Pacemaker or Autowaves, Biophysical and Noetic Curvature, and Shockwaves

For the first time, it has been shown by researchers at UC San Diego that regular electrical oscillatory waves in the brain are a requirement for the proper firing of neurons that provide a nodal grid that acts as a conformal mapping as a kind of spatial sensory compass. There are a number of profound implications of this development which I will attempt to illustrate here.

The first broad implication has to do with the concept of a conformal mapping per se. Gauss showed that the natural alternation of negative to positive curvature of surfaces that we encounter everywhere in nature may be conformally mapped via normals to a tangent plane onto a unit hypersphere. (Hilbert gives a visual illustration of this in his book Geometry and the Imagination.) Riemann continued and expanded upon this concept to evolve the so-called Riemann surface function, which provides a framework for a rigorous network of nodes or branch points that allow functional passage from imaginary sheets (imaginary understood here in the sense of the complex plane) on this Gaussian unitary sphere. Now, pause here and consider how this non Euclidean geometric model might apply to the research cited above. What do we have but such a one to one mapping by our mental sensorium of the "outer space" through which we must navigate. As we move through this space, neurons can fire appropriately to provide layer upon layer of continuous maps so that we may consciously access a memory through the processing of  electrical impulses at these nodes. I will return to this theme shortly after a necessary ellipsis below.

This, I hope, aptly illustrates what to most readers is a remarkable sort of prescience of the genius of a Gauss and a Riemann. However, this quality of thinking needs to be demystified, if humanity is to meet the pressing requirements of the mission of getting off this planet and colonizing space, such that these apparently inaccessible powers of mind become the common property of all. Gauss and Riemann built upon the revolution in scientific methodology introduced by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Here, I must point out that the attempt to characterize Cusa as a Christian "mystic" by modern academics is a completely obfuscatory slander, either resulting from ignorant incompetence or worse intentional malevolence. Ironically, it is Cusa's concept that the microcosm and the macrocosm are necessarily intimately connected in their mutually evolving creative development that laid the foundation for breaking the chains of the destructive and insane precepts of Ptolemaic/Euclidean mystical scholasticism. This too, followed upon Dante's revolutionary ecumenical characterization in the Paradisio, where he foreshadowed Kepler's and Einstein's relativity by placing his frame of reference on the moon and thereby dispelling the mythology that there is some mystical priority of earth's place somehow mirrored  in a pantheon of fixed feudal relationships. Thus, Cusa promoted the return to the Platonic/Pythagorean  measurement of the curvature of the earth by the very same Gaussian normal vector to the tangent plane method by Eratosthenes in Egypt some 1700 years earlier. It is no accident, that Cusa recognized that what was to become the colonization of the new world was a necessary flanking precursor of the universal rights of humanity for development that he enunciated in his writings. This method of Cusa of comprehending and hypothesizing the underlying continuous creative composition of the physical macrocosm and noetic microcosm then, constitutes the basis for a true scientific method of investigation. This revolutionary method so challenges the authority of the establishment arbiters of the second law of thermodynamic plodding, Ockhamite sense certainty method that it is all but forbidden in accepted "peer reviewed" publications to merely allude to these actual facts.

Returning to the matter at hand, I turn next to the question of the pacemaker wave referenced above or what many Russian scientists have labeled the autowave. Again, here in writing of wave phenomena, I must return to the towering figure of Bernhard Riemann. Before there was any physical proof of sonar/pressure shockwaves, Riemann used his method of starting from elements of known physical constraints to adumbrate how shockwaves would develop. He reasoned in his paper  from 1860 "The propagation of planar air waves of finite amplitude" that there is a sort of limit imposed for the propagation of waves through a medium. Furthermore, if the source of propagation of wave exceeded this limit a bunching up of waves would occur that might disrupt the medium itself. This we know today, of course, as the familiar sonic boom. (As an update, I learned that shockwaves emanating from the sun in the early solar system have been identified as responsible for stripping volatile elements from chondrites  that then coalesced to form planets.)

Let us extrapolate this principal given what we have uncovered of some other wavelike phenomena since Riemann's time. The general phenomena of solitonic waves, I believe are examples of extreme wave formations that tend to bridge what Vernadsky characterized as the disparate domains of the lithosphere and biosphere (and as I believe also have a correlative in the noosphere.) It has recently been hypothesized for instance that soliton/anti soliton energetics in phage dynamics can account for transitions from active lysogenic to dormant lytic states. Long lived relatively stable wave phenomena that underlie the proper functioning of the biosphere are evident, whether they be aortic pacemaker waves, calcium brainwaves or quantum wave phenomena along the double helix of DNA.

A question that we may pose, building upon Riemann's work, is what happens in the biophysical domain when the velocity of wave propagation tends to surpass the transparency for propagation in that medium? Certainly, the catastrophic malfunction of a heart attack and epilepsy, for example, are evidence that  these pacemaker waves have dynamically overloaded the biological medium. The means to solving such anomalies, is of course the appropriate province of medical research. Further we see similar destructive such anomalies in the domain of Vernadsky's lithosphere, for what are hurricanes but a kind of soliton dynamic, similarly earthquakes are characterized by disruptive gravity waves, solar flares as plasma wave events, and are not the very phenomena of black holes that can rip apart the center of galaxies themselves a type of soliton? Likewise here, it must be a mission of science to secure humanity against such threats.

Now, finally let us drive the analogy with these anomalous soliton-like formations into the domain of the noosphere. One can think of the radiation of technology in human society over time as operating similarly to the kind of standing waves in the brain. For a society, the successive "waves" of transmission of knowledge through culture and education provides the preconditions  for its continued functioning and survival. However, a crisis is encountered whenever there is a limit of resource transparency for the prevailing mode of technology. As LaRouche has shown, what constitutes resources must be redefined via a breakthrough in scientific creativity. This is the quality that uniquely distinguishes the noosphere. This is what Cusa characterizes as an immanent power of humanity. But it is a mission which is also a choice. Nowhere else is there freedom in this sense. And it is truly this gift that Cusa proffered when he collaborated with Toscanelli to revive Eratosthenes non Euclidean method to send Columbus to the new world so that humanity might escape the clutches of those that would have us be slaves.

Plasma soliton kink breather at the heliosphere?

To my mind, once again, this tremendous bit of astrophysical research bespeaks a scale free, self-similarity self-organizing soliton-like plasma process:

Knot in the ribbon at the edge of the solar system 'unties' (Update)

September 30, 2010 by J. Kelly Beatty

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Roughly the size of a card table, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer is the latest in NASA’s series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

(PhysOrg.com) -- The unusual "knot" in the bright, narrow ribbon of neutral atoms emanating in from the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space appears to have "untied," according to a paper published online in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

When NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) on October 19, 2008, space physicists held their collective breath for never-before-seen views of a collision zone far beyond the planets, roughly 10 billion miles away. That’s where the solar wind, an outward rush of charged particles and magnetic fields continuously spewed by the Sun, runs into the flow of particles and fields that permeates interstellar space in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.

No spacecraft had ever imaged the collision zone, which occurs in a region known as the heliosheath, because it emits no light. But the two detectors on IBEX are designed to “see” what the human eye cannot. The interaction of the solar wind and interstellar medium creates energetic neutral atoms of hydrogen, called ENAs, that zip away from the heliosheath in all directions. Some of these atoms pass near Earth, where IBEX records their arrival direction and energy. As the spacecraft slowly spins, the detectors gradually build up pictures of the ENAs as they arrive from all over the sky.

Mission scientists got their first surprise six months after launch, once the spacecraft had scanned enough overlapping strips of sky to create a complete 360° map. Instead of recording a relatively even distribution all the way around, as expected, IBEX found that the counts of ENAs — and thus the strength of the interaction in the heliosheath — varied dramatically from place to place. The detectors even discovered a long, enhanced “ribbon,” accentuated by an especially intense hotspot or “knot,” arcing across the sky. (see IBEX Explores Galactic Frontier, Releases First-Ever All-Sky Map)

Now scientists have finished assembling a second complete sweep around the sky, and IBEX has again delivered an unexpected result: the map has changed significantly. Overall, the intensity of ENAs has dropped 10% to 15%, and the hotspot has diminished and spread out along the ribbon. Details of these findings appear in the September 27th issue of Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics).

One of the clear features visible in the IBEX maps is an apparent knot in the ribbon. Scientists were anxious to see how this structure would change with time. The second map showed that the knot in the ribbon somehow spread out. It is as if the knot in the ribbon was literally untangled over only 6 months! This visualization shows a close-up of the ribbon (green and red) superimposed on the stars and constellations in the nighttime sky. The animation begins by looking toward the nose of the heliosphere and then pans up and left to reveal the knot. The twisted structure superimposed on the map is an artist's conception of the tangled up ribbon. The animation then shows this structure untangling as we fade into the second map of the heliosphere. Credit: IBEX Science Team/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio/ESA

“We thought we might detect small changes occurring gradually throughout the Sun’s 11-year-long activity cycle, but not over just 6 months,” notes David McComas (Southwest Research Institute), principal investigator for the IBEX mission and the paper’s lead author. “These observations show that the interaction of the Sun with the interstellar medium is far more dynamic and variable than anyone envisioned.”

In the past, space physicists had little notion of what to expect along the boundary where the Sun’s own magnetic bubble, the heliosphere, meets interstellar space. Even though the solar wind travels outward at roughly a million miles per hour, it still takes about a year to reach the heliosphere’s edge. Also, the encounter zone within the heliosheath is believed to be several billion miles thick (roughly Pluto’s distance from the Sun). Finally, the ENAs take another six months to many years to complete the return trip back to Earth, depending on their direction and energy.

With ENAs starting out from such a wide range of distances and traveling back toward Earth at different speeds, IBEX mission scientists had expected that any highs and lows in intensity arising within the heliosheath would be hopelessly smeared out in the spacecraft’s all-sky maps. So they’re elated by the variations and changes seen so far by IBEX. These early results hint that the solar wind and the interstellar flow might be interacting in a thinner layer than many researchers had imagined possible.

McComas says the dropoff in intensity between the two all-sky maps perhaps makes sense, because the Sun is only now emerging from an unusually long period of very low activity and a correspondingly weak solar wind. The fewer the solar-wind particles that reached the heliosheath in recent years, the fewer the ENAs that got created. “We didn’t plan it this way,” says McComas, “but it’s an almost perfect situation, in that we’re seeing the interaction in its simplest state — before trying to interpret what turns out to be a much more complicated interaction than anticipated.”

If IBEX remains healthy, and if the team gets approval to continue well past its planned two-year mission, then the changes it’s seeing in the distant heliosheath should become more dramatic as solar activity ramps up later in this decade.

“The surprising results from IBEX show that there is still exciting science that can be done with small missions,” comments Eric Christian, a member of the spacecraft’s research team and the program’s Deputy Mission Scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is clearly a huge success for the Explorer program.” IBEX is one of a dozen Explorer-class missions operated by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“The public might think that scientists make measurements and instantly know what’s going on, but that is not how science really works,” McComas observes. “We thought the outer heliosphere would be stable over time — and IBEX is showing us that it’s not. This is changing the game completely.”

More information: The paper, "The evolving heliosphere: Large-scale stability and time variations observed by the Interstellar Boundary Explorer," by D.J. McComas, M. Bzowski, P. Frisch, G.B. Crew, M.A. Dayeh, R. DeMajistre, H.O. Funsten, S.A. Fuselier, M. Gruntman, P. Janzen, M.A. Kubiak, G. Livadiotis, E. Mobius, D.B. Reisenfeld, and N.A. Schwadron, was published online Sept. 29 in the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research.

Provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (news : web)

Elephants hear through their feet!

This research appears on first glance to be quite straightforward reasoning from the premise that extends the concept of ground based vibrational communication from bugs to mammals. But, if you review Riemann's philosophical writings and interpolate his work on hearing, then you get an interesting congruence with this research. His view of time being relative to the species and the electromagnetic wave nature of sound as primary combine quite elegantly here. By the way, the notion that all of the biological substrate persists as a kind of soliton is I think a wonderfully apt characterization.

A Solitonic Multiconnected Manifold

 Could it be hypothesized that black holes are a type vortical soliton that connects via a branch to another location perhaps transformed into dark matter (which has no appearance as substantial matter?)

I point to Riemann’s surface functional manifolds upon an multi connected domain. Viewing space as a physical process that is evolving, it is likely that its metrics are lengthening.

Elasticity, Stem Cells, Telomeres, and Loss of Histones

Two results from separate investigations were announced last week that seem to have a peculiar similarity. One showed that stem cells respond and multiply when their environment causes them to stretch. The other showed that as telomeres shorten, the production of histones declines. These are what wind the DNA tightly in a spool like fashion. As histones are lost the DNA unwinds, causing loss of fidelity in transcription and hence epigenetic changes to the genome. So the positive or negative response to stretching or winding and age appears to be similar here.

One more piece of intriguing research in this vein. The elastic energy of DNA itself has now been measured. And it kinks as it is stretched by a critical amount. This to me appears to point strongly in the direction of the soliton model for DNA.

Analog Wave Forms Versus Digital "Information" Models of the Brain

Two recent studies reinforce my previous hypotheses regarding the underlying biophysical meta-stable soliton shockwave nature of brain/mind duality. The first study  from MIT showed that in rats the peak of oscillatory brain waves coincide with the activity of successful problem solving.

This coheres with what I have adduced from the principle embedded in Riemann's work on supersonic shockwaves. To wit: the pre-existing medium of activity is transparent for learned behaviors but must be somehow transformed to allow for new previously unknown behaviors. The wave forms associated with this new process are travelling faster than the medium can transmit. Therefore the oscillations bunch up and the medium undergoes a  transformation via induced plasticity. Once that occurs, the medium is now transparent to the newly learned behavior. (The use of a rat's brainwaves, of course only provides an extremely crude biophysical substrate for human "learning.")

The second study from UCLA, whether the said researchers are aware of it or not, provides a devastating refutation of so-called connectionist artificial intelligence brain network models.

Rather than presupposing a fatuously crude base 2 input-output, on-off "deep grammar" model for neuronal function, it proceeds from the actual physical evidence that there are harmonically tuned analog wave forms that are optimized for maximal learning.

The puerile attempt to model human thought, let alone lower forms of mammalian mental behavior, from the standpoint of a digital model is inherently fallacious because mathematics itself is not and can never be a substitute for the process of universal harmonic, and in the case of humanity, willful, ongoing self development. To coin a phrase, the very neurons and dendrites cry out this truth. 

A Search for the Higher Dimensional Non Linear Manifold or Aesthetic Intelligibility

The tool that Bernhard Riemann adopted of n+1 multiply connected manifold affording an instance of a kind of phase space degree of freedom is really but a mathematical metaphor for the underlying reality of ongoing non linear development of the universe. It is therefore quite disheartening to see the gruesome distortion that the Royal Society's so-called M Theory makes of supposed extra dimensional strings. These folks seem to have gone down the proverbial rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll and never come back. The very same Lewis Carroll who was in reality as Charles Dodgson a dedicated hater of the revolution that Riemann and collaborators created.

Today I came across a remarkable work of mathematical biophysics that for most laymen would seem utterly incomprehensible. It is the development of method for mapping the non linear molecular motion of protein "metadynamics in the conformational space nonlinearly dimensionally reduced by Isomap."

However it is in essence no more mysterious than Brunelleschi's building of Il Doumo in Florence or his revolutionary development of perspectiva in the fifteenth century.

I have for some time now on this blog remarked that the quality of multi-dimensional connectedness of biophysics is uniquely suited for a treatment by Riemannian methods. The manner in which biophysical processes known as proteins interact on the level of the "proteome" wonderfully illustrates this. It has further been my keen interest in certain anomalous types of phases of living, non living, and intellectual substance that has led me to share new examples in these pages with you. The model of the way in which in Renaissance emerges from a dark age in the history of humanity I have likened to a shockwave that is meta-stable in acting upon economy and culture. It is analogous to a long lived soliton in its power to transform the practice and thinking of humanity. The creation of the radically new and singular occurs as a culmination of a lawful development of preceding ideas. The closest we can come to the emotion associated with this is in the music of Beethoven, especially his Fidelio Overture No. 3 conducted by Furtwangler, late quartets and piano works.

I find the fact that the network of molecular motions illustrated from the referenced paper is in the form of a horn torii is lawful. This is precisely what I have hypothesized as a model for non linear development  in these pages. If this direction is synthesized with the class of higher least action Abelian physical functions, one of which called the catenary that the aforementioned Brunelleschi used to solve the construction, then humanity may once again create a Renaissance out of the current nightmarish abyss into which we seem to be hurtling like a somnambulist.

 Three-dimensional Isomap embeddings of trans,trans-1,2,4-trifluorocyclooctane. Each ball represents one of 8375 conformations of the molecule. Each conformation was connected to ten nearest neighbors (measured as RMSD) to form a graph, which is shown as sticks. Threedimensional Isomap embeddings were obtained by multidimensional scaling of pairwise geodesic distances between points measured as the shortest paths on the graph. Isomap embedings were rotated by angle (0.00, 2.40, –0.55 rad) for better clarity