Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Otto E. Rossler, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, F.R.G.

Resumé

There are new developments in gravitation theory beginning in 2005. They have changed the previously accepted scientific picture of black holes. On the basis of these results, a currently running experiment, designed to produce artificial black holes of very low velocity, has ceased to be innocuous. The experimentally hoped-for “mini black holes,” (1) become more likely to arise, (2) do not evaporate, (3) are undetectable by the machine, (4) will in part get stuck inside earth and (5) will grow there exponentially so as to shrink the earth to 2 cm in perhaps 5 years’ time. Hence a re-appraisal of the experiment is necessary before it can be allowed to go on. Please, rule so, dear Council.

(July 30, 2011)

A previously overlooked new fact in gravitation theory is the reason for my turning to you. It looks simple enough: the rest mass-energy of a particle decreases with increasing gravity. To witness, on a neutron star on which gravity is so high that clocks tick almost twice as slow, every particle has only half the outside rest mass without this fact being locally detectable. This mass-change result, implicit in a dissertation of a co-worker submitted in 2005, represents the main content of a 2007 paper accepted for publication by the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals [1]. The same result was independently derived two years later by Richard J. Cook of the Air Force Academy [2]. It finally was obtained on the highest level of technical sophistication by a specialist who wants to remain anonymous while insisting that all credit go to the late Arthur Komar [3]. A maximally simple derivation finally is the “Telemach theorem” [4].

Many predictions pertinent to particle collisions are overthrown as a consequence of the mass-change result. Designing new tailor-made experiments will take several years. All of this is nothing but ordinary scientific progress, taking its due time to be tested and become mainstream wisdom.

By a twist of fate, the new result happens to possess more than just academic interest. A machine that was designed to produce miniature black holes — the Large Hadron Collider of CERN — suddenly becomes the most dangerous endeavor of humankind. As familiar from similar examples in the past, the scientific community is sluggish in recognizing the significance of the situation.

Science sometimes transcends its usual boundaries by spilling over into everyday life and politics. This happens to be the case here. An experiment thought to be purely academic (except for some theoretically unexplored features of quark-gluon plasmas drawn attention to by my colleague Walter Wagner) acquires a menacing character because the most hoped-for experimental outcome suddenly possesses radically new features: black holes.

“Black holes” were so named by John Wheeler in 1968 [5] who had inherited his impishness from his mentor, Einstein. Three years later, Johnny (as his friends sometimes called him) joked that “a black hole has no hair” (in apparent allusion to a Berlin pop song from the 1920s, “Say is it true that the frog at the butt has no hair?”) — “except for three.” The remaining three hairs were: mass, angular momentum and charge [6]. Only three years later, Stephen Hawking [7] described a fourth hair brought-in by quantum mechanics (Hawking evaporation). The latter property would – he argued – drain away mass-energy, slowly emaciating every black hole until it would eventually explode (“evaporate”) on having grown maximally small – as small as the tiny black holes hoped-for at CERN.

Now, almost 4 decades later, two of the remaining four hairs prove to be clipped (charge and evaporation). This fundamentally altered situation logically requires a re-evaluation of the safety equation of the LHC experiment, since the most looked-forward-to fruits of the experiment (mini black holes [8]) have become undetectable by detectors designed on the basis of the overhauled theory. This situation represents a drawback for a lovingly set-up world-class experiment which also is the most expensive of history. Some resistance shown by the scientific community is predictably preprogrammed.

This new situation would not represent a sufficient reason to bother the world’s Security Council – were it not for the fact that the experiment has become unsafe. The undetectable miniature black holes hoped to be generated at a rate of one per second [8] will now do new things which, unfortunately, are not innocuous.

To evaluate the totally changed situation, a “scientific safety conference” was proposed in 2008, with Prince Charles who is widely esteemed for his “green thumb” as the chair. The whole issue was approached in a hope-inspired light tone [9].

But the harsh logic of real-life constraints struck. Would a public safety assessment not cause unnecessary delays and, what is more, drain away valuable public confidence? One member state of CERN’s – Austria — even announced to leave CERN, to reluctantly return after closed-door admonitions.

It goes without saying that the most awesome experiment of history — with its thousands of physicists, the cream of creams, and with all influential governments of the globe participating either as members or as accredited observers who have to contribute too — cannot easily change course. Should it really do so only because a new chapter of future textbook results has been opened up?

Any safety assessment is a double-edged endeavor. What it achieves in terms of added rationality, it jeopardizes in terms of lost planning security. So it is no wonder that there has been little enthusiasm to comply with such a request. Pascal’s logic – a very big risk deserves absolute priority – is predictably hard to enforce in the reality of a tight-budget multinational endeavor.

Does this mean that everything is in perfect order? From the point of view of bureaucracy, the answer is yes, from the point of view of safety, the answer is no. For the risk that our earth will be eaten inside out by the first sufficiently slow artificial mini black hole (anticipated to be produced in a matter of ten days [8]) can be estimated to be roughly 1:6 — a “Russian roulette” — with the added feature of the remaining time for the planet being of the order of 5 years [10]. The low estimate for the remaining time stems from the fact that an independent physical theory – chaos theory – conspires predicting that every resident miniature black hole will be turned into an exponentially growing “miniquasar” [10]. Thirdly, the final safety argument offered by CERN to the world before the new results were brought to its knowledge in early 2008 – the continued existence of neutron stars in the sky – was evaporated by another independent physical theory, quantum mechanics [11]. Thus, three totally disjoint sciences (relativity, chaos and quantum) conspire by each refusing to give the all-clear signal to be expected from at least one of them on the basis of common sense: A “trap” put to humankind by nature as it were.

After the experiment inadvertently got shrunk in half energy-wise, following an early technical accident in September 2008, the probability of earth’s being transformed into a 2-cm mini-quasar got cut in half too – from 16 to 8 percent. This still dreadful level will be reached once the experiment has attained its maximum luminosity or cumulative number of collisions.

Currently, CERN has reached one ninth of the originally planned luminosity while scheduling to reach one third by the end of the next three months [12]. If the already incurred risk thus is 0.8 percent (8÷9 = 0.8), this means that more than a quarter of the danger of 8 percent to be reckoned with will be realized by the end of October 2011. It goes without saying that every single day that the experiment is halted earlier for re-evaluation purposes is worthwhile. The single eventually lethal collision event could happen on the last day before the conference starts.

Nothing more is being asked than to have a second look. A court in Germany — the “Cologne Administrative Court” – before whom CERN was standing as a defendant on January 27, 2011 – concluded its ruling after stating that it could not override an earlier ruling by the German supreme court, on the following sentence which for some reason went unreported in the media:
THE COURT EXPRESSES THAT IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE TO LET THE VARIOUS SAFETY ASPECTS, WHICH ALSO WERE THE SUBJECT OF THE TWO SAFETY REPORTS FROM THE YEARS 2003 AND 2008, BE DISCUSSED WITHIN THE SCOPE OF A “SAFETY CONFERENCE” [13].

I am aware that I have no right to contact you owing to my being an ordinary person only. But I stand here representing the whole scientific community and every citizen and country of the planet when I say: Please, dear Highest Delegates of Planet Earth, do endorse the request made by the Cologne Administrative Court by declaring: LET US HAVE A SECOND LOOK IMMEDIATELY.

For J.O.R.

References

[1] O.E. Rossler, “Abraham-like return to constant c in general relativity: ‘gothic-R-theorem’ demonstrated in Schwarzschild metric,” 2007, http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/ottoroesslerminiblackhole.pdf (second paper there). Revised version: http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/Chaos.pdf

[2] R.J. Cook, “Gravitational space dilation”, 2009, http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.2811

[3] A. Komar, “Covariant conservation laws in general relativity.” Phys. Rev. 113, 934–936 (1959), http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/23/24/L01/pdf/cqg6_24_l01.pdf

[4] O.E. Rossler, “Einstein’s equivalence principle has three further implications besides affecting time: T-L-M-Ch Theorem,” 2011,
http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/einsteins-equivale…t-l-m-.pdf

[5] J.A. Wheeler , “Our universe, the known and the unknowns.” The American Scholar 37, No.2, 248 (1968).

[6] J.A. Wheeler 1971, quoted in: K.S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps, New York: W.W. Norton 1994, p. 275.

[7] S.W. Hawking, “Black hole explosions.” Nature 245, 30–31 (1974).

[8] B. Giddings and S. Thomas, “High energy colliders as black hole factories: The end of short distance physics.” Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 65. 10.1103/PhysRevD.65.056010 (2002).

[9] O.E. Rossler, “A petition to CERN,” April 2008,
http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/PetitiontoCERN.pdf

[10] O.E. Rossler, “Abraham solution to Schwarzschild metric implies that CERN miniblack holes pose a planetary risk.” In: Vernetzte Wissenschaften – Crosslinks in Natural and DSocial Sciences (P.J. Plath and E.C. Haas, eds.), Berlin: Logos Verlag 2009 (July), pp. 263–270 (submitted September 2007), http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/ottoroesslerminiblackhole.pdf (first paper there).

[11] O.E. Rossler, “A rational and moral and spiritual dilemma.” In: Personal and Spiritual Development in the World of Cultural Diversity (G.E. Lasker and K. Hiwaki, eds.), Vol. 5, Tecumseh: The International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics 2008 (July), pp. 61–66,
http://ww.wissensnavigator.com/documents/spiritualottoeroessler.pdf

[12] A. Rydd and M. Ferro-Luzzi, “Experiment’s desiderata,” slide No. 8, http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=1&sess…fId=144632

[13] Original German ending of the Cologne Administrative Court’s ruling: “Das Gericht gibt seiner Meinung Ausdruck, dass es möglich sein sollte, die unterschiedlichen Sicherheitsaspekte, die auch Gegenstand der beiden Sicherheitsberichte aus den Jahren 2003 und 2008 waren, im Rahmen einer ‘Sicherheitskonferenz‘ diskutieren zu lassen“,
http://www.juris.de/jportal/portal/page/homerl.psml?cmsuri=/…A110100233

carboncopies.org

Concerns arose recently about the concept of so-called “catchment areas”, evolutionary developments that result in a very tight interdependence between requirements for survival and behavioral drives. In particular, the concern has been raised that such catchment might render any significant modification of the human mind, such as through brain enhancement, impossible (Suzanne Gildert, “Pavlov’s AI: What do superintelligences REALLY want?”, Humanity+@Caltech, 2010).

The concept of a catchment area assumes that beneath the veneer of goal-oriented rational planning, learned behavior and skill lies a basic set of drives and reward mechanisms. The only purpose of those drives and reward mechanisms is genetic survival, a necessary result of eons of natural selection. It follows that all of our perceived goals, our desires and interests, the pursuit of wealth, social acceptance or fame, love, scientific understanding, all of it is merely a means to an end. All of it points back to the set of drives and reward mechanisms that best enable us as individuals, us as a tribe and us as a species to survive in our given environment.

Why does that describe a catchment area, a type of prison of behavior? It is assumed that the distribution of behaviors that have enabled long-term survival is a narrow one with little real variance. Stray too far from the norm and your behaviors become counter-productive to survival. Worst of all, if you recognize your enslavement to those single-purpose drives and reward mechanisms, if you realize that they have no meaning beyond a survival that itself links to no universal purpose, then you risk embarking upon a nihilistic course that would likely end in your extermination or self-termination.

How risky is modifying reward mechanisms?

If the catchment problem is real, and if it indeed implies that we live in a precarious balance of behavioral drives that keep us alive, then any modification brings with it the risk that we tip the balance. One significant change, or a series of changes could push us into a condition where our mental reward system is no longer aligned with requirements for survival. One form of this problem has been popularized as “wire-heading” (Larry Niven, Known Space & Ringworld novels, 1970–1996), where an individual exists in a short-circuited reward-loop, living only to repeatedly and directly deliver reward stimulus to herself.

There are of course numerous possible critiques of the catchment hypothesis, which bears a heavy burden of proof. There is plenty of evidence that evolution is not an actual optimizer. If the process of natural selection is not an optimizer, then why should we assume that we exist in a delicately optimized state? We may also consider changes in our mental experience in the recent past. For example, humans generally live longer now than they did previously, so that the extended experience itself is a novel condition for human mental function, and brings with it different survival challenges to which behavior needs to be adapted. And, while we share many behavioral traits as a species, there are clearly differences in behavior between individuals, most of whom appear to function and survive. In fact, some behaviors do not seem at all optimal for survival, such as extreme sports. Those critiques do not mean that the notion of catchment areas is wrong, but they demonstrate that we must take care before drawing extreme conclusions in the matter.

If we represent behavioral traits as variables in a multi-dimensional landscape, and the survival suitability of combinations of traits as elevation in that landscape, does the landscape look like a Himalayan mountain ridge with sharp peaks, steep cliffs and deep valleys? Or does it look more like a rolling vista of hills, or perhaps even a concatenation of several contiguous high-altitude plateaus? If we do not know what this landscape looks like, then it is extremely difficult to make informed statements about the results that we should expect when reward mechanisms and consequent behaviors are modified.

Can we modify while specifying conditions for survival?

Is there anything about past developments that we might use as a guide, to tell us if modifications of reward mechanisms and behaviors are survivable, and how that might work? I believe there is. I think the process is unavoidable, as it is a result of selection among differences. Darwin got us here, and he can get us out too.

Let us assume that modifying our reward mechanisms can result in personal destruction. That is not a fanciful assumption. We need only look at the worst-case scenarios in cases of addiction to see relevant examples. Similarly, we may observe that suicide is such a case, unless it is a sacrifice that serves the greater purpose of tribe or species survival.

Do all modifications lead to destruction? That seems highly unlikely, given that humans have not existed forever. There have been ancestors who probably had different brains and at least somewhat different drives and reward mechanisms. The further back you look, the more different and strange those drives and mechanisms may seem, since the species involved will have had somewhat different challenges and requirements for survival.

If there was a way that led from there to what we are now through natural selection, then why should we assume that this is the terminal state? It seems reasonable to assume that if we carried out a large number of experiments in which we modified our brains and their underlying drives and reward mechanisms to some degree, some of those experiments would not result in catastrophe. There would still be a selection process. The question is not whether there exist ways to achieve brain enhancement. Rather, we should seek out the best process. We should determine how to carry out intelligent experimentation that minimizes that rate of failure and maximizes the rate of success.

Image attribution

Wirehead Darwin: modified from George Grantham Bain press photo collection, purchased by the library of Congress. No restrictions.
Survival landscape: modified Height map (Wikipedia), unknown author. Public domain.

The story of “Our Last Hour” (Sir Martin Rees) has a latest twist. Since CERN cannot muster a single scientific argument or a single renowned scientist to defend its use of force against scientific evidence, it recruited a gang of anonymous science kids to defend its cause by pretending to ask a scientific question which, if taken seriously, would have destroyed the scientific reputation of their only planet-widely visible adversary.

The Telemach theorem, which pits Einstein against CERN, was to be discredited, not by scientific argument but by luring its proponent into taking a pseudoscientific question disguised as a genuine concern seriously: If the size ratio between two fingers says something about the ratio between two little guys, what is the ratio between one finger and one guy?

The media cannot understand, of course, but every citizen on the planet will. Science has lost its credit by visibly misleading the planet – unless CERN apologizes immediately for its onslaught on everyone’s life. The two fingers become a world-wide symbol.

Stuart Kauffman and Giuseppe Longo

July 7, 2011

At least since Isaac Newton, an enduring belief among physicists and many other scientists has been that there is a fundamental set of laws, presumably concerning particle physics, that will deductively entail the entire evolution of the universe and all in it, including all of earthly life, the evolution of the biosphere, econosphere and even history. If so, nothing truly novel, ie un-entailed, can arise.

In this piece we provide strong grounds to say that the long held belief that there is a theory entailing all that happens in the universe is false. No Law entails the evolution of life. If so, reductionism is false, and we must think anew. Our world is not what we have thought.

Establishing such a strong claim will require a set of steps.

First, were classical physics correct, the entire evolution of the universe, stated Laplace, would be entirely determined by knowing the positions and momenta of all the particles in the universe and application of Newton’s three laws of motion and universal gravitation. In Laplace’s time, this fully determined behavior was also equated with predictability. Henri Poincare’, considering three gravitating bodies, showed that the behavior of this system was deterministic, but chaotic. Due to the famous sensitivity to initial conditions which lead to radically different behaviors, and because initial conditions cannot be specified with infinite precision, the universe and all in it might be deterministic, but unpredictable.

Quantum mechanics has, in effect, replaced the determinism of the classical physical world with indeterminism. Despite Einstein’s claim to the contrary, “God does play dice with the universe”. But familiar quantum mechanics is quantum “random”, as in the radioactive decay of a nucleus, acausally, a random “Poisson” process in time.

Our first step is to point out, as in a past NPR post, that biological evolution defies the twin pillars of contemporary physics, quantum mechanics and classical physics — never united. Mutations to the DNA of contemporary organisms is often an indeterminate quantum random event. Mutations supply Darwin’s “heritable variation”. Yet evolution itself by natural selection is NOT random. The eye has evolved eleven times. The octopus camera eye and vertebrate camera eye evolved independently, and are nearly identical except that in us the blood vessels lie between the retina and outside world, while in the octopus, the blood vessels sensibly lie behind the retina. The perfection of the camera eye stunned Darwin. The convergent evolution of the octopus and vertebrate eye is not random, but due to powerful selection. The convergent evolution of marsupial and mammalian forms, like the Tasmanian wolf and mammalian wolf are also examples of convergent, non-random evolution.

It does NOT follow from this that the evolution of the biosphere is not entailed by some still unknown law that may unite quantum mechanics and classical physics in an unexpected way. Conversely, the fact that quantum mechanics and classical physics in the form of General Relativity have NOT been united since 1927, while both play a role in biological evolution, is consistent with the possibility that the evolution of the biosphere is ENTAILED BY NO LAW AT ALL.

Central to the belief that there is some law “down there” that entails all that happens in a hierarchical way, is the belief that all can be derived by a kind of aggregation upward and entailment upward from some simplest parts, quarks, gluons, photons and electrons, say, or string theory — only these are fundamental entities.

We believe this view is mistaken. What we shall call “Kantian wholes” dominate what exists and evolves in the biosphere and exist AS WHOLES. Our theory builds from this.

Kant pointed out that in an “organized being” the parts exist for and by means of the whole, the whole exists for an by means of the parts. In a past post one of us introduced Collectively Autocatalytic Sets. Gonen Ashkenazi at Ben Gurion has a nine peptide (peptides are small proteins) collectively autocatalytic set. Each of the nine peptides catalyzes, or speeds up, the reaction binding together fragments of some other peptide into another copy of that other peptide. No peptide catalyzes its OWN formation. Rather, the SET AS A WHOLE has the property that each reaction requiring catalysis IS catalyzed by some other member of the set. In the collectively autocatalytic set, the set as a WHOLE catalyzes its own formation. Calling catalysis a Task, the collectively autocatalytic set achieves TASK CLOSURE.

A collectively autocatalytic set is an example of a Kantian Organized Being. The parts, here the peptides, exist in the universe for and by means of the whole which organizes their catalytic behaviors, while the whole exists in the universe for and by means of the parts. Given such a set, the function of a given peptide is DEFINABLE, its role lies in sustaining the whole, not jiggling water.

In his forthcoming book, “Incomplete Nature”, Terrance Deacon, a professor at U.C. Berkeley, points out that philosopher Jagwon Kim has argued that even such Kantian wholes do not preclude deduction upward from particles to wholes. But, points out Kim, according to Deacon who agrees, that argument rests on classical “materialism” ie the classical physics of point particles and fields. Deacon rightly notes that quantum mechanics, as in Feynman’s sum over all possible pathways the photon might take through the two slits, obviates such a naive materialism. The position and momentum of a particle cannot be jointly measured with precision, quantum mechanics precludes point particles existing prior to measurement, and quantum systems are ineluctably “wholes”. Thus the collectively autocatalytic set is a Kantian “Organized Being” whose ever changing atoms and molecules exist in the universe — when most complex things will never exist — as a whole in its own right, an entity which is sustained existing in the universe by the linked dynamical classical and quantum processes of parts and whole enabling one another. The specific peptides may come and go, yet the Kantian whole remain as a self sustaining, partly quantum, partly classical, perhaps partly Poised Realm, process.

Next, note that a biological reproducing CELL achieves a TASK CLOSURE that involves much more than catalytic tasks, and includes protein trafficking, membrane formation and deformation, work cycles and mitosis.

The wonderfully mysterious issue is this: Given any part or process or set of parts or processes in a cell, say molecules, each part, alone or with others, has an unbounded, unorderable, set of causal and quantum consequences, and, in addition, each consequence or set of consequences has an apparently unbounded and unorderable set of potential uses. Thus, the ordering of water molecules by one protein may form a quantum electron transfer pathway with a nearby protein that happens to order water molecules. Or a protein fragment, by Darwinian preadaptation, may become part of the flagellar motor of a bacterium. In short, for any single or indefinite set of parts and processes, their causal and quantum relations NEED ONLY FIND SOME UNPRESPECIFIED USE alone or together, which augments the capacity of the cell to survive in some selective enviornment. If this occurs, these NOW SPECIFIC BUT UNPRESTATABLE causal consequences, and the new SPECIFIC BUT UNPRESTATABLE functionality, come to exist more or less stably in the universe in an evolving Kantian whole. More, that environment may consist of other cells, as in a mixed microbial community co-evolving with one another often by Darwinian UNPRESTATBLE preadaptations. Further, as posted before on NPR, new unprestatable adjacent possible empty niches WHICH ARE NOT THEMSELVES SELECTED FOR AS NEW NICHES PER SE, come to exist in the universe, and alter the very possibilities that future evolution may or will occupy. Without selection, the biosphere builds some of the very possibilities it becomes. We do not know what those new niches will be.

Critically, there is no way to say ahead of time which of these untold causal and quantum consequences of one or many parts may alone or jointly find some unprestatable use in the evolving cell. All that matters is that SOME KANTIAN ORGANIZED BEING CONTINUES TO EXIST IN THE UNIVERSE, and perhaps is even fitter. More, there is no way to say which new adjacent possible empty niches come to exist, without selection, and modify the future possible evolution of the biosphere.

After the fact we can analyze the new Kantian whole. Before the fact, we can say essentially nothing.

Now Newton taught us how to do science: i establish the laws of motion, eg. his three laws of motion and universal gravitation. ii measure the initial conditions, say the positions and momenta of the billiard balls on the billiard table. iii Establish the boundary conditions, say the boundaries of the billiard table. iv. State his laws in differential equation form. v. Integrate the equations, given initial and boundary conditions, to deduce the now ENTAILED future, (and past) perhaps chaotic, deterministic trajectories of the balls.

We now claim two major points: i. We cannot derive the laws of motion of co-evolving cells, Kantian wholes, making their worlds with one another by means including preadaptations. ii. Even if we could, we do not know the selective conditions which constitute the boundary conditions on the laws of motion which we do not, in any case, have, thus even if we had them, we cannot integrate those laws to obtain the entailed becoming of the co-evolving cells or species in the biosphere.

We make point i, No Laws of Motion. Consider the syllogism: All men are mortals. Socrates is a man. Therefor Socrates is a mortal. Now try: All bibbles are thwap. Gloup is a bibble. Therefore Gloup is a thwap. The first syllogism’s truth rests on our knowing the meaning of the true first and second premises. In the second syllogism, we have no idea if “all bibbles are indeed thwap, nor if “Gloup is in fact a bibble. We do not know if the major and minor premises are true, so do not know if the conclusion follows deductively. If we do not BEFORE HAND know the relevant variables, their causal and quantum consequences that play now functional roles in sustaining the Kantian organized being of the evolving cell or co-evolving cells, then beforehand we have NO WORDS for those functional roles. Hence we neither know the meanings of those words and, it follows, we cannot mathematize beforehand the becoming of the biosphere.

The claim that we cannot mathematize beforehand the becoming of the biosphere without knowing the meanings of concepts beforehand rests on the increasingly accepted view that the foundations of mathematics cannot be merely syntactic manipulations of uninterpreted symbols from axioms of uninterpreted symbols defined as true. Rather, the modern “constructivist” view of mathematics is that founding concepts with semantics are needed. However, the meanings of those concepts must be known beforehand to erect the mathematics. But we do not know the concepts beforehand. In short, we can have NO LAWS OF MOTION for the evolving Kantian wholes literally co-creating the biosphere.

(We note that the syllogism case is slightly misleading for this logic is complete, and even the “bibble” example is formally valid. In the general case, the constructivist view DOES require that the meanings of terms be known before hand to construct the mathematics.)

Point ii. Consider again the evolution by UNPRESTABLE preadaptation of the swim bladder, the sac partly filled with air and water, adjusting neutral buoyancy in the water column of some fish, derived from the lungs of lung fish. Once the swim bladder existed, it thereby CONSITITUTED AN EMPTY ADJACENT POSSIBLE NICHE. A bacterium or worm might evolve to live only in swim bladders. But BEFORE THE UNPRESTATABLE EMERGENCE OF THE SWIM BLADDER, we do not know the new empty adjacent possible niche. But that niche constitutes the very BOUNDARY CONDTIONS on natural selection molding the evolution of the bacterium or worm. If follows that because we DO NOT KNOW THE BOUNDARY CONDITIONS we cannot integrate the laws of motion of the biosphere, which law of motion we do not have anyway. Had we those laws, our task would be like integrating the motions of the billiard balls on a billiard table with unknown and ever changing boundaries. We could not integrate Newton’s laws.

In summary, there ARE NO LAWS THAT ENTAIL THE BECOMING OF THE BIOSPHERE, and a fortiori, the econosphere, or culture or history, or life in general.

We are at a terminus of Reductionism, the belief that there must be a law or set of laws “down there” that entails all that becomes in the universe.

Newton taught us that the universe is a vast mechanism, a view that persists in General Relativity and even quantum mechanics with its peculiar measurement process among known possibilities with known probabilities. All remains entailed from below. Heraclitus taught us 2700 years ago that the universe “bubbles forth”. For the becoming of the biosphere and all of life, we hold that Hericlitus was right. Life bubbles forth.

Note: Earlier hints and discussion of these topics are in S. Kauffman, Investigations, 2000, Oxford University Press, and Reinventing the Sacred, 2008, Basic Books, and F. Bailly and G. Longo, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life, Imperial College Press.

Giuseppe Longo http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo, Stuart Kauffman http://npr.org/blogs/13.7

From: Otto E. Rossler
To: “[email protected]“
Cc: “[email protected]” ; “[email protected]“
Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2011 2:52 PM
Subject: shortest-term survival

Dear Mr. Secretary, dear UN Security Council:

Did you pay attention to this public appeal made to you?

Public Appeal to the Executive President of the Security Council, Dr. Guido Westerwelle

In deep respect,

Sincerely yours,

Otto E. Rossler, Austrian chaos researcher, University of Tubingen, Germany

Why does CERN continue refusing the scientific safety conference demanded by a Cologne court last January? Insiders say it is Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation – a 38 years old hypothesis – was disproved 4 years ago by the gothic-R theorem of general relativity, followed in 2010 by the simpler Telemach theorem of the equivalence principle, and independently by the 2009 paper “Gravitational space dilation” by professor Richard J. Cook of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

CERN’s only defense consists in not quoting those findings known to it since early 2008 and in never updating its already fraudulent safety report of late 2008 – a reproach it accepts ever since.

The UN Security Council has been asked to enforce the logically necessary scientific safety conference before CERN may or may not continue with its according to current knowledge earth-jeopardizing nuclear experiment.

I am waiting for the Security Council’s decision and so does the whole of humankind.

Pascal claimed: When the size of a potential punishment is infinite, any finite advantage gained by taking the risk is stupid.

CERN does not dispute that the so far un-disproved Telemach theorem predicts that its currently running LHC experiment will shrink the planet to 2 cm in perhaps five years’ time with a finite probability (8 percent?).

But CERN refuses since January 27, 2011 the “scientific safety conference” requested by a court to disprove the danger if possible, and continues instead.

Pascal would say that this behavior is incompatible with reason. Is there any citizen on the planet not being an employee of CERN who agrees with the logic of CERN? For example, a member of the UN Security Council?

For J.O.R.

Science requires trust and doggedness, not reproduction. I got introduced to it by Lennartz, Bertalanffy, Weizsäcker, K. Lorenz, Rosen, Winfree, Yamaguti, E. Lorenz, Wheeler, Birman.

1) BIOGENESIS: Life as a self-improving fire (in parallel with Stu Kauffman); as an Erdös growing automaton (in parallel with Joel Cohen); as a Teilhard-Prigogine attractor

2) WELL-STIRREDNESS: Liquid finite automata

3) NP-COMPLETENESS: Traveling-salesman-with-alarm-clocks problem; Gödel as a limit; spatial Darwinism; positional adaptation (unlike metabolic adaptation) is predictable; brain equation

4) HUMANUM: Smile-laughter indistinguishability in a single species; Pongo goneotrophicus; invention of the suspicion of benevolence by the human toddler; epigenetic personogenesis (a function change in the mathematical sense of Bob Rosen); jump to Point Omega; acoustic smile therapy of primary autism; “galactic export” of personhood to other bonding species endowed with mirror competence (including artificial brains)

5) CHAOS: New attractors; chaotic hierarchy; nowhere differentiability on a Cantor set; superfat attractors; transfinite invertibility (Anaxagoras) confirmed; out of gratitude to Anaxagoras, his adopted hometown Lampsacus was later declared “hometown of all persons on the Internet” (1994)

6) PLANCK’S CONSTANT: A first explanation of h offered (based on the Sackur-Tetrode action in conjunction with classical indistinguishability); fever test in the spirit of von Neumann; message sending to another Everett world (with Peter Weibel); cession twin of action

7) EINSTEIN’S CONSTANT: A first explanation of a universally constant c offered (based on Sackur-Tetrode and finite observer diameter); microscopically exact assignment conditions testable

8) NONLOCALITY EXPLAINED: Einstein completion of quantum mechanics made falsifiable; combined ground-satellite Bell experiment to test whether more than one quantum world exists (similarly Feingold, Penrose, Zeilinger)

9) CRYODYNAMICS: Zwicky’s and Chandrasekhar’s “dynamical friction” re-discovered; the new science of cryodynamics as applicable to a gas of mutually attractive Newtonian/Einsteinian particles of different mass classes; sister science to thermodynamics; no Maxwellian velocity distribution; ectropic behavior; Boltzmann’s “hypothesis of molecular chaos” confirmed; connection to Poincaré homoclinicity; new open frontier

(Predicted negative implications: no big bang; no primordial synthesis; no inflation; no accelerated expansion; no dark energy; no distant origin of background radiation in confirmation of Guillaume-Assis; no nonbaryonic dark matter; no multiple universes; no modified gravity

Predicted positive implications: Giacconi’s ultra-distant quasars confirmed; fractal Fournier-Mandelbrot universe; new explanation for Pioneer anomaly; new machines in sight)

10) BLACK HOLES REVISITED: Telemach (T-L-M-Ch) theorem; black holes are non-charged; are eternally unfinished; a Reeb foliation of space-time forms around rotating black hole; in a merger of two [pre-] black holes, the larger one recycles every particle of the smaller one by ejecting it into the outer universe (analog to Ralph Abraham’s blue-sky catastrophe); topology inversion near horizon (Abramovicz) confirmed; quasars acting as charge generators; microscopic mini-quasars existing; exponential quasar growth inside matter; small black holes cannot grow inside superfluid core of neutron star; electrons can no longer be maximally small since they then would be black holes and hence non-charged (first empirical evidence of string theory); LHC danger

APOLOGY: I am not a detached observer. But I hope that the above chronological listing shows that my latest findings are not necessarily less cogent. In particular, point 10 means that the artificial black holes hoped to be produced at CERN are,

i) more likely to form,

ii) undetectable at first,

iii) growing exponentially inside earth,

iv) devoid of astronomical safety assurance.

Therefore, I implore the planet to at long last install the scientific safety conference necessary to deal with the black hole danger incurred by CERN.

I thank Dieter Fröhlich, Bill Seaman, Christophe Letellier and Andreas Scheider. (For J.O.R.)