Wobbly Universe

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.