Metabiota harnesses data science, provides analytical tools, and delivers hands-on support, helping governments and businesses around the world mitigate and transfer the health and economic risks posed by infectious disease. The company is widely recognized in the public and private sectors, having helped to push the boundaries of insuring catastrophic risks, preparing for infectious disease threats, and catalysing public-private partnerships to protect global health security.
NTD | Minutes after Berenson posted for the first time following his reinstatement, he re-posted the words that triggered the ban.
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity,” he wrote.
Berenson was referring to the COVID-19 vaccines, which have proven increasingly unable to prevent infection from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Also known as the SARS-CoV-2, the virus causes COVID-19.
Though the vaccines have been authorized and approved for prevention of the virus, they’re actually recommended primarily for helping prevent severe disease among those who contract the illness.
Twitter had initially claimed that Berenson’s post was “misleading,” even though the company acknowledged that “studies indicate a reduction in vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant” of the virus.
Studies show that the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson shots—the only three available in the United States—provide little protection against Omicron, and that the protection quickly wanes.
Some studies indicate that the vaccinated are more likely to contract the virus after certain periods of time elapse following vaccination.
U.S. health authorities still recommend vaccination for virtually all Americans.
Berenson sued Twitter after being banned, claiming the company breached its contract with him as a user.
A federal judge tossed all of the claims except for the breach of contract one. Berenson and Twitter recently announced they’d agreed on a settlement in principle.
The details of the settlement have not yet been entered into the court docket, with the parties saying they’re still negotiating.
According to court filings, Berenson was told by a senior Twitter executive that posts that sparked controversy would not lead to him being banned from the platform. But Twitter began taking action against him after Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to President Joe Biden, said some of Berenson’s remarks were “horrifying,” first locking him out of his account and eventually enacting the ban.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Clinton appointee, said in a recent ruling that Berenson “plausibly avers that Twitter’s conduct here modified its contract with plaintiff and then breached that contract by failing to abide by its own five-strike policy and its specific commitments set forth through its vice president.”
NEJM | Social media and other digital platforms provide the opportunity to collect data on vaccine hesitancy in nearly real time70,71; they also allow new methods of analysis72 and the opportunity to investigate the effect of vaccine sentiment on actual vaccine uptake and vaccine-preventable diseases. Facebook collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland to collect survey data on a wide variety of behaviors related to the Covid-19 pandemic.73 Starting in January 2021, Facebook users who agreed to participate in the survey were asked about their attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines and reasons underlying vaccine hesitancy.
Although data collected on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, may not be representative, since the users of the platform are not a random sample of the population, the data have aligned well with other, less frequently compiled survey data that are available for select topics and populations. In addition, sometimes data collected through online platforms are the only available information about vaccine hesitancy (e.g., when large-scale surveys have not been conducted). Furthermore, the large samples and the speed with which data are collected and made available make real-time analysis possible for what has become a volatile topic. As data collected through social media platforms become more widely used, we anticipate that validation studies will be conducted, with improvements made in the sampling, weighting, and interpretation of the data.
The large volume of timely data on vaccine hesitancy has provided an opportunity to develop spatially detailed estimates of vaccine hesitancy (i.e., mapping by location). For the United States, surveys administered through Facebook have been used to estimate vaccine hesitancy according to week and ZIP code. These spatial analyses show that vaccine hesitancy varies substantially within a county. For example, vaccine hesitancy ranges from 7 to 49% across ZIP codes within the rural Stearns County, Minnesota. Such widespread variation within a county is common in all U.S. states (Figure 2).
Spatially refined estimates of vaccine hesitancy have proved to be useful in local efforts to increase vaccination rates.75,76 The information has been used by community outreach programs to tailor their efforts to local areas that have the greatest need. Other groups have used local patterns to help to decide where to provide mobile vaccination clinics and where to initiate other measures for reducing barriers to vaccination. Local information can also be used to monitor the effect of local interventions, including the effect of various types of vaccination mandates.
In the future, large and complex data sets on vaccine hesitancy, often referred to as big data, can be analyzed according to spatial identifiers such as ZIP code and various individual characteristics, including race or ethnic group, age, sex, and occupation, which can help to further microtarget vaccination outreach efforts. This information is also potentially critical for monitoring progress toward vaccine equity.
One of the various challenges in taking such an approach to scale and applying it globally is the inequity in the access to and reach of digital media. As the digital revolution unfolds globally, the global health community must keep pace. The consequences of not doing so are loud and clear, as we have seen in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic with regard to the rapid spread of misinformation and consequent vaccine hesitancy.
nature | Vaccine mandates do risk overly politicizing health policy, says MacDonald. But it is hard to accurately quantify the consequences such as social exclusion, loss of public trust or inequitable outcomes. Numerous other factors are at play, such as the way a government handled the pandemic overall, wider political campaigns against vaccination or mandates, or frustrations with the way that a mandate was implemented. Another crucial aspect of whether mandates are successful is the political skill and messaging used to introduce them.
Opposition to vaccines — and mandates — can also be a way of expressing displeasure with other aspects of civil society, says Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “All of a sudden everyone who had an issue with government has an issue with vaccines,” she says. Oliu-Barton says that some mandates seem like a referendum: “Do you like the government? You can say, ’no’, by not getting a shot.”
Ward has tried to gauge how the French public reacted to vaccination policies by using questionnaires. When asked if they felt relief, anger or regret when they got vaccinated, respondents who were vaccinated in early 2021 said they mostly felt relief. But most of those vaccinated later, especially after the government imposed health-pass requirements, reported anger or regret6. In a later poll conducted in March this year, more than 60% of respondents said they had felt at least somewhat ‘constrained’ to get vaccinated. Ward’s future work will further dissect why and how.
In Germany, Katrin Schmelz, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz, has led a unique series of surveys that tracked the evolving views of nearly 2,000 German residents over the course of the pandemic7.
The questionnaire showed that only around 3% of the population consistently opposed vaccination if it was voluntary. By contrast, each survey revealed that around 16% of people opposed mandatory vaccination — crucially, however, it was not always the same 16% of respondents who felt this way. Roughly half of respondents changed their minds over time — and the shifting variables most closely tied to support for mandates were trust in government and belief in vaccine effectiveness.
“Mandates are an essential part of public health policies,” says Schmelz, but her work also suggests that it was a good decision to make vaccination a personal choice initially. Polling before vaccines were available showed that 73% of German adults were OK with getting vaccinated voluntarily8 — which corresponded almost exactly to the fraction who were vaccinated before mandates were introduced. Schmelz says she believes that a sense of moral autonomy motivated these people to help battle the virus, and that mandating vaccination earlier would probably have reduced this motivation. “People respond to feeling distrusted by lowering their effort,” she says.
A major concern is that if a substantial proportion of society has lost trust in public institutions, this will make public-health policies harder to implement — in particular, other ongoing vaccine programmes. “Sentiments around vaccines are hugely tied to trust in government,” says Larson. “What’s the knock-on effect of this COVID experience on routine vaccination?”
Deciphering those longer trends might take time. Larson is awaiting the results of the Vaccine Confidence Project’s latest survey of overall attitudes to vaccines, which she thinks will be an indicator of how views have shifted.
Like so many aspects of the pandemic, decisions about mandates and their implementation have occurred at speed — amid a constantly shifting crisis. The legal requirements now being studied were introduced in the summer of 2021, when anxieties about the pandemic still ran deep, and such measures were more palatable. Available vaccines also offered protection against infection, not just against serious illness. With people becoming less afraid of COVID-19 and vaccines offering less protection against infection by Omicron variants, plans this spring to introduce new nationwide mandates in Austria and Germany, for example, were rejected or never enforced.
As concerns about the pandemic wane in many countries, researchers fear that research fatigue is setting in, too, not least when it comes to analysing the complex behavioural responses of people to the virus and mitigation strategies. Yet behavioural science is an essential part of the response to this pandemic and future ones. “People are tired,” MacDonald says, “I think everybody wants this done.” But what she’s more tired of is seeing governments not learning the lessons of previous public-health emergencies. “We need this analysis done.”
FT | “We do not like to get left behind when it comes to new technology,” she said.
The promise of cryptocurrencies as a wealth builder has been supercharged by celebrity endorsements, sponsorships and advertising. Prominent black Americans including the musicians Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, the boxer Floyd Mayweather, the actor Jamie Foxx and the film-maker Spike Lee have promoted crypto to their communities.
Lee appeared in commercials for crypto ATM operator Coin Cloud last year, saying that “old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down” and “systematically oppresses”, whereas digital assets are “positive, inclusive”. Last month, Jay-Z announced a partnership with former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to launch a “Bitcoin Academy” literacy programme in the Brooklyn public housing complex where he grew up.
Such celebrity endorsers have faced heavy criticism for getting paid to sell high-risk investments to people who may not have the resources to weather crypto’s volatility. “Ninety-eight per cent of these cryptocurrencies were not designed to do anything other than extract money from people’s bank accounts,” said Najah Roberts, a former financial adviser and the founder of cryptocurrency education centre Crypto Blockchain Plug. “This is not ‘get rich quick’,’’ Roberts added. “There are massive targeting ads that are targeting our community.”
Bellanton said it is not adverts but the prospect of financial freedom, a lack of the investment minimums common for mutual funds, and a feeling that the blockchain distributed ledger is more transparent than big banks that draws in first-time investors.
“The reason that minorities at a higher rate than others are adopting crypto is precisely because if you’re not already rich, it’s way cheaper to send [USD Coin, a stablecoin asset] than to send a wire,” said Brian Brooks, chief executive of blockchain company Bitfury, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month. “It’s just cheaper.
The entire system is cheaper and faster. It doesn’t have all these entry barriers where you can only get it if you’re already rich.” Despite the risk of losses, many black investors are staying invested in the market. Dennis McKinley, 41, has been buying the dip against the advice of his financial adviser. He said his crypto coins now constitute roughly 30 per cent of his overall portfolio, held alongside equities.
“Young black America is just now getting to a point where we have the amount of freedom to have the opportunity to invest in alternative strategies besides just real estate,” said McKinley, a small-business owner in Atlanta. “I think that it’s important to learn and get out there.”
The reason for halt of lending and exchange platform has many reasons as follow:
The continuous bad press has made community members uneasy and created a lack of confidence in the platform.
We have received two Cease and Desist letters, one from the Texas State Securities Board, and one from the North Carolina Secretary of State Securities Division. These actions have become a hindrance for the legal continuation of the platform.
Outside forces have performed DDos attacks on platform several times and have made it clear that these will continue. These interruptions in service have made the platform unstable and have created more panic inside the community.
Many in the cryptocurrency community have openly accused Bitconnnect of running a Ponzi scheme, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
The platform was powered by a token called BCC (not to be confused with BCH, or Bitcoin Cash), which is essentially useless now that the trading platform has shut down. In the last The token has plummeted more than 80% to about $37, down from over $200 just a few hours ago.
If you aren’t familiar with the platform, Bitconnect was an anonymously-run site where users could loan their cryptocurrency to the company in exchange for outsized returns depending on how long the loan was for. For example, a $10,000 loan for 180 days would purportedly give you ~40% returns each month, with a .20% daily bonus.
Bitconnect also had a thriving multi-level referral feature, which also made it somewhat akin to a pyramid scheme with thousands of social media users trying to drive signups using their referral code.
The platform said it generated returns for users using Bitconnnect’s trading bot and “volatility trading software”, which usually averaged around 1% per day.
Of course profiting from market fluctuations and volatility is a legitimate trading strategy, and one used by many hedge funds and institutional traders. But Bitconnect’s promise (and payment) of outsized and guaranteed returns led many to believe it was a ponzi scheme that was paying out existing loan interest with newly pledged loans.
The requirement of having BCC to participate in the lending program led to a natural spike in demand (and price) of BCC. In less than a year the currency went from being worth less than a dollar (with a market cap in the millions) to a all-time high of ~$430.00 with a market cap above $2.6B.
Bitconnect is officially closing up. They sent me 33 BCC for my $11k+ in loans. Worth $6600 and dropping by the second. Their exchange is down so the only option is to send the BCC to an external exchange.— LifeByAdam (@LifeByAdam1) January 16, 2018
TechnologyReview | Sports betting in Africa is not an entirely digital phenomenon: dingy betting parlors filled with underemployed youth have long been fixtures of the urban landscape. Increasingly, though, gambling has moved online, aided by the rapid spread of technologies like smartphones, high-speed internet, and mobile money platforms, which enable payments via phones without a bank account. Today, gambling happens almost anywhere: on college campuses, in far-flung villages, or even, as Kirwa admits with a hint of embarrassment, behind the wheel while driving. Experts say this ease of access is driving up participation and making betting more addictive across Africa—in economic powerhouses like Nigeria and South Africa; in poorer, more fragile states like the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and in soccer meccas such as Senegal, home to the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations champions, where online betting got a late start but is now growing by 50% each year.
Nowhere, though, is the craze as acute as it is in Kenya, the country that gave birth to the continent’s first mobile money service, M-Pesa, and is often called Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” for its status as a regional tech powerhouse. While the country’s mobile money revolution has played a well-documented role in encouraging savings and democratizing access to finance, M-Pesa’s role in betting presents something of a paradox. Today, it’s easier than ever for those in fragile economic circumstances to squander everything. Although estimates on the prevalence of gambling vary, a December 2021 survey by the US research firm GeoPoll found that 84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis. The vast majority, like Kirwa, do so on their smartphones using mobile money.
“Most people who bet in Kenya are not doing it for recreation—they’re doing it because they want to make money,” says Fabio Ogachi, a professor of psychology at Nairobi’s Kenyatta University. Ogachi says a significant proportion of Kenyans who bet show signs of gambling addiction—behaviors that include betting to recover lost funds, staking increasing amounts, and lying about one’s habit. Technology, he adds, has been a major driver of the sports-betting phenomenon: “We’ve been using mobile money for so many years, it’s become part and parcel of how we conduct business. When online betting came along, it found this ideal system was in place.”
That mobile money would become so ubiquitous in Africa—let alone fuel a betting epidemic—is in many ways an accident of history. The technology has its roots in a 2006 experiment, conducted by the telecom firms Vodafone of the UK, and Safaricom of Kenya, that sought ways to increase access to finance among those who’d previously been excluded from traditional banking.
M-Valued LETS (REDUX Originally Posted 10/22/08)
M-Valued LETS
Sketch of the Most Likely Scenario for Implementing a Post-Bretton Woods Global Monetary System Utilizing m-Logically-Valued Exchange Units based on Quantum Principles of Self-Organization (circa Spring 1998, Saigon)
This site is devoted to all and everything associated with the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units and their applications to LETS, local exchange trading systems. Definitions of scope are broad and shall include: m-valued logic (e.g., fuzzy logic, Lukasiewicz logic); theory of monetary instruments; related quantum theoretical issues; applications technologies (hardware and software); research and development; the involved strategic planning issues; real politik of insinuating m-logically-valued exchange systems into the prevailing Newtonian institutionalization; quantum accounts of self-organization as they apply to questions of monetary theory; autopoiesis and its graphical representation systems; metaphors in theoretical biology, biometeorology, oceanography, and related sciences of multiscale dynamical systems; applicability of complexity theory to monetary systematics; history of any and all related subjects. Definitions of exclusion are narrow and shall be determined only by the propensity of any given contribution to elicit ennui.
Hypertext markup language is one very small step for mankind in the direction of employing m-valued logics. Free associations once were pristine logical accommodation schemata by virtue of animistic “identity transparency”. We are inspired by this fact and will embody that inspiration as complete disregard for conventions of binary logical thought -- though we will make no active effort in crass display of such unrespect.
"We will never be fully vaccinated against Covid-19."
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) July 4, 2022
Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says Canadians need to be "up-to-date" on their vaccines, which he describes as getting the Covid vaccine every nine months. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/pjuPGbORQa
bombthrower | Despite increasingly compelling data and peer reviewed studies coming out detailing the harms and side-effects of vaccinations, Canada’s Liberal-Socialist coalition government is doubling down on vaccinations, and appear ready to move the goalposts on what constitutes vaccine compliance.
As reported via Blacklocks Reporter (@mindingottawa on Twitter),
Canadians will be required to get a Covid shot every nine months for the foreseeable future, says Health Minister . Previous definitions of “fully vaccinated” made no sense, he told reporters.
“Nine months is very clear and will help people understand why ‘up to date’ is the right way to think about vaccination now,” said Duclos. “‘Fully vaccinated’ makes no sense now. It’s about ‘up to date.’ So am I up to date in my vaccination? Have I received a vaccination in the last nine months?”
Duclos previously called for the provinces to make vaccinations mandatory and when asked by reporters if mandates would return this fall, he replied “We must continue to fight against Covid.”
Canada seems to be one of the few countries outside Communist China who is frantically clinging to the COVID narrative, relentlessly pushing largely ineffective (and arguably dangerous) vaccines on an increasingly fed up population.
The Trudeau regime is increasingly unpopular, a recent Angus Reid poll finding those who “strongly support” the government falling into single digits. The largest single category was “strongly disapprove” at 41%, Reeling with numerous scandals, corruption and gaffes, Justin Trudeau holds power solely through the merger of his party with the Canada’s Socialist NDP, headed by millionaire Jagmeet Singh.
The deal ostensibly keeps him in office until 2025. Singh is also on the
ropes, frequently being jeered in public even among his base
constituency in Brampton, Ontario. His brother lost his seat in the
recent Ontario election, and Singh himself was run out of a campaign stop by enraged Sikhs who called him “a sell out”.
amidwesterndoctor | Most of the injuries I saw reported here overlapped with the ones I encountered and documented within my own adverse event log. Additionally, there were dozens of respondents (primarily healthcare workers) who had observed a large number of individuals with vaccine injuries; meaning that my experience is not at all unique. The most commonly reported injuries were as follows:
•Strokes and blood clots.
•Fatal heart attacks and less frequently myocarditis or heart failure.
•Cancers that often emerge spontaneously, shock the doctor, and were highly aggressive (frequently killing the individual).
•Sudden severe cases of COVID-19.
•Cases of sudden death (i.e. a wife heard a thump upstairs, ran up, and found her husband dead on the floor).
•Rapid
progression towards dementia in an elder relative (typically resulting
in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, although in one case Lewy body
dementia occurred).
•Other neurological conditions
One thing I have noticed in reviewing reports of adverse reactions to vaccines is that a large number of them go underreported (even within these reporting surveys) because they represent common diseases people develop rather than something very noteworthy. For example, I believe new autoimmune diseases or exacerbation of pre-existing autoimmune diseases are the most common adverse event that occurs following vaccination, as that seems to be the case for around 20-40% of the patients in many rheumatology practices (see this testimony for example) and this report of a survey conducted by the Israel ministry of health.
However, despite this being the case, I only saw a few reports of autoimmune conditions resulting from the mRNA vaccines within these survey responses. This is relevant because adverse reactions always distribute on a bell curve and the more extreme ones, therefore, are much rare than the less severe. ones. This means the adverse reactions that are noteworthy enough for someone to notice and share likely only represent the tip of the iceberg for adverse events occurring. A recent article showing there has been a 10% spike in disability within the US population so far is the best dataset I have come across to suggest something very concerning on a more chronic level throughout the population is happening.
Many of these cases were very sad, and it is difficult to even begin to imagine what the survey respondents had gone through during this process. Cancer is a particularly terrible disease given the death process associated with it, and despite coming across numerous cases of this happening, I was a bit surprised at how frequently respondents reported these cases. I likewise can understand why continually seeing these types of reports has motivated Steve Kirsch to spend every waking moment he has to bring attention to this issue.
Other conditions were less commonly reported. I took particular note of the following:
•Seven
cases of liver failure (or something similar), along with additional
cases of cancers rapidly metastasizing to the liver and causing liver
failure.
•Six Reports of Lou Gehrig's disease (also known as ALS)
•Three Reports of Fatal Prion Diseases (two of which were specified to be CJD, the third most likely was as well).
•A
few reports of birth defects in vital organs with ACE-2 receptors such
as the heart (it is harder to draw a correlation here since those
defects sometimes happen otherwise, but given that I know one case where
this almost certainly happened, I suspect these may have been linked as
well).
I learned a few major lessons from these reports.
The first is that one respondent made it very clear he and another individual had had a mild Covid infection they were dealing with, but once they became vaccinated, the infection went out of control and rapidly landed them in the hospital. I have been trying to come up with an explanation for a while over why it is so common to see individuals be vaccinated and then rapidly be hospitalized or died from severe Covid. I now suspect that being vaccinated while you are infected alters the immune response and makes COVID much more likely to progress towards being a fatal condition. This is unfortunate because those deaths are often used to justify the urgency of vaccinating.
Interview Transcript. (helpful for following along)
researchgate | We present a critique of mathematics as the sole means for discovery and validation of physical truths and offer a conceptual alternative to the now virtually abandoned notion of a luminiferous aether. We propose a ‘new physics’ embracing the central idea that spacetime itself is to regarded as a secondary reality, constructed from something more primitive: twistor space, a transcendent substratum or mesostratum.
Introduction
In his latest book [1], Roger Penrose contemplates the fashion, faith, and fantasy which have entrapped most theoreticians in their pursuit of truths about ultimate physical and transcendent realities. Penrose reexamines the uncanny enfolding of mathematical truths with the minutest and largest properties and phenomena of the physical world and the remarkable effectiveness of mathematics in describing and predicting those properties and phenomena. However, Penrose implicitly cautions that discovering mathematical truths is not the same as discovering physical truths: “. . . as regards what is really going on in the physical world, there is something profoundly missing. To get a proper solution [for example] to the measurement paradox, we need a change in the physics, not just some clever mathematics, brought in to cover the ontological cracks!”
Discussion
Theoreticians have built ingenious mathematical structures and objects - virtually without empirical content - which are applied to help improve understanding of almost every aspect of the physical world. They have uncovered mathematical truths that echo and illuminate empirical observations and discoveries - certainly contributing to knowledge of the physical world. Based on strict adherence to fashion, faith, and fantasy, as elucidated by Penrose, they have tyrannically insisted that mathematics is the exclusive instrument for the discovery and validation of such knowledge.
Large, powerful, expensive high energy facilities are often demanded by theoreticians who have adopted iron-clad premises based essentially on combinations of fashion, faith, and fantasy. Extreme high energy apparatuses - like CERN's Large Hadron Collider - are designed to duplicate conditions assumed to have prevailed at the onset of a super-hot Big Bang. Alternative hypotheses based on abundant evidence that the Cosmos emerged quiescently from a Bose-Einstein Condensate substratum are ignored or dismissed [2].
Theoreticians have imbued space with metric attributes and properties. Synthetical spaces ostensibly produce quantum particles, quantum waves, and force fields that interact energetically. Current concepts of spacetime are not restricted to just four dimensions. In an attempt to explain quantum particles and waves, string theory posits ten-dimensional spacetime. M-theory, an elaboration of string theory, posits compactified dimensions which reside unnoticed in Minkowski spacetime. Synthetical sub-spacetime manifolds are considered able to manifest as physical objects. Various vibrational modes of the manifolds are taken as being the origins and constituents of quantum particles, fields and forces that pervade the cosmos.
Penrose bemoans the multitude of compact extra sub-space dimensions of string and M-theory although they may well lead to an ultimate destination and next level of understanding. In his view, that destination resides in twistor space which he studiously sets apart from the domain of Minkowski spacetime. Twistor space is envisioned as a separate domain which coexists with and complements Minkowski spacetime. Twistor space transcends Euclidian space and time wherefrom Minkowski objects - such as light rays and light cones - are mapped onto corresponding twistor objects - such as twistor points and Riemann spheres, receptively.
Twistor space attributes may be best understood and explained with reference to the Penrose impossible tribar. The tribar, an imagined three dimensional object. cannot exist in ordinary Euclidean space, yet, its individual parts can. Penrose notes that locally there is nothing impossible about the tribar concept. The impossibility is non-local, and disappears if one considers a small enough region of the tribar. Penrose devised a cohomological context in which the local parts may be joined, as illustrated by arrows in the figure.
Penrose resolves the impossibility issue with twistor theory in which the basic idea is to regard conventional Minkowski spacetime as being subsidiary to twistor space: “Being a fully complex space, [twistor space] provides the potential to exploit complex-number magic in ways that do not readily present themselves in the standard spacetime framework. Accordingly, rather than using descriptions in terms of real spacetime coordinates, one uses the complex twistor variables. . . . twistor functions are not really to be viewed as 'functions' in the ordinary sense, but as what are called elements of holomorphic sheaf cohomology.”
Penrose explains that although the notion of sheaf cohomology is sophisticated mathematically, it is
inherently simple. He suggests that the easiest way to picture this notion is to think of the way in which a conceptual manifold can be constructed with a number of coordinate regions or patches. Each ‘patch’ may be defined such that there is a transition function or ‘overlap’ between pairs of patches. The transition function provides the glue that unites the patches to construct the manifold and analogously provides the means to join the three ‘local’ parts of the Penrose tribar.
Twistor space provides the cohomological foundation for realization and study of strings and other types mathematical ‘continuum’ objects that are impossible to realize solely in particulate space-time reality. Consider the emission of a quantum ‘particle’ from a physical device, the detection of the ‘identical’ particle by another device and the curious and seemingly inexplicable mode of transit from source to detector. The process alternates between two completely different states: transit (involving state evolution U which is continuous and deterministic) followed by detection and measurement (involving an abrupt state reduction R which is discontinuous and probabilistic) as depicted by Penrose:
Since the state function ψ, describing state evolution U is continuous, it is a valid descriptor only of the in-transit process conceptually occurring in twistor space (the mesostratum) [3]. The instant the electron or photon is detected and measured, the wave function is said to have ‘collapsed’. This simply means that ψ does not anticipate reduction R as a particle ‘jumps’ from twistor space to Minkowski spacetime.
Einstein stressed that special relativity took away the last mechanical property of the aether: immobility. However, he asserted that special relativity does not necessarily rule out the aether, because the latter can be used to give physical reality to notions of acceleration and rotation. This concept was fully elaborated within general relativity, in which physical properties (which are partially determined by matter) are attributed to space, but where no substance or state of motion can be attributed to Einstein’s aether.
Penrose’s twistor space which corresponds to the transcendent mesostratum substratum [3] conceptually overcomes the problem of attributing substance to aether. Twistor space is not a substance but a venue or domain where ‘continuum things’ such as light waves, electromagnetic waves and fields transpirate and evolve as U before reduction R, i.e., detection/measurement in the physical world.
Conclusion
After an incisive critique of current theoretical physics [1], Roger Penrose offers a ‘new physics’ embracing the central idea “. . . that space-time itself is to regarded as a secondary notion, constructed from something more primitive, with quantum aspects to it, referred to a twistor space.” Penrose has in effect revived the notion of ‘luminiferous aether’ which in the late 19th century, was the postulated medium for the propagation of light. The negative outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment suggested that the aether as a substance was non-existent. Instead of characterizing it as a substance, Penrose’s twistor space aether is a substratum, which corresponds the transcendent mesostratum [3] a hyperspace domain, wherein state evolution U prevails exclusively, for example as Schrödinger wave functions and other wave propagation modalities.
Received October 3, 2016; October 22, 2016
References
1. Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, Penrose, R., Princeton University Press, 2016.
2. Cryogenic Origin & Nature of the Cosmos, Vary, A., Prespacetime Journal, Volume 7, Issue 5, 2016. 3. Exploration of Mesostratum Physics, Vary, A., Prespacetime Journal, Volume 7, Issue 11, 2016..
