Though I find Lynds' arguments unconvincing, his ideas are getting sufficient exposure that I think It's appropriate to post them here on SCIY. ~ ronjon
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...physicist Peter Lynds ... says that his model not only solves Kant's infinite versus finite universe paradox, but also resolves the mystery of the origin of the universe itself. Lynds' model predicts that the universe will contract toward a big crunch, but instead of a singularity ever being reached, events will reverse and the universe will again expand from a subsequent big bang. Unlike previous cyclic models, Lynds' does not breach any physical laws, as his model has entropy continuing to increase as a result of events being reversed.

If he's correct, then we live in a universe where there is no past or present, and one that is deterministic, even if it is impossible for us to recognize it as such. But there are a number of pressing questions in regard to Lynds' model. How does it fit in with current research that claims that the universe will expand forever? Does Lynds' model imply that the universe somehow "knows" to play events over and over? And will we all have to relive our lives backward? ...   more »

#1.Steve Jobs
Chairman and CEO, Apple

During the first two decades of his remarkable 30-year career, the Apple Inc. founder twice altered the direction of the computer industry. In 1977 the Apple II kicked off the PC era, and the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since. Along the way Jobs conceived of "desktop publishing," gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks. As a side gig he bankrolled Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Since returning to Apple in 1997, he has changed the dynamics of consumer electronics with the iPod, and persuaded the music industry, the television networks, and Hollywood to distribute their wares with the iTunes Music Store. With his hugely successful Apple Stores, he gave the big-box boys a lesson in high-margin, high-touch retailing. And this year, at the height of his creative and promotional powers, Jobs orchestrated Apple's entry into the cellular telephone business with the iPhone. ...   more »

Auroville's development is inextricably intertwined with the surrounding villages, which are classified as part of a "most backward area in need of development" by the Tamil Nadu Government. There are 13 villages in the immediate area of Auroville, comprising about 40,000 people, and altogether 40 villages in the bioregional area. Some 350 people from the surrounding villages have joined or been born in Auroville.

Almost 5,000 local people are employed by Auroville, from sweepers to engineers; most of them have been trained in Auroville to improve their qualifications and skills. Most important is that Auroville provides for the young of this rural area a real and viable alternative to the migration to the cities and urban centers, which is so often the only option for those seeking self improvement and employment. ...   more »

Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ...   more »

VALENCIA, Spain -- The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace, a Nobel-winning U.N. scientific panel said in a landmark report released Saturday, warning of inevitable human suffering and the threat of extinction for some species.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said climate change imperils "the most precious treasures of our planet" and called on the United States and China _ the world's two biggest polluters _ to do more to fight it.

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's megacities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says. ...   more »

Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades. But two new studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.

One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.

Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school. The studies might even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes of disruptive behavior in some children...   more »

Prapanna Smith,  MAED

Principal, Integral Elementary School

Rainbow Kids Integral Preschool

http://www.IntegralElementary.com

http://www.RainbowKidsSchool.com

Office: 858-450-4321

Cell: 858-204-2096

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I recommend viewing this short 30-second video about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) "Give One Get One" project. See the previous article posted to SCIY for more details about this very worthy project.  ~ ronjon

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One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time.

Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. ...

Kim and I just placed our order for this. Not only is $200 of it tax deductible, but T-Mobile is also giving you one year of complimentary HotSpot WiFi access with your order, more than a $350 value! I highly recommend this amazing, state of the art computer.  ~ ronjon   more »

China will become the world’s biggest carbon polluter this year, overtaking the United States, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a bleak forecast of soaring global demand for fossil fuels. The rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies will raise global energy demand by 50 per cent by 2030, the agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook. India and China alone will account for almost half of the increase.

The agency pointed a finger at soaring coal demand, which threatens to upset carbon reduction targets, as it painted an alarming picture of a future of energy insecurity, soaring oil prices and a massive increase in carbon emissions. The dash towards prosperity in Asia will be fuelled by hydrocarbons - and mainly by increased burning of coal – with an inexorable rise in carbon emissions, hastening climate change.

Accelerating demand for oil, which will reach 116 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030, up 32 per cent, will require huge investments to keep pace, the IEA said, and the sums are increasing. Inflation has taken its toll, and the agency reckons that $5.4 trillion (£2.6 trillion) must be spent to raise capacity, up a quarter from the estimate last year. It gives warning that plans to raise output from new projects may not compensate for the decline in existing fields.

“A supply-side crunch in the period to 2014, involving an abrupt escalation in oil prices, cannot be ruled out,” the IEA said in its report. ...    more »

SMALLER than an atom, they arrive with the energy of a tennis ball served by a champion. When they hit the atmosphere they create showers of daughter particles that zap mountaineers and people in aeroplanes. And no one knows where they come from—nor how, in apparent defiance of the laws of physics, they get to this planet in the first place.

Actually, that last sentence is no longer true. The super-particles in question are a particular type of high-energy cosmic ray and fittingly, given their extreme properties, their origin has now been worked out by a team of 444 researchers from 17 countries, using the biggest piece of scientific apparatus on Earth—the Pierre Auger observatory, which occupies 3,000 square kilometres of western Argentina.

Ordinary cosmic rays are puny things. Indeed, they are not really “cosmic” at all. They originate from various events (supernovae and so on) within the Milky Way galaxy that is home to the Earth. A few, however, are real whoppers—the products of events far more powerful than occur in the Milky Way. These are the tennis-ball equivalents and their existence is a puzzle. ...   more »

...In physics, too, there is a Central Dogma, which I have dubbed ‘the evolutionary paradigm’. It is the notion that physics can be neatly divided into a kinematical part, which concerns the description of a physical system at an instant of time, and a dynamical part, which concerns the evolution of a physical system from earlier to later times.

The laws of physics are correlation laws. In classical physics, states are correlated deterministically, so earlier states can be used to predict later states (and later states can be used to retrodict earlier states). Quantum physics correlates measurement outcomes statistically, so earlier measurement outcomes can be used to predict the probabilities of the possible outcomes of later measurements (and later measurement outcomes can be used to retrodict the probabilities of the possible outcomes of earlier measurements). Because the quantum-mechanical correlation laws are genuinely probabilistic, they may not conform to the evolutionary paradigm.

And they don’t. For one thing, the time-symmetry of the laws of physics is at odds with the unidirectionality of the evolutionary paradigm, which has its roots in a physically unwarranted projection into the world of the way we perceive the world. (This casts doubt on the appropriateness of the evolutionary paradigm even for classical physics.) For another thing, the interpretation of a quantum state as an evolving physical state (rather than as a mere computational device) gives rise to no end of pseudo-questions (and gratuitous answers), such as the notorious questions of where and when and how (and with respect to which basis) the wave function collapses ...   more »

I can vouch for John Todd's research. I knew him back in the 70's and was impressed then with the quality of his work. His "Eco Machines" are the outcome of 30 years of research and trial and error experimentation. ~ ronjon

Social responsibility, sustainability, and 'natural capitalism' are becoming new models for governments and corporations in the 21st century...

The ECO Machine - a wastewater treatment system that naturally treats sewage and industrial waste to re-use quality. An important consideration as fresh water becomes one of the most important commodities in the new millennium...ECO Machines bring advanced wastewater treatment technology, and unsurpassed aesthetic, economic, and environmental advantages to companies, communities, and resorts both at home and internationally.

ECO Machines accelerate nature's own water purification process. Unlike chemical-based systems, ECO Machines incorporate helpful bacteria, fungi, plants, snails, clams, and fish that thrive by breaking down and digesting organic pollutants, pollutants that normally deprive the water of oxygen. This clean, simple approach efficiently transforms high-strength industrial wastewater and sewage into water clean enough to be recycled for reuse. ...   more »

SCIY's page views totaled 1,101,797 hits through the end of Oct.07. We had 18,696 Distinct Readers during the month of October 2007, a decrease of 9% from the month of September 2007. Concurrently, we had 83,839 page views in October, an increase of 5% over September, and 6,752 Total Megabytes transferred, a large increase of 24%. These stats imply that our average reader is spending more time on SCIY, an interesting trend. ...   more »

“Islamizing” modernity instead of modernizing Islam – preposterous! worries Professor Mohammed Arkoun. A refuge in poor countries, a rejection of “tele-techno-scientific reasoning” in rich countries, religiosity is spreading in the world at the expense of humanist values and philosophical thinking. ...   more »

...After more than two decades of working intensively with men and women who claim to want to transform and develop spiritually, I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons it is so challenging for us to attain and sustain higher levels of spiritual development is that we expect so much and are willing to give so little in order to get what we think we want. The truth is, it's hard to be happy. These days, it's become almost a truism that simply fulfilling our narcissistic and materialistic desires will not necessarily make us truly happy. But how many of us have really dug deeply enough to reconfigure our won ideas of what happiness means in light of a higher set of values than those held by our crazy culture? For our values to change in a way that is nothing less than dramatic, we have to be willing to make a hell of a lot of effort. More and more of us are turning to the spiritual dimension of life. But it is telling that many of the most popular expressions of postmodern spirituality are based on a philosophical perspective that encourages us to pursue the promise of effortless peace, happiness, and release rather than an engagement with the life process that would always require more from us.

Why, for the luckiest people who have ever been born, should happiness be a birthright? Why should our spiritual aspirations be focused on the pursuit of inner peace alone? Did God create the universe so that you and I, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, could be happy? Is that really all there is to this fourteen-billion-year process? And why is it that so many of us presume that we deserve to be happy in the first place? What is it that we have actually done to give us such an innate privilege? ...   more »