tension and that it is given some twists and belted about about and then let go and behold there is a Universe. Now we just have to work out what will happen, and I will show that with only things that were known more than a century ago, the structure of the entire cosmos can be explained in ways that have never been done before.

In the beginning was the vibration*

* substitute "word", "light" or "vibration" according to religious taste.

Don't miss the next exciting episode where waveman escapes the evil clutches of the physicists, evades the cosmologists and lets the blob of aether begin to sing. Translated this means that you can subscribe to this blog by clicking on the feeds at the bottom of the panel on the right.

See step 2.

This is an analysis of what the search engines send to my web site at http://ray.tomes.biz and its subsidiary pages, not including my blogs.

Proportion of searches by typical main search phrases.

I only know the main search results and have grouped them into the main phrases and placed some links here for the most relevant ones.

Big Bang Bung (it seems that "Bang" sometimes has another meaning than the "Big Bang" which I say is "Bung" or wrong).

The Harmonics Theory is my own original research on the cause of structure in the Universe based on cycles and including the physics and maths of this and relationhip to Pythagoras.

Animated GIFs. It was not my intention to be a source for these, but it happens - if you want these then please copy them to your own site as hot linking is a nuisance.

Champagne Wire Sculptures are a sort of doodle made from the wires off the lids of bubbly - in my case, bubbly grape juice.

Cymatics is the study of how sound makes form in fluids and powders, so named by Hans Jenny and related to earlier work by Chladni.

Edward R. Dewey was a most prominent interdisciplinary cycles researcher who formed the FSC (see below) and left a great legacy in his research.

Ray Tomes is me. The whole web site is by me, so pick what interests you from the list, or the title takes you to my main page.

The Expanding Earth is an idea that the Earth might be growing, probably due to some presently not fully understood physics. There are advocates of fast or slow growth. My analysis of GPS data indicates that slow expansion of the Earth is occurring.

The Foundation for the Study of Cycles (FSC) was started by Edward R. Dewey in 1941 to study regular or nearly rhythmic repeating phenomena in all branches of studies, nature and human activities. Cycles Research Institute is the scientific arm of FSC.

Cycles are found in everything that has been studied: astronomy, biology, botany, business, climate, commodities, cosmology, crops, dendrochronology (tree rings), diseases, economics, finance, geology, history, investments, physics, real estate, sociology, stocks and shares, varves (geological layers), wars, weather, zoology. Some cycles reports, analysis methods and definitions, and cycles in the solar system.

Just Tuning means having no compromises in the musical scale as has been practiced fro the last few centuries. In the past people understood better about musical tuning.

And now for something completely different (as they say in a famous British comedy) ...

If I was in the Simpsons, I would be aRTy Simpson, an uncle, hopefully on Marge's side. ;-)

You can make your own Simpson character on the Simpson Movie Site. Have fun.

My aRTy character would have had whiskers, but unfortunately they didn't allow for that possibility.

Some Simpson quotes:

Scully: Homer, we're going to ask you a few simple yes or no questions. Do you understand?
Homer: Yes. (lie detector blows up)

Bart: I am through with working. Working is for chumps.
Homer: Son, I'm proud of you! I was twice your age when I figured that out.

Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut!
Homer's Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer: Explain how!
Homer's Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services!
Homer: Woo-hoo!

Marge: Homer, the plant called. They said if you don't show up tomorrow don't bother showing up on Monday.
Homer: Woo-hoo. Four-day weekend.

Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.

Homer: Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasel.

Homer: Oh Lisa, there's no record of a hurricane ever hitting Springfield.
Lisa: Yes, but the records only go back to 1978 when the hall of records was mysteriously blown away.

Reverend Lovejoy: Homer, I'd like you to remember Matthew 7:26. "The foolish man who built his house upon the sand."
Homer: [pointing a finger] And you remember
[thinks]
Homer: Matthew... 21:17.
Reverend Lovejoy: [confused] "And he left them and went out of the city, into Bethany, and he lodged there?"
Homer: Yeah. Think about it.

Homer: Hey boy! Wanna play catch?
Bart: No thanks dad.
Homer: When a son doesn't want to play catch with his father something is definitely wrong.
Grandpa Simpson: I'll play catch with you!
Homer: Go home.

Ralph: My cat's breath smells like cat food.

Ralph: Me fail English? That's unpossible.

Mother Simpson: [sings] How many roads must a man walk down / Before you can call him a man...
Homer: Seven.
Lisa: No, dad, it's a rhetorical question.
Homer: OK, eight.
Lisa: Dad, do you even know what "rhetorical" means?
Homer: Do *I* know what "rhetorical" means?

Homer: Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.

Bart: Aren't we forgeting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa.

Homer: How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

Homer: I'll never wiggle my bare butt in public again
Lisa: I'd like to beleive that this time, I really would.

Chief Wiggum: Uh, no, you got the wrong number. This is 9-1... 2.

Homer: There's your giraffe, little girl.
Ralph Wiggum: I'm a boy.
Homer: That's the spirit. Never give up.

Bart: Ay, carumba!

Homer: D'oh!

At the NASA web site the following description is found about a polar map of Jupiter.

This map of Jupiter is the most detailed global color map of the planet ever produced. The round map is a polar stereographic projection that shows the south pole in the center of the map and the equator at the edge. It was constructed from images taken by Cassini on Dec. 11 and 12, 2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during a flyby on its way to Saturn.

The map shows a variety of colorful cloud features, including parallel reddish-brown and white bands, the Great Red Spot, multi-lobed chaotic regions, white ovals and many small vortices. Many clouds appear in streaks and waves due to continual stretching and folding by Jupiter's winds and turbulence. The bluish-gray features along the north edge of the central bright band are equatorial "hot spots," meteorological systems such as the one entered by NASA's Galileo probe. Small bright spots within the orange band north of the equator are lightning-bearing thunderstorms. The polar region shown here is less clearly visible because Cassini viewed it at an angle and through thicker atmospheric haze.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Jupiter polar map produced by NASA from photos taken December 11-12, 2000.

It is clear that there are several types of features that repeat around that planet at fairly regular intervals. There are regular white spots about half way between the pole and equator, and much closer regular notches nearer to the equator.

Several of these features are marked on the map below, and in some places where the pattern is not clear it is continued until it links with the same pattern further around.

Jupiter polar map showing harmonics of 12, 24, 72 and 144.

The smaller wave pattern is made clearer in the following magnification. There is a Full size image of Jupiter available at this same scale at NASA.

A magnification shows the regularity of the wave identified as the 72nd harmonic.

It so happens that there is an explanation based on the harmonic formation of waves in a non-linear system that predicts that certain harmonics should be much stronger than others. It is called The Harmonics Theory and was developed by me, Ray Tomes. Here is a graphic showing the predicted relative power in various harmonics:

Predicted Strong Harmonics from 1 to 100 according to the Harmonics Theory

Quite clearly, 12, 24 and 72 (also 144 not shown on this graph) are expected to be strong harmonics. The reason that certain harmonics are stronger than others is that they can be formed in more ways. This type of behaviour is not observed in essentially linear systems such as a guitar string, where no harmonics are especially strong relative to their neighbours. But in 2 and 3 dimensional structures, especially nearly closed systems where standing waves can last for a long time, not only do harmonics form, but harmonics of harmonics.

This means that a wave that divides the planets circumference in 2 for example will itself have divisions which will therefore divide the planets circumference in 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and so on. Likewise a wave that divides the planet into 3 will form harmonics that divide it into 6, 9, 12 and so on. Because some numbers can be factorised in many more ways than others, these strong harmonics will be more evident when we see pictures of Jupiter or any other nearly closed system which can sustain standing waves for long periods of time.

Harmonics theory also makes predictions of much smaller waves (larger order harmonics) and these predictions are also found in cloud patterns on Earth. When applied to the entire universe, the theory explains why there are certain scales of distance at which structures prefer to form and these include galaxies, stars, planets, moons as well as cells, atoms and nuclear particles. Based on the predicted and observed patterns, it can be concluded that the universe is much larger than many cosmologists currently believe.

The title is just a fancy way of saying that some women seem to have four colour receptors in their eyes rather than the usual three. Actually some people also have a different set of three and this was known for some time before the discovery that quite a few women see extra colours than the rest of the population. Of course some men are missing a receptor and have only two and as a result are called colour blind. Compared to tetrachromats we are all colour blind.

[For Americans, some of the world spell color as colour and colorblind as colourblind and so on. This is just to help the search engines to find this page.]

"Oh, everyone knows my color vision is different," chuckles Mrs. M, a 57-year-old English social worker. "People will think things match, but I can see they don't." What you wouldn't give to see the world through her deep blue-gray eyes, if only for five minutes.

Preliminary evidence gathered at Cambridge University in 1993 suggests that this woman is a tetrachromat, perhaps the most remarkable human mutant ever identified. Most of us have color vision based on three channels; a tetrachromat has four.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority -- genetics dictates that tetrachromats would all be female -- has intrigued scientists since it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us do. The scientists are building on a raft of recent findings about the biology of color vision.

This is from Looking for Madam Tetrachromat which goes on to describe the search for women who can see more colours. I guess that we men, and the rest of the female population just have to accept that some women who give interior design advice should be listened to so that the results are suitable for all people, not just trichromats and bichromats (or is that dichromats?).

According to The Science Show site, Robyn Williams states that each year the London Daily Telegraph gives a prize for science writing. The prize for 2004 junior winner was Caoimhe McKenna who’s 18 and who thinks she knows why women are so much better men at seeing colour coding and properly matching clothes. Here’s Caoimhe McKenna's winning piece.

As an Irish, teenage girl, I have often wondered if the world of colour that I perceive with my eyes is the same as that of others. Not only my fellow XX chromosome holders but also those holders of the X chromosome paired with the puny and rather ineffectual Y chromosome, commonly known as "men''. I wonder this as my father sets out to work in his mismatched tie and my brother with his odd socks, while my mother and I discuss various shades of colour to match our newly decorated living room.

Let me begin with a look at the history of our colour vision. We are descendants of nocturnal tree dwellers. Colour vision is thought to have evolved in our ancestors about 35 million years ago, giving them more opportunities to find fruit and leaves to eat. Humans have inherited a colour visual system that is dependant upon three forms of iodopsin, or colour pigments, each responding to light of a different wavelength region. Each form of iodopsin occurs in a different cone type and the relative stimulation of each type is interpreted by the brain as a particular colour.

I can see a demonstration of this when I get up close to my television; there are only three colours: red, green and blue. These coloured spots on the screen stimulate the colour pigments in the retina of my eye to different extents, so that when I stand back I can see all the colours of the rainbow. Maybe. All this is down to that amazing chemical iodopsin. Iodopsin is a pigment that like all proteins is coded for in the DNA of my genes. Interestingly the genes controlling the production of the pigments in the eye that enables discrimination of red and green is sex-linked.

The green and red genes encode photopigments that respond to different, overlapping regions in the middle-to-long wavelength spectrum and are adjacent to each other on the X chromosome. Strangely, the blue photopigment gene is on its own on another chromosome - feeling blue in solitude? This explains why the most common form of colour-blindness, red-green, is hereditary and why it affects about eight per cent of Caucasian males and less than 0.5 per cent of females.

I have two X chromosomes, one from my mother and one from my father's mother (thank you, girls). My brother has to manage with mummy's two photopigment genes on his X chromosome but I have four between my two X chromosomes. This is where it gets interesting.

One of my X chromosomes may have a slightly different green photopigment gene from the other and "X inactivation'' might happen. This well-known biological phenomenon causes some cells to rely on one X chromosome and other cells to rely on the other. I might have four different types of photopigment; blue, red, green and shifted green (or red and shifted red). All I need now for four colour vision (tetrachromacy) is a superior brain.

A recent paper by Kimberly Jameson, Susan Highnote and Linda Wasserman of the University of California, San Diego, concerning females who may have tetrachromacy shows amazing results. Up to 50 per cent of women are tetrachromatic and can use their extra pigments in "contextually rich viewing circumstances". For example, when looking at a rainbow, tetrachromat females can segment it into, on average, 10 different colours, whereas their trichromat brothers and sisters can see only seven, much as Isaac Newton's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Consequently, for those special tetrachromat women, this island that they inhabit may be seen in emerald, jade, verdant, olive, lime, bottle and 34 other shades of green. Apparently, men and women do see the world differently.

However, the tetrachromats among us should not think themselves too superior. If you want truly advanced colour vision it might be a good idea to become a bird. Pigeons, according to a paper by the late Francisco Varela of the University Hospital in Paris and colleagues, have five colour receptors and can process visual imagery up to 10 times faster than human beings. While we see a television producing smooth movement in realistic colour they will see dull flickering lights - this may be why you won't see a lot of pigeons watching Birds of a Feather.

In an article A Life More Colorful Cynthia Wood describes that "Jumping spiders are natural tetrachromats, with four kinds of receptors, and while there are no known mammalian tetrachromats, there are believed to be tetrachromats among birds, insects, reptiles, and amphibians."

The normal human retina's color receptors are tuned to green, blue, and red. Working together, the three give us our colorful view of the world. When one or more of those color receptors is missing the result is color-blindness. The genes for our red and green color receptors are located on the X-chromosome, giving women a redundant set of receptor genes. This is why men are far more prone to color-blindness than women. In order to be functionally color-blind a woman not only has to be missing a receptor gene on both X-chromosomes, it must be the same gene on each one. The chances of this happening are so slim that only 0.4% of the US female population is affected. By contrast male color-blindness is far more prevalent with 8% of the US male population affected - 95% of them with red or green receptor problems. Color-blindness makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish some colors, depending on which receptor is affected. The term color-blindness itself is somewhat of a misnomer, since color perception is altered, not eliminated. True color-blindness, wherein a person can distinguish no color at all, requires a malfunction of all three kinds of color receptors, and affects only 0.003% of the population regardless of gender.

With reference to searching for tetrachomats in humans, Cymthia Wood goes on to examine the question of whether having the two types of colours receptors in the two X chromosomes would be matched by the necessary brain development to use them ...

Dr. Gabriele Jordan of Cambridge University may have answered that one. She tested the color perception of fourteen women who each had at least one son with the right kind of color-blindness. She set up a test where the subjects had to manipulate and blend two wavelengths of colored light to produce any hue they liked. They then had to match their own results a second time. With normal color vision, several different combinations would match any given hue, with a tetrachromat the possible combinations to produce a visible match would be much reduced. Dr. Jordan reported that two of the fourteen women showed exactly the results she would have expected from a tetrachromat. At least one of the two women reports having a different sense of color from the people around her, with both better color matching and better color memory. While not completely conclusive, this initial study has so far provided our best candidates for natural human tetrachromats.

This is an interesting subject, and I note that the wikipedia article on primary colours does mention tetrachromats, but as other species

To generate optimal color ranges for species other than humans, other primary colors would have to be used. For example, for species known as tetrachromats, with four different color receptors, one would use four primary colors (since humans can only see to 400 nanometers (violet), but tetrachromats can see into the ultraviolet to about 300 nanometers, this fourth primary color might be located in the shorter-wavelength range and would probably be a pure spectral magenta rather than the magenta we see which is a mixture of red and blue).

However there is a wikipedia article on tetrachromacy also which states:

Tetrachromacy is the condition of possessing four independent channels for conveying color information, or possessing four different cones, one other than RGB. Organisms with tetrachromacy are called tetrachromats. For these organisms, the perceptual effect of any arbitrarily chosen light from its visible spectrum can be matched by a mixture of no less than four different pure spectral lights.

The normal explanation of tetrachromacy is that the organism's retina contains four types of higher-intensity light receptors (called cone cells in vertebrates as opposed to rod cells which are lower intensity light receptors) with different absorption spectra. This means the animal can see colors beyond those of a normal human being's eyesight. In practice the number of such receptor types may be greater than four, since different types may be active at different light intensities.

Tetrachromacy has not yet been confirmed in any mammals, though it is likely that it occurs in some birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, arachnids and insects. Humans and closely related primates normally have three types of cone cells and are therefore trichromats (animals with three different cones). However, at low light intensities the rod cells may contribute to color vision, giving a small region of tetrachromacy in the color space.

It has been suggested that women who are carriers for variant cone pigments may be born as full tetrachromats, having four different simultaneously functioning kinds of cones to pick up different colors.[1] One study suggested that 2-3% of the world's women may have the kind of fourth cone that lies between the standard red and green cones, giving, theoretically, a significant increase in colour differentiation.[2] Although further studies will need to be conducted to verify tetrachromacy in humans, at least one tetrachromat has been identified - "Mrs. M," an English social worker, was discovered in a study conducted in 1993.[3] Variation in cone pigment genes is widespread in most human populations, but the most prevalent and pronounced tetrachromacy would derive from female carriers of major red-green pigment anomalies, usually classed as forms of "color blindness" (protanomaly or deuteranomaly). The biological basis for this phenomenon is X-inactivation.

To take a colour blindess test if you want. Sorry, we can't give you a tetrachromat test because your monitor only has 3 colours. :-)

This article will put forward a view which will be considered radical by experts in physics, climate, human behaviour and probably many other fields. However that does not make it wrong. The fact is that something like 99.9999% of humanity have never been exposed to the thinking put forward here and so it has never been thoroughly tested for its validity. So you, Dear Reader, have a chance to be one of the very few who has a new way to look at things. If seriously considered, this approach will gradually cause connections to be seen between many aspects of the operation of the Universe and as a result the affairs of humans.

As background to the main argument I will present a few pieces of evidence that are relevant. They will seem like they are disjointed at first, but I will show how they make an undeniably strong argument.

1. Climate varies on many different time scales. There are fluctuations of hundreds of millions of years in climate that have major consequences for the type of and distribution of life on Earth. On this longest scale we are presently in one of the colder periods known as ice ages. There are variations of tens to hundreds of thousand years known as the Milankovitch cycles and we are now in a short inter-glacial that is due to end quite soon and return us to the prevailing ice age conditions. There are shorter cycles of hundreds to thousands of years that are not as strong as the others, but still sufficient to cause the rise and fall of civilisations as they make that little bit of difference in how hard it is for people to stay alive. When the going is easier, humans have spare capacity that they turn to culture and other activities than just staying alive. There are shorter fluctuations from decades to years and less, and we call these weather rather than climate. Still, they relate to the yield of crops and other important results in terms of human survival and comfort.

2. Measurements of variations in the Sun are strongly correlated with climate change on Earth. Although this is denied by some people who want to blame global warming totally on human activity, it is really self evident. If the Sun's heat output varies then it must affect temperatures on Earth. But further, it is demonstrated by many scientific papers. These variations are on many scales and many are known to be correlated with climate. There are also orbital and rotational variations of the Earth with respect to the Sun that play a part.

3. Humans have produced far more CO2 and other chemicals into the atmosphere in that last century or two than at any previous time in recorded history. Many people are concerned that human activity will detrimentally affect our environment and push it into some terrible positive feedback that makes the Earth a much more unpleasant place to live. If this happens it will be too late to try and reverse things, so it is wise to be cautious.

4. The evidence put forward regarding climate change an global warming has been highly politicised. This is because of fear and greed. The green faction fear the destruction of our habitat and so look at things with a biased eye to try and find that cause everywhere. The industrialists want to make profits and greed leads them to try to deny the problems. Scientists who write reports are often financed by or sympathetic to one group or the other, or have some additional agenda. Scientists are no less biased than other people, suffering from the same mental weaknesses of desire for income, desire for security and adherence to what they learned at home or school even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

5. Studies of electromagnetic fields (EM) effects on humans find that extra-low frequencies (ELF) can influence human reaction times and emotions. This is not surprising, because these ELF waves are in the same range as human brain wave rhythms. Waves that are slightly faster than normal brain waves can cause faster reaction times while slower ones cause slower reactions. This is quite an expected result as it is common physics for frequencies to entrain systems that have nearby frequencies through resonance. Additionally, other research has shown that people have more accidents when there is strong natural ELF just below the normal human brain wave frequencies. Again, it is no surprise that something that slows the brain and reactions down will cause more accidents, as our bodies move just as fast but our thinking does not keep up.

6. There have been studies that show that war has present cycles of period 11 and 22 years, just the same as sunspots have. The peaks occur at the same time. It is known that the Sunspot cycle cause big variations in the output of various frequencies of radiation and particles which arrive soon after at the Earth. The Solar output affects the Earth's EM field, causing variations in geomagnetic activity as well as fluctuations in the Earth's natural EM oscillation known as the Schumann resonance. This is the period at which the earth's EM field oscillates and it is right in the middle of the human brain wave frequencies, a fact that is probably not coincidence. Is it any wonder then that human behaviour is affected by the Sun, and that humans get more "uppity" and fight more wars at those times that the Sun is causing more agitation of the earth's EM oscillations and human brains too?

Taking all of the above together a pattern begins to emerge. Humans are more active when the Sun is more active. This applies to centuries long cycles as well as shorter ones. The peaks of all the major civilisations over the last few thousand years have been when the Sun is hotter and the earth also hotter. Cold periods have caused bleak periods where sometimes even the recording of history seems to almost die out. Now the question that naturally results from all this, but which no-one has asked:

Is extreme human industrial activity with its possible environmental aspects part of a natural cycle that follows from extremely high Solar activity in recent decades?

In other words, instead of looking for a human OR Solar cause to climate change, might we not see that Solar changes affect humans and that both affect the climate together? If we take away our normal judgments about human behaviour (a big ask I know) then we might see that humans are just pawns or cogs in the whole process. This is not to excuse that behaviour, but to explain its origin. We might still need to take action to change ourselves if we wish to avoid problems, but it should be action based on proper understanding of how we fit into the grand scheme of things.

I know that I will already have pushed many people into an uncomfortable idea, whether they be on one side or the other of climate debate. But sides are not useful, understanding is. And I will press on to the final step in this logic:

What if the Sun, like humans, is just a pawn or cog in the cosmic dance of energies?

This requires a leap of understanding that will need evidence that is beyond the scope of this article. However it can be shown that some of the Sun's has cycle periods are related to wider aspects of the structure of the Universe. The huge geological cycles that show in terrestrial geological formations are closely related to the waves of galaxy distribution in space. The Sun too is dancing to the Universal Cosmic rhythms that pervade the entire Universe. The entire Universe and everything in it is nothing but vibrations of energy, from sub-atomic particles through to galactic super-clusters, all are of the same essence.

In the future I will present further articles that will explain much more about these logical conclusions and show that there are very sound scientific reasons for this view. Whenever I have presented this material to people at conferences I find that it is well received, because people have a feeling for it that they cannot put into words.

In a paper with the title Experiments with rotating collimators cutting out pencil of α-particles at radioactive decay of 239Pu evidence sharp anisotropy of space, S. E. Shnoll, I.A.Rubinshtejn, K. I. Zenchenko, V.A.Shlekhtarev, A.V.Kaminsky, A.A.Konradov and N.V.Udaltsova report on their continuing physics discoveries which in my (not so humble) opinion shows up serious thinking errors in modern physics.

The anisotropy of space referred to in the title means that the properties of space are not the same in all directions. There have been a number of reports in recent years that question the isotropy of space, but this paper reports on results in the laboratory on Earth that clearly show effects in a reproducible form.

The experiment shows that the alpha particles coming out when radioactive plutonium decays do not come out equally often in all directions. The direction is influenced by the relative orientation of the laboratory apparatus to each of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the distant Stars or Galaxies. This result is not expected in standard physics and suggests that things are not as random in quantum events as they are believed to be.

Before looking at the exact nature of this experiment it is worth first reviewing the experiments that lead the researchers to look at things in this way.

I met the authors of this paper in Pushchino and elsewhere in Russia in the mid-1990s when I visited their laboratory to find out more about their work and was also invited to give a seminar on my Harmonics Theory. Simon Shnol is the head of the Biophysics Laboratory at Pushchino. Alexander Konradov was at Moscow University and unfortunately died several years ago. Natalia Udaltsova moved from Pushchino to California about a decade ago. I will mention some of my own work related to these experiments which was confirmed by Dr Udalsova later on. Unfortunately the English speaking world has not taken sufficient notice of these important Russian results.

By the mid 1990's, the Biophysics laboratory had already established some important findings. Their work may be seen as a continuation of the work of Giorgio Piccardi who found that certain chemical tests do not behave the same all the time but vary with cosmological factors. There is a long tradition of investigating Cosmological factors in Russia where A Chizhevsky was an important pioneer. The Russians have found that not just a few chemical and biological factors are affected by cosmological configurations, but that indeed all biological, chemical and physical measurements are subject to fluctuations and that these fluctuations have a common cosmological origin.

In a typical experiment, the Pushchino Biophysics laboratory takes regular measurements of the rate of decay of a Plutonium sample. From a series of consecutive measurements they make a histogram. Naturally this histogram obeys the laws of statistics of a Poisson distribution for an expected set of random events. However there is something else going on that is not random. When the histograms are compared to other histograms taken at the same place at different times, it is found that more similar histograms result after 24 hours, after 27 days and after 365 days. Careful measurements show that there is similarity after both 1440 minutes (exactly 24 hours) and also after 1436 minutes. These two periods are the periods of the Earth's rotation relative to the Sun and to the distant stars and galaxies. The other periods show that the Sun and Moon configuration relative to the earth is important.

Many physicists do not want to know about or acknowledge such results because they might be seen as giving support to astrology which to them is a truly shocking thing to have to concede. Let me make it clear that these are real physics results and that supporting astrology is not the motive.

In these latest tests, the physicists decided to slowly rotate their apparatus relative to the Earth so that the rotation of the earth was cancelled out. When they did that the 24 hour period of similarity in histograms disappeared. Then they tested with the apparatus rotating 3 times per day in the same direction as the earth. This resulted in similar histograms every 359 and 360 minutes, being 1/4 of the original 1436 and 1440 minutes. The reason for this being 1/4 with 3 rotations per day is that the Earth's actual rotation is also occurring so that the apparatus is really rotating 4 times per day relative to the stars.

Quite clearly the experiments show that atomic phenomena are sensitive to the inertial frame of the universe and also to the direction of the Sun and Moon in the sky. There is no means for these things to be communicated to atomic phenomena in standard physics.

However when the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) is understood as all particles being composed of real standing waves in space, then the results make a lot of sense. If particles are standing waves in a tensile medium then the fabric of space is vibrating around all particles, and the direction of that vibration at any location is transverse to the radial direction. Wherever there is a massive concentration of particles such as in the Sun, then the combined effect of all the particles leads to space vibrating in the tangential direction relative to the Sun. This vibration directly leads to the equations of General Relativity and explains the bending of light by the gravity of the Sun without any need for non-Euclidean geometry. It also leads to the expectation that rotating objects such as the earth will notice variations in the vibration from all cosmological sources.

Almost since I got access to the Internet in 1994, there have been repeated reports about two things that are now increasingly being linked.

1. The Mayan Prophecies of 2012.

2. The increasing frequency of the earth's Schumann resonance.

These are both solidly in the area of cycles and I often get asked about them. I just received an email from a friend about INTERNATIONAL BRANCH Of LION Of JUDAH. This site in turn quotes Weinholds.org where we can read "Welcome to the home page of Barry and Janae Weinhold and the Carolina Institute for Conflict Resolution and Creative Leadership (CICRCL), which provides evolutionary resources for shifting consciousness."

The stuff that we seek is on several pages and indeed the site map shows that there are 15 pages about the shift of 2012. There we can find this paragraph which was also quoted on the other site:

The Schumann resonance, also known as Earth’s heartbeat, has increased from its normal 7.8 hz. and is hovering around the 9 – 11 hz. level. It is expected to move to 13 hz, the frequency of unconditonal love. Gregg Braden, a geologist who has been studying this, calls this place where the Schumann or magnetic frequency and the electric frequency intersect ZERO POINT.

So perhaps it would be of interest to find out what the Schumann frequency is actually doing. There is a site that makes available information about regular measurements of ELF / ULF (Extra Low Frequency / Ultra Low Frequency) and the Schumann Frequency of the Earth. They have graphs of Schumann frequency from 1990 up to almost the present so we can see what is really happening. Two different laboratories have made the measurements, Arrival Heights, Antarctica (upper graph from 1990 to 2000) and Parkfield, California (lower graph from 1996 to 2003).

Looking at these two graphs we can see that there is a slight variation in the Schumann resonance frequency. It goes up and down on some sort of annual cycle by about 0.1 to 0.2 Hz, and combining the two graphs together we can also see that there were peaks around 1991 and 2002 with a trough around 1996. It would appear that the 11 year sunspot cycle is also showing up in the frequency.

However there is no sign of an increase to the 9-11 Hz range as stated by Barry and Janae Weinhold and those that quote them. There are no dates on their web pages, so we do not know when they were written. They do say:

It is interesting that the largest increase ever recorded in the Schumann frequency occurred in 1987 and coincided with the eruption of Supernova 1987a and the Harmonic Convergence, when millions of people gathered at sacred sites around the world to pray and meditate together. If you remember, this is the time when Russell Boulding believes that the Shift might have really begun.

Well our graph doesn't go back as far as 1987, but certainly if anything unusual happened them (which would surprise me greatly) it had all returned to normal by 1990.

I also see that they in turn copied this information from someone else. Russell Boulding has a web site Preparing for the Great Shift. However I don't think that he is the origin either.

A google search for schumann frequency increasing 2012 says that there are 11,700 sites, but google usually overestimates by a large factor so that a thousand is more likely.

Why do so many people pick up and quote something that has no basis in fact? It appears that someone made this up (I am guessing about 1995) and since then it has been quoted and expanded by people who make a living by telling people all about the coming golden age and the frequency of love, when all around us there is war and destruction. I invite any of these people to produce evidence that the Schumann frequency is actually increasing, has reached 9-11 Hz or is heading towards 13 Hz.

For that matter, the idea that the frequency is moving from 8 to 13 Hz because these are Fibonacci frequencies is equally silly. You cannot say that 13 Hz is a Fibonacci number, because 13 Hz is the same thing as 13*60 cycles per minute or 780 RPM and 780 is not a Fibonacci number. Of course it is the 10th harmonic of the old 78 RPM records, so some is clearly going on here. (sarcasm! sarcasm!) Frequencies are not numbers - they have units. This whole thing of ignoring units and taking the numbers is totally meaningless and a sure sign that the writer does not know what they are doing. You can only look at things as numbers when they have no units which can also result from taking ratios of things that have the same units as then the units cancel.

The same meaninglessness applies to the supposed 2012 date of the Mayan calendar. This looks to me to be the equivalent of the Christian calendar turning over to 1000 or 2000 and nothing more. Of course humans made all sorts of fuss at these times too and nothing happened. I find no evidence of the end of the world. I find no combination of cycles coming together to make catastrophe at that time, and I have studied many hundreds of cycles.

I do find a time in the future when a combination of cycles come together to cause extreme catastrophe and a mass extinction event. I predict that this will happen in 42,000,000 AD. There will be a couple of lesser events in 4,000,000 AD and 16,000,000 AD but the really big one is still quite a long way off. For 2012 AD I don't find anything out of the ordinary.

When making predictions it is a good idea to give your past credentials. In 1986 I predicted that 1987 would be 1929 revisited, an accurate prediction. This prediction was based on my own cycles analysis of stock or share markets done in the 1980s and was verified with Edward R. Dewey's analysis which was done back in the 1960s. I have predicted no other such serious event in our time. I did repeatedly have a big laugh about the Y2K predictions. But just to be sure, I pressed the buttons on our washing machine with a long stick on 1st January 2000 (and again in 2001 in case that was really the millenium as some claimed).

In the early 1900s, Alexander Chizhevsky (sometimes spelled Tchijevsky or various other ways) made very comprehensive investigations in historical processes, especially wars, to try and determine the causes of the processes. He found that existing methods of analysis could not predict major events that were about to happen.

Unfortunately for us in the English speaking world, most of Chizhevsky's writing is in Russian or French and has never been translated into English. Some parts have been, and the investigation into war has been reported in English. Some of this material has also been reported by Raymond Wheeler in America, but I think that Chizhevsky was the originator. It would be good to know the full story on any links between these two.

Chizhevsky first began to observe that conflicts in Russia tended to be cyclic. After publishing several papers on this he expanded his study to world wide conflicts and made an index of battles for the last 2500 years. It showed clearly that there were 9 fairly regular peaks in conflicts each century, or averaging 11.1 years apart. There were other fluctuations, great sweeping rises and falls over longer periods, but this one cycle stood out.

It so happens that the sunspot cycle also has an average period of 11.1 years, so it was natural to begin to look at the connection. He found that the peak in human aggression fairly much coincided with the peak in sunspots. It is natural to wonder as to whether the Sun is somehow causing or contributing to human behaviour.

There are some additional facts available to us now that help to understand this process. I have never seen this fully laid out exactly like this before (excluding things that I have written), but here are a collection of facts that we can connect the dots on:

1. The quantity of different types of radiation vary over the sunspot cycle.

2. There is a continuous stream of radiation of various types, called the "Solar Wind" that arrives at the Earth.

3. Fluctuations in the stream of radiation at the Earth affects the earth's geomagnetic field.

4. There is an oscillation of the Earth's entire electromagnetic field, called the "Schumann Resonance" which oscillates about 7.5 times per second because that is how fast electromagnetic waves travel around the Earth.

5. Bursts of Solar radiation can get the Schumann resonance really ringing. Although the 7.5 Hz mode is the main one, there are also oscillations at near multiples of this: 15, 22.5, 30 Hz and sometimes at lower frequencies such as 3 Hz.

6. Human brain wave frequencies that are commonly studied cover the range from about 0.3 to 40 Hz, and the Schumann resonance is right in the middle of that range. The brain is a largely electrical organ in its functioning.

7. Outside electromagnetic fields can affect the brain by entrainment or in other ways. For example it is known that 10 Hz waves will make human reaction times faster while 3 Hz waves will slow it down.

8. Accidents are more frequent when there are strong ELF or ULF (Extra Low Frequency or Ultra Low Frequency) waves such as 3 Hz. This can be understood as resulting from a slowing down of human reaction times - people are less able to deal with tripping up or sudden events and so more likely to have an accident.

I do not know of evidence that moods are affected by ELF / ULF waves, but would expect that to be the case. Certainly we may say that the evidence is that when the Sun gets uppity, so do people, probably because of electromagnetic waves affecting our brain operation.

My guess is that we all have stored up resentments that we are bottling up, and that when a bit of extra electrical activity is brought to bear on our brains, these then overflow just as they would when the last straw was added by events in our lives. Then all sorts of stuff bursts forth. However when this comes from the whole Earth resonating, it means that many people get agitated at the same time. That is just the recipe for international conflict or social unrest.

For further reading please see:

Chizhevsky's paper (1.4 MB PDF file) as published by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.

Edward Dewey's War cycle analysis (0.1 MB PDF file). Dewey found other cycles in Chizhevsky,s data also, of which the strongest were 53.5, 23.8, 17.4, 11.2 and 6.0 years.

This article will look at the cyclical aspects of Solar Cycles that affect the earth's Climate.

An article by Thomas J. Crowley, Published July 14, 2000 Science, 289: 270-277: Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years.

Abstract:

"Recent reconstructions of northern hemisphere temperatures and climate forcing over the last 1000 years allow the warming of the 20th century to be placed within a historical context and various mechanisms of climate change to be tested. Comparison of observations with simulations from an energy balance climate model indicate that as much as 41-64% of pre-anthropogenic (pre-1850) decadal-scale temperature variations were due to changes in solar irradiance and volcanism. Removal of the forced response from reconstructed temperature time series yields residuals that show similar variability to control runs of coupled models, thereby lending support to the models' value as estimates of low-frequency variability in the climate system. Removal of all forcing except greenhouse gases from the ~1000 year time series results in a residual with a very large late 20th century warming that closely agrees with the response predicted from greenhouse gas forcing. The combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system. A 21st century global warming projection far exceeds the natural variability of the last 1000 years and is greater than the best estimate of global temperature change for the last interglacial."

To Crowley's graph I have added a regular 123 year cycle and it can be seen to fit the minima in the graph rather well. On this basis another minimum should occur around 2060. There are clearly two other periods of solar variation happening in the graph. Firstly an 11 year period, showing only in the more recent years and being the sunspot cycle period. Secondly,. a longer cycle that occurs less than twice in the full 1,000 years plotted here, with a period of about 600 years.

This longer cycle had minima in around 1070 and 1700 and so we are close to a maximum right now with the next minimum not due for some 300 years.

A period of 600 years was noted by Edward R. Dewey in the formation of major religions. This strange fact may also be connected with the rise and fall of major civilisations, with new prophets appearing at around the peak in civilisations.

The major world religions started at the following times are noted:

~1200 BC  Moses     Judaism
 ~600 BC  Buddha    Buddhism
         (also Lao Tze, Confucius, Zoroaster)
   ~0     Christ    Christianity
 ~600 AD  Muhammad  Islam
~1200 AD  (none)
~1800s    (Bahai, Jehovah's Witness, Mormons, Theosophy, others)

The civilisations may be interpreted as Ancient Greece then Rome, Arab Empire, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution.

There is a tendency for scientists today to see everything as one-off events, something which I consider to go against the main principle of science which is to find patterns of behaviour. Of course the patterns must be solidly statistically based to be of any use. There is plenty of data to show that the 11 year and 123 year cycles are real. The 600 year cycle is on a little less certain footing, but should be considered as a reasonable candidate for existing.

We are at present right at the peak or just past it on both the 123 year and 600 year (if it is real) solar cycles. That gives some solace to those who are trying to make efforts to alter potentially damaging human behaviour.

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Although I had been somewhat interested in cycles before 1978, that was the year when I began doing economic modelling on a computer and some cycles just jumped out at me uninvited, and a long time serious interest in cycles began. I did work at that time for a number of Corporations, both large ones and small ones that were about to become large. I developed my own techniques for doing this, and eventually became convinced that this method is better than the methods used by many economists.

This study was performed at a time when the NZ economy was not an open one and some corporations wanted to predict possible future changes in the exchange rate, changes in interest rates and in inflation. Data were gathered for the last 44 years and included anything related to the New Zealand economy:- import and export prices and volumes by various major categories; stocks of major NZ production items; terms of trade; share prices; several price and inflation indices; a variety of demographic data; births, deaths and marriages; mortgages and land and building prices and transfers; wages. The analysis used the base variables and also the annual rate of change of them because that is often what is desired to be predicted.

All these variable were processed by a method known as factor analysis. What this does is to take many variables and reduce them to a much smaller number that still contains the essence of the original, in that the original data is very largely explained as each item being affected by several of these factors, with the balance taken as being to some extent noise. In this study, 9 independent (that is uncorrelated) factors were extracted and this report shows graphs of these. When considering any of the original variables or its rate of exchange, nearly all of the variables can be well explained as the sum of a combination of the factors with various loadings.

The factors are displayed below:

Factors in the New Zealand Economy

It can be seen that the first two factors are rather slow moving ones that show the general state of the economy and it is suggested that these are related to the Kondratieff cycle which is recognised as being about 53 years. Factors 3 and 4 show a moderately regular cycle with a period varying between 3 and 4 years. These two variables are related in the same way that a sine and cosine wave are (or an electric and magnetic field for that matter) with factor 4 being a reasonable measure of the rate of change of factor 3 and factor 3 being a reasonable measure of the negative rate of change of factor 4. These two together are what is generally called the business cycle.

Factor 6 shows a quite regular cycle of close to 3 years although it shows two periods of heightened amplitude around 1957-60 and 1972-74. These two periods correspond to brief periods (3 years each) when the country had Labour governments in between longer periods of National government. However the timing allows the conclusion that the cause of the cycle was not the change in government but perhaps the other way around.

The other factors are not so clearly defined as cycles, although there is some presence of cyclical activity. They are less well defined, but have specific meanings in terms of which variables they correlate with.

In order to try and predict future economic conditions, multiple regression equations were found that use the 9 factors to predict each of the factors in turn from the previous years values for those factors. This works particularly well for factors 3 and 4 because, as mentioned, each variable is closely related to the rate of change of the other.

Before trying to predict the future, it is always best to try and predict the past to see if the method is reasonably sound.

So here are two test runs of the method compared to what actually happened. One test was started in 1960 and the other in 1973. The choice of 1973 was made because the so-called oil shock happened in 1974 and lead to major disruption in world prices and economies, and is considered to have been a random rather than a predictable event.

However the test shows that the regression equations predict the big swing in factor 3, actually slightly over-estimating it. Factor 3 is negatively correlated with many economic variables and so goes up when the economy crashes - the things related to it are terms of trade and export prices and volumes. NZ is harder hit by this factor than most countries.

Test Prediction of Factors in NZ economy

In most cases the predictions are moderately accurate for about 5 years ahead after which the forecasts become a bit sterile compared to the economic movements that actually happen.

The next step is to use the data to make real predictions about the future.

It has been said that prediction is a difficult business, especially about the future.

These forecasts were supplied to several corporations and also I gave a talk at the NZ Statistical Association Conference. It was well received, except that several economists had some criticisms. They told me that the long cycle that seemed to exist in factor 1 (and perhaps 2) was called the Kondratieff cycle and also named another cycle or two and then told me that these cycles did not exist. I was very puzzled as to why cycles that didn't exist appeared in my data and why that had been given names! However participants other than economists said that some of the other cycles were exactly what they experienced in their own areas of study.

Predictions of NZ economic factors

These predicted values for the factors are then used to work backwards to the original variables and give the clients what they wanted to know. My prediction of inflation continuing at a level of around 15% for at least 5 years was very markedly different from NZ Reserve Bank and other economists who were predicting a rapid decline towards 5% in 3 or 4 years time. My prediction was the one that was right.

In my report to my client, I was able to make quite an accurate prediction of the share market for the next few years and to state that there would be no more devaluations of the NZ$ as there had been several in the previous few years. There were no errors in my forecasts.

Conclusion

This method of reducing economic variables to a small number of factors that still contains the essence of the data is a valuable method that overcomes several serious problems in economic modelling. Firstly, there is usually insufficient historical data and models become over specified and mathematically are not sound. The use of factors also removes noise and the factors are much crisper and cleaner data.

There are other methods that are also better than traditional modelling methods, such as Box-Jenkins ARIMA models etc. These methods are mathematically based and assume no economic knowledge and they work. The economic understanding models are generally less accurate. I have not compared my method to Box-Jenkins, which uses only one variable to,predict any variable -- itself! I suspect that this method would allow an improvement on Box-Jenkins, because in the case of factors like 3 and 4, they do show that there is momentum in the economy that moves from one variable to another.

There are a number of people that claim that the Earth is expanding, some at a modest rate, and some at a faster rate. By modest, I mean at about the same rate as the Universe is supposed to be expanding, while the faster rate would mean that the Earth was very much smaller even when there were living things on it.

This idea is not totally crazy as some scientists would want people to believe. There are some reasons to support it. The main reason is that in continental drift theory, which itself changed from being regarded as crazy 50 years ago to being accepted now, does show that the continents fit together better on a smaller Earth than on the present sized one. The only real argument against it, is that standard physics doesn't expect it. But standard physics really wouldn't expect it, even if it was right, because physics is based almost totally on measurements and experiments done in a very short period of time.

Anyway, we do not need to speculate on whether the Earth is expanding or not, because we can measure it, and we do not need a 40,000 km long tape measure to do it. The GPS (Global Positioning System) can measure locations very accurately. For fixed places that take many measurements every day for years on end, even movements by mm (millimeters) can be detected. These measurements have been used for some time to measure continental drift and show quite clearly that the Earth's surface is divided into a set of fairly solid "plates" that move about relative to each other at speeds of generally a few cm per year (about an inch per year).

Several decades ago there was criticism that the analysis of the laboratories that took measurements was only done in 2D, assuming no vertical component to the movement. However the accuracy is sufficient to measure the vertical movement, and for some time this data has been available. It is quite staggering to think that satellite orbits are known well enough to allow measurement of things on earth to 1 mm accuracy.

The thing with the measurements is that they show that some places are moving up and some down. No doubt this is because of local conditions, as some tectonic plates push up onto others, pushing them down, or a mountain range is being formed by a collision. However average statistics are very useful because they should remove all these random factors and show a clear trend.

The conclusion: On the average the Earth's radius is expanding at about 1.7 mm per year. This fits in with the proposal by some people that the Earth is expanding slowly.

Many scientists and others will not accept this as definitive for a variety of reasons, and leaving aside prejudice (which cannot be logically dealt with) it is worth looking at some of these.

Some people get confused by some of this, so we need to address those questions first. It is known that ancient sites are located below a lot of dust and stuff. Hadrian's wall in Britain is 2,000 years old and its 6 m (20 feet) height is almost totally hidden - incidentally this corresponds to 3 mm per year, quite near the rate that I found. However this falling of dust would not be measured by a station that does GPS measurements, because the dust would land on the roof, not under the building and pushing it upwards. It would probably wash off the roof onto the ground and might eventually bury the building but would have zero effect on the measurements.

So even if the Earth is expanding from new material which might be falling to the Earth from space as meteorites, dust, water and whatever, this will not really affect the GPS measurements. It will of course expand the Earth over time, so that the faster expansion theories could be right if this is their source. The estimates of matter falling into the Earth are not very consistent, some estimating many times what others determine, so no faith can be placed in this.

Matter falling into the Earth will not directly lift a GPS station, but by washing down in rivers to the sea and settling on the floor, it will raise water levels and push down on the sea floor and so push up the continents. This is a realistic possibility. It would be a possible explanation for Earth expansion that didn't require physicists to abandon some of their preconceived ideas. However the estimates of material falling to Earth are not nearly high enough. We have to assume that Hadrian's wall is being buried by dust from elsewhere on the earth.

One criticism is that all the GPS stations are on land. This is true, but many are on islands located in the oceans. The trend is very clearly upwards. Actually the sea level can also be measured equally accurately but I do not know of anyone looking at this data for an expanding Earth. The argument is that the Earth's continents could be going upwards as a slow rebound since the last ice age saw the large ice sheets weight removed from the continents. If this were the case, then somewhere else would have to be going down, and that somewhere would be the oceans. In that case, the extra water in the oceans should be causing islands in the ocean to also be getting pushed down. I don't think that there is any evidence for that.

This is not to say that the weight of water cannot push continents up and down. My analysis does show that Auckland, where I live, moves up and down several mm each year with the seasons. This is presumably because of seasonal temperature changes of the sea and its resulting change in density.

I can see no good reason not to take the idea of an expanding Earth much more seriously than it has been.

It is my opinion that ultimately this will lead to new ideas in physics.

Below is a graphic showing plot of daily measurements of solar irradiance (effectively brightness) from 1979 to 1993 as measured by Nimbus 7 (upper graph). It is noticeable that as well as the broad sweep of the 11 year solar cycle, the irradiance of the Sun shows very sudden drops of up to 0.25% that last just a few days.

I have marked in red two regions where these drops are quite regular, and the periods found are ~150 and ~75 days. These periods are near commonly reported solar cycles of 154 and 77 days reported in a variety of solar measurements. The shape of the cycle is very far from sinosoidal, being very lopsided so that the dips are very short compared to the peaks. Such shape is characteristic of behaviour that flips between two quite different forces such as a bouncing ball where gravity controls one part of the motion and compression the other.

Interestingly the longer period occurs near solar minimum and the shorter one near solar maximum. This is an indication of an underlying process that has switched to twice the frequency (harmonic) under more intense conditions, a quite common physical response.

A search for cycles of about 155 days in Solar irradiance does show a number of articles:
http://www.google.co/search?q=140..170+day+cycle+solar+irradiance
as does about 77 days http://www.google.co/search?num=100&hl=en&q=70..85+day+cycle+solar+irradiance

I just came across a graph of real estate prices in the USA for the last 116 years after removing inflation. People often say that house prices go up faster than inflation, but for the 50 years from 1947 to 1997 house price increase exactly matched inflation on the average, with swings of some 10% either side. However there have been a few occasions when something much more spectacular happened, and the period 1997 to 2006 saw an 82% climb in 9 years!

This graph is interesting because it also clearly shows a fairly regular swing above and below the trend line. Here is my modified graph showing the trend and peaks and troughs. Because of the limited width of graphs in my blog you will get a clearer picture if you save and display the file separately.

The green pluses and the red minuses show the dates of the of peaks and troughs. They are fairly regular, averaging 11.2 years for the peaks and 10.6 years for the troughs for an over all average of 10.9 years. That period is rather close to Sunspot cycle period of 11.1 years average, so we might consider it possible that there is a link.

Thanks to my friend Chloe for finding this link (click title to see) at NASA. The NASA article states:

"February 20, 2007: One pole of the sun is cooler than the other. That's the surprising conclusion announced today by scientists who have been analyzing data from the ESA-NASA Ulysses spacecraft.

Ulysses is the only ship in the NASA or European fleet capable of flying over the sun's poles, a result of the spacecraft's uniquely-tilted orbit. Its ability to study the sun's unexplored polar regions is prized by solar physicists.

Ulysses' first polar flybys in 1994 and 1995 revealed the asymmetry—"a 7 to 8 percent difference in temperature," says Ulysses science team member George Gloeckler of the University of Maryland. The measurement was both mysterious and a little hard to believe. What would make the sun lopsided in this way?"

Well the answer was found by me around 1990. I have presented this at a conference in Crimea and in Russia and had info on www since about 1993. My old notes are available here:

A mechanism for the sunspot cycle is proposed which explains the correlations between planetary periods and alignments and periods found in the sunspots. and,

The effect of gravity on photons has been dealt with by Einstein. The normal terms such as acceleration are awkward when applied to photons, and so I am defining a new variable, which I call PULL, which has the same units as acceleration, and can be applied to both photons and normal matter. The advantage of this will then be demonstrated for performing some calculations in areas not previously explored.

In the first paper above I state:
... "Jupiter (as an example) displaces the centre of the sun by 600m over half a revolution. This is small compared to the sun's size being about 10^-6 of the sun's radius. When we consider that the sun has a temperature gradient that is a fairly steady one amounting to 15,000,000 degrees over its radius, we see that this small displacement should heat the surface by about 15 degrees in one hemisphere. This is .25% of the sun's temperature at the surface which would result in an increased energy output of 1% (as energy is proportional to the fourth power of temperature).
Actually this figure is higher than the observed change, but the other hemisphere has an opposite effect. The observed change is of the order of 0.1% only. This demonstrates that the planets do have a big enough effect on the sun to fully explain the observed changes in solar output."

Both my blogs have been subject to spam attacks over the last few weeks, with someone setting up automated posting to many parts of the blogs. At first I thought that this was just stupidity, see the title link to my other blog. If you have posted to my blogs and the post has not appeared it is because it is lost in over 1000 spam messages. I am still trying to get the ISP of the spammer to shut them down and am close to a name and shame on them.

I am wondering whether there is an alternative motive here. Perhaps I said something that offended someone and they are the sort of people that don't do things openly. However I have news for them. All the activity on my blog has lifted it up the google ratings, so keep it coming and whatever you don't want known will get better publicity.

....

I was getting paranoid because of getting some 1400 spam comments to my blog. It seems that this is actually a flaw in b2evolution and that it is the trackback feature that needs to be turned off - Advice to all who use this blog.

I think that I am now back in business and ready to receive comments again. But will be away for some days so don't expect your comment to appear immediately.

As I struggle to find the truth in this area, I found this article (linked to by title) interesting because he mentions the politicising of the issue and shows the state of known solar causes knowledge:

"What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier."

Read the rest of the article ... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

I called my first cycles blog at blogspot.com "Wobbly Universe" and it is still there, but now I have started it up on my own domain which makes it easier and more permanent. If you want to see some of the older posts, click the title "Wobbly Universe" above.

I thought that it is rather a catchy title, and expressive of the fact that the universe is essentially wave structures rather than solid stuff. I really enjoyed discovering that a google search of Wobbly Universe puts my older sites in 1st, 2nd and 4th spots! Unfortunately this new blog is well down the list, so get clicking folks and move my new blog to no.1 please ;-)

Or tell a friend about Wobbly Universe which has information about cycles and periodicities found in nature and human activities.

The following is from Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 76: Jul-Aug 1991, which may be visited by clicking the title link. I am posting a number of abstracts from Science Frontiers and encourage people to visit the site and to purchase the very fine collection of books produced by William Corliss. In my opinion, anyone who wants to do original scientific research that makes substantial new discoveries will find Corliss work to be a gold mine. It has helped me immensely.

This particular piece interests me especially, because I have found this 26 minute period before, not in ants, but in the fundamental time interval after which earthquakes are likely to be followed by more earthquakes at the same location. Not only after 26 minutes, but also after multiples of 26 minutes for many hours. It seems highly likely that the ants are sensitive to the earth processes that relate to earthquakes. Other animals are known to be predictors of earthquakes, and earthquakes are also associated with low frequency electromagnetic waves - ELF and ULF and even lower.

"Abstract. Activity levels within ant colonies are monitored by using a solid-state automatically digitizing camera. The movement-activity levels of whole colonies and of isolated groups of workers are studied. Whole colonies of Leptothorax allardycei show rhythmic changes in movement-activity level. Fourier and autocorrelation analyses indicate that the activity levels of colonies are periodic, with an average period of 26 min. Single, isolated workers do not show the pattern of periodic changes in activity level. Single workers become active spontaneously, but at no particular interval. Pairs of workers, confined together, also do not show periodicity in activity level. One worker can stimulate another worker to become active, thus coupling their movement-activity patterns. As ants are placed in larger groups, the variation in the interval between activity peaks declines in a manner predicted by coupled oscillator theory. It is argued that the colony can be regarded as a population of 'excitable subunits."

Activity records from two ant colonies Activity records from two ant colonies. Time (horizontal axis) is measured in 30-second intervals.
(Cole, Blaine J.; "Short-Term Activity Cycles in Ants: Generation of Periodicity by Worker Interaction," American Naturalist, 137:244, 1991.)

Comment. The author also pointed out the "formal" or mathematical similarity of the ant movement-activity levels and the dynamics of epidemics! This makes us wonder whether wars, economic cycles, etc. might be explained by considering humans as "excitable subunits."

"Published data sets of major geologic events of the past 250 Myr (extinction events, sea-level lows, continental flood-basalt eruptions, mountain-building events, abrupt changes in sea-floor spreading, ocean-anoxic and blackshale events and the largest evaporite deposits) have been synthesized (with estimated errors). These events show evidence for a statistically significant periodic component with an underlying periodicity, formally equal to 26.6 Myr, and a recent maximum, close to the present time. The cycle may not be strictly periodic, but a periodicity of 30 Myr is robust to probable errors in dating of the geologic events."

There are many examples of similar graphs from paleontology, showing mass extinctions at intervals of 26 to 27 million years. This example of geologic events is another clear demonstration that most cataclysmic events happen at regular intervals.

Some one once said that time is the universe's way of not having everything happen at once. However it seems that this is only half true - an awful lot happens in short periods of time, now and then.

Searching on "cycles" at Science Frontiers site yields a bunch of interesting stuff. lick the Title to get more details.

1. Peace And Sunspots
2. The Taos Hum
3. The Missing Sunspot Peak
4. Do large meteors/comets come in cycles?
5. What Drummer Do Periodical Cicadas Hear?
6. Nose News
7. Rhythms In Rhythm
8. Sunspots And Planetary Alignments
9. Extraterrestrial Influences On Chemical And Biological Systems
10. Biology Anomalies by Subjects
11. Icy Comets, Oceans, Life
12. Does The Earth Breathe?
13. Blind Man Runs On Lunar Time
14. Anomalous Eeg Discharges
15. How can the sun influence chemical reaction rates?
16. The Mind's Rhythm
17. Wanted: disasters with a 26-million-year period
18. Are Parasites Really The Masters?
19. A Different Way Of Looking At The Universe
20. Periodical Invasions Of Aliens
21. Ants as \"excitable subunits&
22. Honest, this is the Last \"plant\" Item!
23. How A Fly Hears What A Cricket Hears
24. Self-organized Stone Stripes
25. The Moon And Avalanches
26. 90-DAY SEA-LEVEL OSCILLATION AT WAKE ISLAND
27. Stonehenge in the 1990s: a mainstream view
28. Cyclothems As Solar-system Pulse Recorders
29. A NAZCA ZODIAC?
30. Geophysics Anomalies by Subjects
31. Science Frontiers: The Book Index
32. Astronomy Anomalies by Subjects
33. The Sourcebook Project: Strange, bizarre & anomalous phenomena

The following is from "Science Frontiers", but I was a little surprised that the sleep cycle of 90 minutes is not mentioned in which deeper and REM sleep alternate. From actual graphs that I have seen, the average length of the cycle is more like 85 minutes, consistent with a whole range of astronomical cycles and the 83 light minute spacing of the outer planets.

"Observations of individuals undergoing hypnosis suggest that intervals of particular susceptibility come along about every 90 minutes. Expert hypnotherapists are cognizant of this psychophysical cycle and often wait for it to appear. By closely watching the subject's swallowing, eye-blinking, respiration, etc., the hynotizer can take advantage of these periods of heightened susceptibility.

(Rossi, Ernest L.; "Hypnosis and Ultradian Cycles: A New State(s) Theory of Hypnosis?" American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 25:21, 1982.)

Comment. The reason for this 90-minute rhythm and the control system behind it are obscure."

The following is from "Science Frontiers" online No. 34: Jul-Aug 1984 by William R. Corliss, the producer of a very interesting series of books on scientifically reported anomalies.

Six of the major influenza epidemics, at least as far back as 1917, were synchronized with the sunspot cycle. Furthermore, all but one of these epidemics involved an antigenic shift, wherein the flu virus developed a new coat of protein, which made it resistant to the immunities the population had built up over the years. There is no known mechanism by which solar activity can abet virus evolution, except penetrating radiation, which is inherently destructive.

Lowered human immunity may also be a consequence of solar activity, according to Solco W. Tromp, director of the Biometeorological Research Center in the Netherlands. Over 30 years of research, using blood data from 730,000 male donors, led Tromp to the conclusion that the blood sedimentation rate varies with the sunspot cycle. Since this rate parallels the amount of albumin and gamma globulin, resistance to infection may also follow the lead of the sun.

(Freitas, Robert A., Jr.; "Sunspots and Disease," Omni, 6:40, May 1984.)

Oil Giants' Money Fuels Climate of Suspicion

Last night, 16th August 2007, I was reading the 13th January 2007 issue of New Scientist, and I came across an article on page 14 that explained at least some of the things that have caused me problems in investigating the facts of climate change. The article states that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil spent US$16,000,000 on funding research at 43 bodies that were critical of claims of climate change, such as Frontiers of Freedom in the apparent expectation that these groups will propagate disinformation about global warming even when what they are publicising has been shown to be wrong.

In 1998 ExxonMobil-sponsored promoted a report that said that carbon dioxide emissions posed no warming threat. The report was authored by, amoung others, Slly Baliunas, and astrophysicist affiliated with at least nine ExxonMobil funded groups. In 2003 Baliunas published a review paper in Climate Research (vol 23, p 89) claiming that the climate had not changed significantly in the past millenium. Her conclusions were challenged by 13 scientists whose work she cited, but ExxonMobil-funded groups have continued to promote it.

The above was added on 17th August 2007. Based on this the following should be treated with great suspicion.

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Some quotes from Sally Baliunas from the above article in Reason magazine ...

"We're trying to subtract the sun's influence [from climate fluctuations caused by other sources]. The sun is particularly good at explaining this early 20th-century warming, which can't have been caused by the greenhouse gases. If we had a good prediction for what the sun would do next, given the past calibrations that we've done, we then could make a prediction. But we're not at the point where we can predict what the sun will do 50 years from now."

Referring to the previous IPCC report she said "The IPCC report actually is very careful to say that the models have not been validated. That tells you that you can't make a prediction with them. The executive summary says that there's a discernible human influence, but the information in the chapter on which that conclusion was based has been overturned by the scientific process. The report is obsolete."

Of course the next IPCC report is now out.

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Oil Giants' Money Fuels Climate of Suspicion

Last night, 16th August 2007, I was reading the 13th January 2007 issue of New Scientist, and I came across an article on page 14 that explained at least some of the things that have caused me problems in investigating the facts of climate change. The article states that between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil spent US$16,000,000 on funding research at 43 bodies that were critical of claims of climate change, such as Frontiers of Freedom in the apparent expectation that these groups will propagate disinformation about global warming even when what they are publicising has been shown to be wrong.

In 1998 ExxonMobil-sponsored promoted a report that said that carbon dioxide emissions posed no warming threat. The report was authored by, amoung others, Slly Baliunas, and astrophysicist affiliated with at least nine ExxonMobil funded groups. In 2003 Baliunas published a review paper in Climate Research (vol 23, p 89) claiming that the climate had not changed significantly in the past millenium. Her conclusions were challenged by 13 scientists whose work she cited, but ExxonMobil-funded groups have continued to promote it.

The above was added on 17th August 2007. Based on this some remarks in the following should be treated with suspicion.

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It is important to understand how much of global warming is due to humans and how much due to factors outside our control, especially the sun. It isn't a question where you can tick one box, but a question of apportioning the cause. I would guess that it is 50:50 but it certainly isn't all one or the other. A summary of some of the facts and some links to past articles follows.

a. There can be no reasonable doubt that the temperature lately is outside the normal range.

b. There is no doubt that the amount of CO2 is way above the normal range.

c. There is no doubt that humans have caused the amount of CO2 to rise rapidly.

d. There is no doubt that in the past, CO2 and temperature have moved together.

e. There might be some doubt about which causes which.

f. There is no doubt that the Sun is more active now than it has been for many centuries.

On 31-Jan-2007 I wrote "Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?" and referred to an article from Cycles Research Institute" which looked at different time scales and what climate was doing and might be expected to do.

On 4-Feb-2007 I quoted James Lovelock on Climate Change said of the IPCC report "Quite simply, it’s very stark: it says that by around 2040 to 2050, the European summer of 2003 (where over 20,000 people died of overheating) will be the norm."

And today I have quoted Sally Baliunas as saying "After looking at this, I began to ask, How well do the climate simulations handle this relatively new knowledge about the sun? And the answer is, not very well. We don't know the mechanism for change in the sun very well. We don't know the response of the earth to such changes. So I thought, How do you make predictions 100 years in the future if you don't even know what all the sources of change are?"

And also today I quoted New Scientist as reporting in 2003 that "The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium."

It is hard to reconcile all of this. Let us consider all the possibilities.

1. Human activity and Solar activity are coincidentally both increasing lately.
2. The Sun affects human activity.
3. Human activity affects the Sun.
4. Something else affects both the Sun and Human activity.

My personal view is that 1 can be dismissed and that 3 should be considered very unlikely. There is quite a lot of reason to believe that 2 has some validity, since Chizhevsky has shown that number of battles in wars rise to a peak at fairly regular 11 year intervals just as the Sun does. Furthermore, there is evidence that links solar activity to terrestrial electromagnetic disturbances and those to human behavioural changes, especially accidents.

There are not many people who would have suggested 4 above, and most of the other ones that I know of are dead. It is difficult to distinguish between 2 and 4, so it is perhaps a moot point. Perhaps I will expand on this another time. The key point is that 1 is not true. Human activity and Solar activity are far from unrelated. Such an idea is unlikely to be popular with scientists, belonging more with new age ideas perhaps. But things are changing.

Then we have to consider whether the one, the other or both are affecting the climate. Or then again whether the hidden cause of both is doing it. To those that think that I am just rambling, I would highly recommend reading The Case for Cycles by Edward R. Dewey. In this, the most definitive report on knowledge in cycles, he states that we cannot understand any branches of science without the study of cycles. This is because there are relationships where humans just do not expect them. Dewey was not at all New Agey, and took very solid scientific advice before reaching his conclusions. A must read for anyone who would understand the world we live in.

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Long term sunspot activity shows a rise in the last century - the sun is now very active

The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth.

The dark patches on the surface of the Sun that we call sunspots are a symptom of fierce magnetic activity inside. Ilya Usoskin, a geophysicist who worked with colleagues from the University of Oulu in Finland and the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, has found that there have been more sunspots since the 1940s than for the past 1150 years.

Sunspot observations stretch back to the early 17th century, when the telescope was invented. To extend the data farther back in time, Usoskin's team used a physical model to calculate past sunspot numbers from levels of a radioactive isotope preserved in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica.
Global warming

Ice cores provide a record of the concentration of beryllium-10 in the atmosphere. This is produced when high-energy particles from space bombard the atmosphere, but when the Sun is active its magnetic field protects the Earth from these particles and levels of beryllium-10 are lower.

There was already tantalising evidence that beryllium-10 is scarcer now than for a very long time, says Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford.

But he told New Scientist that when he saw the data converted to sunspot numbers he thought, "why the hell didn't I do this?" It makes the conclusion very stark, he says. "We are living with a very unusual sun at the moment."

The findings may stoke the controversy over the contribution of the Sun to global warming. Usoskin and his team are reluctant to be dragged into the debate, but their work will probably be seized upon by those who claim that temperature rises over the past century are the result of changes in the Sun's output (New Scientist, print edition, 12 April 2003). The link between the Sun's magnetic activity and the Earth's climate is, however, unclear.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters (in press in Nov 2003)

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

2 Feb 2007
By Christine Carter
Page 2 of 6 (go to article to read other 5 pages)

FS: Has global warming ever happened before?

JL: The climate change we’re seeing now is closely similar to a geological event that occurred 55 million years ago, at the beginning of the period geologists refer to as the Eocene. We’re not quite certain how, but about two million million tons of carbon dioxide came into the Earth’s atmosphere over a period of about 10,000 years. I think the most likely cause was a volcanic sill: lava underground from a volcano coming up beneath a petroleum deposit in what is now the Norwegian Sea. This vaporised practically the whole deposit and put a huge quantity of carbon into our atmosphere.

FS: What would the climate be like without humans?

JL: If we had never developed as an intelligent species, the climate right now would probably be moving slowly back towards the next glaciation. There’s some debate about that: some think the present interglacial era would go on a bit longer this time, perhaps as long as 50,000 years. But sooner or later we would be going back into an ice age again. Now we will not: by putting so much carbon in the atmosphere, we have irreversibly changed the Earth. We won’t have another ice age, not at least for another 200,000 years.

FS: What can we expect to see in 20 or 30 years from now?

JL: I can speak not just from my own view, but from the opinions expressed by senior climatologists who have represented their thoughts in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The last one was in 2001, but the update is due in 2007 [February 2nd] and I’ve seen it. Quite simply, it’s very stark: it says that by around 2040 to 2050, the European summer of 2003 (where over 20,000 people died of overheating) will be the norm. People might be able to deal with the consequences: they may go away for the summer to cooler places or they can turn up the air conditioning. But for the plants and the ecosystems, there’s no such relief. European agriculture will probably cease to produce food by then, it will become a desert and scrub region. And the rest of the world will not be exempt: Asia and America will be suffering the same consequences, as will Africa and the nations of the southern hemisphere. We will be entering a world where food supply becomes more and more scarce and there will be mass migrations. Anyone with an imagination can see the awful human consequences of that, and we’re talking about something which is only about 30 years ahead.

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Following is a list of cycles that have been named after people.
Are there any more that anyone knows of that have names
of people or other names?

Milankovitch 100,000 and 41,000 and 23,000 years
(also perhaps 400,000 years)

Halstatt 2,300 years*

de Vries 207 years

Gleissberg 80 to 90 years

Kondratieff 53 to 54 years

Brucker 36 years*

Hale 22 years

Kuznets 18 years

Schwabe 11 years

Juglar 9 years

Kitchin ~4 year
(maybe a cluster of cycle lengths 3.39, 3.95, 4.45 years)

* These two cycles are not commonly known by these names
but there are references on www to them.

There has been a steady campaign to delete articles and categories relating to cycles from wikipedia, sometimes preceded by an effort to make them factually incorrect so that they are more worthy of deletion. I will deal with a single instance here, the deletion of the category:cycles.

The person proposing deletion (AFAIK because the detail is gone) was "Delete. No argument. siafu 23:22, 20 September 2005 (UTC)" who obviously gives no reason why there should not be a category called cycles.

The deletion article above finished with the comment "# Closing note. Discounted sock-puppet votes. 5 total, 4 del, 1 keep. ∞Who?¿? 01:58, 28 September 2005 (UTC)" which is presumably supposed to show that justice was done. Well I have counted the votes in the article and there are 5 for keep and 3 for delete. That is a majority for keep. The accusation of sock puppets is one made repeatedly in trying to delete cycles articles and has been specifically directed at me in the past. For those that do not know what a sock puppet is, it is a made up login to wikipedia that is really the same person, created for the purpose of double voting. I have never done this and I am pretty sure that there are no sock puppets involved in this case because I know a number of the names from an interdisciplinary cycles discussion forum (which exists and has 400 members in spite of the fact that these people claim there is no such area of study).

If there are sock puppets involved, the procedure that talleys votes should say who they are so they have a chance to reply otherwise the vote is simply being tampered with. I challenge those that run these things in wikipedia to account for their actions. This is not an isolated case.

The only validity to the arguments given for deletion was that several of the articles perhaps should not have been in the category. However given that being corrected (the obvious correct decision rather than deleting the category) the category did satisfy the stated objective of the reason for inclusion in the category being obvious.

A subsequent category:cycle was created and suffered a similar fate, largely because the deleters move in droves together and get something deleted before those who know about the subject are even aware of it. They even have clubs for organising these deletions. The argument put forward for deletion of this category was "Aside from the fact that these things occur in cycles, they have nothing in common". Well you might say that apart from all being countries, what do category:country have in common or any other category. That is the whole point of a category isn't it?

The wikipedia article on Edward R. Dewey has, like many other cycles related pages, been a battle ground. You can read the talk page to see some of it. In this case, material was repeatedly inserted regarding a book by Philip Ball called "Critical Mass: how one thing leads to another" which purported to be a criticism of Dewey. In fact, Ball did not mention Dewey and simply criticised economists ideas on the business cycle. Dewey also criticised economic methods and was an economist himself to begin with.

I did go to the trouble of getting a copy of Ball's book and found it interesting. Ball, like myself, is a generalist in an age of specialists. His broad sweep is generally well presented, although his little bit on cycles I found was somewhat weak. At one time I posted this in the Dewey talk page:
And yet this is done on the basis that a graph of national per capita output "looks more like the random static of a detuned radio signal" than a cycle [quote from Ball]. He has done no analysis and is only guessing. Perhaps you would care to show a reference to where Dewey claims that national per capital production has a cycle in it? You can see a number of examples of Dewey's and Schumpeter's presentation of cycles analysis on the page http://ray.tomes.biz/dewey.htm including a clear 9 year cycle in wholesale prices from USA, Britain and Germany that shows the same phase and regular 9 year cycle for all three countries. Perhaps you would care to explain why this is wrong based on Ball's speculation on different data.

I was therefore interested in the notes in another blog:
Fisking Dave Altig (Philip Ball Responds) and Fisking Philip Ball. I thought Ball responded well, accepting some of the criticism and getting the favour returned. It is a pity that the wikipedia discussions did not fare quite so well, although I did find the one academic who got involved to have a better manner.

I have noticed that trees sway in the wind in fairly regular rhythms and other people have mentioned this to me also. Measurements of wind speed show that there are cyclical bursts of wind. Studies done on this show that wind speed commonly has periods present of 14, 28 and 39-40 seconds as well as 40-45 and 80-85 minutes. When there is rain a 6 minute period is also found.

All of these periods are known from other studies related to weather and earth processes.

Waves in the sea very often show periods around 13 seconds and sometimes also doublings and halvings of this - 6.5, 3.25 and 26, 51 and 102 seconds. Very large waves in the sea occur at 20 minute intervals which I learned from my surfie friend Mountain Man.

Periods of 80 and 160 minutes and 3 and 6 minutes are all pervading periods of the solar system and living things. Sometimes 40 and 20 minutes are also found. These periods are not just limited to the earth or solar system but the 160 minute oscillation is reported even in other galaxies by Russian astronomers.

Originally posted by email September 1997. This will no doubt become topical again some time.

In recent times there have been many news reports concerning the problems of rabbits for farmers in the south island and the release of rabbits contaminated with the RCD rabbit virus. I am writing because I have some information which might be of relevance to the problem, and without which some mistaken conclusions might be reached.

There is a cycle of 9.6 years in snowshoe rabbit populations in the northern hemisphere. Many other animals show this same variation, including canadian lynx, hawk, owl, partridge, tent caterpillars, chinch bug, ticks, coyote, fisher, martin, mink, muskrat, four varieties of fox, timber wolf, goshawk, skunk and salmon. In most cases the variations in animal populations and reproduction rates vary by enormous factors over the 9.6 year cycle. For example the canadian lynx population increases by about 1000% in 5 years and just as rapidly declines to its original level. A graph of the canadian lynx population, as measured by the number trapped for fur, and covering a 200 year period is enclosed. Humans too are slightly affected by the 9.6 year cycle with a variation in heart attacks.

These matters have all been reported extensively by Edward Dewey and others at the cycles foundation over a long period. Other variations over a cycle of 9.6 years include wheat production, tree ring widths, financial crises, storm track shifts, magnetic measurements, lake varve thicknesses, atmospheric ozone content, atmospheric pressure and the runoffs of certain rivers.

I recently came across an old book with some further interesting material related to the matter. Ellsworth Huntington reported in the 1940s that ozone concentration in the lower atmosphere also varies over the same cycle and that some solar variations are suspected to be responsible. It is also known that litter sizes and breeding frequency increase considerably as the growth phase of the cycle gets under way.

Huntington makes it clear that we do not fully understand these things but offers clues for further research.

Some research on the various creatures affected by the cycle has been carried out because several others are pests as well as rabbits.

Although there is no certainty on the cause, the suspected culprits of weather variations and such factors are not the primary cause of variations.

The question of relevance to farmers is whether epidemics of rabbits can be predicted and, that being so, whether anything can be done about it.

The other important question is what would the natural cycle be doing at the moment without the RCD rabbit virus. All of the animals whose populations vary on a 9.6 year cycle reach peaks at nearly the same time. This is called cycle synchrony by Edward Dewey and is common to other cycles also. There are other cycles of different periods in other animal populations and in many other variables.

Extending forward the dates of the peaks of the various animal populations from the historical records of the 9.6 year cycle leads me to conclude that they would mostly reach a peak around early 1996. On that basis, assuming that our southern hemisphere animals follow the same cycle then it is quite understandable that there has been a serious problem for farmers over the last several years. However, even without the release of RCD rabbit virus we could expect a reduction in rabbit populations to already have begun and for rabbit populations to decline significantly through 1997 to 1999 and reach a low around the end of the year 2000.

It concerns me that even if the rabbit population just follows its normal decline this may be interpreted as being a result of using RCD and so RCD may acquire a reputation whether or not it deserves it. For that reason I wanted to make the facts about animal population cycles known so that when MAF and others are reaching their conclusions at some time in the future they will put this information into the equation also.

For studying cycles, or repeating phenomena, in every branch of human knowledge. Continuing the work of Edward R Dewey, who discovered that there are related cycles in many seemingly unrelated things - see graph at left as an example. Useful for scientific study, investments and understanding the universe.

"..., insofar as cycles are meaningful, all science that has been developed in the absence of cycle knowledge is inadequate and partial. Thus, if cyclic forces are real, any theory of economics, or sociology, or history, or medicine, or climatology that ignores non-chance rhythms is manifestly incomplete, as medicine was before the discovery of germs."

- Edward R. Dewey (Cycles Magazine July 1967)

9.6 year cycle

My friend Gabriel has made some excellent animated GIF files that show the possibilities for explaining the wave structure of matter (WSM) in a clear way. These show the meaning of de Broglie waves and other known physics in a way that has not been fully understood in the past.

Doppler motion of de Broglie waves

One of the most important questions facing mankind in the twenty-first century is to what degree is human activity responsible for climate change, particularly temperature change, and is there anything that we can or should do about that?

This issue can be focussed on narrowly or broadly and entirely different answers arrived at. Some of the relevant aspects are the long term ice-age or Milankovitch cycles, medium term solar fluctuations, the effect of humans burning fossil fuels, the possible bias in sampling locations, and ecological and political propaganda.

... more at the link

See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

Wave Particles: Oscillons, Cymatics

Experiments with vibrations and water generate fascinating patterns which hint at the composition of matter as really being similar types of waves. To understand the secrets of matter I suggest that cymatics is a necessary subject to study. Click the title for much more.

Cymatics in Coffee cup

"This cup of coffee was on a surface vibrated at approximately 20Hz by a an electric motor driving an unbalanced flywheel."

Cymatics is the study of forms, often changing, caused by the vibration of liquids or partcle dusts.

There are 24 cymatics videos on youtube and another 31 on google video.

For those who have never seen a cymatics video, then you are in for a big surprise. Simple sound waves acting on fluids or powders can cause amazing structures to form, including ones that look like life forms and others which strange convolutions and flows.

Cymatics 2

This site has information on all the following economists and cycles researchers. Click the title to go to active links for all the following:

Business Cycle Empiricists
* Joseph Kitchin
o "Cycles and Trends in Economic Factors", 1923, REStat.
o Identified the three-to-five year inventory cycle.
* Nikolai D. Kondratiev, 1892-1931?- (1), (2), (3)
o The World Economy and its Condition During and After the War, 1922
o "The Long Waves in Economic Life", 1926, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (transl. 1935, REStat)
o The Long Wave Cycle, 1928.
o Russian economist, founder of the Moscow Institute for Business Conditions, Kondratieff identified the half-century "long wave" in his famous 1922 tract and 1926 article. One of the architechts of the first Soviet Five Year Plan, he was rewarded by Stalin with imprisonment in one of his Siberian camps, in which he died sometime in the 1930s.
* Wesley Clair Mitchell and the American Institutionalists
* The Harvard Barometer Group (Bullock, Persons, Crum)
* Moses Abramovitz, 1912-

Climate Theories of Cycles
* William Stanley Jevons, 1835-1882.
* Henry Ludwell Moore, 1869-1958.
* Johan Henryk Åkerman, 1896-1982

Continental Tradition: Overinvestment Theorists
* Clèment Juglar, 1819-1905.
* Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky, 1865-1919.
* Arthur Spiethoff, 1873-1957.
* Gustav Cassel, 1866-1946.
* Dennis H. Robertson, 1890-1963.
* Joseph A. Schumpeter, 1883-1950.
* Jean Lescure, 1882-1947.
* Marco Fanno, 1878-1965
* Adolph Lowe and the Kiel School

Monetary Overinvestment Theorists
* Ralph G. Hawtrey, 1879-1971.
* Friedrich A. Hayek, 1889-1992.
* Gottfried von Haberler, 1900-

Anglo-American Tradition: Expectational and Lead/Lag Theorists
* Alfred Marshall, 1842-1924.
* Irving Fisher, 1867-1947.
* William H. Beveridge, 1879-1963.
* Wesley C. Mitchell, 1874-1948.
* Albert Aftalion, 1874-1956.
* Arthur C. Pigou, 1877-1959.
* John Maurice Clark, 1884-1963.
* George L.S. Shackle, 1903-1992.

Underconsumption Theorists
* John A.Hobson, 1858-1940.
* William T. Foster, 1879-1950.
* Waddill Catchings, 1879-1969
* John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946.

Keynesian Multiplier-Accelerator Theories
* Roy F. Harrod, 1900-78.
* Paul A. Samuelson, 1915-
* Lloyd A. Metzler,
* Sir John R.Hicks, 1904-1989.
* James S. Duesenberry, 1918-
* Luigi Pasinetti, 1930-
* Dale W. Jorgensen, 1933-
* Arthur Smithies

Keynesian Endogenous Cycle Theory
* Erik F.Lundberg, 1907-1987.
* Michal Kalecki, 1899-1970.
* Nicholas Kaldor, 1908-1986.
* Richard M. Goodwin, 1913-1996.
* Hyman P. Minsky, 1919-1997.
* Hugh Rose, 1920-
* Jean-Michel Grandmont, 1939-

Shock-Dependent Theories
* Ragnar A.K. Frisch, 1895-1973.
* Eugene Slutsky, 1880-1948.
* Robert E. Lucas, Jr., 1937-
* Real Business Cycle Theory

Resources on Business Cycle Theory
* HET Pages: Old Business Cycle Theory, Keynesian Business Cycle Theory.
* The National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER)
* NBER business cycle dates table
* The Quantitative Macroeconomics and Real Business Cycle Home Page
* "The Development of Business-Cycle Theory in the German Language Area, 1900-1930" by Harald Hagemann, 1999, SdPE

25 January 2007, From New Scientist

"There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.

Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.

He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, Gábor Ágoston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature.

Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other."

-end quote- see article for more

Solar Resonant Diffusion Waves as a Driver of Terrestrial Climate Change is the original article in the astrophysics archive. It is clear from this article that Ehrlich's model produces a series of periods of the form 360,000 years / n^2 where n is 1, 2, 3, 4, although the figure 360,000 years seems just a little low. This gives periods corresponding to the 4 main Milankovitch cycles of 400,000, 100,000, 41,000 and 23,000 years. Previously these periods were considered to appear in the climate record because they related to earth orbital and axial dynamics, so the new proposal is a surprise.

For many years I had an interest in cycles in many things - economics, sunspots, weather, climate, biology, astronomy, physics etc. Starting from trying to predict economic and business cycles for businesses my interest expanded until I gradually learned that there are cycles in everything and that many seemingly unrelated areas have exactly the same length cycles in them. Furthermore, the most common cycle periods reported are related by simple whole number ratios. Eventually I developed a theory based on non-linear physics that explained this and a lot of other stuff besides. I have spent about 15 years full time on this pursuit.

For those interested in this subject, I would recommend first reading the paper by Edward R Dewey The Case for Cycles which gives an overview of the most significant discoveries concerning cycles in many disciplines. More can be found at Cycles Research Institute.

My own work involved rediscovering much of what Dewey had (unknown to me at the time) already found. I found a reason for the patterns of cycle periods observed by him, based on non-linear systems. The basic laws of the universe must be non-linear, and GR is a non-linear theory. The Harmonics theory states that in such a non-linear system, any standing wave structure (any lasting energetic form) must develop harmonics of the wave and that each of these harmonics must do the same. This last clause is my contribution, because the formation of harmonics of waves was already well known. The maths of this and the consequences for the structure of the Universe are developed in my Harmonics Theory Maths pages.

The theory is consistent with GR but not with big bang bung cosmology. I would go further and say that it follows logically from GR and that the Universe is vastly older than the deeply flawed big bang cosmology suggests.

I welcome any questions and comments.

I am a philosopher in the style of the old natural philosophers; a generalist in an age of specialists. Before and after retiring from a career in computers at the age of 42 (that is the meaning of life if you read Douglas Adams*) I spent many years of full time studying what makes the universe tick.

My interests centred around the study of cycles and this ranges over cycles in astronomy, economics, geology, history and physics. It began by my attempts to predict economic cycles using computers and resulted in the development of the Harmonics theory which turned out to be a theory that explained the structure of the universe.

"The universe, believe it or not, is nothing other than a giant musical instrument with a very special but predictable pattern of harmonically related oscillations which determine the structure of everything from galactic clusters to subatomic particles".

Although this theory is properly called the Harmonics theory it may be alternatively known as the Big Bong theory!

My main website about me, Cycles and Harmonics Theory
Harmonics Theory main discussion
My StumbleUpon blog a useful way to find lots of interesting stuff
Cycles Research Institute where I am an active participant
Cycles discussion group on Yahoo! for email or web discussion of anything to do with cycles
Wobbly Universe (blog) now inactive as I will blog here
Myanmar Gold (blog) now inactive - about Meditation trip to Myanmar