Deep Thoughts Paul Bird (Last edited 09/04/2002) CONTENTS Here are a few Updates <http://users.whsurf.

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Contents Introduction What Things are Made of Interactions and the Gravity Problem Einstein's Bigger Blunder (still to come) Spectacular Failures and How to Fix Them How I Found it all out Philosophy of the Self Does Fate Exist? Happiness Warp Speed Super Numbers Why Don't Atoms Collapse? Fitting the Pieces Together Black Holes and the Big Bang Them Damned Masses! How I discovered Selfism A Brief History Scientists and Philosophers Self and Society Conclusion Appendices Diagrams Mathematics Glossary Chapter 1 Introduction Hello. My names Paul and I hope you'll join me as I tell you how I discovered the secret to the Universe. Whether you are truly interested in my ideas, whether you already know the secret to the Universe and would like to gloat over where I've got it wrong or whether you are just bored and couldn't care less one way or the other - all are welcome. 'Hang on a moment,' I here someone say, 'why do you want to tell me about it - for I am but a lay person with nowt but a slender grasp on geometry? Surely you would be much better off talking to some seasoned academic from yonder University of Oxbridgeford. For they are wise and great.' But I say to you, no. For an academic no more has the answers to the meaning of the universe than a priest has to the meaning of life. Surely, both have strongly held beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. But trying to convince an academic of a new idea is similar in scale to trying to convert a Catholic priest to Hinduism. 'Surely not,' I here someone remark. 'For an academic believes only what is true.' Nay, but cannot the same be said of a Catholic Priest or a Hindu Swami?

It is customary in anecdotes such as these for you to claim that you were destined to find the secret to the Universe and point at some point in your childhood which proves this point. But this is silly. If I were a fireman I would probably claim it was my destiny ever since age four when I refused to play with matches. Or if I were a deep-sea diver I could claim that this was my destiny because at age 3 I liked taking baths! Particularly as I was under 21 when I had my main inspiration which in America is still considered juvenile I will skip this part. In fact I will skip most parts about my personal life because as a human being, the only sense of self I have is my memories and I'm not prostetutin' them for anyone! Instead I will concentrate on the ideas - you might think of this as a case study into scientific intuition. Before you get any ideas, let me tell you that you will not learn anything remotely useful by reading this book. Knowing the secret to the universe will not get you off work in the morning, it will not make your cornflakes taste any better, it will not make you any more attractive to the opposite sex (as far as I know), and it will not make you rich. On the last point I should add that there is one way to make money out of knowing the secret to the universe and that is to write a book entitled 'How I discovered the Secret to the Universe' but tough luck, mate, because I've already done that! 'OK, so why should I read your book, mister?' Could you not read it for its entertainment value, or for the satisfaction of learning something new, or, you know, just for a laugh? 'Well I suppose....' You might be thinking, quite reasonably, that I could have simply made up the secret to the Universe. But let me assure you that this is not the case. Secondly, I'm most definitely not a lunatic, although your entitled to make up your own mind on this point - after you've finished the book. This is my second attempt at writing a book about the Universe, the first which I started before I even knew the answer (if that's not confidence for you, I don't know what is!) would not have sold well. Given that every inclusion of an equation in a book is estimated to half the sales (or so Mr Stephen Hawking says) then that book would have sold approximately 1 copy, if that. And that would probably have been bought by my mum! This time, I am dispensing with equations and simply using the power of the written word to express my discoveries. I did include one however, seeing that the Theory of Everything essentially is an equation it seemed appropriate to include it. (see Appendix I). It's not really as quotable as 'E equals M C squared.' Its rough translation might be 'A equals trace E to the B minus trace B integrated over four dimensional super-quaternion space.' You're not meant to understand what this means, (if you did there would be no point reading the rest of the book!) Its just something that you could memorise and quote at dinner parties, should you be into that sort of thing. Sorry to be a spoil sport, but the number '42' has very little to do with the Theory of Everything and the Universe in general. The closest number, which is the number of different types of particles in the universe is '39'. (See appendix I). If you like you could count the last 3 twice but why would you want to do that? Are you crazy or something? Other things that have very little to do with the Theory of Everything are the Pyramids of Geezer, Little Green Aliens or Big Foot. So these things will not be mentioned henceforth. One piece of information which you may like to remember when you embark on your own deep thoughts is this: 'Most things are as they appear to be.' No matter how hard you think about something you will pretty much find that 'it is what it is'. No matter what some philosopher says about it. Space is that big empty thing in the night sky, time is the thing our watches measure, life is life, death is death, I am me and you are you. Space is not a rubber sheet, time is not a flowing river, life is not an inner flame, death is not a final journey, I am not the same as you nor you the same as me. So I hope that's cleared that up! You don't have to know any detailed geometry or maths to understand this book. In fact as long as you can add up to four you shouldn't have any major difficulties. A good rule to go by when constructing Theories of Everything is that if you end

up with more than two digits you've probably gone wrong somewhere! Big numbers just aren't important in physics. It doesn't really matter exactly how many miles the Universe is across or exactly how many days it was since the Beginning. All we really need to know is that the universe is very very big and also very very old. The Theory of the Universe can be derived from certain basic principles. The 2 main principles that I wish to impart to you, reader, will be the 'weight principle' and the 'quaternion principle'. Once you understand these basic principles, the rest will follow. The Fundamental Philosophy which we shall also be talking about might also be derived from certain principles. These include the 'Self principle', the 'fate principle' and the 'belief principle'. I shall undoubtedly be talking about other stuff too. You might not agree with all of it but I hope it will at least inspire you in some way in your own deep thoughts. I've tried not to go over too much old ground and if I have I hope I've at least done it in an original way. Sometimes when you're feeling a bit 'intellectual', you want to read something deep and meaningful. Usually you can never find such a book or the books you do find are too dry. This is my view of what a 'deep' book should be about. I hope you enjoy it. . Chapter 2 What things are made of. I'd better start by explaining a bit about the subject in hand. Now I've read most of the popular books about physics on the market and by Zeus they are dull! To save you from this I will be as brief as possible. If you take an apple for instance (it doesn't have to be an apple - an aardvark would do equally well) and chop it in half, and then take one of those halves and chop it in half again, then keep doing this about eighty-five times (more if you have used an aardvark) then you will end up with an atom. All things are made of atoms. But what's an atom made of? All atoms have protons in the centre and electrons round the outside. Protons are made of 3 other things called quarks. Got that? If you haven't you can read it again. I'll wait. But what are electrons and quarks? This is the tricky bit and I don't expect you to believe me when I tell you that they are blurs. That's right, they are little tiny smudges. The electron-smudges smudge around the outside of an atom while the quark-smudges smudge around in the centre. 'Surely not!' I here someone say. 'Aren't they little tiny spheres?' OK, but a sphere is made of something. What's it made of? 'Erm, well not spheres then - tiny points with no size at all?' This is a common misconception. People have had this idea since the Greeks who had thought of atoms by pure imagination and without any of the scientific equipment we have today. But there is a problem with points. If you shine a torch at a wall the light doesn't go straight through the wall and out the other side. This is because the particles of light interact somehow with the atoms in the wall. In fact they interact with the electrons in the atoms. Now if all these particles were huge spheres, then they would have lots of opportunity to bounce off each other. If they were smaller spheres they might miss each other. And if they were points they would have absolutely no chance of hitting each other and the light would go straight through the wall. So it is impossible that electrons can be points. So if electrons are blurs, they have blurred edges, so how do they interact with other blurs? To find out how, it would be useful if we could expand these blurs to a very big size. And that is exactly what people did. Infact it is going on in millions of peoples television sets right now! If an electron blur escapes from an atom, it spreads out in all directions. This is what is referred to as a wave. This spread-out blur behaves very much like a water wave and we know how water waves interact with other water waves - like the ripples in a pond when you throw 2 stones in. These electron waves escape from the atoms at the back of your television set and are projected onto the screen to form an image. Let's recap. Electrons, quarks and other so-called particles are normally very

small blurs or smudges but occasionally, if they escape from atoms they spread out and are what we call waves. The electrons and quarks are what is known as matter matter is what stuff is made of. On the other hand photons (not to be confused with protons) are almost always spread out - in fact it is almost impossible to pin a photon down. Photons are what light, radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays, and lots of other sorts of rays are made from. Light is simply spread out photons. For instance, when light comes out of your light bulb, it spreads out in all directions. 'Ah, but what about laser light? That's not spread out is it?'. Unfortunately sir, it is. Laser light is spread out along the beam. Photons always move at the same speed - the speed of light. But just as water waves have different distances between the waves, so photons pulsate at different rates. For instance light pulsates at a faster rate than radio waves and at a slower rate than X-rays. I hope you're with me so far and that my explanation isn't to vague or should I say blurred? Ha! I jest! I have no idea how easy this is to understand because the way I learned it was first by being told an extremely bad explanation then wrestling with that for a couple of years until finally I realised what was really going on. So if you're still clinging to the idea that all things are made from little shiny spheres - then bad luck I'm afraid because worse is to come! We shall now look at where the light comes from that comes out of a light bulb. Lets assume you know what electricity is made of. I'll just remind those of you have forgotten. Electricity is made of electrons (those little smudges) jumping from one atom to the next all the way around a wire. Because there are so many electrons we can think of this movement as a flow. We won't say why these electrons are moving just yet just that they are. Thus electricity is flowing round this wire perfectly happily until it reaches the really thin bit of curled up wire inside your light bulb. For all these electrons to get through this little bit of wire they must go even quicker than usual. They are moving so fast in fact, that they are in danger of escaping from the wire altogether! The atoms are pulling the electrons down, but in order for the electron to stay within the atoms, they need to slow down. But electrons can't just slow down, the movement that they have has to go somewhere. What happens is that they emit a photon which takes the movement from the electron. If I said that a photon suddenly appears exactly where the electron is and then shoots off - this is hard to believe. But remember everything is far more blurry than this description. What actually happens is that waves of photons gradually start appearing roughly around where the smudged electrons are. This is easier to believe because this is exactly what we think of when we look at a light bulb. Not all things can emit photons - those that do are said to be charged. Electrons are negatively charged, protons are positively charged and quarks are a mixture. Imagine a pair of electrons close together. If one emitted an photon and it was absorbed by the other one, some movement would have been transferred from one to the other. So both electrons would change speed. Certain rules which we shall seek to find later tell us that the electrons will generally move away from each other. As we never see these photons being absorbed and emitted it seems as if there is some mysterious force pushing the electrons apart. Indeed this is was what scientists believed until about fifty years ago. This mysterious force had a name. It was (and still is) called the electric force. Other rules say that two positive charges will generally move away from each other and opposite charges will come towards each other. It is also easy to see that the nearer these things are to each other the more they are affected by this 'force'. Electrons stay in atoms because of this exchange of photons between the electron and the proton. 'And that must be what keeps quarks together in protons, right?' Not, quite. Although quarks are charged particles, it is not the electric force which keeps them together in protons. 'What is it then?' The 'glue' that keeps quarks together in protons is the exchange another variety of blurry, wavy things called gluons. Things that emit gluons are given a colour-name such as red, green or blue. This has nothing to do with the colours that we see in everyday life -

that has to do with the particular wavelength of light - these are just convenient names. I'm sorry if this is confusing the matter but it wasn't me who invented these daft names! Gluons have several extraordinary properties not seen with ordinary photons. If a quark emits a gluon, it changes its colour. So a red-quark might change into a blue quark for instance. Just as photons can transfer the property of movement between electrons, the quarks do this as well as transferring the property of colour. A proton is made up of three quarks of different colours. The proton itself seems to have no colour at all from a distance - just as a Hydrogen atom made of a charged electron and charged proton seems to have no charge from a distance. If we want to imagine the insides of a proton, we would have to think about 3 blurs of different colours merging into each other with a haze of gluons linking them together. Another strange property of gluons, is that gluons can emit and absorb other gluons. In other words gluons can multiply! The effect of this is that the 'force' between quarks seems to get stronger as the quarks are move further apart, whilst quarks close together seem to have no 'force' between them at all. It's almost as if the quarks were stuck together with elastic bands. In other words you can't split a proton like you can split an atom - no matter how hard you stretch it will always snap back into shape. 'Hang on a minute! If I've got this right - you can never see a quark by itself and you never see a gluon outside a proton - so how do we know they exist?' This is a fair comment - but it can't be answered now. All I will say is that we can shoot things into protons, and probe their insides in this way. It's not direct proof but its the best we can do. When talking of animals it is useful to classify them in some way. For instance it would be very tiresome to talk of 'those warm-blooded, furry critters what suckle their young' when we could simply say 'mammals'. Like wise 'those blurry, wavy things that get emitted and absorbed, such as the photons and the gluons' we shall call 'force-particles' and 'those things that are mostly small blurs with properties such as charge and colour such as electrons and quarks' we shall call 'matter-particles'. We make the distinction between points and particles by saying that particles can be blurry and spread out into waves whereas points are points are points. Force-particles are also called spin-1 particles and matter particles are also called spin- particles. Remember this because it is important later on. We'll leave the discussion of what 'spin' actually is until later because it's a complicated concept. So we have more-or-less dealt with atoms. We know what they're made of and we know how they're held together. We've dealt with electricity, in passing, and how light is emitted from light bulbs. While we're on the subject we should deal with several other phenomena. These are classed as optics. Why is light reflected from a mirror? Why does light bend when it enters water or glass? In both cases, when the photons of light hit the surface of the object, they are absorbed by electrons in the atoms of the surface. The electrons gain too much movement and the atom is pulling them back so they emit another photon back out again. If the object is translucent, like water or glass, then the light is simply slowed down by the continual absorption and emission of the photons. The light changes direction or is 'refracted' through the material. The change of direction is due to the wavy nature of the photons and is identical to the way water waves behave when suddenly entering shallow water. If the object is opaque then the light is reflected. Whether the object is translucent or opaque depends on the ordering of the atoms. A crystal, such as diamond, has very ordered atoms. For a disordered substance the photons basically have a harder time finding a path through and most of the light waves cancel out when entering the solid. Next on this whistle-stop tour through four millennia of scientific knowledge we must turn to the 'force' which keeps the moon orbiting the earth and the earth orbiting the sun. As you should have guessed by now, this mysterious 'force' is actually the emission and absorption of force-particles. These force-particles are

naturally called 'gravitons'. (Also called spin 2 particles.) They are emitted and absorbed by all other particles - including themselves. 'This might be a silly question - but might we be able to see these gravitons?' This is not actually a silly question, although it is a difficult one. When we talk of seeing something, we don't claim to see the light, we claim to see the object which the light was emitted from. This is the same with gravitons. We can't talk about seeing gravitons, but we might be able to see new objects using gravitons. Unfortunately, nature didn't equip us with a graviton eye, but it is possible to make a crude graviton detector. Very simply, we put two lumps of heavy metal close together and if a gravity wave passes by, the distance between the two lumps of metal will change very slightly. But when I say slightly, I mean so slight that no-one has been able to say for sure if this has ever happened yet. 'But I was told gravity was due to the curvature in a cosmic rubber sheet. Is that not true?' It is true that this is one very useful way to think of the effects of gravity. Just like we can think of the quarks inside protons as stuck together by tiny rubber bands. It is a useful approximation and it gives many accurate results, but they are only approximations and where we're going we need to be a little more accurate than that. 'Right. This seems to all be in order. So, what seems to be the problem?' I see you're easily pleased. But those of you with more enquiring minds might have noticed that I have not said why all these different particles exist and also very importantly I have not said where they have come from. For instance, have you ever wondered why there's a universe at all; why it is the way it is; why you are you and I am I; why now is now and then was then? Have you ever wondered what time is; why we were born at all and why we die; why everything doesn't just stop? I could go on, but instead I will outline the main problems that confronted me when I was looking for the secret to the Universe and then you shall be in a position to follow me as we find out the answers! Why are there all these different varieties of particles? I have outlined the main particles that we come across in everyday life. The list doesn't stop there, however. There is one more set of force-particles to add to the list. It is a very weak 'force' and is only ever seen in rare radioactive materials. It is called, surprisingly enough, the 'Weak force'. These force-particles are different to all other force-particles in that they are heavy. In other words they travel below the speed of light. When a neutron (or the quark inside the neutron, to be precise) emits a weak particle it changes into a proton. The weak particle then changes into an electron by emitting another matter particle called an antineutrino (not to be confused with a neutron). We haven't mentioned this antineutrino so far because it is one of the most unremarkable of all the particles. It isn't heavy, as far as we know, and it goes straight through most things. It is a very unsociable particle indeed. One of the problems we shall have to solve is: Why are the weak particles the only heavy force-particles. For every matter particle that we have mentioned, the six varieties of quarks, the electron and the neutrino, there are two more identical particles with different weights. For instance the identical particles to the electron are the muon, and tau particles. The reason that these particles are of limited importance in every day life is that they always turn into the lighter particles that we know of by a process of emission. For instance we can only see the muon, usually, when we give the electron so much movement that it can turn into a muon by emission. This only happens in gigantic man-made particle accelerators. On our search for the secret to the Universe this is one of the problems we shall have to solve: Why are there three varieties of every particle. Finally, we have lots of matter-particles and lots of force-particles which are emitted by certain charged particles and then we have the graviton-particle all on it's own. Different to all other particles because it acts on all particles in only one way - it pulls things together. We have to find how this fits in with the scheme of things. In a similar way that Mendelev invented the periodic table of chemical elements which revolutionised chemistry. In the end, we hope to find a

similar structure for the elementary particles of nature. Where did all these particles come from? In the beginning, there was the void. Or so says one theological text. We know from looking through our telescopes on Earth that every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy - all the stuff in the Universe is gradually spreading itself out. From this we can conclude that a long, long time ago, about ten billion years ago (give or take a few billion years), all the stuff in the Universe was very close together indeed. Shortly afterwards everything started spreading out. It is currently believed that this happened at an explosive rate, the so-called Big Bang theory. The name 'Big Bang', which was first used as a derogatory term, implies an explosion of some kind and explosions have centres. But as the Universe doesn't have a centre, this is quite a confusing name. What we would like to find out is what happened before the 'Big Bang' and why was there a 'Big Bang' in the first place. There are several other questions we should like to know the answer to concerning the infinite nature of the Universe. Chapter 3 Interactions and the Gravity Problem When it comes to the crunch, the Theory of Everything simply describes what interacts with what. If you have the complete list of possible interactions, you have the Theory of Everything. Each particle has an interaction 'weight'. This is defined as 2 minus the spin. So for instance, the spin-2 graviton has weight 0 and the spin- electron has weight 1. Now what I found out was that the total weight in an interaction must be a whole number: four or less. 'Oh, you just found that out did you?' To be honest, yes, I just noticed it. Later on I found the reason why this is so, but the truth is that first of all I just noticed it. That's mostly the way with science, you notice things first and try to prove them later. What this boils down to is that there are certain 'allowed' interactions and certain 'forbidden' interactions. For instance the interaction of an electron emitting a photon involves three (yes three) particles. These are the incoming electron, the emitted photon and the outgoing electron. Of course we could say that it was the same electron all the time - but we won't. This interaction has a total weight of 1+1+1=4 so it is allowed. The interaction of an electron emitting another electron (which again involves three particles) is disallowed on two accounts, firstly because the sum of the weights is not a whole number and secondly because the sum is over four. Other results are: We can never have more than two matter- particles, four force-particles or eight gravitinos (spin 1 particles) in an interaction. The interesting part comes with the gravitons. Because they have weight 0, there can be any number of these in an interaction. Fortunately the interactions involving millions of gravitons have a very low chance of occurring otherwise the Universe would simply explode! Actually this is not all there is to it. There are certain other disallowed interactions for instance interactions with more than two photons are not allowed but this is for a totally different and much more complicated reason. Also I have implied that some interactions have weight less than four, this is not strictly true. The missing parts of these interactions are things called 'derivatives' and each has weight 1. (We will discuss what these 'derivatives' actually are later.) For instance in a 3 force-particle interaction we must include one 'derivative' to bring the weight up to four. All graviton interactions must have four 'derrivatives' since gravitons have no weight of their own. So far so good. Using these simple rules we can easily find the rules for the interactions of electrons and photons, for example. Trouble comes when we try to include gravity. What we would have liked is that we would end up with Albert Einstein's celebrated 'General Relativity'. This is the famous theory which predicted black holes and is usually represented by a marble moving on a rubber sheet. Unfortunately (for Einstein fans at least) we get something a little different. Albert did not express his theory in terms of graviton interactions but when you do it turns out that the weights of the interactions add up to 2! Fortunately all is not lost. Our

theory predicts nearly exactly the same results in areas of empty space (such as outside a star or above a planet) as Albert's theory does although it differs for areas inside a star or planet where no-one has been able to test anyway! It must be said that many people have pointed out that Albert's theory is not the only theory to get the required results but at least we can say that we have settled the matter. I have to say that it is quite annoying to get different results then the accepted norm, firstly because it means that a great deal you thought was true turns out to be false and secondly because it means that it's going to be twice as difficult to get anyone to listen to you! But as long as your theory doesn't disagree with experiment your laughing. 'But why must the weight of an interaction add up to four?' This can best be explained by using the concept of 'super-dimensions.' A super-dimension is not something that actually exists but is a useful metaphor for some complicated abstract algebra. Basically each particle in an interaction exists in a number of super-dimensions, this number being equal to 2 minus the spin of that particle. Just as an interaction occurs at a place in four-dimensional space, so it must occur at a place in this four-dimensional super-space. What this boils down to is that the sum of the super-dimensions that the particles exist in must add up to four. Or in other words, the weight of the interaction must be four. The 'Gravity Problem' is solved because a theory with four 'derivatives' works while one with 2 'derivatives' doesn't - simple as that. We had to abandon General Relativity (if only in the case of inside matter) which would be a hugely unpopular step because a lot of books, not realising, not caring or misunderstand that there are other theories of gravity that obey Einstein's principles have popularised Einstein's one result. You have to admit that expressed in terms of 'weights' the possible interactions that can occur seem ridiculously easy to calculate so why is this fact not more well known? One possible answer came when I tried to find the explanation for the 'weight principle.' What I mean by explanation is how do we arrive at the weight principle logically from simple assumptions? The most obvious assumption is that the number of super-dimensions is equal to the number of ordinary dimensions. But a super-dimension is worth an ordinary dimension so when we work everything out we get a theory in which the weights of the interactions must add up to 2. This theory predicts Einstein's theory of gravity plus a few extra gravitino particles but nothing else. No light, no matter, no nothing! This can't be right. We need a way of doubling the number of super-dimensions of the theory while at the same time leaving the number of ordinary dimensions exactly the same. The only way to do this is to replace ordinary dimensions with what are called 'complex' dimensions. (We shall come back to this later on.) You don't need to know what these are at the moment only, as the name suggests, they are more complicated than ordinary dimensions. We end up with more super-dimensions because we have to add those super-dimensions relating to the mirror images of the complex dimensions. Using ordinary dimensions, the mirror images are identical so we only have half the number of super-dimensions. What we now get is a theory in which the weights of the interactions all add up to four as we wanted. As a bonus, because of the additional complexity of the theory we also get force-particles and matter particles thrown in to the bargain! But do we have all the particles that we know of? Unfortunately not, no. 'Surely, there must be a way. Isn't there a way to add more complexity?' You see, you're getting the hang of this now aren't you? That's exactly what we do next. We replace the 'complex' dimensions with even complex-er dimensions. They are called 'quaternion' dimensions because they are four times as complex as ordinary dimensions. "Naturally. So now do we have all the particles?" Lets see, one, two, three ....one-hundred-and-twenty-four, one-hundred-and-twenty-five, yes all there. "Oh good." So there we have it. The complete method for generating particle interactions. It would be nice if there was a simple equation which would express this result in a nice neat fashion like Einstein's E=mc2. (Which translates as: 'Mass is movement.'

and was famously applied to changing the mass of Uranium nuclei into the movement of particles in atomic explosions.) I don't know whether you would call it simple, but we can write an equation expressing the sum of all possible interactions, in all of space and time (see Appendix 3). So if you've ever wondered what the Equation for the Theory of Everything might look like, this is it! I'm sure someone will come up with a 'prettier' version of this equation probably involving new invented symbols. But for now you are invited to memorise this equation so that you are able to produce it on demand at a dinner party should the topic come up. The equation itself is not the Theory of Everything, the methods and formulae needed to make the exact calculations from this equation are equally important but these are reasonably well understood and are implied by writing the equation in this form. Let us return to super-space. What good is it? The point of adding superdimensions is that we can increase the symmetry of the theory. All theories can be tested on two accounts. The first is, 'Are the rules of the theory the same in all directions?' In other words, does the theory have 'rotational symmetry?' The weight of a rotation is 0 which means that we can apply rotations without affecting the spin of the particles. Applying this to light, we get James Maxwell's Theory which incorporates Einstein's 'special relativity'. (These theories have a special kind of four dimensional rotational symmetry.) The second test is, 'Are the rules of the theory the same in all places in space?' Or, does the theory have 'translational symmetry?' The weight of a translation is 1 (the same as a 'derivative') which gives a connection between gravity and spin-1 forces. Einstein's theory of 'General Relativity' satisfies this criteria. With the addition of super-space, we have another symmetry called 'super-symmetry' which has weight . Applying a 'super- translation' on our particles transforms matter into forces and vice versa. The theory must still be valid for this new set of particles, that is, the new set of particles must be from the same set of standard particles as the original set. Given that a matter particle is 'worth' a force particle this seems to suggest that there must be exactly twice as many matter particles as force particles. This is an important result since if this equality is not satisfied for the particles that we know of, it means that there are still some particles that we haven't yet found. By this reasoning we can say beyond doubt that there must be at least 2 particles that we haven't yet discovered, the two spin 1 gravitinos which are the matter particles corresponding to the spin 2 graviton force particle. There may be one way to 'save' Einstein's General Relativity and it goes like this: Take an interaction from General Relativity which sums to 2 and then add a spin-0 particle (which has weight 2) to make the interaction add up to four. Now this spin-0 particle cannot be like any other particle because it cannot move. This is because for a particle to move there must exist an interaction with an incoming particle, an outgoing particle and a number of derivatives, but with a spin 0 particle there is no room for derivatives in the interactions since the weights already add up to 4 = 2+2. At the present time it is unclear whether such a particle could really exist and so 'save' General Relativity. Another option would be if the extra weight in the interaction was given by four gravitino particles (weight ) to make the interaction up to four. All these new interactions will be found in our theory with weight four interactions. In other words we can get General Relativity out of our theory if the effect of the gravitino particles does not have any major affect on the interactions. The only way this could happen was if the gravitino field was constant over all space. What would happen if this was so? Well, for a start it would make it harder for particles to move through space. This property manifests itself as the 'mass' of the particle. Thus a constant gravitino field would give some of our particles masses. This mechanism for giving particles masses was already thought of some years before and was called the Higg's mechanism. It's inspiration came from research into superconductors. The Higg's mechanism originally speculated that the masses arose from interaction of a spin 0 particle. But using the weight principle

we see that the absorption of a spin 0 particle by a matter particle could not occur so it could not give the matter particles mass. In the superconductor model electrons get combined in Cooper-pairs so that they effectively become spin 0 particles. A similar thing might happen to pairs of gravitino particles, the resulting particle being our spin 0 Higgs particle. This Higgs field must be all around us and yet at the same time completely invisible. This just means that it doesn't interact with light. Which is obvious, otherwise light would also have a mass and be able to slow down and stop! It is useful to imagine this Higgs field as a thick syrup in which massive objects move through. Because the Universe is spreading out this 'Higgs-syrup' is thinning and so particles such as the electron are getting lighter and lighter. Of course the Universe spreads out so slowly that we could never measure the difference - not even if we waited a hundred years! In the distant future as particles become lighter, the electrons in the atoms will move further away from the centre and the atoms will essentially become bigger. 'What exactly is a derivative?' This is a good question. Normally when we talk about a derivative we are simply comparing two very close regions of space. For instance the derivative of the height of a hill in the direction of the slope, is the difference in height between two very close parts of the hill. For a steep part of the hill the difference will be bigger than a flattish part of the hill. Thus the derivative tells us the change of something over distance or time. In our Theories, we need derivatives to tell us how the waves change over a small distance and brief period of time. From which we can work out how the waves change over larger distances and times. In many cases the derivative can be treated exactly the same as a particle. If it were a real particle, given that its interaction weight is 1 it must either be a force-particle or made of 2 gravitino particles, in other words a Higgs particle. In that case it may be possible to get rid of the derivatives altogether in which case we would have a 'pre-geometric' theory. We could always insert the derivatives back in if we wished by replacing all the interactions with 2 gravitinos with a derivative. We might now be able to answer a question which has baffled me for quite some time now: 'Why does a wave wiggle?' This might be best answered with an analogy. I've tried not to use analogies or metaphors up till now since I don't particularly like them and they're not particularly reliable - you can prove almost anything, true or not, with a good enough analogy. As Richard Feynman pointed out, in the realm of particle physics analogies are doubly useless. He gave the example of trying to explain magnetic forces in terms of rubber bands and then finding out that rubber bands must be explained in terms of magnetic forces! Our analogy goes like this. A universe without a background Higgs field can be compared with waving a corkscrew about in the air in that it encounters no resistance and nothing much happens. A universe with a Higgs field is like pushing a corkscrew through a cork in which case the corkscrew will rotate. (The Higgs field is, of course, the corkscrew in this analogy,.) So in derivative theories we must simply postulate that waves move as they do, while in the 'pre-geometric' theory without derivatives we can conclude that waves move as they do due to interacting with the background Higgs field. This makes our Theory very simple indeed since it can now be written as the sum of all possible particle interactions without the need for fiddly derivatives! An interaction is possible, in this system, if the weights of the particles in the interaction add up to exactly four. 'Why do some theories "work" while others don't?' One of the reasons is that some interactions are invisible. Just like the 'force' of gravity is essentially invisible because the objects emit and absorb gravitons without us ever seeing one. When calculating the strength of such a force we must consider not only the straightforward one-emission and one- absorption process but an infinite number of processes which involve the gravitons splitting up into any number of particles and then recombining themselves into a graviton again before being absorbed! If a

theory 'works' it means that the more complicated the processes get, the less affect these processes have on the overall force. So when we add up the contributions from all these processes we never get a probability of over 100% or less than 0%. The trouble is that a lot of theories seem to work until you include processes with at least 8 or so interactions which are very complicated indeed. The hope is that by making very very symmetrical theories, a lot of these processes will simply cancel each other out - because they are like mirror images of each other. Adding more symmetries is like adding more mirrors, each mirror giving a different reflection of a process and so giving more ways to cancel things out. So Super-String Theory is thought to 'work' because it has so many symmetries than any known particle theory. Indeed my Quaternion Super-Gravity theory has many more symmetries than any previous particle theory and so I would expect it also to 'work' A question you may have been asking yourself is this: 'How does a blur interact with another blur?' Lets take the case of an electron emitting a photon. An electron-blur can be thought of as an infinite number of points spread out in a distribution to form the blur. In an interaction, each electron-point can emit a photon-point. In normal terms, if particles were just points, this event would have zero chance of happening (points being so small that they would never bump in to each other). But since we have an infinite number of points in a distribution, we don't get this problem. All the photon-points being emitted by the electronblur will also form a distribution and this is the photon-blur. What we have just described is an electron blur emitting a photon blur. The key thing to realise is that interactions involving blurs can be calculated by decomposing them into an infinite number of interacting points. These points don't actually exist as such, they are simply a useful tool in calculations. The diagrams for interacting points are far easier to draw, they are called 'Feynman diagrams' after the famous charismatic American scientist Richard Feynman who invented them. Chapter 4 Spectacular Failures and How to Fix Them. In this chapter we shall look at some other people's so-called Theories of Everything which although exciting, beautiful and downright spectacular - don't actually work. The reason being, if you have read any book whatsoever about modern science you would most likely have come across these 'theories' and were most probably convinced by the arguments (I know I was!) A famous example is the theory by Mr Kaluza and Mr Klein. They were trying to find a way to combine Prof. Einstein's Theory of gravity with Prof. Maxwell's theory of light. They 'discovered' that if you applied the theory of gravity to a Universe with four space dimensions and then 'rolled up' one of the dimensions really tightly then you ended up with a 3 dimensional Universe which had gravity and light. When asked exactly how this extra dimension got to be curled up in the first place, Klein replied 'Er, maybe in some weird quantum fashion?' Which is where the theory breaks down. Quite simply it is ludicrous to talk about 'curled up dimensions'. A dimension is not a solid thing such as a piece of paper which can be rolled into a tube. A dimension is a man-made concept which lets us talk about the position of something in relation to a set of grid-lines. It's hard enough to understand the Universe with a fixed set of grid-lines let alone adding extra ones in multi-dimensions! This is not the only way people have tried to extend General Relativity to include new particles. Another idea was to try to combine the spin 2 gravitons with spin 1 gravitinos. The way to do this was again to start with a theory with more dimensions. This, time however the extra dimensions are called super-dimensions. In a sense these are worth an ordinary dimension. Adding four of these superdimensions onto general relativity gives four dimensional supergravity. This is a great success by normal accounts but we still haven't included normal forces and matter into this scheme. To do this we could start with General Relativity in 11 dimensions, add a dash of supersymmetry to get the gravitinos and apply a libral amount of Kaluza- Klein's method of compactification to get rid of the extra 7

dimensions, while at the same time getting some more forces and matter. Not surprisingly however this somewhat naiive hodgepodge tangle of theories does not produce anything remotely similar to what we see in nature. In fact calculations done using this theory didn't even work! However, for some reason, this did not stop many people including Stephen Hawking as claiming that this was the Theory of Everything and that the lack of agreement with experiments was due to us not probing deep enough into the structure of particles. I'm sure that Mr Hawking nolonger believes this to be the case but it just goes to show how even the most famous scientists can get it wrong some times. Another more modern theory is the Super-String theory. This proposes that all matter is made up of little tiny strings. Force particles (spin 1) correspond to open ended strings while gravitons (spin 2) correspond to closed loops of string. In fact the number of ends the string has is given by twice the 'weight' of the particle. This gets complicated for matter particles (spin ) which must have 3 ends! These strings are supposed to be tight so they don't spread out all over the place. So what holds these strings together? 'Er..' What are they made of? 'Er..' What's more string theories only work in 10 dimensions. There are five string theories in 10 dimensions depending on whether it permits open ended strings and whether the vibrations around the string clockwise are to be treated differently to the vibrations going around the string anticlockwise. These all can be described in terms of a theory in 11 dimensions with 1 dimension curled up in various ways. This new theory called M-Theory is one of the most popular 'Theories of Everything' at the moment even though it has completely the wrong number of dimensions and does not predict a single particle that we observe. The reason it is popular is that at least it might work! Scientists have for so long tried to make their own theories work that once they found a theory that looks as if it might work they don't want to let it go so easily. 'What does the "M" stand for?' The M usually stands for Membrane, or Matrix or Monkey for all that it matters. M-Theory is a theory of membranes. That is, instead of strings, we now say that matter is made of little tiny wibbly sheets. These sheets might be closed into spherical shells or rolled into tubes or simply wibbling about openly - nobody is entirely sure as of yet. At the point where we are starting to talk about tiny wibbly sheets surely any normal person would have stood up and said 'Surely that's crazy talk!' And I'm sure many people have, but still M-Theory remains one of the most popular Theories of Everything to date. Theories of blurry particles seem boring by comparison, they don't stand a chance! M-Theory is spectacular, but it is, by any experimental accounts, a failure. There are simply too many ways you could curl up the extra 7 dimensions to get our four space-time dimensions that the theory has absolutely no predictive power. You could curl them onto spheres or tubes or donuts or beanbags or millions of other multidimensional shapes. It seems such a shame that M-Theory has come so far and yet produced so little. Can it yet be saved? There does seem to be a way. This comes from the observation that a good approximation of M-Theory turns out to be 11 dimensional Supergravity. (Which is not really that surprising when you think about it). It suggests itself to us that we might be able to convert the Triangle of Supergravities to a Triangle of M-Theories. Each new M-Theory approximating to a Theory of SuperGravity. If we generalise M-Theory into complex-space we get a theory in 12 dimensions (or 6 complex dimensions) which we shall call 'F-Theory'. There has long been thought to be an M-type theory in 12 dimensions but no-one has known what it was. What was not thought was that there would be a theory in 16 dimensions (or 4 quaternion dimensions) which we shall call 'Q-Theory'. Intuitively we should expect that this theory should approximate to our Theory of Everything. But how can this be so? The only answer is that 'Q-Theory' is the Theory of Everything, simply written in a different, geometric, form. Just as General Relativity can be viewed as interacting graviton particles or marbles moving around rubber sheets, so our Theory of Everything now has a geometric

interpretation in terms of wibbly 'manifolds'. Why is it that string theories seem to solve so many of the problems that have plagued other theories? My view is that it is because (without realising it) string theories embody the weight principle. Instead of 'weight' we have the number of open ends of a string. The rule that the weights of all interactions must be four or less is a natural consequence of the string principle that the 'topology' of the strings changes at a single point. The four open-string interaction corresponding to the four force-particle interaction is shown in the appendix. For M-Theory the 'weight' might correspond to the number of edges. Thus a graviton could correspond to a closed spherical membrane while a spin-1 force particle might could correspond to a hollow tube-like membrane. Taking a slice out of either of these shapes would get us back to the string picture. The trouble comes because a 'torus' (a hollow ring donut shape) also has no edges nor does any other multi-holed membrane. So we have an infinite number of different membranes that could correspond to our one graviton! Equally we could fix multi-holed membranes to our tube and have an infinite number of membranes corresponding to our spin-1 force particle. As we saw before there wasn't really a satisfactory picture for our matter particles in the string model. For instance what does a string with 3 ends look like? Is the membrane picture any better? Our spin 1 gravitino must correspond to a membrane with 1 edge. A simple circular disc fits this picture. (A Mobius strip - a tube with a half-twist - also fits this picture but this is a complication we shall ignore for now. It basically doubles the number of possible membranes.) In fact the particles in M-Theory should correspond to a sphere (or multi-holed membrane) with a number of circular holes cut out of them. This number being equal to the twice the interaction- weight of that particle. One good thing about this description is that it gives a united description of forces and matter in that the only difference between them in this model is whether the membranes have an odd or even number of holes cut out of them. But at what price? Do we really need membranes just to give a nice geometrical picture of the weight principle? I don't think we do. Although it is a fascinating subject if you're into that kind of thing, in terms of actually calculating anything it is just far too complicated. 'What about higher dimensional membranes?' Well, strings are 1-dimensional, membranes are 2-dimensional objects. Lets skip 3-dimensional objects for a moments and talk about four-dimensions. In four dimensions there is a theory that says it is impossible to classify four-dimensional membranes. In other words, whatever classification scheme you use, there will always be at least 2 objects which you will not be able to determine whether they are the same membrane of a fundamentally different membrane. In 2 dimensions this is simple (for untwisted membranes) you just count the number of holes. Thus a sphere is different from a torus because it has a different number of holes. No matter how you squash a sphere you can never turn it into a torus. In four dimensions however, there are so many ways to squash and twist your membranes that after a few steps they look completely different. In 3 dimensions, nobody yet knows (Jan 2002) whether there is a classification scheme or not. It is an unanswered question. One of the new problems with 3 dimensional membranes is that they can have knotted holes. For ordinary 2D membranes, knots don't cause a problem. If you tie a knot in a torus, it doesn't alter the 'topology'. That is, you can still paint it in exactly the same way. But a knotted hole is fundamentally different in that the topology of the solid surrounding the hole now has an altered topology, and you can't necessarily paint it in the same way. The problem of classifying knots (which at first seems very simple, but try it yourself - it's not), has only very recently been solved. Very simply, it involved drawing knots on various multi-holed membranes. So it seems a stroke of luck to the M-Theorists that the membranes only have 2 dimensions! Even so, I believe it is a waste of time. The only reason, I believe, that M-Theory is at all successful is that it embodies the weight-principle and as I have already shown, we don't need membranes for that! I propose that we can get

exactly the same results as M-Theory by writing it as a theory of interacting particles. I propose that M-Theory can also be described as a theory in 11 dimensions in which all the weights of the interactions add up to 5. To get the Supergravity approximation, we notice that some of the particles in the interactions don't have much effect in normal experiments and so by ignoring certain particles in an interaction, we can reduce the weight of some interactions to 2 and so get an approximation which includes Einstein's General Relativity (which is a weight 2 theory). When you write it all down, the equations for particles and strings turn out to be exactly the same, so String-Theory and M-Theory are not really new theories just different ways of calculating the same things. It just so happens that the descriptions of String Theory and M(embrane)-Theory are more interesting than boring old particles. While we are on the subject of absurd theories, let us examine several more. The first being any theory which says that time-travel is possible. This is obviously just science fiction since otherwise you could go back in time and kill your grandparents before you were born. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see why this would cause serious problems. Any scientist who says 'there is no scientific reason why time travel should be impossible' clearly wouldn't know a scientific reason if it came up to him and bit him on the nose! The argument just given is in the form of a long recognised form of proof. Assume that the statement you want to disprove is true and then show that this leads to absurd consequences. (It's called reductio absurdum in Latin, if you want to know.) We don't always have to add numbers together to prove things. Time-travel is one of those 'scientific' subjects which a scientist talks about if he wants to get into the newspapers. Others include, warp-speed - travelling faster than the speed of light, or anything else off of Star Trek. Wormholes are another one. This one comes from taking the rubber-sheet analogy of General Relativity too far. You can't prove that a wormhole can exist simply by connecting two rubber sheets with a tube. It should be plain by now that wormholes are a fantasy. Firstly because we now can say what is inside a black-hole and it isn't a hyper-dimensional transportation channel to another universe. Secondly using the graviton description of gravity, a wormhole cannot even be imagined, let alone proved. This is another case of misusing analogies and metaphors. These are dangerous creatures and should be used sparingly. As we've dispensed with wormholes we had better also get rid of parallel universes since allegedly the only way to get to a parallel universe is through a wormhole which don't exist. It has often been said that 'something that cannot be observed doesn't exist'. This one of those funny statements that philosophers like to puzzle over. It is similar to 'a blue unicorn doesn't exist'. The trouble philosophers have over this is trying to visualise a blue unicorn with the property of not existing. Imagine a particle that didn't interact with anything. It would be to all intense and purposes invisible. There would be absolutely no point to the existence of such a particle. It would be impossible to say if there existed one at all! On the other hand if we assume that 'everything is interaction' then by definition this particle is nothing. Similarly these parallel universes are nothing, in other words they don't exist. Something else that's semi-mythological is the fabled 'dark matter'. Now good reason to believe in the existence of this dark matter. One reason concerns the fate of the Universe. If the universe had just the matter that we can see through our telescopes then the Universe would continue expanding forever. Whereas if more than 90% of the universe was made of invisible matter, matter that did not interact with light, then the universe would at some time be overcome by the forces of gravity and collapse back together again. In terms of rubber-sheet geometry this universe would be spherical. There is a dividing line where the universe had exactly 90% invisible matter in which case the universe would have just too little matter to re-collapse. In terms of rubber-sheets this universe

would be flat. Now if we are refusing to believe in any of this 'curved-space' nonsense then this seems to be the most likely scenario. Secondly, the stars in our galaxy seem to be held in place by some force, and yet there does not appear to be enough matter in the galaxy to account for the predicted gravitational attraction. The only solution seems to be that the galaxy contains a fair amount of invisible matter which accounts for the extra mass. So what can this dark-matter be? Many scientists have come up with wild and crazy ideas in terms of WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and hot-dark-matter and cold-dark-matter and many other things. But this doesn't actually tell us what this dark matter actually is. Let us look at the list of candidates (see Appendix). We can discount most of them because they interact with light. We can discount all the force particles including the weak force Z0 particle which would instantly decay into lighter particles if it found itself floating about in empty space and the neutral gluons which are thought to be massless. We are left with the 3 generations of neutrinos and the 2 gravitinos. We have already theorised that the gravitino particles have coalesced to form the background Higgs field responsible for mass and possibly momentum. So we are left with the neutrinos (v). So far in experiments no-one has successfully measured the neutrino masses. But if these particles had just a tiny tiny mass, they might just be able to account for the missing mass of the universe. Unlike electrons and anti-electrons (also called positrons), there is no long-range forces between neutrinos so there could have been many neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs created in the Big Bang taking away 90% of the mass of the universe! And since neutrinos barely interact with anything this matter would be completely invisible, the fabled 'dark matter'. I should point out that this is not an original viewpoint, in fact its a very old one, but I can add to it the proof that the only particles which exist are those that we have listed and that if dark-matter exists it must also be made of these particles. Chapter 5 How I found it all out. Are there any psychologists out there? 'Yes sir, I am one such person.' And are you interested at all in the psychology of learning and intuition? 'Why, yes sir, that is my specialist subject.' And so you should be otherwise something must seriously be wrong with my imagination. 'Quite right, sir.' So for you, psychologist, I will tell you a bit about how I learn things. The funny thing is that I find it very hard to be taught anything. The problem with being taught is that you have to remember what you are being taught. Now I don't know about you, but if you are told to concentrate very hard on something and memorise it, I feel as if they are trying to control the way you think. Now if you are stuck in a classroom all day your freedom is somewhat diminished already and your mental freedom is all you have left, so when people are trying to deprive you of that.... Thus revision, studying and memorising are things that I hate the most. But there are a few subjects in which memory is not so much required which relies on intuition they are Art and Mathematics. 'Mathematics? Surely not. Are you not required to memorise times-tables and the like?' Ah, but you see with a subject such as History if you can't remember the name of Henry VIII's third wife there's not a lot you can do about it. But with Mathematics if you do not know what a certain sum is you can always work it out - on your fingers if necessary. An interesting fact is that mathematics used to be considered as a branch of Art. Probably since in both Art and Mathematics you need to know about circles, lines and squares, but also perhaps because they both require (at least in modern times) the act of inspiration. Now in these modern times of ours, a non-artistic person can also do very well in Mathematics as the inspiration has been done and we are left with a lot of facts to learn, and it is now very much more difficult for an person of artistic sensibilities to get into the subject. A person such as Albert Einstein was a artistic character since he used his imagination to create new theories about the universe. His mathematics teachers, on the other hand, thought he was lazy. In

these days the artistic types with there wild, crazy ideas are discouraged from science which has become stagnated with it's dry and methodical bookkeeping. The way I learn things is to invent them myself. I can't take something at face value. If I'm told something, I look at it, have no idea what's going on and put it to one side. Then I think to myself, 'If I were inventing this subject, what would I do?' It then might take me a few days to get something down. I then compare what I have 'discovered' to what I was told in the first place. I can then translate what I have been told into my own language and usually I end up understanding it. Discovering things is quite easy. Discovering useful things is the difficult part. The first part of discovering something is to have a vague idea what you are looking for. The second part involves selecting out the important information from this vague idea. The third part involves trying to think of everything you know that might be related or affected by this new information. The forth part involves trying to find a pattern in the way all these things are altered. The fifth part involves translating this pattern into a set of rules and simplifying the rules as far as possible. The sixth part involves trying to generalise these set of rules. This might then spark of another vague idea. Obviously it is not quite as easy as this and a lot of it is down to practise and 'intuition'. An interesting thought is 'would it have been possible to make a machine that would have come up with the Theory of Everything?' We might look at this further when we talk about Artificial Intelligence. I'm sure I'm not the only one who learns things in this way. It could be that many people learn in this way without even realising it. Or on the other hand I could be interpreting a normal learning experience in a abnormal way. Whatever's the case this is how I think I learn things and perhaps that is as important as anything else. It could be that an important part of having original thoughts is trying to convince yourself that you are not simply being geeky but that you are actually a bold adventurer into the unknown universe! What else could be similar about people who invent new theories (or try to)? One obvious trait could be the desire to show-off. The prime example would be Isaac Newton, apparently one of the most arrogant, show-offs the world has ever seen so I'd probably have got on quite well with him hadn't he been dead for over two hundred years. Another trait could be to make the best out of what has already been achieved and to try to fit it all together. For example the ancient Greek Euclid's famous book 'The Elements' did not necessarily contain many new theorems yet those that it contained were brought together under his new scheme. Isaac famously said that he was 'standing on the shoulders of Giants' although he was being typically modest in this case seeing that most of modern physics is now stacked squarely on his shoulders. A theoretical physicists (or Natural Philosopher) though, has an easy life compared with a real scientist. The physicist never has to get his hands dirty conducting experiments or wading through masses of photographs to find that elusive track of a new particle. He's not the one who's made the discovery that Jupiter has satellites or that the universe is expanding. All he has to do is sit in his study room and say 'Ah yes, I could have told you that,' and get all the credit. The Ancient Greeks believed that experiments were unnecessary and that everything could be reasoned from pure thought. When you look at the beauty and simplicity of the Equation of Everything you almost wonder if they could have been right. But could an Ancient Greek have reasoned the existence of the W-, W+, and Z0 weak-force particles? I think not. No matter what a Natural Philosopher may tell you, without the centuries of experimentation and discovery, he would never have arrived at his theories. Discovering a new formulae or inventing a new theory is both an exhilarating and frustrating experience. Its exhilarating because you have proved to yourself that you were indeed capable of what you have spent ages trying to achieve. It is frustrating too. Firstly because finding something new often includes realising

that things that you had believed for the past few years had been completely wrong. Secondly because you are now the only person who knows these new ideas and you feel a sense of responsibility to tell people about them. Thirdly because you know damn well that no-one is going to believe a word of it! This line of work (if you can call it work) can also be highly embarrassing. This comes about after you have been telling people one thing and then suddenly finding out that it was completely wrong! A good example of this is Andrew Wiles and his solution of Fermat's Last Theorem which was reported in all the papers. A few months later he realised he had made a mistake. You can bet his face was red for a few days! Luckily he managed to not only patch things up but come up with a far more elegant proof. Who knows, perhaps without this embarrassment, he would never have been driven to find this elegant proof. In terms of my own discoveries, I might compare this with my first discovery of the Quaternion Supergravity and its subsequent replacement with the far more elegant Q-Theory. I must admit that if I had discovered this theory after I had written the book I'm sure I would have been as embarrassed as Mr Wiles! I'm not out of the woods yet, though. Should I later stumble across a simple formulae for the masses of every particle in the Universe.... Perhaps, to avoid embarrassment I should stop looking for the 'Answers' - if only it were that simple. (Try telling an artist to stop painting.) The thing about mathematics is that it can be highly addictive. Firstly because you can do it practically anywhere, indeed it is one of the few things you can do when you're alone in your room(!). Secondly, it is amazingly cheap - all you need is a piece of paper and a biro. Thirdly, it can be completely unpredictable, in that the results you come up with can seem completely unrelated to what you started from. It could justifiably be described as exploration for lazy people. And fourthly, just like playing the lottery, there is that one-in-a-million chance that you might suddenly hit upon a theorem which has baffled mathematicians for centuries, and henceforth your name would be made. I've often thought of mathematics, not so much a skill to be proud of, but a sort of mental illness to be got rid of at all costs. Now this might be an extreme and somewhat surprising opinion coming from me. But think about it logically. Most of mathematics is completely useless for ordinary life, and continually thinking about mathematics can impede your daily progress. There seems to me little difference between a mathematician rearranging equations and a mental-case continually arranging objects in sets of three. Indeed the fact that a largerthan-normal proportion of autistic children display an extraordinary gift for mathematics or music (once a branch of mathematics!) would seem to suggest this link. What could drive someone to this ultimate distraction in the search for a mythical formulae for the Theory of Everything? Time for a little history I think. Back in dark ages of the 1980's the first computers were beginning to come out. In our house we had an old ZX81 invented by a Mr Sinclair. Now its all very clever and everything to invent one of the first personal computers but the trouble was it was completely rubbish! The games were loaded on tape cassettes. There was a simple chess game and a Reversi game, I think. It was very very slow, taking almost a second between the time you pressed a key and something appeared on the screen. The next computer we had was a Philips word processor which was much quicker and was programmable in BASIC. It was mostly meant for text and so the graphics weren't up to much. Still, I made some quite reasonable games on it. But apart from that you could also investigate simple mathematical problems. For example, 'Approximately how many prime numbers are there below a certain number?', 'Find a good approximation for 1%2%3%% n.' Questions which might otherwise take months to work out could be solved within a couple of hours. Of course no amount of number-crunching would actually prove these things - but that's another matter. You can also do other things that weren't even thought of until the invention of the computer, like draw Mandelbrott's fractals, or run Conway's 'Life' program.

Unfortunately, even with the most powerful computers of today, these things can take a very long time to run. These are all 'construction' problems in that you have to construct an answer. There is another type of problem which assumes you already have an answer you just don't know why it is the answer. These are 'proof' problems. Now I have come to hate these problems. The worst one I was told was this: 'Take a number, any number. If it is odd, multiply it by three and add one. If it is even divide it by two. Repeat this with the number you now have. Prove that in the end you always end up with the number one.' Now it seems such a simple problem. But try it with the number 7. We get the sequence 7t22t11t34t17t52t26t13t40t20t10t5t16t8t4t2t1 so we finally get to the number 1 but only after sixteen steps! This type of problem is easily programmed onto a computer which can be made to test all numbers one by one. But the computer can never prove that all the numbers will eventually go to one because the computer can never test all the numbers. As far as I know this problem has never been solved (Jan 2002), and if I were you I would stay away from this problem too. Andrew Wiles spent 14 years of his life trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem but was that 14 years well spent? I'll leave that for you to decide. After about a year of on-and-off trying to solve this problem, I reasoned, it is because I don't know enough mathematics. I must be missing something out. So, I thought to myself, lets start at the beginning of mathematics and try to construct it without missing anything out. Now this is a tall order, but being young(er) and confident, I thought I might as well give it a shot. One of the approaches I took was this: I began with points in space as my fundamental principle. I derived some rules for combining these points to get new points - the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square-root rules. I then showed that for the scheme to be consistent, these points must all lie on a plane - the complex numbers. I introduced new points called the Origin and Unity, representing the numbers 0 and 1. From this it was easy to define the numbers: 2 = 1+1, 3 = 1+1+1, 4 = 1+1+1+1, and so on. Negative numbers and fractions easily followed. Surds, those numbers which included square roots, also had a special place in this scheme. I was very exact in this scheme and would talk of 'the point with the label 2' and so forth. We could also talk of labels (for example x) for which it was unknown which point this label belonged to. So when we said 'the label x represents the same point as the label 2' this would mean in normal terms: x = 2. This unknown label is what we normal call a 'variable'. From then I went on to 'discover' geometry, equations, complex numbers, Rieman surfaces, and many more things. Each time trying to fill in the gaps and find which points of mathematics had been overlooked. I found out many things during this time including the solution to the cubic equation (the next step up from the quadratic equation you learn about in school) and the quartic equation. The quintic equation can not be solved (as a Mr Galois pointed out just before being shot dead in a duel at the age of 21) with just the usual square roots, cube roots, fifth roots and so on. It can be solved, however, with the use of 'theta functions'. It is totally irrelevant what these things are but it is interesting to note that generalisations of these functions turn out to be invaluable for making calculations in string theory! A prescription for how to add, multiply and otherwise combine a point with itself or others would be called, as is usual, a 'function'. Applying this prescription again to the resulting point is called finding the 'function of the function'. In my scheme I had different colours for numbers, variables, addition signs, functions and so forth. The next step up would be the prescription of how to add, multiply and otherwise combine a function with itself or others. This would be called an 'operator'. The next step up from that would be a 'super-operator', and then a 'super-duperoperator', and then a 'super-duper-wooper-operator' and so on. (The notation I used is in Appendix 3).

It soon became apparent to me that these operators which I had 'discovered' were exactly the objects that Quantum Mechanics was expressed in. So I set about writing it in my own notation to fit in into the Scheme. I also found examples of 'super-operators' (for instance finding the exponential of an operator is actually a super-operator action). From Quantum mechanics I learned the Dirac's equation of the electron. Later I learned the Maxwell's equations for light and Einstein's equations for gravity. What I had here were 3 approximate theories. The Dirac equation held as long as light and gravity where not affected by the electrons. The Maxwell equation held as long as the electrons and gravity were not affected by light and Einstein's equations held as long as we ignored we ignored the creation of gamma rays or electron-positron pairs in areas of high gravitation such as at the edges of black holes. What I wanted to know was the theory in which light interacted with matter without restriction. This was called Q.E.D (quantum-electrodynamics) and had all those interesting looking Feynman diagrams. I also wanted to know how gravity could be combined with quantum mechanics, something that, at that time, had not even been discovered. And lastly I wanted to know why there was no spin 1 particles and yet there was apparently a spin 0 Higgs particle. I remembered reading somewhere about the Action (the sum of all particle interactions) which I felt would be important. In the library I found books showing the Action for Q.E.D (photons and electrons) and another book showing the Action for gravity. If you set the Q.E.D action in a gravitational field, I presumed, and then added on the Action for gravity would you not get the combined quantum-gravitational theory? Why wouldn't this theory work? Later I was to find out that one reason why this theory wouldn't have worked is because Einstein's theory of gravity has just 2 derivatives which would contradict the 'weight principle'. But at this time it just wasn't making any sense. The theory was fine as far as approximations go, but how can you justify an approximation from a theory which doesn't even work? Apparently the answer had something to do with Superstrings. So I sent off for a book, from Amazon.com called 'Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory' by Michio Kaku. It was from this book that I was eventually to learn the secrets of SuperSymmetry. It was around this time that I discovered a formula for prime numbers. 'What! I thought that was impossible!' Apparently not. I'm sure I'm not the first to discover it, but I can tell you that I was quite pleased with myself at the time. With nothing more complicated than the ordinary operations of algebra addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and the sum and product operators (of which I also found continuous versions of) I found a continuous formula for the nth prime number. The formula itself is not very neat in that there are 6 layers of sums and products, some of which are infinite, but it works and that's what counts. I shouldn't think it is at all useful for anything but the fact that it can be done at all is something that should be more well known I think. The method I used could in fact be generalised to all other kinds of functions. For instance it is not too hard to find a function for the highest-common-factor of 2 numbers. It is even possible to make a function which has the value of 1 if Fermat's Last Theorem is true and 0 otherwise so Fermat's Last Theorem can be restated as 'What is the value of this function?' We now know that this function must be equal to 1. Chapter 6 Philosophy of the Self Selfism is a difficult subject to explain, especially because if one takes the tenants of Selfism seriously, there seems to be little motivation for explaining the ideas to another person. So, perhaps, I should begin be examining my motivation for writing this book. It would be wise of me to say that the reasons are that I respect all the people who may potentially read this book and wish to impart knowledge to them in a purely altruistic manner but, I will be truthful and

admit that the reasons are purely selfish, in that firstly I will enjoy writing this book, and secondly any financial reward, or kudos gained will not be unwelcome. But what is the truth, and what it is wise to say is a tricky matter and I shall come back to in later chapters. Selfism, as its name suggests, is based entirely on the concept of the Self. In other words, it is all about me. But, and this is the important point, I would expect you to apply it to yourself. Everyone has a concept of 'self', everyone has a special word to refer to the person that they are, that is 'I', or 'me'. Yet if someone should proclaim that they are different to everyone else in that they are the only one that they can use the words 'I' and 'me' towards and so must in someway be fundamentally different than everyone else brings cries of 'megalomaniac', 'egotist' and so forth. And yet given the choice of two people being killed, themselves or someone else, it is obvious who they would choose. But whether it is wise to do so or not, I shall proclaim it here: I am the Self. I am the center of my universe. There is no other like me. I am unique. Of course, I would expect you to believe the same. I would respect you, if you told me the same. If you did not believe the same, I would presume that either you had not considered the issue seriously or that you had some sort of inferiority complex. But, as to whether I thought what you said was the truth - of course not! There is only one Self and that is me. At first glance there appears to be a conflict here but this is only superficial. The solution is simple, since to judge the truth of one of these statements, you would have to be a conscious being capable of reason, and in that case you would only accept you own statement. If there is still confusion it is because of the abstract concept of 'consciousness' so we'll examine this next. So what do mean by 'consciousness'? Each of us would not hesitate in proclaiming that 'I am conscious'. It is the fundamental tenant of philosophy: 'I think therefor I am'. But just because someone says they are conscious doesn't mean that they are. For example a tape recorder could say the same thing but we know that a tape recorder is not conscious. Consider for example, that everyone except for you was a very convincing robot, programmed to exactly imitate a human being. It would also say 'I am conscious'. The point here is that we can only talk of consciousness when we talk of ourselves. In fact we could use the phrases 'The conscious being' and 'The Self' interchangeably. There is in fact a theoretical experiment which can be performed on someone other than oneself which shows that if this person is conscious at time A then at time B they must be both conscious and unconscious at the same time, i.e. Both alive and dead. We may come back to this point later. It would appear at this point that we have come to a dead end. What it seems we have done is abandon belief in anything other than the Self. But we have done no such thing. Most importantly we have not abandoned logic. This is all very well, you may think, but there is not much further we can go from 'I think therefore I am'. And until last century you would be correct, but it wasn't until this century that the full power of logic (in particular the logic of relations) was realised. The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell showed that mathematics was simply logic in disguise. Other people have demonstrated that physics is mathematics in disguise. From physics (and hence from pure logic) it is possible to predict the existence of the Universe, the size of a Hydrogen atom, and even the possibility of life itself. So we must frame the thought 'I think..' in the context of the universe as a whole. We might find that 'I think therefor I am an intelligent being inhabiting a body formed from the atoms of long dead stars,' for instance. In the Selfist point of view - should we have wars? The result seems to be a disagreeable 'yes'. The reason being that in war - you cannot predict our own death and this is fundamentally important for any intelligent yet mortal creature. The reason that the creature must be intelligent is that non-intelligent creature could not know that it would one day die. Incidentally, the creature must be mortal (as it turns out by the laws of physics that they must be - even a creature

that could live until all the stars in the universe had burned themselves out, 100 billion years or so, would still one day decease in the coldness of space) since an immortal creature could not afford the risk of accidental death. The questions of time and death are intimately related. In terms of the Self, death is something which has only happened to other people. The reason is the Self can only have memories of other people's deaths, he cannot have a memory of his own death. Death, for the Self, is always a future event, in the same way that his birth is always a past event. He can no more predict his own birth then he could remember his own death. It has often been said by many people that it is not death itself which scares people but the process of dying. It is interesting to note that people who have come close to death report that in fact the experience was quite pleasant, this seems to be because morphine-like substances are released into the brain at this time. I should also think that the because we cannot accurately predict the time of our own deaths that this always gives us hope. Recall the phrase 'I think therefor I am'. Note that this does not necessarily imply that 'I was' or I 'will be'. This seems to imply that only the one instant exists. Perhaps this is true. The problem lies in the fact that it seems to take a finite (as opposed to an infinitesimal) period of time to have a thought like this. Lower level thoughts: emotional, sexual, visual do seem to act at an instant, this being because we can think of them as states of mind. Yet a higher level thought such as 'I exist only in this instant' can't be thought of instantaneously. This may be due to our use of language for thought which is highly linear and our inadequacies of visualisation. Another problem is memories. In any instant we cannot remember everything that has ever happened to us. Memories come and go, usually one at a time. Therefor if we only exist in the instant, and at that time are recalling one particular memory of our past, what of our other memories, in what sense do they exist? It seems that we must look at the psychology of our brains. Obviously to a large extent we believe that our memories and thoughts do make sense. We cannot possibly recall every memory at each instant so how could we know this to be true? The answer is we can't. We must have a kind of blind faith that the chemistry in our brain would alert us to the fact that something is arry. What we are assuming is that there is a state of mind which acts at instants corresponding to 'everything is logically consistent'. This must be true in evolutionary terms otherwise every intelligent being would be overcome by a seething doubt over his own temporal existence and give up the task of propagating the species. We may well exist only in the instant but in that case do past and future have any meaning? There is a sense in which they do. Let us consider the Instant in physical terms. We can ask, in what way are instants at different 'times' related to the Instant - the instant in which the Self exists? In scientific terms, the instants are related by probability. For instance, at a time shortly 'after' the Instant, there are certain possible future instants. Each possible future instant is related to the Instant by a certain probability. It is obvious that the closer we are to the Instant, the more certain we are what the future instants will look like. (Think of this as a string pinned down at one end but where the other end is left to fly about in the wind). Equally with the past except this time there is another factor. If we go far enough back in time, we get to the Beginning of the Universe (or the Big Bang as its often called). Thus with our analogy with the string, it is pinned down at both ends. In other words although it is true to say that closer to the Instant we have a better idea of what the past instants must look like, the past is always restricted to the cases where it must have evolved from the Big Bang. Thus the past is never completely indeterminate. Also, we can be pretty sure that in the instant closest to the Instant, there will be a copy of the Self's physical body. Thus in a sense we can think of the Self's physical body at the Instant to be spread out, or distributed in some way between the instants shortly before and after the Instant. And if the Self's physical body is spread out in such a fashion, might not the Self (or the Consciousness) also be spread out like this? To sum up we might say that indeed the Self exists at the

Instant with certainty, he also exits a little after and a little before the Instant in a lesser form. This is certainly a more appealing way of looking at things than to dismiss the past and future entirely. In what sense does the Self exist in space? As we have seen, the Self must inhabit a physical body to exist. We single out the brain of this creature as the main place where the Self exists. This all seems very intuitive, but notice how different things would be if our brain was, say, in our chest away from all our sensory organs, the eyes, ears, and nose in particular. Would it then be so obvious that our brain housed the seat of consciousness? Incidentally despite all the obvious clues it was once thought that the so-called 'soul' resided in the 5th chamber of the heart - a place, it turned out, doesn't even exist! If the brain is the place where the Self exists, we might think of the body as a tool, for interaction with the world. But then what of tools themselves: scissors, pencils etc.? What distinguishes them from the body? And what of the environment in which the body works, and of other people? Quite clearly, this again is a matter of degree. We might say that the Self resides within the brain, or perhaps a particular area of the brain, and that the Self resides within the body to a lesser extent and in the environment to a lesser extent still. He resides within other people to an extent and to the far reaches of the Universe to a still lesser extent. We might like to say that things further away from the Self are less of the Self than things near to it. But it is also a case of interaction. A moth flying near to the Self's head is obviously less of the Self than the Self's own foot even though the moth is closer to his brain. In what way is the Self related to the Universe as a whole? Firstly we shall show that the Self is always at the centre of the Universe. If the Self looks up at the night sky into space in any direction, the things that are furthest away are also the things furthest back in time. (The light from them takes so long to get to earth). If the Self looks far enough, he will back to the beginning of time. This is the edge of the Universe. (The fact that it is an edge in time and not space makes no difference. There is no point in saying, the stars just look young since the light took so long to get to earth, since nothing can travel faster than light, we may as well say the stars are young.) Since it is the same whichever direction the Self looks in, this amounts to saying the Self is in the centre of a giant sphere whose surface represents the edge of the Universe. Equally every other intelligent creature could use the same argument and propose that he was the centre of the Universe, but as we have seen in the first chapter that is irrelevant. Chapter 7 Does fate exist? As I have said, the Theory of Everything can only answer questions about the future by telling us all the possible scenarios and the proportions of the types of possible scenarios. We talk about a type of scenario being more likely to happen if it is one of the more popular types of scenarios. In other words, before an event we only know that one of these things is going to happen but we have no idea which one it will be. After the event, if it was one of the more popular scenarios that happened we generally exclaim "Yes, well that was to be expected." Whereas if it was one of the unpopular scenarios we exclaim "Would you look at that! I wasn't expecting that at all!" In the end, though, it all depends on how you classify the scenarios. For instance if you threw a pair of dice ten times and got 8, 1, 1, 6, 9, 3, 4, 9, 5, 5 this would generally be classed as a typical nonspectacular throw - unless, of course, this happened to be your telephone number! So maybe it is impossible to say what will happen but could we ask the question why have things happened the way they have? A need for a fate-principle can be expressed as follows: The principles of science can only tell us what things could possibly happen. To tell us what is so special about the choices that did happen we need a principle of philosophy. One answer goes something like this: In order for there to be a Universe, it must

be observed by something. Therefor, the events in the Universe which have brought about intelligent life have been favoured. If we modify this to say that events have happened in order to bring about a physical form for the Self, from which He can observe the Universe we still have some explaining to do. For instance, why does the Self inhabit this particular body. In other words "Why am I me and not somebody else?" The standard answer, that if I was somebody else I could still ask the same question and be none the wiser, is all well and good but doesn't really answer the question. Also, what determines (or has determined) the events that happen during the Self's lifetime? I will give an answer to this, but you might not like it because it involves the concept of 'fate'. The argument goes like this: In order for events in the future to exist they must be observed by the Self in the future. Futures in which there is no Self, for instance those in which the body of the Self has expired don't exist. Therefor, in any event where there is a choice between the Self's body living or dying, the choice of life is always favoured. In other words, the Universe acts in preservation of the Self. "Oh so that explains why I'm not dead." There are some problems with this argument. For instance, is it possible that the Self could end up at a dead-end where all possibilities lead to death - one that could have been avoided by some earlier choice? Is this argument simply an elaboration of the concept "I think - therefor I'm not dead?" It seems that if we don't believe in fate then we must accept that we live in a Universe where something happened rather than something else for no particular reason whatsoever. A random event comes about like this. According to the rules of blurry particles, these particles can spread out as waves and sometimes can appear to be at 2 places at once (see picture in Appendix). Now if part of this wave could enter the Self's eye, the eye would send a blurred signal to the brain and in turn the brain would find itself in a thoroughly blurred state. Obviously, if none of the wave entered the Self's eye, the Self would not have seen this particle. On the other hand, if all of the wave had entered the Self's eye, the Self would certainly have seen this particle. But what happens when only part of the wave enters the Self's eye? According to the laws of science, the Self's brain would become a blurred state a sum of the states of a brain that had seen a particle and a brain that hadn't seen a particle. Now the Self, is a logical being, it is either TRUE that it sees something or it is FALSE. There is no in-between. And so what happens is that it makes a choice. How this choice is made we have yet to discover. For arguments sake lets call it a 'random' choice. The brain becomes un-blurred accepting either the TRUE or FALSE state. In the words of quantum mechanics 'an observation is made.' Here we see that probability and chance are directly related to observations by the Self. Some people have suggested that both the TRUE and the FALSE states of the brain continue to exist in 'parallel Universes'. It can be argued that just as the time 'now' is no more important than any other time, the particular parallel universe that we happen to find ourselves in is no more important than any other parallel universe. But it seems to me that since these other parallel universes no longer interact with our own, can we still talk about them in terms of existing? I'm not convinced on this one. There are several concepts all linked together and questions about one of them suggest questions about the others. They include Time, Probability, Death and Free Will. We have touched on the first three concepts so this should raise some questions about the last. For instance: What is free will? How can free will exist if everything happens without reason? The question that strikes at the heart of the matter is: What is free will for? The answer: nothing. If we know that one choice is better than another by some criterion then we don't need free will since we can mechanically make that choice. If we have no idea then each choice is as good as another so we can make the choice randomly. So the Self does not have free will it simply observes the Universe and things happen either by 'fate' or just because they do.

Let us consider for a moment that the Universe does indeed protect the Self from dying. What does this mean for the future of the Self? Over time the Self's body and mind will naturally decay to some extent so how much of the Self's body and mind could still exist for us to say the Self still exists. For instance, we could take away one of the senses such as sight or smell and we would still say that the Self existed. What if we took away all the senses - all connections to the outside world - would the Self still exist then? What if the brain lost its long term memory or its short term memory, what then? Another interesting thought experiment goes like this: Imagine sawing off the top of your head and then taking a chunk out of your brain with a spoon. Then doing this again and again, how much of your brain could you take away before the lights went out? Apart from the practicalities of operating your arm with half a brain (and severe brain haemorrhaging of course) this is a quite reasonable experiment. Someone with more time on their hands could do the experiment by taking out one neuron at a time. If our argument is to work, the Self must always be able to observe some part of the Universe in some way. Let us for a moment assume that the area of the brain in which the conscious Self resides was somehow found and that this area comprised of a handful of atoms. Now these atoms can only interact according to the rules of physics. A certain set of interactions will correspond to the feeling of consciousness that the Self has. Now let us imagine that we could somehow move these atoms further apart. Due to the continuity of space-time, the same interactions should still be able to occur though in lesser form. Continuing the experiment, we scatter these atoms across the far reaches of the Universe, the set of interactions that correspond to the conscious Self are now a minute fraction of the total possible interactions for these particles. According to normal language, these atoms are far more 'likely' to interact with atoms in their immediate neighbourhood. But according to our principle that the Self must always exist, the highly unlikely interactions that correspond to the Self's consciousness must still occur and the Self is still in a sense interacting with the outside Universe. The mere fact that these atoms were once part of a conscious being seems to determine that they should henceforth always be a part of a conscious entity. It seems that although the body of the Self has in all senses of the world died, the essence (or if you like 'spirit') of the Self will remain, although in a somewhat depleted form. This argument could also be taken to the case of before the Self was born, where we are now following the same atoms before they formed inside the Self's brain to the point where they became the central consciousness of a human being. These atoms would again have been dispersed in space. We could then conclude that the Self always was and will always will be. And but for this brief period in which the Self became the central consciousness of a human being, it was dispersed throughout space. We can also conclude that a life-form such as a human being must exist somewhere in space and time since nothing else is complex enough to 'tangle' those atoms into the conscious Self. The 'fate-principle' can then be expressed like this. The Universe makes certain choices in order to bring about human beings and the physical Self. The Universe then makes choices in order for the essence of that Self to continue to be. Unfortunately, except as an interesting thing to think about, the 'fate-principle' has no practical purpose. We could never use it to predict the future because we could never know why a particular choice was made and whether it was good or bad. Phrases such as 'Ours is not to reason why,' and 'It's all part of His grand scheme,' and 'I'm sure He knows what he's doing,' come to mind. In terms of a 'Selfish Gene' approach to evolution, we might think of this as a 'Selfish Self' theory. In which the Universe conspires to keep the Self going without much regard for the body that the Self inhabits. 'Freewill' is a trick played upon the Self's body when in fact every thought and movement is controlled by the Universe. We talk about the Universe controlling the Self's every move and the Self being inexplicably linked with the Universe and the Universe making choices for the

benefit of the Self. But is this process simply one-way? Could it be that the Self can control aspects of the outside universe. In other words is tele-kinetics (the movement of objects through thought) actually possible? Before you think I've gone quite loopy and that I am about to dive into the realms of the supernatural I will reassure you that I don't believe a word of it. I think that if it truly was possible then someone would have managed it by now and they haven't. It is important that we ask this question though to determine exactly the link between Self and universe. If the Self could be compared with a god then it is a very powerless god. The point to remember is that firstly the Self and the thoughts of the brain are separate. The Self's brain acts just like any other human being's brain and is capable of precisely the same thoughts. Secondly, you cannot use the Self's presence to your own advantage. According to the laws of physics, it is possible, although very unlikely for an object to spontaneously jump off the table. Although we must assume that these unlikely events are of no advantage to the Self. But also according to the laws of physics there is absolutely no connection (that a human brain could control, at least) between a human being's brain and events that happen outside it that are not directly controllable by a human being's body. Although, as chaos theory tells us, an insignificant movement of a butterflies wings in Australia could affect whether or not there was a hurricane in Florida, the human brain or any conceivable machine, just would not be intelligent enough to use this to their advantage. Philosophy is one thing. Happiness is another. Chapter 8 Happiness. As I began to understand the truth about the Universe and its relationship with the Self, I realised that none of this new knowledge was going to make me any happier. Knowing the Theory of Everything didn't mean that I didn't have to go to work in the morning, it didn't mean that all my life's problems would be solved and still meant that I was going to die one day. In fact knowing all this and in particular, believing all this, was potentially very depressing. But before you start getting all depressed, let me reassure you that there is a way to know all this stuff and still be happy. The trick is to separate in your mind what is true from what you believe. 'Hang on a minute,' I hear someone pipe up. 'How can this be? Surely you can only believe in what you know to be true. Is this not the definition of belief?' Beliefs exist to block out difficult questions in our mind so that we can get on with our life. For instance, if you were out in the woods hunting a wild boar and then suddenly stopped and thought to yourself 'Yes but why am I here? What does it all mean?' You might take your mind off the job and promptly get eaten by a passing wolf. Whereas if you are steadfast in the belief that you are here because the great Creator who lives in the Swamp burped up the world one day after a particularly heady meal of Celestial Fireflies. And that your destiny is to kill as many Wild Boar as possible to appease his Holiness's yearning for a decent Rump Stake. Then your mind can be concentrated solely at the job at hand. What's more after a particularly successful days killing you have the excuse to hold a large festival in his Holiness's honour and get totally smashed on Turnip Cider. Happiness, then, is assured. But what can we do if we already know that the world was made X years ago as a collection of dust particles was brought together by gravitational attraction? And that the only purpose our life has is to serve our 'Selfish Genes' (by Richard Dawkins)? The answer is to make something up and believe it anyway! There are various ways of doing this. Some people like to take the beliefs from a ready-made religion. Favourites include Hinduism, a particularly colourful religion with lots of gods to choose from and many lively festivals. If mediation is your thing, Buddhism might be to your liking, although some find it slightly boring and apart from reincarnation, which it inherited from Hinduism, the set of beliefs are rather limited. If you are more classically trained, perhaps the ancient Greek or

Roman religions might appeal to you. Again, a myriad of Gods, Goddesses and deities to choose from although some of the beliefs and practices have been lost through the mists of time. I particularly like the Ancient Nordic religion of the Vikings which is still alive in Iceland. This has a belief in elves and the 'others'- multidimensional creatures who inhabit strangely shaped rocks. Ancient Celtic religions with their Druids and oak worship are largely lost although you can find modern day varieties if you look hard enough. Most festivals, it must be pointed out, usually have no great association to the religious name that they have been given. Christmas has more to do with Santa Claus, Lapland, and Reindeer than St Nicholas, and the birth of baby Jesus. Britons have always had a winter festival long before St Augustus tried to convert us all. So selecting a Pagan religion need not prevent you from celebrating a Spring Festival with chocolate eggs or a Winter Festival with mince-pies. In most countries there is no longer any need for everyone to have the same religion. It is written in law that we all have the freedom to express our own religion although there is still the problem in this country at least, that your religion is only recognised when 1000 people admit to following it. (Hence why Jedi became a recognised religion in 2000 after the National Census). A particularly curious country is China, which is an atheist state. This means that you are not aloud to believe in Gods or elves which doesn't leave you much choice apart from becoming a Buddhist which doesn't require the belief in god or a follower of the Tao religion. Should we teach our children to believe in the gods? One popular answer is that we should not teach our children to believe in anything and then when they are old enough they can choose who or what to believe in. The trouble I have with this is that the age that you are most able to pick up the stories and beliefs of a particular faith are the years of childhood and that if you wait until you are ready to make that choice it is far more difficult to train yourself. A child needs beliefs just as much as an adult does. We all know it is harmless for a child to believe in Father Christmas so it should also be harmless for them to believe in wood nymphs, lepricorns or Thunder Gods. We tell our children stories of the Three Little Pigs, so why not tell them about the adventures of Thor, or Odysseus? Happiness comes from having answers, even if these answers come from irrational beliefs, at least these irrational beliefs might be interesting, colourful and exciting. Why do we fear death? Logically we shouldn't since death is not part of our life (unlike dying but we shall come to that later) so it should not concern us. Of course we are not entirely logical beings and the thoughts of being buried underground, alone in the cold and the dark for eternity, are not entirely appealing to us. Death is often seen as a dark place, since it is the great sleep where we close our eyes forever. Yet, from the stories of people who have gone through near death experiences, we find out that the final states of the dying brain produce the illusion of a light - hence 'entering the light'. More interestingly, people who have drowned and then been resuscitated have claimed that it was quite a pleasant and calming experience. This is thought to be due to endorphins released in the final death-throws of the brain. Thus when we think of death we should keep these ideas in mind. Another way to combat the fear of death is to make plans for what happens to your body. 'But why's that important? You won't care what happens to your body once your dead!' This may seem strange to some people but this is not to help you when you're dead it's to put your mind at rest while you're alive. Personally I would not like to be buried in the cold ground and eaten by worms or burnt in a crematorium - I find these ideas too claustrophobic for me. My personal preferences would be to be thrown into a live volcano or set out to sea in a burning Viking longboat - but that's just me, you may have other preferences. I used to think that the honour of being killed in battle, for instance, was irrelevant because when your dead, your dead and it doesn't matter how you died. But I realise now that although honour as a concept might not exist, it is the

belief in honour which is the important thing. The belief in honour by persons in battle is their way of conquering the fear of death. As Woody Allen once remarked, "I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." This is quite a common idea. The fact that one day you might be told that you have 3 weeks to live. The plan for these people, is usually to invest in a load of Class-A drugs, and for 3 weeks live it up, having a bloody good time, until they're so zonked out that when the time actually came they wouldn't even notice it. I can't see anything particularly wrong with this idea, indeed many places actually offer drugs to their 'departing' residents - although this is still a controversial issue. The only problem with this is that you have to have enough money to keep up your habit unless you suddenly become sober just before you're about to kick the bucket. So it seems the more money you have the earlier you can start with this process. Perhaps this is the unwitting reason that so many millionaire rock-stars begin to dabble this area? Perhaps not. Another common theme when people are told that they have 3 weeks to live is to go and do a bungee jump. I don't know how bungee jumping became the meaning of life, but there you go. So what is 'The Meaning of Life'? As most people have pointed out over the years, this is a very imprecise question. It could be interpreted in many ways. For instance 'Why does life exist?'. This is an easy question and can simply be answered by evolutionary arguments. 'Why do I exist?' We may have answered this question in terms of the Self and the need for the Universe to be observed. The most interesting interpretations of this question can be thought of as 'What should I believe?' And 'What should I do with my life?' Because these are of the most practical importance. I hope I may have answered the first question in some form. The second one is more difficult. The obvious answer is to be nice to people, make friends, have a good time, and make lots of money. These may seem to be irrelevant in the great 'scheme of things' but on the other hand in the great scheme of things you, as the Self, are at the centre. I imagine it as if the Self is in some kind of warm bubble surrounded by other things and far out in the distance in all directions surrounded by another cosmic-shell made of the SuperSubstance. Imagine getting on a train. Looking out of the window you see the view change and the road rush past. Then you get off the train and you are somewhere else. But at each stage of the journey you are still supposedly at the centre of the Universe so what has happened? It is just as if you have been playing a video game. In reality you never actually move anywhere yet your view changes and in the game you're character is somewhere else. The fact is that you can never escape from being at the centre of the Universe. You may appear to move but your co-ordinates are still zero, zero, zero. Another fascinating thought experiment is this. We all know that your mind is in your head right? But would this be so obvious if your eyes and ears were in your feet? Again we could take your brain out of your head and put it in a box, but provided everything was still connected up, you wouldn't notice the difference. Now imagine that your eyes are on stalks and that these stalks are billions of miles long. So long that signals sent from them to your brain would take years to get there. How would this affect things? Another experiment in which your brain was spread out over a volume of billions of miles such that one part of the brain would takes months to pass a signal to another part of the brain. Could such a brain even be conscious? If not then there must be an absolute size restriction on the size of a brain. It would be too large for us to worry about. This thought experiment is important because we have said that the Self is the centre of the universe, but exactly how big can that centre be? It can't be a point since a brain cannot exist at a point. What we are asking is how big is consciousness? Chapter 9 Warp Speed Albert Einstein's first theory of Relativity can be summed up by saying that the

square of your speed through space* plus the square of your 'speed' through time is always equal to the square of the speed of light (c2). In other words a person travelling at a high speed will experience less time (and so age less) than a person standing still. A person travelling exactly at the speed of light would not experience the journey at all and would not age at all. They would essentially be in 'suspended animation'. Of course it is not really possible to travel at that speed which is about a thousand million miles per hour. Even Concorde which has broken the sound barrier travels at only about a thousand miles per hour. Any conceivable substance from which your spaceship could be made would disintegrate long before that speed. It is also said that a person travelling in a spaceship at speeds close to the speed of light will be contracted in the direction he is moving. The strange thing is that the person will not notice this as his eyes will also be contracted in this direction and so things inside his spaceship will look perfectly normal to him. Also, as Roger Penrose pointed out, a person watching him will also not see that he is contracted because of an optical affect due to the fact that he is observing the spaceship with light also. It would actually look like the spaceship was rotated at an angle. So its up for debate whether something that is never able to be seen can actually said to occur. Unlike the contraction of time affect, when the person stops travelling near the speed of light, he will not emerge flatter than when he began. What he would see if he were looking out of the cockpit straight ahead, because of his squashed eyes, would be more of the stars than he usually would and that they'd all be concentrated more at the point to which he was travelling. This can be taken as an indirect proof that this length-contraction has happened. Either that or you'd have to say that the entire universe had changed due to his travelling at high speeds. (Which is in fact impossible to rule out!) Due to the person's squashed eyes and the time moving more slowly inside the spaceship, the rules of physics appear to obey exactly the same rules as for a person standing still. For instance, if the spaceship was travelling at the speed of light, and then fired a missile at the speed of light, at first glance it seems that the missile would be going at + =1 times the speed of light. But isn't this supposed to be impossible? The simple answer is that although the person thinks he has fired a missile at the speed of light, he hasn't really. He has fired a missile at less than the speed of light only it looks to him like its going faster because time is moving more slowly for him! One question that's often puzzled me is, if all speeds are relative in that physics obeys the same principles at all speeds, why is most of the universe at the same speed? That is, why are there not bits of the universe flying about in all directions and at all speeds? Equally, how can any 2 speeds be anywhere near each other. Think of the spaceship again, firing a missile, then this missile firing another missile and so on. This process could carry on forever. The speed of any particular missile is only remotely similar to the missile it was fired from and the missile it fired. The other missiles are virtually at the speed of light compared to it! The simple answer is that there must have been a time when all the speeds of all the particles were fixed together. This time must have been at the very beginning of time at the Big Bang or inside the Super-Substance. So Einstein's first theory of Relativity, even without the inclusion of gravity, must predict a Big-Bang type Universe. Due to the speed of light, when you look further and further through your telescope, you look at a younger and younger Universe. It is mostly said that you are looking back in time, to millions of years ago. Another interpretation of this is that although you are indeed looking at a younger universe, but that it exists at precisely the same time as you or me. At the boundary, the cosmic shell which surrounds the Universe, as it expands, more bits of the Universe are created every day. These two descriptions are merely a matter of taste, they don't alter anything physically. The first puts the Self as furthest most thing in time. The

second puts the Self at the centre of the Universe. Another question is this. Given that all motion is supposed to be relative, why is that the person in the spaceship experiences less time than someone standing still? We may have simplified things too much. So lets go over the space journey again and see what we've missed. The spaceman waves goodbye to his brother and steps into his spaceship. During this period both brothers are experiencing the same amount of time. That is to say they are having the same amount of experiences. The spaceman closes the spaceship doors and puts his seat-belt on. He checks his blind spot, releases the hand-brake and puts his foot on the accelerator. The spaceship takes off, slowly at first and then speeds up. The passage of time for the spaceman, compared to his brother on the ground, is starting to slow down. As the spaceship escapes from the Earths gravitational pull, the spaceman takes his foot off the accelerator and the ship drifts off into space at a constant speed. Compared with his brother, he is now experiencing less time. When he arrives at his destination he puts his foot on the brake and his speed slowly decreases. His rate of time becomes the same as his brothers again. What we should have been able to deduce from this is that by accelerating away from (or towards) an object causes your rate through time to slow down compared with that object. While if you are going at the same speed as that object your rate through time will be the same. Further this means that some time in the past, all things were going in the same direction at the same speed - otherwise bits of the universe would have to have accelerated or decelerated to move into line with the rest of the universe and in that case different parts of the universe would be going through time at different rates. Obviously is not the case, for instance, all similar atoms vibrate at the same rate. So again, this is another reason why a Big-Bang theory of the Universe is necessary. It is often said that Einstein's first theory of relativity does away with a need for a universal space and time. But this is not strictly true. We can define the universal space and time to be the space which is given by the 'fixed' stars and the universal time by the rate at which these 'fixed stars' move through time. These stars are fixed because at one time at the beginning of the universe all matter was moving at the same 'stationary' rate in the Super-Substance before the Big Bang. (We have ignored the complications arising from the fact that stars are grouped in galaxies and galaxies in super-clusters and so on.) So why is it impossible to travel faster than light? We have already seen why this is so. If you are flying about in your spaceship, every time you appear to be doubling your speed, you are in fact only going slightly faster since everything seems faster than it is when your time is moving slower. Another reason concerns Prof. Einstein's equation E=mc2 which says that movement is equivalent to mass. So the faster you go, the more movement (E) you have and so the more heavier (m) your spaceship becomes. The c2 bit is simply a very large constant relating to the speed of light which simply means that you have to have a hell of a lot of movement (i.e. moving close to light-speed) before you notice any increase in mass. But when you are going this fast, this extra mass means that it is extra difficult to increase your speed. Just like a Sumo Wrestler you become increasingly difficult to budge. You would have to have an infinite amount of coal to put into the spaceship's boiler before you got it up to light-speed. In Star-Trek they use Warp-Speed which means that they warp, or contract the space between two places so there is less space to go across and hence they can go across it faster. Is should just like to remind all those Trekkies out there that this is Science Fiction, in other words, it's not actually possible. Space, by definition, is nothingness and you can only warp solid objects like plastic by throwing it on the bonfire. *The square of your speed is equal to the sum of the squares of your speeds in the x, y and z directions. So this equation unites the 3 dimensions of space with the 4th dimension of time. Chapter 10

Super Numbers Warning: If you don't like numbers I wouldn't bother with this chapter if I were you! Normal numbers such as those found on a thermometer are arranged in a line. A line is one-dimensional. The dimension is the up-down dimension, or the left-right dimension depending on which way up your thermometer is. All the numbers found on a thermometer can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided by one another. All this means is that given any pair of numbers we have a rule (for instance the 'addition' rule) which tells us how we can use these numbers to determine a new number. So pick any pair of points on the number-line, select a rule, and this determines a third point on the number-line. But why restrict ourselves to lines? Taking any pair of points on a piece of paper, can we invent rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division which will determine a new point on the piece of paper? Let us draw a line on this paper and say that we want the same rules to work for points on this particular line as they did before. It turns out that we can. We can add the points by combining the directions and distances of the pair of points to find a new point. We can multiply points by combining the angles between the direction of the point from O and the line and multiplying the lengths. Thus by a process of rotations and scalings we can determine simple rules for these 'two-dimensional' numbers. These new numbers are called 'complex' numbers presumably because they are more complicated than normal numbers. The numbers on the line are called 'real' numbers because they can be used to measure 'real' things like temperature, or height above sea level. The distance the complex-number is above the real-line is called the 'imaginary' part of the number. We don't have to stop there. Why not try 'three-dimensional numbers?' using points in a solid object. This is the idea a fellow named Mr Hamilton had a long time ago. He struggled with this problem for many years. He finally realised that 3Dnumbers were impossible* but that there existed such things as 4D-numbers. He called them 'quaternions'. We can't order these 'quaternions' in just 3D space but only in 4D space-time. Time being the 4th dimension here. There is something special about these quaternions that no other numbers not even the 2D complex numbers have. For complex numbers multiplication is similar to rotation. Given two rotations, it doesn't matter which one you perform first. For instance a rotation of a turn clockwise followed by a rotation of of a turn anticlockwise always gives you of a turn clockwise no matter which one you do first. Multiplication with 4D quaternion numbers includes rotations in 3 dimensions. But this is different. A roll forwards followed by a twist left is not the same if you change the order. 'Surely not.' Try it with a die (sing. of dice) if you don't believe me. An aerobatics pilot learns this very quickly otherwise it could get him in serious trouble! What I am trying to say is that with quaternions, it matters which order you multiply them in, because you will get different results. This extra bit of trickiness is one of the reasons that quaternions have largely been ignored in physics. Unfortunately it seems that quaternions are not only useful but are, in fact, necessary. [They aren't so much useful in describing our ordinary four dimensional space-time but are in fact applied to the extra super-dimensions that we need to explain the 'weight principle' and super-symmetry.] (One other property of quaternions which is not at all obvious is that every real whole number can be written as the product of two smaller quaternions made of four whole number parts each. I'm sure this is a very useful result although I'm not sure what for!) Now I shall explain in mathematical terms how the weight principle comes about. You can skip this bit if you don't like maths! To describe a position in a normal four dimensional space we use four ordinary old numbers from a number line (x,y,z,t). This describes where the position is in the left-right, up-down, forward-backwards and past-future directions. The density of a particle distribution at this position is got by taking these numbers and adding, multiplying, subtracting and dividing them in a certain way prescribed by our

Equation. The most important property about these numbers is that we can multiply them in any order. In mathematical terms this means x%y = y%x. Now, we have been talking about Super- Dimensions quite a lot so what exactly are they? Firstly they are nothing at all like ordinary dimensions. Suppose we have four super-dimensions and that a position in this four dimensional super-space is given by (a,b,c,d) then the super-particle density should also be given by adding, multiplying, subtracting and dividing these super-numbers. But because these are 'supernumbers' they have a very super property that is, like the quaternions we met before, we get different results depending on what order we multiply them in. In fact we have precisely a%b = -b%a. This at first seems quite reasonable until we realise that this means that a%a = 0. Now, being super-number, this doesn't mean that a = 0. What this does mean is that you can only multiply four super- numbers together at a time, one from each dimension. For instance we could have a%b%c%d. This is where we make a connection with the 'weight principle'. A super-field is simply a sum of ordinary fields multiplied by certain supernumbers. The part of the super-field relating to the graviton is multiplied by zero super-numbers, the part relating to the gravitino is multiplied by one of the super-numbers, the spin-1 force-particles by two and the matter-particles by three. You may have noticed that these numbers are simply twice the 'weight' of the particles. To find all the interactions we multiply these parts together as many times as we like. Due to the properties of the super-numbers and that if we multiply more than four super-numbers together we get zero, all our terms will have weight 2 or less! We can combine super-dimensions with complex or quaternion principles in which we have to include the mirror images of the super-dimensions to create a weight 4 theory**. There are certain other things we do to get rid of the interactions less than four while at the same leaving the theory free of super-dimensions altogether. But I don't know how to explain them in simple terms. Super-dimensions are not real in the physical sense but are a human invention. Perhaps even more-so than ordinary dimensions. You will never be able to see a super-dimension or more through one. In fact the word 'dimension' is very misleadingly. Super-dimensions don't have any dimension to them! Whilst ordinary dimensions are associated with a geometry, as far as I know, no such geometry can exist for super-dimensions. The only point to them, as far as I can see, is to be able to write the rules of the Universe in very very short Equations. Perhaps they might come into their own if encoded on a computerised algebra program like Mathematica. We shall have to wait and see. Now I will try to explain something which is most probably unexplainable. That is the Superstructure of the Theory of Everything. In mathematics, reasoning, logic and so on, different ideas and statements are related to other ideas and statements. Sometimes, these ideas form long chains. Sometimes they branch out into trees with ever smaller branches. Sometimes within these trees a certain set of ideas forms a complete circle. Sometimes circles of ideas are related to other circles of ideas through chains, trees or other circles. Sometimes these circles link together, like the rings on the Olympic flag or like the hexagons on a football. Within all this mess and mayhem lies the Superstructure. It is the largest, most perfect set of ideas. Containing the ideas such as 'four-dimensional space' and 'quaternions' and 'super-space' and so on and including all information about the Universe. Away from these ideas we see the great mess of other ideas. The search for the Theory of Everything is (whether we know it or not) the search for this Superstructure, and when we find it will have enormous impact on logic, mathematics and philosophy. The existence of this Superstructure is the reason that the Universe exists at all. And finding it might enlighten us into why it exists. This may all seem a bit mystical to you. Indeed physics is a bit mystical. But instead of casting stones to try to predict the future we are rearranging numbers on a piece of paper. It just so happens that the second way seems to work much better than the first. A physicist could be thought of as a modern-day witch

although nowadays they tend not to dance about naked in the moonlight, (as far as I know.) Now here's a tricky question. What is logic and why must it exit at all? Logic is the basis of all mathematics and as the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out mathematics is essentially logic in disguise. Since mathematics is the basis of physics and physics explains the Universe we should really get a grip on what this logic thing is anyway. Logic is based on the idea that a statement is either true or false and that something either exists or it doesn't. We know that the universe behaves in a fundamentally blurry fashion and that the Self is in fact the only embodiment of pure logic. The way we use logic is to rearrange statements on a piece of paper or thoughts in our mind. Defined in this way logic becomes part of the universe. So the universe contains within itself a way in which it can be understood. This may be the key to the question. Since could a universe which was impossible to understand really be said to be observable? And as we have shown, only observable universes can possibly exist. We might conclude that a universe could only exist if it contained within itself some method by which it could be understood, i.e. logic. This is not quite a foolproof argument as it first seems since we have used the concept of existence which is itself a logical concept to prove (using logic) that all possible universes must be based on logic! It's something to think about at any rate. In all of these philosophical arguments we are simply arranging a series of words in sentences. A good philosophical argument is simply a different combination of words than a bad philosophical argument. All I can hope for is that my particular combination of words was more convincing than any other combination of words that you have seen before! We could be very pedantic and analyse the complete structure of language (as has been said is the only task left for philosophers these days) but I am assuming that you, reader, are not a machine and would benefit far more from a literary description. *3D-numbers are impossible because however you rotate an object in 3 dimensions you will always end up with a line of points (the axis of rotation) that haven't changed and this causes serious problems with division. [**The super-quaternion rule is a*%b* = -(b%a)* where * stands for mirror image.] Chapter 11 Why Don't Atoms Collapse? I shall now talk a bit about chemistry - and this is not because I've run out of things to say about physics, but because we have left some important questions about atoms unanswered. One important question is why don't all the electrons in an atom simply fall into the nucleus? The answer involves a very special property of electrons, or indeed any spin particle. In fact it is the very reason why electrons are called spin particles. Beware because it first seems to defy reason. When we think we are seeing two electron blurs, what we are actually seeing is a single blur in eight dimensional space! We only notice four dimensions because half this space (and everything in it) is an identical reflection of the other half. This may seem a bit far fetched but stay with me on this one. Due to being spin particles this reflection is not entirely perfect in that the reflected blur is of opposite phase. The distribution of one electron is given by the position of the blur in terms of the first four dimensions and the distribution of the other electron is given in terms by the position of the blur in terms of the other four dimensions. The important point here is that this is an eight dimensional blur is not a pair of four dimensional blurs. The two electrons can never be in the same place since in this case the blur would be reflected onto itself and due to the fact that the reflection must have opposite phase this is impossible. This is called the Pauli exclusion principle. It is one of the reasons why the electrons in atoms all don't fall into the nucleus. When we think we are seeing three electron blurs, it is really a single blur in 12(=3%4) dimensional space and so on. The number of dimensions of space is in fact equal to four times the number of particles in the universe. The reason why we

only see four is that every four dimensions of space is an exact reflection of every other four dimensions apart from the phase of electron blurs. It seems a bit unnecessary to invent an infinite dimensional space simply to explain why the electrons in atoms don't fall into the lowest levels but I'm afraid its the best explanation anyone's come up with. Sometimes people talk about rotating electrons and that if you rotate an electron round a full turn it becomes out of phase. Well I don't know how these people are rotating these electrons but it would be a pretty amazing thing to see! I expect they mean in some abstract mathematical sense because you can only rotate a solid object. In case you need to know, you can achieve this by pushing on one side while pulling on the other. And since electrons don't have sides as far as I'm aware 'But why do spin particles become out of phase when reflected in this strange space?' This gets right to the heart of the matter. Even Richard Feynamn, the great American scientist, who could answer any question about physics was stumped when asked this question. The answer makes use of super-space. Because spin matter particles and spin 1 particles exists in an odd number of superdimensions, when we change a pair of particles we get an added factor of minus one using the rules of super-space. Electrons can form distributions around atoms in various ways. Because of the wavy nature of the electrons, there must be a whole number of waves going around the atom in some direction. Now this wave goes all around the atom in a kind of fuzzy electron-shell. The first 'shell' involves electrons with just a single wave crest going around the atom. This atom with a single electron and a single proton in the nucleus is called a Hydrogen atom. This shell can also hold another electron which is not identical to the first because it is 'spinning' the other way and so avoids the exclusion principle. This atom is called Helium. The universe is mainly made up of these 2 elements. Roughly Hydrogen and Helium. The distance this fuzzy shell is from the centre of the atom is roughly proportional to the number of wave crests that go round the atom in that shell. The surface area of that shell is roughly equal to the square of this number. So the number of electrons in each shell is given by 2%n2, for the nth shell. So after Hydrogen an Helium there should be 2%4=8 more elements until the second shell is full. This is indeed the case. These atoms form the metals Lithium and Beryllium, the brown powder or yellow crystals of Boron, the graphite or diamond structures of Carbon, the odourless gasses Nitrogen and Oxygen, the pale yellowgreen gas Fluorine and Neon - the gas used in electric signs. After that it gets more complicated since it is sometimes more efficient for an atom not to fill up all the shells. Now I want to tell you about probably the most complicated object in physics. We shall call it the 'Universe Vector'. This object represents the sum of all possible knowledge about the universe at any given time. This vector exists in an infinite number of dimensions and each dimension represents a universe with a different number of particles. The length of this vector in each dimension is determined by the probability that the universe has that amount of particles. The situation is more complicated than that, though, since because each universe has four times as many dimensions as particles, the first component of the 'Universe Vector' forms a three dimensional field, the second forms an eight dimensional field and so on. These fields represent the probabilities that the particles have certain positions. The number of dimensions of the Vector increases quite rapidly. For instance, for the tenth component we are already considering a 40 dimensional space. In other words there's a hell of a lot of dimensions out there! Now imagine trying to make a calculation about some event and for simplicity dividing each dimension into just ten short lengths. Then, just considering three components of the Universe Vector, we would have to consider 1001001001 (one billion one million one thousand and one) different volumes. It is no surprise then that giant supercomputers are often used for this task. What exactly is this 'spin' that we keep talking about? When we used to imagine

electrons as tiny spheres, spin was a well defined concept. It simply meant that the electrons were spinning on their axis like tiny little planets. If we think of the electrons as points, this description fails slightly and when we describe electrons as blurs or waves, this description seems to make no sense at all! So let us start with the simple picture of the spinning spheres and see where we get. The spin of this tiny sphere can be given by a 'spin-direction', this is the direction through the axis of rotation such that if it were pointing straight towards us then the sphere would be spinning clockwise. This means that if the spin-direction was away pointing directly away from us the electron would be spinning anticlockwise. We can justifiably say that this sphere is spinning because points on its surface would have move round the axis of rotation. But when we shrink this sphere to a point the notion of spinning no longer makes any sense. All we have now is a spin-direction associated with a point particle. It is no longer necessary to think of spinning particles. Because a blur can be made of an infinite distribution of points and each point is associated with a spindirection, we now have a distribution of spin-directions (or arrows) which make up a spin-field. (see Appendix). For a spin-1 particle we can define two spin directions, spin-1 gravitinos have three spin-directions and spin-2 gravitons have four. Given that a spin-direction can be given by two components, latitude and longitude, a pair of spin-directions is given by four components and so can also be represented as a four dimensional 'vector'. Vectors can be thought of as arrows which have direction and length. Since vectors were discovered long before spin- directions, all the old Theories of light and gravity are written in terms of them. But, as Roger Penrose discovered, they can also be written in terms of spin-directions. It was not until Dirac discovered the equation of the electron that spin-directions were discovered. This spin-field gives rise to something quite common and that is magnetism in things like the rock magnetite. Usually, because atoms point in all directions in a solid, most solids aren't magnetic but in some the atoms can all point in the same direction. Given any spin-direction, all other spin-directions can be made from a blurry combination of that spin-direction and its opposite spin-direction. We use complex-numbers to combine these two directions which gives all the various directions. To measure a spin-direction, the only experiments we can do are those which pick a direction and then ask 'Is the electron spinning in this direction?' The chance that this answer is YES depends on the proportions of this direction and its opposite direction which make up the actual spin-direction of the electron. A YES answer will make the electron spin in that direction and a NO answer will make the electron spin in the other direction. A massless particle or a particle travelling close to the speed of light has a well defined spin-direction which is in the direction of motion or completely opposite to the direction of motion. Because of this it is sometimes more appropriate to talk of there being 2 different types of electron left-spinning and right-spinning electrons. This is especially useful when talking about the Weak force, since the W+, W- and Z0 weak-force particles only interact with rightspinning electrons. In other words the rules of physics would not be the same for a mirror image universe. Another interesting phenomenon is that because neutrinos particles, which are thought to be massless, are only ever created in interactions with Weak force particles, there may be no such thing as a left-spinning neutrino! Photon spin is more often called polarisation. Lets assume that the photon is travelling in the z direction. Then, like the electron, any photon can be made up of the blurry combination of photons polarised in the x and y directions. A force particle which has mass can also be polarised in the z direction. A photon's vector field is not really drawable because it involves four dimensional vectors. Given a polaroid filter which lets photons polarised in the x direction through and not those polarised in the y direction, what will happen to photons polarised

at an angle? Well, since these can be thought of as a blurry combination of photons polarised in the x and y directions, the chance that you will detect a photon on the other side will be given by the proportion of that blurry combination that was made from photons polarised in the x direction. Chapter 12 Fitting the Pieces Together It may be ironic that it was during the time I was re-sitting my University exams (which I had failed miserably due in some cases to not turning up to them) that I came upon the Theory of Everything. Not being able to fully concentrate on my revision as usual, I began doodling on a napkin - as you do. After filling every available space of the napkins available I hit upon something which I considered an important result. I had to put my excitement aside for the moment though because I had an exam to attend to. After it finished I rushed to the Post Office and bought a notepad and immediately set to work. A little later I found that my initial revelation did not really amount to much. A little downhearted but still determined I went back to a previous idea I had. This idea, probably inspired by Super-String theory, was that the Universe could be represented as a surface with a sort of Swiss-cheese-like structure and that the particles were simply vibrations around closed loops of this surface. Now if this was the case, like superstrings, this theory should approximate to a SuperGravity theory. The important idea came when I realised that for an even number of dimensions, this surface could be built out of complex-surfaces, that is surfaces on which every point is associated with a complex-number. At first when I had this idea it didn't seem that important but now, in this room, I realised that this would radically alter the number of dimensions that these theories could exist in. Ordinary 'real' Supergravity theories could exist in four, eight or eleven dimensions. I struggled till late to find out how many dimensions these complex- Supergravities could exist in and after many attempts I gave up and went to bed. I'd had enough of mathematics for one night but the ideas kept whirring about in my head until the answer just popped into my brain and I knew I must be right. I jumped out of bed and wrote down the answer. Complex supergravities exist in four or six 'complex' dimensions. (A complex dimension is worth 2 ordinary dimensions.) What I had now was three 'real' supergravities and two 'complex' supergravities. It now seemed enticing that there must exist a single 'quaternion' supergravity to complete this triangle. The problem was that I kept getting the answer that this must exist in four 'quaternion' dimensions. 'This can't be right', I thought. This meant, since a quaternion dimension is worth four ordinary dimensions, that in a sense this theory existed in sixteen dimensions. Yet every book I had read on the subject until this time had said that eleven was the maximum allowed, twelve was stretching things but sixteen - that was impossible. I wanted the answer to be twelve because that was safe. But try as I might I couldn't find anything wrong with my reasoning and finally had to admit that I had found out something new: Sixteen dimensions were possible if you used quaternions. The problem with the eleven dimensional theory was that it was too small to predict all known particles - so would mine with sixteen dimensions fair any better? In fact, yes. Using quaternions with their 3 complex and 1 real component meant that the theory predicts 3 generations of matter-particles - a good start. What's more, because of the connection between matter and forces, it also predicted 3%4=12 force-particles. This all seems quite reasonable now but at the time I made a bit of a mistake and forgot to divide by four thereby predicting an extra 80 or so particles which had never been seen before which was a bit of a disaster! It also predicted exactly the right interactions which should occur although this is far more difficult to explain in words at this time. So finally I had my 'Periodic Table of Elementary Particles' (see fig.3 at the back). This represented the entire list of possible particles. If a particle wasn't on this list it didn't exist. Chuffed with this breakthrough, I promptly had the design printed on a T-Shirt, in glorious Technicolor, which I'm still too embarrassed to wear in public! In parallel with Mendelev's theory of the elements,

it showed which elements existed but lacked a sophisticated theory of chemical interactions. As with mine it showed, definitively, which particles existed but the theory was messy and lacked the elegance that a Theory of Everything must surely have. I then faced the following problem: You have discovered the Theory of Everything (or at least a very substantial part) what do you do next? The obvious answer was to write in to a scientific journal. Before we continue I'd better explain a bit about scientific journals to you. Scientific journals in their modern form have been around for about eighty years. This was the time that Albert Einstein came up with his theories of Special and General Relativity and some other clever people discovered that the atom actually did exist. Before this time most of physics could be calculated with Isaac Newton's laws of motion and the idea of continuous matter - matter that could be chopped in half as many times as you like without ever hitting upon an atom. After Albert, who said that essentially all of physics is wrong and here's how to put it right, the floodgates were opened and everyone from physics teachers to Master Bun the Bakers son were coming up with new theories of the Universe. Some even cleverer fellows thought to themselves, 'Ere, I reckons we could make a few shillings out of this 'ere fad' and the modern journals of theoretical physics were born. 'Fine so these journals must have been a great help to the advancements of physics right?' I'm not commenting on this only to say that the quantum theory of interactions and the theory of gravity were both invented before the 1950s and that in my opinion there have been no other 'great' advancements in physics since. The texts that have advanced physics have all been written in books. Think of, Mr Euclid's 'The Elements', Isaac Newton's 'Principia Mathematica', Plato's 'Democracy'. It is also a fact that Einstein's General Relativity was barely known about outside of Germany until [Sir Arthur Edington?] wrote his famous book about it. (He's the fellow who when told, " I 'ere theres only 3 people what understand General Relativity" after a long pause replied, "I'm trying to think of the third." Surface it to say that I didn't get very far with these journals. I would write out my ideas and send them off to one of these journals and many months later I would receive an often quite rude reply from some 'scientific referee' who had completely missed the whole point of what I was saying. On my last effort my papers were passed through 3 people each of which obviously hadn't a clue what I was talking about until finally I received a reply stating that what I was doing 'just isn't physics!' And that it was 'extraordinary' to 'abandon real space' to find an equation which includes all the particles of the Universe. I mean, if I were inventing a character who was stuck in the past and afraid of new ideas, I don't think I could have written it any better! These were dark times of false hopes and crushed dreams. I don't want you to get the picture that I was sitting in a darkened room waiting for the day to come when I'd have my theories published - far from it. Now perhaps I should have given up then and there. You can lead a physicist to new ideas but you can't make him drink them and all that. But then I'm a very stubborn person. If these journals were not going to publish my material then I would do it myself. I would spread my ideas to the masses in my own personal Scientific Journal. So under the assumed name of 'Andrew Hartley' I set to work writing the first edition of 'Supergravity and the Standard Model' and with a name like that it was sure to be a raging success! Of course, it wasn't. After I had sent a copy to all 50 'old' universities I haven't heard a word since. But I at least had the hope that someone somewhere might have read it and been inspired. It was a year after my first discovery and I was still playing about with the Theory trying to find out what it might say about Quantum Gravity. The 2 discoveries I made were firstly, that a quantum theory of gravity should have interactions with up to an infinite number of gravitons. This is one of those annoying discoveries because at first you think that you must be wrong. Nowhere

had I ever read that interactions with more than four particles were possible, let alone an infinite number of particles! But, it seems, if the theory of quantum gravity were to approximate to General Relativity, there must be interactions with many graviton particles. I put this aside and thought to myself, 'What we have here is simply a sum of all possible interactions. Why these interactions and not others?' I then remembered something vaguely about weights and started to apply this. Ignoring gravitons for the moment, and taking the four force-particle interaction. Giving the force-particles weight 1 meant that the interactions must add up to four. The derivative must also have weight 1 since we have the 3-force and 1 derivative interaction. The matter particles must have weight 1 which I thought was odd since they have spin . Now if the gravitons were to be included they must have weight 0. This explained why there could be an infinite number of them in any interaction, because you can add 0 to a number as many times as you like and not change it. From there it was an easy step to see that the weight was 2 minus the spin of the particle in question. This all seems ridiculously easy, like one of those modern art pictures of a big red square. You think to yourself 'I could have done that.' And of course you probably could have done but, the simple fact remains, you didn't! Any good theory should make predictions and this simple theory predicted that if a particle with spin 1 existed, it would have weight and so could occur in an 8 particle interaction. This couldn't really said to be a nice result since it means that calculations using this particle might prove to be terribly complicated. But its one of those quotable scientific facts that all good physicists should know. The next day (or was it the day after?) I was thinking about why the interactions should add up to four and related it to a similar fact from Super-Symmetry theories that you must have exactly four super-dimensions occurring in an interaction. I still didn't have the Equation of Everything yet although I had a rough idea what it might look like. As the 'exponential' (ex) of a Super-Graviton field. The exponential is simply a quick way of writing down the sum of interactions with 1 particle (x), 2 particles (x2/2!), 3 particles (x3/3!) and so on. A few days later I realised that I had only to write the graviton theory in terms of exponentials and then add super-space dimensions to get the theory in terms of a Super-Graviton field. This is the equation in the Appendix. What I actually had was a 'complex' theory although I thought it was a 'real' theory. Previously I had shown that the theory must be quaternion in order to include all known particles and I was struggling to combine the 2 theories. Finally it gradually became clear that what I had was a complex theory and that the quaternion theory could be written exactly the same way except to state that we were now using quaternion valued fields. So this was it. I had found the exact equation for Quaternion Supergravity starting from a completely different angle. Or had I? Supergravity theories are extensions of Einstein's General Relativity with supersymmetry added. They did not obey the weight principle in more than four dimensions and so did not work. What I had included a theory of gravity with four derivatives. It could not be called a SuperGravity theory as such. Then I remembered that String-Theories, and Membrane theories could be approximated to Super-Gravity theories. So what I had actually found was the richer theory which was equivalent to a theory of membranes! Quite by accident I had found the equations for all possible theories of strings and membranes, which I had previously dismissed as unimportant. Further it meant that all these theories of strings and membranes could be written as theories of interacting particles obeying the weight principle. Michio Kaku, according to his book, 'An introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory' found the full string-equation with an infinite number of interactions. I'd just like to say that Michio's book was very helpful in my research, although only a few years old, its now completely out of date! Michio is one of those people that the writers of Star-Trek ask when they want some kind of technical language that will convince people that it is actually possible to travel at warp speed and jump through wormholes. By the way, what on earth does 'remodulate' mean?

How do I know that this is the Theory of Everything? Firstly from a purely aesthetic point of view it is a beautiful equation. In its simplicity and elegance. The interrelations and counterpoints between the juxtapositions It could almost be a work of abstract art. It is totally symmetrical in that there is no known symmetries that it does not already posses. It is in four dimensions, which is always useful for describing a four dimensional universe. It predicts every particle that we know of. It has no redundancies and no variables which need to be found from experiments. It is the perfect equation. It is short - and this is important because it means that it is self-contained. I would not believe a long equation. A long equation contains too much that might be changed. I have to admit, however, that I am slightly disappointed with the final equation. It just seems to lack that certain sparkle that an Equation of the Universe cries out for. Perhaps it's just the way I've written it. So anyway, I discovered the Theory of Everything, wrote this book and that about brings us up to date. What happened next? That's for the Universe to know and me to find out! Chapter 13 Black Holes and the Big Bang As we all know, when you drive your spaceship into a black-hole you end up in a parallel Universe inhabited by multidimensional aliens..... Or so Stephen Hawking would have us believe, but then he does have a very vivid imagination. Lets be fair, despite some of his more eccentric ideas, Stephen Hawking has done some of the most important research into the black holes and quantum gravity to date. But does he know what's inside a black hole? Do you? 'No sir, I can't rightly say.' Well lets investigate the matter. A black hole, in case you didn't already know, is not black and not a hole. 'A good name then?' Probably not, but lets continue. If a star is very heavy the light that it emits is slowed down by the 'force' of gravity of the heavy star. The smaller and heavier the star, the force of gravity will be stronger near the surface. So if a star is somehow compressed beyond a certain limit then, we would expect, that the force of gravity will be so strong that light cannot escape from its surface. 'Ah, so it will become completely invisible!' Well, no, not quite. For a start, black holes will usually by spinning on their axis and ejecting jets of ionised particles from its poles. Plus, if they are orbiting a nearby star, they could be drawing fiercely luminous stellar gas around it and absorbing some in bursts of gamma rays while throwing the rest of into space - but apart from that, yes, black holes are completely invisible. To find out what is inside a black hole let us first examine what a star is made of. First of all a star is not made of atoms, it is made of 'plasma'. This means that the electrons are free to move around the star independently of the protons and neutrons. We can think of plasma as a fourth form of matter, the others being solid, liquid and gas. Lets imagine that the star is dying, its fuel is spent and it is no longer able to support its own weight. It starts to collapse inwards. The electrons are forced to interact with the protons to produce neutrons and massless neutrinos which shoot off into space. These bursts of neutrinos may be enough to push off the outer layer of the star but what we are left with is an extremely small and heavy object called a 'neutron star'. This might be compared with a huge neutral nucleus of an atom although the comparison is not entirely accurate since gravity has no real effect within atoms and there are no protons in a neutron star. We could identify this star with a fifth form of matter we shall call simply neutron-matter. Now imagine that the star was bigger and heavier to start with, the collapse might not stop at the neutron star stage, the quarks and gluons that make up the neutrons might become separated. The star would be made of an even denser substance which is called the quark-gluon-plasma. The particles in this star are getting pretty cramped so far so lets see what happens if the collapse continues. Obviously what happens during the collapse is that at different stages, different forms of matter are produced but is there a final state of matter? The answer is probably yes, but what is it. Is it perhaps a gravitino-plasma? Whatever it is, being the final state of matter means that the substance is now perfectly

ordered and that there is no room now for more collapse. This substance is so dense that according to some theories light cannot escape from its surface - in other words it is the centre of a black hole. To get an idea why order is important we must remember that random movements produce disorder. For instance, if we start with a group of particles arranged in an orderly fashion and then allow them to move about, over time they will disperse and become unordered. We can say that the disorder in the Universe always increases over time. 'Hang on a minute. I could easily arrange these oranges here in a ordered way. There, I have increased the order of the Universe!' This is not strictly true my friend, since for you to move your arms to arrange those oranges, you had to first digest food such as a beefburger made from a highly ordered cow, which involves breaking down and disordering the said beefburger. It turns out that the amount of disorder you create digesting your food is always more than any order you can create under your own will. More significantly all the order created on earth can easily be accounted for by the vast amount of disorder created by the sun as it boils away in space. Once the sun can no-longer produce enough disorder, such as when it cools and dies, the order on the earth will cease to be created and life will die. You may have noticed a connection between the creation of disorder and heat. 'I did actually.' Back to the 'black' 'hole'. We have said that the centre of the black hole is completely ordered but we have also said that disorder always increases so where did all that disorder go to? Stephen Hawking gave an answer to this question and it made him quite famous (although writing that book probably had a minor part to play). The answer, he claimed, lay in small region of space, a certain height above the centre of the black hole. This region is special because just above it light can escape from the black hole and just below it light can't escape from the black hole. Inside this thin layer, according to how many gravitons are around at the time some light escapes while some light is dragged back into the black hole. If in this region a graviton 'decays' into an electron and a positron (this is an allowed interaction because it has weight 3) then the electron might escape into space and the positron might be dragged down into the black hole. The resulting disorder in this thin region surrounding the black hole completely accounts for the disorder that we'd thought we'd lost from the original star. 'Is there somewhere else that this super-subtance in the centre of black holes might be found?' Why yes, there is, as it happens. Remembering that this supersubstance is the most highly ordered material in the Universe and that disorder always increases with time we might like to look back in time, back to the beginning of the Universe in fact. Because light travels at a constant speed, the light from distant objects such as stars and galaxies takes so long to reach us that when the light actually enters our eyes we are seeing them as they were hundreds, thousands or even millions of years ago. Using a very powerful telescope, even more powerful than the Hubble spacetelescope, which we sent out into space far beyond the solar system to get a good view, what would it see if it looked further and further into space? The further it looked, the smaller the portion of sky that it zoomed in on, the more galaxies it would see as the galaxies were closer together in the past. Zooming in still further, we would see a distant past where all the matter in the Universe was crammed in very close together. It would be increasingly difficult to find areas of space to zoom in on because the sky would become filled with matter. Beyond a certain limit when we came to a point where the entire region was filled with plasma, light would be no good because plasma scatters light so we couldn't see what was behind it. But assuming that we had some way to detect what was behind this plasma screen, what would we see then? Well, as before in the case of the collapsing star, we would go through several stages of matter, neutron-matter, quark-gluon-plasma and then we would get to the final stage, the super-substance that we were looking for. 'And beyond that?' It's irrelevant. This final stage of matter is so compact and ordered it is like a cosmic-barrier that nothing, not even information itself, could cross. Since this shell of matter is the farthest

thing out in space in all directions, it is also the thing furthest back in time. It is what the Universe was mad of in the 'beginning'. An infinite super-substance filling all of infinite space. It is easy to see using this description that no particular place in space at the beginning of the Universe is any more special than any other place. Anywhere looks just the same as anywhere else. There was never any centre of the Universe from which it expanded from. The whole Universe simply dispersed - each part moving away from every other part. So to call the start of the Universe the 'Big Bang' is very misleading since in everyday terminology bangs have centres. The 'Great Dispersion' might have been a better name though admittedly not as catchy. The exact form of this super-substance was once referred to as the 'Initial conditions' of the Universe. It is an extremely difficult task to find these initial conditions. It was so difficult in fact that scientists tried to get rid of the need for initial conditions. One idea, which I'm sure seemed very clever at the time, was to suggest that the entire Universe simply popped into existence from nothing. This very conveniently bypassed the need for initial conditions but then had the following problem: To get from nothing to something, you essentially have to enlarge this 'nothingness' to infinite size. 'What?!' Exactly. This doesn't even make sense. It was simply a load of deep sounding words strung together in a plausible yet ultimately ridiculous way. When you get this problem with infinities it means you have hit upon a singularity - a place where the laws of physics just don't make sense. It was thought there was a singularity at the beginning of time and a singularity in the central point of a black hole. The argument raged as to whether singularities had a physical existence or whether it simply meant we that they had drawn too many conclusions from partial theories. It turns out that the latter is true. The way to make this clearer is this. At every moment in time the Universe is composed of a large number of particles in a large number of places. The entire information about a moment in time can be determined from the distribution of these particles. We might think of the entire history of the Universe consisting simply of different arrangements of particles. Thus when we talk of Black Holes we must be talking about a particular arrangement of particles and when we talk of the moment before the Big Bang we are simply talking about another arrangement of particles. Singularities can't exist because they cannot be talked about in terms of arrangements of particles. Another idea Mr Stephen Hawking had of eliminating the need for initial conditions was to say that at the beginning of time space was bent back on itself. This idea he called the 'no boundary proposal' and involved some naiive use of 'complex' time. Now 'bending time backwards on itself' is one of those nonsense sentences that sound very deep but has no real meaning. To be nicer to Stephen (for I fear we have been rather rude so far) our super- substance theory is also a no-boundary theory. This is because the time in which the super-substance existed need not be the beginning of time. It is the beginning of information on our side of this timeline, but there can also exist a Universe on the other side of this timeline. Only theoretically speaking of course, since it is impossible to have any knowledge of it. Since this time was the most ordered time, away from this time, before and after, the Universe must become more disordered. It should be quite easy to see the symmetry here. 'Is what you are saying that before the Big Bang, there was another Universe running backwards?!' Well, yes and no. As far as we are concerned the Universe began at the Big Bang. Now imagine that this other Universe was the precise mirror image of our own (which it may have to be in order for the universe to balance out right) we would be tempted to take this time line and bend it back on itself Has Stephen, through his strange geometrical ideas, come up with the same theory as our own? I think there are several reason why he may not have. Firstly, by reversing the direction of time, an electron is changed into an anti-electron. If time really is bent back on itself, surely there would be an identical number of electrons as anti-electrons which would all interact and disappear in a puff of photons. What we see is that the Universe is predominantly

made of electrons. The other Universe for which the time is reversed would seem to be made of anti-electrons. So the symmetry is still preserved. 'What does this Super-Subtance look like?' We would never be able to actually see this super-substance because it would always be surrounded by a black hole. But we might still be able to deduce its structure. If you compress a load of carbon atoms together very compactly what do you get? 'Yes, I've seen Superman too - you get a diamond!' That's right. A diamond is a crystal in which all the atoms are packed together in a very ordered way. There are many types of crystals with various orderings of their atoms. Cubic crystals with a cubic arrangement of atoms, hexagonal crystals, parallelogram crystals and so forth. Perhaps our SuperSubstance is a type of crystal in that all the blurry matter-particles and forceparticles are arranged in an ordered structure. This seems quite strange since if the particles were arranged in a cubic formation for instance this would determine certain x, y and z axis as special and we have not observed this. Equally for any other normal crystal structure there is this problem. We live in a Universe in which all directions appear almost exactly the same. 'What about a blurry combination of different structures?' This at first seems reasonable - but a blurry combination of different structures is still a blurry structure and we still have to determine what this structure is! One answer, which Roger Penrose might be favour, is that the structure would be that of a quasicrystal. Quasi-crystals come about because some atoms when compressed try to arrange themselves into 5 sided 'pentagonal' patterns. The problem is that unlike squares, triangles and hexagons, pentagons don't tessellate. You can't fit pentagons together without leaving any gaps. When these atoms try to arrange themselves in an ordered way, the pattern that they create is never repeated from place to place. Unfortunately the overall crystal that they create is more or less ordered. It is shaped like a dodecahedron (a solid made of 12 pentagons). It seems we might have to abandon our crystal analogy. Other similar problems are the sphere-packing and bubble-packing problems. It has been proven that most efficient way to pack 2 dimensional circles together is in a honeycomb structure. The same question in terms of spheres is unanswered. It seems obvious enough that layering several honeycomb structures on top one another would be the answer but this has never been proved (Jan 2002). It seems to me that these questions are linked with determining the structure of the Super-Substance and that finding the answer to one would help finding the answer to the other. The main problem with finding the structure of the Super-Substance is that there is no good definition for disorder. If we could say why a particular arrangement of particles is more disordered than another, perhaps we could simply plug this into the equation, set time to zero, and out would pop the answer! There would probably be more than one answer for instance a mirror image super-substance would also be a valid solution. But we are just guessing here. The problem may turn out to be simpler than we think. It may not even by important what the exact structure is. We don't know the exact structure of water at any one instant but we've got a fair idea how it flows. Assuming that the Super-Substance did exist (which, in my view, it must have done) then what stopped it from collapsing to a smaller, denser size? At first we might think that it is a similar mechanism to the one that stops the electrons from collapsing into the centre of an atom. This being due to the fact that no two identical electrons can not inhabit the same space or, alternatively, have the same angular speed. But it turns out that if gravity continues to increase between close particles, as we presume it must, even this is not enough to halt the collapse of the Super-Substance. So what does? There is another idea and that is that black holes don't exist at all. The irony is that the theory that predicts black holes breaks down at exactly the place where black holes are thought to exist. Let us assume that we have found the Theory of Everything and that this theory says that the gravitational force vanishes for very small distances. In this case gravity would never be strong enough to pull light back onto the surface of any massive body. So no matter how

massive an object was it would never be 'cut off' from the rest of the Universe and form a Black Hole. This absence of gravity at close distances would also stop the super-substance from collapsing into a point singularity. There would no longer be an 'event horizon' because there is no region beyond which light can't escape. This is important because if was impossible to see inside a black hole then particles that fell into it would simply vanish from the observable universe! What's more we would have no right to talk about what was inside a black hole. It seems to me that as things can't just vanish, the Theory of Everything must predict that it is possible for light to escape from a black hole. And if black-holes don't really exist then neither do we need Mr Hawking's radiation theory to explain where all the disorder goes. I think this will turn out to be one of those cases where the Universe turns out to be much duller than people originally thought! [CURVATURE2] The reason that the Theory of Everything predicts that gravity vanishes at small distances is as follows. As we have said before there can be any number of gravitons in an interaction. It turns out that the 1-graviton exchange produces an attractive force, the 2-graviton exchange produces a smaller repulsive force, the 3-graviton exchange produces an even smaller attractive force and so on. At far distances only the 1-graviton exchange is at all noticeable and this force is precisely the one that Isaac Newton found. It is proportional to the inverse square of the distance to the massive object. But when two objects get very close together the other multiple graviton interactions become important and basically they all start to cancel one another out until there is no gravitational force at all! The amazing thing is that this theory is completely consistent with Einstein's gravitational theory. 'So why did people reject it?' At the time no one was thinking in terms of gravitons and it seemed impossible that the gravitational force could vanish at near distances. 'But we know now don't we!' Yep. The region where the 'event horizon' was in the original theory is now simply the region at which the gravitational force is the strongest. The strength of the force here is inversely proportional to the mass (f}1/m) which is what we would expect. The lesson to learn from all this is that when dealing with subjects such as the Big Bang and Black Holes, it is no good using approximations. We really need the complete Theory of Everything to answer these questions. Even then it may take giant Super-Computers months or even years to make accurate calculations. Chapter 14 Them Damned Masses! There are no coincidences in physics. If 2 things look like they may be related, they often are. To show you what I mean, first let us consider the size of the universe. How big is it? It is very, very, very, very big. Now let us consider the mass of an electron. Even compared with the Planck mass which is about a thousandth of a milligram (about the weight of a speck of dust) the mass of the electron is very, very, very, very small. So we have 2 numbers, one very big and one very small. Coincidence? I don't think so! Let us remember what causes mass. According to what we have said before, mass is thought to be due to interactions with the Higgs particle. These (blurry) Higgs particles are spread evenly around in space. But, the universe is expanding! So these Higgs particles become more spread out and thinner until they are hardly there at all. The more the universe expands the more these Higgs particles fade. The effect that this has one the masses of the particles in the universe is to decrease them. It doesn't take a genius to work out that as the universe becomes very very big the mass of the electron will become very very small. The exact relationship is not yet known since this would involve knowing exactly how fast the universe was expanding and what was the exact mechanism that gives mass to particles. But we have shown that there is a relationship which could explain the smallness of the electron mass. If we follow this thought process back in time it would also mean that in the early days of the universe the masses of the particles were huge! Where did all

this mass go? According to E=mc2 and the equivalence between mass and energy we might assume that this mass has turned into some of the movement of the expansion. Rather poetically we might describe the mass of particles as the result of the universe pushing against matter as it tried to expand. This is not altogether clear though since we don't know whether the conservation of mass and movement should necessarily occur in an expanding universe. Perhaps the biggest number in physics is the distance across the visible universe in terms of Planck lengths which is nearly the same as the time since the Big Bang in terms of Planck time-units. In the old English language where a billion is a million million, then this number is about a decillion! Normally it would be good that these values are nearly the same, but according to most theories of the Universe they shouldn't be. This can only mean that we haven't yet arrived at the correct picture of the universe. One of the Holy Grails of science is to find from first principles a simple formula which would give the masses of all the particles. This is because these are perhaps the most 'natural' of all numbers in the universe. We can measure the mass of the electron as many times as we like and it will always be the same but no-one knows why it is always the same or why it has that particular mass. It is one of life's little mysteries. Imagine that we had never measured the mass of the electron and someone said 'the answer you get will be' and then we measured it and they were right! Of course it is a little different nowadays in that we know the answer we just don't know why it is the answer. The trouble with these numbers is that they are not simple numbers like 1,2,3.. They are big numbers and not whole numbers at that. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to them. If we really did have a Theory of Everything, the first question all the top scientists would ask is: show how to calculate the mass of the electron and all the other particles. For quarks it is a very difficult question since it is a very difficult problem even measuring their masses since they are trapped inside protons and neutrons. We do know that the Muon is roughly 207 times bigger than the electron and the Tau particle is about 3500 times more massive than the electron*. And it is these numbers that are the real test of a Theory of Everything. Even though our theory of everything predicts that there are three generations of particles it is still hard to see why they should have so very different masses. This is not necessarily a fault of the Equation, merely our lack of understanding at how to solve the Equation. One explanation for these masses could be related to the Super-substance. In the super-substance, all the particles must be arranged in the most efficient manner. We can imagine the 3 generations of electrons as being the 3 axis of a cube, for instance. A certain rotation of this cube might give the most efficient supersubstance. Because the Higgs field would also have existed at this time, this rotation would have encoded itself onto the Higgs field which and so this would fix the masses of the electrons to their different values. This is not really a particularly scientific way of thinking about it but it is quite useful. We know, for instance, that the quarks that we see inside protons and neutrons would correspond to rotated axis. In real terms this means that the quarks that we observe are actually blurry combinations of quarks from all 3 generations. This is born out by the fact that in Weak interactions which change the charge of quarks there is also a certain chance that the quarks will change generation. This being due to the fact that the 3 generations of quarks with charge -1/3 are rotated slightly differently to the 3 generations of quarks with charge +2/3. In gluon or photon interactions which don't change the charge, the quarks don't jump generations. Due to the fact that the Weak interactions occur vary rarely, we hardly ever notice that the quarks are not themselves! So apart from finding the quark masses we also need to find the various angles by which the 3 generations of quarks are rotated. 'Is that it?' Well, no. We have missed out some very important things. One of the reasons that the electron-photon theory works is that the chance of an interaction

happening is roughly 1/137th of the chance of it not happening. The chance of two interactions happening is the square of this number which is even smaller. The fact that this number is so small means that we can mostly ignore circumstances where more than a few interactions occur. Our Theory of Everything should predict this number. It is probably not 1 divided by exactly 137 although it is remarkably close to it. Since this number is not astronomically large but quite small and tidy, this number will probably just drop out of our calculations sometime in the near future. We know it must be hidden somewhere inside our Equation, it just remains to carefully write out each part of the equation and compare it with our previous theories. (This is easier said then done!) All these little problems of rotated quarks, Higgs interactions and so on make this task very tricky indeed. We get other numbers for Weak interactions and quark-gluon interactions which we should also be able to find from our theory. I predict that we will get all these numbers out of the Equation with a year (Jan 2002). In normal theories there is room to put whatever masses and constants in that you like but in our Theory we have a single equation which cannot be altered in any way without ruining it. Another of those tricky problems is to establish the differences between the various forces. It is easy to explain why there are twelve forces but harder to explain why they form groups such as the 8 gluons of the strong force, the 3 massive particles of the weak force and the 1 photon of the electromagnetic force. Surprisingly enough, to establish these groups we need the help of 'Group Theory'. A useful result of group theory is that every rotation in x dimensional complex space can be made from x2-1 types of rotations. We can associate the 8 gluons with the 8 types of rotations in 3-dimensional complex space and the photon with a rotation in the 4th complex dimension. The 3 weak-force particles correspond to the 3 different types of rotations in ordinary 3-dimensional (real) space.** The graviton, due to being a spin 2 particle, corresponds to all the rotations in four dimensional space-time all by itself! All of these rotations can be described in terms of rotations in four dimensional quaternion-space. When a matter particle gets changed by the absorption or emission of a force particle, it can be thought of as the same particle which has undergone a strange kind of rotation in quaternion space. It is then easy to see that there are 3 different colours of quarks due to the fact that gluons correspond to rotations in 3 complex dimensions. This isn't the whole picture. According to the Electro-Weak theory, the rotation for the photon and the rotations for the weak particles are actually mixed up a bit but this is not important for our discussion since it doesn't alter the number of particles. The reason that the weak force particles have mass and the others don't is because the Higgs particle only interacts with these particles. This is due to the fact that the gravitinos which the Higgs particle is made of are thought to have no electric charge or colour so they will only interact with the weak force. The weak force particles have a mass about 180,000 times bigger than the electron.*** *These number can be given by the formulae 207 j exp(42/3) and the Tau mass ratio by 3500 j exp(72/6) although we are not entirely sure yet why this should be so. **The group of rotations (and reflections) in n dimensional real space is written O(n), the group of rotations in n dimensional complex space is written SU(n) and the group of rotations in quaternion space is U(n,q). Also it is known that the following three groups are essentially the same O(3)=SU(2)=U(1,q). So our group for the force particles can be written as SU(3)%SU(2)%U(1). The graviton obeys the space-time symmetry group O(3,1). ***It is interesting that 180,000 j exp(112/10) which is close to the mass we would have guessed for a fourth-generation electron although this could be just coincidence. Chapter 15 How I discovered Selfism What got me started into thinking about the philosophy of the Self were the

classic phrases and paradoxes of ancient philosophy. A paradox is something which at first seems to defy the rules of logic - and many seem to believe that the existence of paradoxes proves that the Universe is in some sense irrational and that there is no hope for any of us to make any sense of it whatsoever. Now, as you might expect, I don't believe in paradoxes. A paradox, to me, is simply something that at first seems unreasonable but with a bit of lateral thinking can easily be solved. For instance take this classic case of the Black Knight. One day he says to his friend the White Knight, "I am lying." Is his friend to believe him or not? The paradox is that it makes no sense if he is telling the truth or if he is lying. The solution is that we have assumed in this question that statements are either true or false. But this is not so, the Black Knight's statement, "I am lying", is an example of an 'illogical' statement - one that makes no logical sense. So should his friend believe him? No, he should simply tell him to stop being so illogical! Here's another paradox. A football match ends in a draw. The final result depends on a penalty shoot out between B. Knight, the perfect striker who always scores, and his brother W. Knight the perfect goalkeeper who always saves. Which team wins the match? The paradox comes because there is no situation in which both the striker scores and the goalkeeper saves the ball. So what happens? Is it simply a 50-50 chance? The simple solution, which you probably got, is that it was I who was lying this time. If there existed a striker who always scored there could not exist a goalkeeper who always saved just in case the above situation came up! Your answer should be, 'I believe you are in error, Sir, two such people could never exist simultaneously!' So twice we have been given a paradox and twice we have solved it with a little lateral thinking. With practice could we not solve the paradoxes of science and philosophy just as simply? We could do just that, although the resulting philosophy that we end up with might not be to everyone's taste! How do I know I am not simply a 'brain in a box' floating about in space? This is a similar question to 'Is the universe but a figment of my imagination?' The fact that these questions are so difficult to answer lead me to the view that these questions might in fact be irrelevant. If we consider that the perception that the Self has of the Universe is the Universe then in the first example the brain in a box cannot really be said to exist. It can always be possible that there are brains in boxes floating about in space, but the Self can never be one of them. This follows from the assumption that the Self can only inhabit a body that directly interacts with it's Universe. Things get a bit tricky when we enter the dream world. When the Self dreams, is the dream reality? I would dismiss this case since we cannot properly claim that the mind is conscious at these times. It is only after we wake up that we can remember and examine the thoughts that went through our heads at night. Indeed sometimes we don't even remember at all. A related subject is whether what the Self believes is reality. This is problematic because the Self could believe one thing and then realise that this was untrue. This also seems somewhat irrelevant since beliefs are created in the brain which is part of the universe but this does not necessarily mean that they are accurate. We never really believe anything 100% and so are never really 100% surprised if this belief turns out to be false. If we are 50% sure that blue unicorns exist, perhaps blue unicorns do exist in a halfway sort of sense, until the day that we find absolute proof that they don't. The trouble here is that the brain of a human is not powerful enough to work out, given what it has just seen, what is consistent with that vision and what is not? Even with modern day scientific understanding we are never really sure. Surely we can't believe that there were possible universes in which people floated about in the air until Isaac Newton discovered gravity, and 'poof!' all these possible universe vanished? As you can see this is a tough question and there probably is no sensible answer to it. All I can conclude from it is that if you're going to believe in something, make sure

that you believe in something good! Another classic thought experiment was invented by a Mr Shrdinger and involved his pet cat. If you've read any other book on popular science you're probably bored to death with hearing about his stupid moggy. This cat, who we shall call Felix, was put in a sealed box. Also in this box was a lump of radioactive material, a Geiger counter and a bottle of arsenic. These were rigged up so that if the Geiger counter should register a radioactive emission then the bottle of arsenic was opened and Felix would succumb to a horrible and painful death. It was worked out that the probability of the Geiger counter registering anything in the first half-hour was 50% likely. So if Mr Shrdinger opened the box after half an hour there was a 50% chance of seeing Felix lying on his back with his paws up in the air. There is no point in actually doing the experiment because nothing unusual will happen. The important point is how we think about what has happened. According to the normal rules of Quantum Mechanics, before we open the box and make an observation of the cat's health, the contents of the box should be a blurry sum of the 2 possibilities of there being an alive cat and there being a dead cat. The question Mr Shrdinger put to the world was this: 'How can my cat be both alive and dead at the same time?' Before answering this question, I would like to change this experiment ever so slightly in order to give a 'proof' that is only one conscious being in the Universe. The experiment goes like this. Firstly, you leave Felix alone for the time being and put a real human being in the box. Now let us assume that a conscious being cannot at the same time be unconscious. This is a pretty reasonable assumption I think. Now according to Quantum Theory, once we've closed the box, after about half an hour, the person in the box will be a blurred sum of an alive person and a dead person. We should then be able to deduce that this person could not have been conscious otherwise this would contradict our first assumption. Since we can do this experiment with anyone in the entire Universe it seems to suggest that no-one (apart from you) is conscious. 'Ah, but couldn't put yourself in the box and disprove your own consciousness?' Well, lets see what happens. If you place yourself in the box, it will now be the universe outside of the box that will become a blurred according to Quantum Theory. It will only be when you, the 'observer', opens the box and looks out that the universe becomes un-blurred again and falls back into a certain path. Thus it is just as impossible to disprove your own consciousness as it is to prove anyone else's. This was one of the first indications that there was something special about the Self. Something so special, I fact, that the concept of Self should be the fundamental basis for all philosophy. 'Why do we not see the blurriness of the universe?' My view is that the universe is fundamentally blurred but that it is blurred in a way that is impossible to notice. Imagine that radioactive source again and that Geiger counter. Lets assume that this Geiger counter has a light bulb that lights up when it detects a radioactive emission. Now how many different ways could an atom emit a gamma ray, for instance? Well there's the direction to consider, the polarisation and the wavelength and that's about it really. It enters the Geiger counter and sets off a chain reaction. In each step of the chain reaction, there are a variety of ways in which events could happen. But provided the chain reaction gets a certain way, most of the things that could happen lead to the bulb lighting up. How many ways could this bulb light up? There are literally billions. The photons could all shoot out in different directions, or any number of things could happen. A human being, however, would simply class all these different ways as 'the bulb lit up'. Now it is only through these very obvious signals, such as watching a bulb light up, that the Self can interpret the world. We could never be 100% certain that the Geiger counter was accurate but every photon coming out of the bulb and entering our eyes would add to the evidence. This question of the blurriness of small things compared with the seemingly sharp nature of big things is a subject that has baffled people ever since the invention of the Quantum Theory. What is 'consciousness'? My first conclusion about this subject was that there was

only one consciousness that I could prove actually existed and that was my own. Even if I plugged my brain into someone else using some kind of twinkling neurooptic-cable-device, so that 'their thoughts were my thoughts,' as Mr Spock might say, the resulting double-brain would only have the single consciousness (at least from my point of view) and although I would see through the other persons eyes read their memories, I would not be able to prove that this being had a consciousness before I 'plugged in'. Thus the concepts of consciousness and the Self were intertwined. The Self perhaps being a broader term than consciousness which might represent a small part of the Self relating only to its immediate experiences. A better question might be why is there consciousness at all. This again is related to why there is a Universe at all to which the Self is the central experience of it. So why is there a Universe? Try to imagine the Universe not existing. Its impossible because you can only imagine things which you can experience. It is quite possible for you to imagine there not being a black cat sitting in front of you because there are many experiences which involve there not being a black cat sitting in front of you. But imagining that the Universe does not exist is a different matter. If the Universe did not exist, you would not exist, and so how could you have an experience of the Universe not existing when you couldn't be present at the time? In order to think of an argument which proves that there is no possibility other than that the Universe exists we must use the relationship between Self and the Universe. We shall find that objects are less important than the relationships between objects. In fact if we took out all the objects and left just the relationships, the whole thing would still make sense - this may even be a better description of reality. Those who believe in the fundamental existence of objects are known as Platonists (after the Greek philosopher Plato who wrote a book about the subject.) For instance what is the answer to this riddle. "I am what I represent. What am I?" The answer is "I am the word 'word.'" Here, we have not said what a word is, or what the word 'word' is. But providing we know what the concepts of 'being' and 'representing' mean we have not only defined words but also shown that there must be at least one example of them. 'Being' and 'representing' are fundamental concepts that we must accept in order to understand anything. But perhaps if we could find relationships between these concepts and others that only these concepts could satisfy (as in the case of the word 'word') we might be able to dispense with them as fundamental ideas and take the structure of the relationships as fundamental. I'm not entirely sure this can be done, because it seems that there must be at least one fundamental concept, that one being the concept of the Self. And since there is one fundamental concept there must be others otherwise we could define this concept as 'the fundamental concept'. These ideas of breaking down concepts and language into abstract relationships is one of the main preoccupations of people involved in research into Artificial Intelligence. For quite a while I have been interested in this subject and have made a few attempts at creating an artificial intelligence on my computer. There are many ways to approach this in terms of storing and retrieving logical sentences and inferring one statement from another. This, however, is the 'easy' part. The difficult bit comes when you sit back and think to yourself, what is this Artificial intelligence for? What is it's motivation? If its motivation is simply to do whatever it is told to then how can we call it intelligent? It is merely a sophisticated slave or machine. The goal of some scientists is to build a machine that is capable of reducing the human's need for toil and hard labour. We can envisage a world in which we have robot slaves waiting on us hand and foot, doing all the work that needs doing. These robots would have to be able to maintain their energy levels for instance by changing their fuel cells. They would have to be able to carry out repairs on each other and build new robots to replace those that were beyond repair. They would have to operate in all terrain and be able to communicate with human beings. When trying to design such a machine it turns out that the most efficient design is almost identical to a human being. So this is a world in which the slaves look

like human beings, talk like human beings, think like human beings and yet are treated as subhuman beings. Is this any better than what we started with? "Of course, the difference is that these slaves are robots." The fact is whatever you may call them, a population of beings capable of keeping human beings in luxury would almost certainly fit any description of the word 'alive' as could be imagined. The only difference is that these robots could be programmed to enjoy their work and be happy. If only there was a way in which we could engineer a population of human beings so that they would be happy in the work that they did. I am not necessarily talking about a genetically engineered population of human slaves - there are quite possibly social factors which have affect on a populations happiness. In fact such a situation was more or less around in the last hundred years in England and is around to some extent today. It was called the 'class system'. The human beings who lived a life of luxury, attending social engagements, and pursuing scientific interests were called the Aristocracy. The 'slaves' who did all the work, served them, and generally kept the world running smoothly were called 'peasants' or 'the working classes'. Now it might not be possible to say that the working classes were happy doing all the work but it is true that generally they accepted it. "The French Revolution?" Merely one aristocracy taking over from another by manipulating the aspirations of its people. "That's a very cynical point of view." Isn't it. So in many respects, this was the 'ideal world' that researchers into artificial intelligence are trying to create. Which is fine as long as you are a member of the Aristocracy and not a lowly peasant! The point I am making is that there is no perfect state. We can't say that everyone must share equally in the workload (the communist philosophy) for there will always be some who aspire to achieve more but nor can we divide the population into the Aristocracy and the working class for there is never so clear a divide. The state must be flexible, such that although everyone is equally happy with their 'lot', two peoples 'lot' need not ever be the same. Chapter 16 A Brief History Given all that we know so far, how does our universe look? Let us write down what we know. A 'Brief History' of the universe if you like! I hope you will excuse the huge dollop of poetic licence I have used. In the beginning was the Super-Substance. It filled all of the great void and darkness was abundant. The universe was perfect and symmetry ruled. From whence scattered far and wide among this Super- Substance the particles from which the Self was to be made beckoned, 'Let me be' and the Universe began its descent into chaos. The Super-substance began to disperse in all directions. Descending through the stages: First was the quark-gluon plasma, then as the quarks coalesced into triplets the second stage of neutron matter came to pass. The universe entered the third stage as the neutrons decayed into protons and electrons. Several millennia passed. The Self beckoned 'Let their be light,' and there was light. The universe entered the forth phase as the electrons and protons came together to form neutral Hydrogen and light was free to propagate throughout the universe. The universe, again guided by what was to become, found itself being pulled together in certain areas by parts of the universe which had never got out of the first stage and were called Super-Massive-Black Holes. The matter swirled around these massive black holes and where called galaxies. The immense forces near the centre of these galaxies caused the matter to come together and become hot, and the first stars were born out of the darkness. Ages passed by and galaxies collided and stars died and the universe drifted further and further apart. From the remnants of several exploded stars called Supernovae, a star was born and was called the Sun. The gasses around the sun spun around it in a disc. Some coalesced into the gas-planets, not quite big enough to burn as stars. Others, made of matter from long dead stars, were too close to the Sun and were burnt or were too far from the Sun and were frozen. One planet which was called the Earth was at the right distance, and was

stabilised further by a smaller planet circling it, which was long dead, called the Moon. These and other unlikely events came about from the Self's will to exist. There was a great expanse of water on this world and darkness was on the face of the deep. Until the light from the Sun stirred these waters and storms blew across these waters. As lightning struck the Earth, carbon compounds were fused together to create the Amino acids, which were to become the fundamental building blocks of life itself. Small chains of these acids came to be and a particular chain was made which encouraged the creation of other chains. These chains replicated many thousand fold until the whole of the great Sea was filled with them. By other accidents, chains were created which fed on these other chains, and some chains came about which helped other chains. Through mutations and assimilation, these chains became longer. A certain chain occurred which encouraged a liquid crystal surface to form around it and so the first cell was born. Some organisms were able to harness the energy from the deep ocean vents and some were able to harness the light directly from the Sun. Many celled creatures arose after that, and through the process of natural selection they began to evolve. Again by assimilation and mutations cells came together to form small multi-celluar organisms. The Sea was now teaming with corals, jellyfish and amoeba. Through time, and evolution, fish and other sea creatures came to be. Some fish grew legs and some crawled or hopped out of the water onto the marshland. Great lizards roamed the face of the Earth and this was called the Age of the Dinosaurs. The Earth was as a Great Swamp. The Self called again and great calamities happened. Through the years giant volcanoes irrupted, and huge meteors pelted the Earth. The Earth grew cold and the Great Swamps dried up and the Dinosaurs were no longer to be found. Life was never so big again. It was now the age of the small. Mammals climbed down from the trees and began to walk on the dry land. Some mammals were as the Tree-Shrew or the Bush-Baby and had forward facing eyes. These were to become the monkeys, the apes, and human beings. These human beings walked on two legs and were able to speak more than any other animal. They evolved quicker than any animal for they killed their own weak, through many wars and religious practices. They began to understand the world and represent it through sculpture, pictures and song. They clothed themselves and spread throughout the world. Those that lived in hot regions became black and those who lived in the cold regions became white. Those that lived in the jungles became short and those that strode through the deserts became tall. Each one had the capacity to be the Self and each believed that he was the Self. And the Self was to be one of these people. And so it came to pass that the Self was born. And the Self is you . * * * The molecular chains we talked about here are of course what we now call DNA. But since this is such a technical term I thought it would spoil the flow of the 'story'. I have cast the Self here, as a kind of godlike figure although this is not meant to be taken too literally! It is only meant to suggest that without the Self to observe it there could be no Universe to observe. Most of the events we've described either happened at the very beginning of time or very near the present day. We've glossed over what happened in the middle since it is not particularly interesting. The whole stream of events from beginning of time to now took about twelve billion* years give or take a billion years. The earth was formed about 4 billion years ago. Single celled organisms are thought to have arisen around 3 billion years ago. The Jurassic age (as in Jurassic Park) began just a 1/5th of a billion years ago. Mankind evolved a minuscule 1/500th of a billion years ago. Written history of mankind is an insignificant 1/250,000th of a billion years old. And an average person lives a preposterous 1/25,000,000th of a billion years. But I expect you already new that didn't you? It just goes to show that when people talk about our brief time on this Earth, 'brief' is the operative word! Considering that in this time a human being can gain an adequate understanding of the rules of the universe - this must mean that the universe is

an extremely simple place indeed. I suppose we should talk a bit about evolution since this seems to be the subject which connects the laws of physics with the emergence of life. Evolution, in case you didn't know, was not invented by Charles Darwin. It was not even invented by those Ancient Greeks who indeed had similar ideas. Evolution has been known about ever since man could stand up on two legs and wave a stick about. It was not until fairly recently that certain civilisations tried to distance themselves from the 'beasts'. In the distant past and also in certain ancient cultures of today, man identified himself with the animals. It was quite obvious to do so since in those days he would as likely be eaten by a wolf as to eat a wolf for breakfast. We might like to think about the Aboriginal culture and its stories of half-animal, half-human dream people. Or more classically, the Egyptian culture and its many strange gods with animal heads. Most stone age cultures, it is believed, involved Witch Doctors who dressed up in the skins of a wolf and performed strange animalistic rituals. To them it was obvious that there was a special connection between animals and humans but to 'civilised' people, particularly the uptight Victorians, this could not be so. (The idea that humans essentially the same as animals was also dismissed on religious grounds.) Certain Greeks on philosophical grounds, put forward the proposal that life could have originated from the oceans but they could not say why life has evolved into what it is today. The thing that people like Darwin and others did was to explain why things evolve. His idea was called 'Natural Selection'. Imagine a community of red foxes and wolves living on neighbouring islands. Imagine that over millions of years one of the islands slowly drifts northward towards the Arctic. The island gets colder and becomes covered with snow. The foxes on this island have a tough time of it because they stick out like a sore thumb against the snow. One day, by chance, one of these foxes produces a darker than usual fox cub. Due to being so obvious against the snow this fox cub gets eaten up rather quickly. Another day a fox produces a paler than usual fox cub. This fox cub gets by unnoticed by the wolves and manages to settle down one day to father its own family. His family will inherit some of his paleness and so will also have a better chance of survival. As the years go by, the darker foxes get eaten by the wolves while the paler foxes reproduce. Gradually the population of foxes becomes paler and more adaptable to its environment. This process is called Natural Selection. You may have thought that as soon as the island became covered with snow, the foxes would all be eaten up one by one. But, if the diet of the wolves depends on foxes, this cannot happen. This is because when too many foxes get eaten, the wolves start to die out, and when the wolves start to die out the fox population can increase again, and so on. What happens is that both populations fluctuate and as long as there isn't too much of a shock, the population of foxes will be unlikely to die out. An Austrian Monk called Gregor Mendel was the first to discover that characteristics were inherited in discrete amounts. Previously it was though that children were simply averages of their parents with a little bit of chance thrown in. He did this by crossing his varieties of smooth and wrinkled peas and finding out that the plants they produced were either had all wrinkly peas or all smooth peas - never slightly wrinkled peas. Much later on the long molecule of DNA was discovered and it was suggested that maybe this strange chain of molecules could hold the information that was inherited from parents to children. As we know, they turned out to be right. The important thing here is that we have reduced evolution down to the level of chemistry. Chemistry is theoretically derivable from physics and physics describes the universe. So instead of thinking of evolution as something different from physics that is simply added on to explain the existence of life, we should think of it as a fundamental physical rule. Evolution is a logical consequence of the Theory of Everything. Just like the rule which says that the total disorder in the universe must always increase we now have a rule which says that the total

complexity of a population of self-replicating molecules must always increase. It is interesting to think of the universe as a foam of bubbles. The centre of each bubble is gradually becoming more complex while the disorder, which more than accounts for this, is being pushed to the surfaces of the bubbles. The total disorder in this model is always increasing yet at certain small yet definite places, the complexity is also increasing. There is a limit to this model, however, because there is a limit to disorder. A time must come when even the most complex of things must become disordered and the universe will go into a totally disordered state. My point is that just as it was inevitable that the early universe was composed of Hydrogen and Helium, and that stars formed from these gasses, and that some stars had planets; it was also inevitable that some planets had life upon them, and that this life evolved, and that this evolution lead to intelligent beings such as ourselves. It may not be provable with numbers and mathematical equations but then there are no mathematical equations which prove that you exist - some things you just know. *Nowadays most people use the American terminology of a calling a thousand million a billion. In numbers that's 1000,000,000. Chapter 17 Scientists and Philosophers In the olden days there was no such thing as science or scientists, those that enquired into the nature of things were called Natural Philosophers. (And this is still what you are called in certain older institutions.) For those people engaged in Theoretical Physics, I think that this is quite an accurate term. A scientist, in my view, is someone who conducts experiments, via the 'scientific method' and writes down his or her results in tables and displays them on graphs. Nowadays, however, most scientists like to distance themselves from philosophers particularly scientific philosophers - who they regard as people not clever enough to construct new theories and so have resorted to examining old ones. 'My, that seems a very arrogant stance to take!' Do you know, I think you may be right there. Most of the scientists I have come across, usually on television or radio, do come over quite arrogant. It is easy to see why. The scientist has spent a fair proportion of his life time learning about the 'truth' about the universe and he feels, quite rightly, that he has a greater knowledge on this subject than the ordinary lay person. Most scientists adamantly refuse to entertain the notion of gods or lepricorns. When encountering a 'believer' they have a certain urge to 'enlighten' this poor lost soul. You can imagine him saying 'Now look here young man. There is no God. The universe is bleak and meaningless. And you are worthless.' This scientist, must feel like he has just done a good deed but I fail to see how this has increased the overall happiness of the world. For a scientist truth outweighs happiness. Hence why you might often hear the argument, 'The discovery of the atomic bomb was inevitable. Humans beings will always desire truth. The consequences of this are not the fault of the scientists.' Strangely, many scientists refuse also to believe in their conscious selves. When talking of a human being, they often talk about them as if they are simply very complex robots. This is all very well when talking about other people, because it is scientifically impossible to prove otherwise. But when talking about themselves, these scientists talk about their own bodies in exactly the same scientific way. For example, 'I am not conscious. I only think I am because this is an evolutionary advantage for my species.' These scientists often view the world from above, as if they are somehow floating above the earth observing it (and themselves) in a detached manner. Even quantum mechanics which inherently demands an 'observer' has failed to bring these people back to Earth. (Talk about a God-complex!) It is only possible to observe the world if you are a constituent part of it. I haven't attended any lectures specifically in physics, but I have it on good authority that those that did were a pretty strange looking bunch of people.

Obviously there are those that are completely normal but physics is not normally a subject normal people take. Physicists are mostly male people, probably not unrelated to the fact that most train-spotters are male. Physics is about power over knowledge and ultimate control over the universe. Its also something that Star Trek fans might become interested in. What I mostly attended, when I attended anything, were Mathematics Lectures. Now considering that most mathematicians go on to become accountants, you can imagine that this was a barrel of laughs. In fact some of them were, this being due to the fact that a fair proportion of maths lecturers are slightly bonkers. Some lectures in mathematics were attended by the Economics set, which are a completely different class of people owing to the fact that they are studying a subject which might actually be useful for something! Even today I am still trying to fathom the purpose of Universities. Given that most of the courses you can take are utterly useless for any job you are likely to take. If indeed Universities are simply a way of separating the Middle from the Working classes then why do you need 3 years to do this? My view is that they are simply a relic of the olden days when it was thought that the Upper classes might benefit from a little imparted knowledge. Obviously, whatever the upper classes did the middle classes wanted for themselves and so it became a status symbol for your children to go to university. As more and more of the middle classes attended such institutions, the job market used it as an easy way of avoiding having to employ the working classes. The university professors continued teaching there fascinating yet completely useless courses. Nowadays to get a good middle class job you have to attend a university for 3 years. Times are changing now with the introduction of actually having to pay to have this 3 year holiday at university. Maybe one day people might even leave university with a useful skill! Many mathematics lectures are designed, I believe, for robots rather than human beings. Maths lecturers have a certain desire to be ever so precise about everything. They hide the fact that when a mathematician actually discovers something of any importance, he has spent days approximating, guessing being very un-precise and messy about practically everything. To me mathematics is more of an art than something a computer could do. In fact, it has been proved, that mathematical discovery is beyond what a programmed computer could do. For a computer to be able to discover new mathematics, you would have to teach it intuition, insight, inspiration and 'having a general feel for things'. These things are at the moment beyond any artificial intelligence ever made. It seems to me that science is very much like religion. Science has its Holy Books such as Newton's Principia (the Old Testament) and its Church Periodicals (the Scientific Journals). It has its spirits and elves (the Super-Strings and Membranes). It has its idols, for example Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and its prophets like Stephen Hawking. It has its mystical beliefs in the unseen (dark matter) and in the places 'not of this universe' (the eleventh dimension). It has its priests and preachers (university lecturers). Anyone who doesn't go along with what the scientists tell you is the truth is called a 'heretic'. When looked at like this, it is not really surprising that scientists and the Catholic Church have been battling it out for centuries. Science is a new threatening religion and the Catholic Church is running scared. Many people claim to be both religious and understand the full workings of the Universe. I don't believe anyone could really do both. Interestingly though, religious people who study science often find their faith strengthened while religious people who study Theology often find their faith severely tested. I don't know what that says about the world but there you go. On that point, when non-religious people like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking talk about 'God throwing dice' or 'being like seeing the face of God' I don't think this is a clever use of personifying Nature but that it is playing into the God-People's hands, frankly. It seems even Atheists are not against using the name of God to get themselves into the papers! Many scientists have an irritating way of talking in metaphors. Watch any popular science program on TV and you will be told 'the universe is like an orange', 'a

particle is like a fruit cake', 'a wave is like a sea gull'. They will then begin to wave their arms about in a ridiculous manner and expect you to know what they're talking about. When I see these people I think to myself, these people obviously had a tough time understanding what was being told them at school and now they think they can explain it better. Why don't they just tell it like it is that's what I want to know. The only thing that metaphors do is mislead people. Another curious thing about popular science on television is that they never expect you to know anything. So you can watch ten programs about black holes in a week and you can guarantee that each program will start with a laborious explanation of what a black hole is: 'A black hole is like a dishwasher' But watch ten wildlife programs and you will never find David Attenborough, or whoever, say 'A bird is a flappy thing which lives in the sky' People expect you to know what a bird is. What they don't seem to realise is that most people know what a black hole is - at least those people who watch documentaries about black holes. They've seen enough other documentaries, and watched enough science fiction to have a fair idea. Indeed if they didn't know what it was they could pretty much work it out from the name. So about of the way through the documentary after they've finished their explanations, they proceed to tell you some 'new' piece of information which they have just discovered about black holes which seems suspiciously similar to some 'new' piece of information from that ten year old documentary that you had just watched last night. I haven't met many philosophers, but the lectures in philosophy I have attended were also attended by a sizeable proportion of girls with dreadlocks and/or purple hair. According to my sources, this is not an uncommon theme. What this tells us about philosophy, I can't rightly say. I might be wrong in this but what practical use can there be for the economics of this country in teaching people (especially purple haired people) this subject? Imagine this was the only cause available at the Universities, would people still think that sending their children to these institutions was such a good idea? I think not! The only type of philosophy that people seem to make money out of is the one that say 'Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus' and is that one of the available courses? Well, is it? Philosophy is something you think about when you are really really bored. It is human nature to think about what you're doing. So if you're a baker you spend a fair amount of your time thinking about bread, if you're a butcher you spend a lot of time thinking about dead animals, and so naturally, if you are out of work and simply existing, you would naturally spend a large amount of your time thinking about existence. I'm not quite sure if it is philosophy that is particularly depressing or whether it is simply the subject you think about when you are particularly depressed. It is often said that people become more philosophical when drunk. This is not actually true, its just that, when you're drunk you don't realise that what you're saying is a load of old rubbish. Call me a bitter and twisted cynic if you like, but to me University is simply a government funded three-to-four year 18-30's holiday for the middle classes and not a very good one at that! It is as if 3 years of mandatory unemployment somehow prepares you to forty years of decently paid work. By middle classes I am including all those at university who came from comprehensive schools (the so-called 'lower middle-classes') and also those who came from a more classically trained public schools* (the so-called 'upper middleclasses'). Most people who would be called 'upper-class' don't bother with University because, by definition, they are filthy rich anyway and don't need any qualifications. Hence the expression 'upper-class twit'. Although I'm sure most people would choose being an upper-class twit than a working-class hero any day. It was once said (probably on some television program I watched) that football was invented in England by the upper-classes in order to give the working class something else to do besides plan the next Revolution. I don't know if this is entirely true but if it is then it was a bloody good idea since there hasn't been a Revolution in the entire history of British football. When I hear working class types talking about being proud of their working-class roots, and how going to t'

match is what they live for I think to myself, 'Fair enough, that just means less competition when trying to reach the really good places in society.' In terms of purely selfish motives it is never a good idea to give people more hope or aspirations then they already have. And if you can find ways of diminishing the general populations hopes and aspirations so much the better for you! In terms of politics this was once the 'Conservative' view of things. Don't upset the status quo, keep things as they are, conserve things. It's who the upperclasses should naturally vote for and who any aspiring person should vote for. On the other hand the new 'Labour' view of things is that we should inspire everyone and give everyone hopes and aspirations. That the upper-classes should be made to pay more. Basically that everyone should become more equal. As we have seen before, as everyone becomes more equal, the total wealth and happiness of the population actually can decrease. The hidden truth is that the only way the total wealth and happiness can stay the same, or increase, is if the jobs that once were done by the working classes are now contracted abroad to people in the third world. Thus a great proportion of the population of England would become middlemanagers of manufacturing in third world countries. Although the wealth and happiness of the third-world country might have improved in the short term, there is now no long-term future for this country - it is now simply the working-class of the world-economy. I think we have digressed slightly, but I think it was an interesting digression none- the-less. *In England public school means private school. Sorry to confuse all the American readers. Chapter 18 Self and Society This is a list of the sayings from my first book. Hopefully they may inspire you (or make you laugh). They are written in a slightly biblical style but don't let that put you off. Basically it is a list of some of my shorter thoughts which I arrived at over several years. It might give you an insight into the way I was thinking over this period. THE SOCIETY Human beings form societies in order to share out the work load. Although by doing just a single task people can be unfulfilled. A society is a group of people living together - and should not be viewed as anything more. A gang is a group of people who sacrifice their identity to gain power in numbers? It is easiest to form a gang of people of shared attributed e.g. all men/all white men/all football fans. The Self is a person and people form societies. Given this, how should the Self, as a person, respond to society? The society can only survive if most people are law abiding, so most people are law abiding in societies. In a stable society when lawlessness gets too high there is a 'backlash' and it is suppressed. A 'crime' is an action such that if too many people did it, it would break up society. If the a person commits a crime it follows that most people in society will say this is wrong to do this. A society only work if enough people work to give enough food to the population. Since this means that most people need to work, if the Self does not work, most people will say this is wrong. HAPPINESS The aims of any person are to: be well nourished and warm. have peace of mind be stimulated have a good relationship with a partner Without ambition a person will fixate and obsess over the wrong things. With too much ambition a person will become frustrated.

Whichever way this is achieved is RIGHT way. A person must weigh up the possibilities. A life of what others may consider WRONG, is RIGHT for the SELF if the objectives are achieved. A life of selfless hard work is WRONG, if the objectives are not achieved. Every way is right that leads to these objectives but by considering the following sayings, the objectives can be achieved. Anyone who accepts these sayings blindly is misguided. Anyone who already knows the truth of them is wise. Write your own rules for when you achieve enlightenment you will know that: All words have truth. For a man to achieve greatness, many must stay in ignorance. Let an ignorant man remain ignorant if he is happy and the TRUTH is in conflict with his way of life. THE INDIVIDUAL Confidence in ones knowledge is a virtue. Yet confidence without knowledge is arrogance. Do not keep thoughts inside, always tell the whole truth. Test your ideas by speaking of them. A man may sleep with a woman for nature has set him this course. Yet if a man should sleep with a man no good will come of this. There is no reason to try new things "for the experience". For an enlightened man knows that nothing is truly new. An enlightened man who's mind has been altered through consuming substances, exhaustion, or heat may loose control of his thoughts and actions, but the essence of his mind cannot be changed. A man who's thoughts are kept within him, who's mind has been altered may then let out his thoughts. But beware of the things he says for they have been kept inside his head and have not been tested by speaking of them. When spoke they may be illinformed and corrupt. Do not seek to change your mind through substances for an enlightened man's mind cannot be changed but a mind that is not enlightened may be corrupted When your actions are non-selfish, it is better to DO, than NOT to do. When your actions are selfish, let it be, for you have no justification. Don't do things that are against your principles. Have principles for then your actions have foundations. If you find yourself doing this week what you did the week before and you are unhappy, move onwards for the world is a big place. If you have problems with the people in the place that you live - don't run away. The problem can occur wherever you go. Make a fresh start with the people you know, for it is the greater challenge. Don't make too much of your mistakes - remember that people forget and given time people forgive. You cannot hope to guess what people are thinking because mostly they don't know themselves. You can make up there mind for them. Make use of every possibility that arises for good opportunities are few and far between. You can not be at rest when there is the possibility of doing something and you don't do it. People will be un-rested when things are not fine and there is nothing to do about it. Be calm when things are fine and there is nothing to do. When waiting to do something big don't neglect the small things because it will cause your downfall later. Often we argue not to convince others of our ideas but to convince ourselves. Only when you have achieved complete calm are you ready for excitement. Only when you can live apart are you ready to live together. Only when you can do without friends are you ready for friendship.

To be alone and happy is the greatest freedom. Dependence on people is the source of misery and is a prison. Support your friends. Let them support you. A lifetime is not long enough to find out everything yourself. So accept knowledge from books, and people and friends. Seeking perfection is no better than having no standards at all. Since in the first case you will not accept the world whereas in the second case the world will not accept you. Either way loneliness or self deceit are the only outcomes. Any relationship must have a FOUNDATION of similar activity/ Examples are work, hobbies and so-forth. FALSE foundations in which the person has less CHOICE in the activity can not hold the foundation of a strong relationship. Since if 2 people choose to be in a certain place and are willing to be together in this place -what better a foundation? Also false foundations are places where people go in order ONLY to seek a relationship (night-clubs etc.). RELAXATION: Don't worry, be happy! When you can spend days making something then destroy it without thought, you are free from the material things. The act of creating is to be more enjoyed than the creation itself. You can convince yourself that you like anything. Don't deceive yourself. Have the confidence to know that you are right and everyone else in the world is wrong. Don't go and socialise for socializing's sake - it must be within a context such as work, etc. Good things lie in ALL directions. But if you don't CHOOSE a way, you will go nowhere! Don't become a farmer - become a person who also farms. Don't become a scientist - become a person who also does science. Don't become an expert - become a person who also has expertise. SILENCE: A Million people can be together in silence. Yet only 2 can be together in conversation while excluding all others. There is always a boundary in whatever you do. You can never know where it lies until you cross it. Life is best nearest the boundary. Once you cross it, you can no longer fear it. You will always fear death for that is a boundary you cannot cross. LOVE The people we find most attractive are those with the least defects. They are the ones that repel us the least. For lust drives us to look for a mate, but those who are not suited we find repellent. If our choice is restricted in some way then we are drawn to those from the restricted group who are least repellent. Perhaps the personalities clash, perhaps physically they are imperfect. If we find someone we are familiar with and are not repelled, then our physical desire will make us fixate, and maybe become obsessive. This state of mind is sometimes called love. RELATIONSHIPS It is important for a man to have female friends else he will idolise women in his eye and reject all others. You must be genuine towards people. To show you are genuine you must look within their eyes. Avoid shyness for with shyness you can not be genuine. You must find genuine people. If they are trying to put across that they are genuine - it is a fasard You must find someone of the opposite gender to have FUN with because nature has allowed opposite genders to be the most close. For someone to like you they must first KNOW you. A girl can only choose from the people she knows. Nakedness is like a bare canvas - not impressive. BE the person you're happy being! Be happy being the person you are! Let your mind rule your body. Let your mind be guided by your principles. If your body wants to sleep, but you have plans, don't let your body sleep.

Someone who seems so confident about something can make you doubt your own confidence. Have strength to know they may be wrong. We must learn to enjoy the trivial things and not go after something that has greatness for it is true that all things are trivial when it is known what they truly are. Happiness is warmth and calm. It is better to have a lot of rubbish so the truth is gauged - than a few gems to deceive the viewer! CHILDREN You should not bring a child into the world and not instil it with a purpose (a dream). If a child has not ambition, it has nothing. You cannot tell a child it can do any job it pleases. You must give it destiny. Give it skills and a purpose. For who else would be a baker - but a baker's son? And who else would we have King but the son of a King? A society in which it's children have no purpose is filled with despair. Societies develop through generations. How can they develop if it's children disperse? PRIVACY There is freedom in privacy. When you can do as you wish. It is more valuable than gold. To count on yourself. Nobody to tell you what to do. It is pitiful how people depend on each other and love each other so. For an older person young love is a foolish thing. But then all love is foolish. A man has respect who can stand on his own. CONTROL If you find yourself in a situation (night-club) and you are trying to know what to do (be the best dancer)- step back - if the outcome is stupid - leave the situation. The first step out of poverty is acting rich. [The past is needed to make the present consistent. It is a consequence of the consistencies of the present.] THE SELF "I know that I am the Self." There is no knowledge without language. There could be no language without evolution. Once there was order and the Self can look no further than that. The Self exists - this is the only Truth. If the Universe exists then the two must be one and the same. From these words all knowledge is deduced. That which is close in space or time, by interaction or observation is more a part of the Self than that which is distant. The Self is all knowledge and that which must be so through consistency. At the moment of birth only the future has meaning. At the moment of death only the past has meaning. In the middle of life, happiness is hope for the close future and fond memories of the recent past. The Self is Everything. All that exists is the Self. That which is part of the Self has become so through Interaction, communication through Language and the Senses. The Self can only look at the Universe as a constituent part of it. He cannot abstract himself out and look within for this makes no sense. Chapter 19 Conclusion So what have we learned? 'I dunno, you tell me.' We've learned that particles are blurry and sometimes wavy. That you can have blurry combinations of particles. That forces are actually the absorption and emission of particles. That the universe began with the super- substance which is what the centre of 'black' holes are made from (and that black holes aren't actually black). We've learned that gravity vanishes at very very small distances. That mass and possibly waviness is

caused by the interaction of particles with the Higgs field. That the Higgs particle is composed of a pair of gravitinos. We've learned that the weight of an interaction must add up to four. That the interaction-weight of a particle is 2 minus its spin. That the 'weight principle' can be proved using super-dimensions. That we must use quaternion dimensions to include all known particles. We've learned about the philosophy of the Self. About how to be happy. About why the universe exists at all. We've learned about the fate principle. And we've learned about how it all came about. Is that enough for you? 'It will do I suppose. In fact, it was a very good story all round. Although it could have done with a love interest I think.' And what of the future? Now that we have the Theory of the Universe, the way science is taught in schools could be radically altered. Traditionally, science was taught in a historical way in that we learnt the most ancient theories first. First early Greek ideas, then skipping a few thousand years, the Renaissance which featured the brilliant artist and scientist Leonardo DaVinci, next the Newtonian period and then up to Victorian times with Faraday and electricity and magnetism. Finally we learn about the concept of atoms and sub- atomic particles. Various people such as Richard Feynman have tried to turn things on their head over the years. Why not, he asked, start with the fundamental concept of atoms and then build up the theories of heat, electricity and so forth from that? The 'Feynman Lectures on Physics' in which he tried out his new ideas turned the teaching method on its head, which is quite astounding considering that most of the undergraduates for whom the lectures were intended stopped going to them because they found them too difficult. The problem with doing things this way around is that you need to start with a fundamental concept, in other words a Theory of Everything. In those days there was no such theory. The principle that 'everything is made of atoms' is a good one but it is not entirely true. Many things such as light, electricity, the sun are not made of atoms. It is strange to think that a course teaching the History of physics would be taught in the complete reverse order of a course teaching the Theory of Everything. I'm sure that one day the basics of the Theory would be taught in secondary schools*. In a few years when the Theory undergoes further simplification, I can envisage a day when bright children of ten years old will be able to learn the Theory. There will, I predict, also be a revival of the teaching of quaternions. (At the moment all the books about quaternions are stored away in back rooms of University Libraries for which you need permission to enter.) For some reason quaternions are not seen as sensible mathematics. Most scientists will tell you they are unnecessary, but with the invention of quaternion-superspace I think they'll be back with a vengeance In terms of experimental science, the next big breakthrough could be the discovery of the Higgs particle or the 2 gravitinos which I have postulated that it is made from. After this there will be no more particles to find, apart from the graviton which probably can't be observed in any normal way. So once this has happened I would recommend to any government that they cease funding the particle accelerators. The only reason that they could have of staying open is to disprove the Theory which as far as I'm concerned is un- disprovable. Perhaps they might find a commercial use for them such as giant ray guns or something. In terms of theoretical physics the next breakthrough would be the determination of the particle masses and constants from the Equation. In terms of actual predictions it is very hard to see where the Theory can be tested. The only places where the theory predicts new phenomena are near the edges of black holes and at the beginning of the universe. Most other predictions might be too small to observe. In terms of mathematics I can see a flood of new mathematical theorems being invented to explain the superstructure of the Theory of Everything. I am looking forward to seeing what uses, if any, quaternion-superspace has in other areas of mathematics. By translating the Theory between string and particle models it may

open up new areas and provide links between geometry, topology and other topics. In the longer term as the competition is over, so-to-speak, and the Theory has been found, I can see a decline in the interest in physics. Once everything has been found out there will no longer be a way to make your name in physics. Also, it will no longer be possible to invent bizarre new theories because all theories must now comply with the Theory of Everything. There are also a few commercial uses for the Theory. One of the most obvious is the translation of the Theory into a computer program. This program should then be able to answer any simple question about the Universe. I'm not sure how long the calculations would take but it would probably be a task for a super-computer, if not several. My favourite use of the Equation would be the Theory-of-the-UniverseT-Shirt. And if no-ones making them within 5 years I'll bloody well make them myself! We could also have the Theory-of-the- Universe-Mug and the Theory-of-theUniverse-Stationary-Set. I'm sure the film and soundtrack would follow. I am also looking forward to the day when an examination appears with the question 'Derive the Theory of Everything from first principles. You have 2 hours.' It will become the ultimate status symbol to be a holder of a Degree in Everything (MScE). What about practical uses of the Equation. Can it be used to build a super-atomic bomb (like Einstein's E=mc2 enabled)? I doubt it since it doesn't offer that much new practical information. The atomic bomb, remember, wasn't made from sub atomic particles but ordinary everyday Uranium ore that you can dig out of the ground. It was the process of bringing all that Uranium together that created the power and instability of the bomb. Probably the next big step in bomb technology would be an antimatter device. Once the scientists have found a suitable way of containing antimatter for long periods of time and an efficient way of producing it, the power of that bomb could be limitless. I doubt that a bomb of this type would be produced within the next hundred years at least. It is customary to end your book or article with a final amusing or witty remark. But I can't think of one and anyway, I hate all that nonsense. Bye! *That's High schools for American readers. Appendix I Tables and Diagrams This table shows the ordering of all the types of elementary particles in the Universe from which everything is made of. The matter-particles are on the left and the force-particles are on the right. They are linked by super-symmetry. Note the three generations of matter-particles and how they relate to the twelve forceparticles in the same way as the graviton relates to the two predicted new particles: the gravitinos. Triangle of Supergravity Theories This shows all the consistent Super-Gravity theories possible. The largest 'real' Super-Gravity theory is 11D Supergravity which people thought must be the correct theory since it was the largest possible - even though it predicted none of the known particles. The next two rows show how I extended these theories into different number systems to produce the final 4D (quaternion) Supergravity which predicts all of the particles in the table above. 4D (real)8D (real)11D (real)4D (complex)6D (complex)4D (quaternion)Pictures and Diagrams A '3-particle' interaction. The emission of light from an electron. The Theory of Everything Equation People have often wondered whether there was a simple formulae for the Theory of Everything that can neatly be expressed on a T-Shirt such as Albert Einstein's famous E=mc2. Well, the simplest formulae I could come up with, without inventing new symbols is: This is the 'Action' which neatly expresses the sum of all possible interactions

happening at all possible places in space and time. As an explanation of some of this equation, the first '4' represents the 4 space-time dimensions and the last two '4's represent the 4 super-space dimensions and their 4 mirror images which indicate that the 'weight' of an interaction must add up to 4. B is the superfield matrix (including a derivative) which can be expanded in terms the superdimensions h. The super-field, B, has overall weight 0. This equation embodies the 'weight principle' and the 'quaternion' principle in one simple equation. (The quaternion part of the ordinary dimensions actually becomes irrelevant.) Writing the equation is the easy part - solving it, now that's another matter! An representation of a blurry particle. This one appears to be in two places at once! Table of spins and interaction weights. ParticleSpinWeightGraviton20Gravitino1Forces11Matter1The spin-direction in terms of the tiny sphere model of the electron. Table showing how the force-particles correspond to rotations in quaternion-space. xyztK?3 Weak Force ParticlesJI8 Gluons1(1 photon)This shows that there is space for more particles which might exist at very high energies before the symmetry is 'broken'. Appendix II Some Mathematics You don't really need to know about these but I thought you might be interested in them anyway. A function f of a variable x is written fx for instance fx = x2+3x-2. An operator M of a function f is written M[f[x]] for instance M[f[x]] = f fx+3(fx)2. A super-operator S of an operator M is written S[M([f[(x) ]])] for exmaple S[M([f[(x) ]])] = M(M[f[(x)]]) + fx + 3 It gets a terribly messy after that with loads of curly brackets flying about the place. The number of pairs of brackets needed is a Fibbonacci number 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, Where each number is the sum of the 2 numbers before it. We need a few more conventions when dealing with functions of more than one variable or operators of more than one function. I could see that this notation might be useful for computer algebra programs but perhaps less useful for normal working out. The Prime Number Formula The nth prime number can be given by the following 'simple' formula for nm3. Basically this formula counts the number of primes under each prime until the number of primes reaches n and so this will be the nth prime number. Deeper layers of the formula check to see if a number is prime (using Wilson's prime number theorem). Finding this formula is a construction problem in that we have not tried to prove anything here. This formula probably serves no use whatsoever. I have simplified it as much as I can though it still involves 3 layers of sums and products. There is also a hidden product since n!=1%2%3% %n. If you have the time you should try to memorise this formula so that you can produce it at a suitable occasion. Blurb Had any deep thoughts lately? The author of this book has. This is the story of one persons journey as he travels, thoughtwise, to the outer reaches of the Universe and the inner depths of the Self. Glossary Complex Number. Just as ordinary numbers can be arranged on a number-line, complex numbers can be arranged on a number-plane. The rules for adding and multiplying these numbers involve translations, rotations and scalings. Ordinary numbers are a subset of complex numbers. Complex Supergravity. Supergravity with complex-dimensions. They can exist in 4 or 6 complex dimensions.

Derivative. The difference of some quantity between two very close regions of space. It is used to express how this quantity changes over space and time. It's main use in particle physics is to express how waves move in space and time. It has weight 1. Fate principle. The idea that the choices that the universe makes are for a purpose and that purpose is to preserve the existence of the Self. Field. The distribution of a number of similar blurry particles. The electromagnetic field is the distribution of photons. Force. Due to the exchange of particles between one another, it appears as if there is a mysterious 'force' pulling or pushing the particles together or apart. F-Theory. A complex version of M-Theory in 6 complex dimensions in which the interaction weights sum to 6. Higgs particle. A hypothetical particle that is predicted to give particles mass through interaction with it. It may be composed of a pair of gravitino particles. General Relativity. Invented by Albert Einstein, this is a theory of gravity which incorporates special relativistic principles. It can be described in terms of graviton- interactions which have weight 2. Gravitino. One of the 2 particles with spin 1. They have not yet been discovered (Dec 2001) but are believed to be the constituents of the Higgs particle. Graviton. The particle which is responsible for the gravitational force. It is a spin 2 particle. Gravity. A force which acts attractively on all particles according to their amount of mass and movement. It is caused by the absorption and emission of graviton particles. Interaction weights. A number given to a particle equal to 2 minus the spin of that particle. The sum of the weights of the particles in an interaction gives the weight of that interaction. In terms of Superstring interactions, the number of open ends of the string is twice the interaction weight. Pre-Geometric. A Theory without derivatives. The movement of waves is determined by interactions with a background field such as the Higgs field. Prime Number. A number, bigger than 1, which cannot be made from the product of smaller numbers. For instance 6 is not a prime number since 2%3 = 6 whereas 7 is a prime number. Quantum mechanics. The theory which tells us how to calculate with blurry-wavey particles. Quark. A constituent of a proton or neutron. There are 3 quarks in one of these. 'Up'- quarks have electric charge 2/3 and 'down'-quarks have electric charge -1/3. There are 2 more generations of quarks. Quaternions. The extension of complex numbers into four dimensions. There are no more extensions into higher dimensions in which division is well defined. Q-Theory. 'The Theory of Everything.' It can be described as a four dimensional super- quaternion theory in which the interactions sum to four. The equation for this theory is in appendix A. It can be viewed as interacting particles or geometrically as interacting multidimensional membranes. Mass. The tendency of a particle to resist movement. A massless particle such as a photon cannot resist movement and so always travels at the speed of light. Mass may be caused by interaction with Higgs particles. Membranes. A point is a 0 dimensional object. A string is a 1 dimensional object. A sheet, membrane or surface is a 2 dimensional object. The concept can also be extended into more dimensions. M-Theory. A theory first formulated in terms of membrane interactions. It is an 11 dimensional theory in which the weights of all interactions sum to 5. Self. As in 'myself'. The Self assumes a fundamental part of philosophy since it is impossible to prove the existence of anything apart from it. It is called 'the observer' in quantum mechanics. Superstrings. A theory assumes that the fundamental constituents of the Universe are tiny little strings and uses these to calculate particle interactions. The string and particle descriptions are alternative descriptions of nature which

yield identical results. Special Relativity. Developed by Albert Einstein, this theory combines space and time into four dimensions and explains why nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It also predicted the equivalence of mass and movement given by the equation: E=mc2. Spin. The spin of the particle determines how much symmetry the particle has. This determines what affect this particle has in interactions. For example, the force given by gravitons which has spin 2 is always attractive. The force given by spin 1 particles can be either attractive or repulsive. The spin is 2 minus the interaction weight. Supergravity. A theory which extends General Relativity by incorporating supersymmetry. Supergravity theories can exists in different dimensions the most interesting being 4, 8 and 11. The weights of the particle interactions in 11 dimensions vary because it is not a complete theory but an approximation of MTheory. Supersymmetry. A rotation has weight 0. A translation has weight 1. A supersymmetry operation has weight and so transforms matter-particles into force-particles. Theory of Everything. A grandiose name for the theory of elementary particle interactions which must include, among other things, gravity, light, matter and mass. Q-Theory is the most promising candidate. The theory was so difficult to find since some particles have not been discovered as yet such the Higgs. Weight. See interaction weight.