My husband Andrew, who began this blog in October 2007, died peacefully on September 3rd 2012, at the age of 83, after long and well-controlled illness culminating in a sudden, brief decline. I'll be posting pieces of his life writing and autobiographical reminiscences to his other blog, The Game of Life. This blog will be used for other material relevant to Andrew, beginning with the wonderful tributes to him which poured in after his death, both by email and on facebook. At some point this blog will become an archive, without further additions.— Rosemary Nissen-Wade


Sunday 30 December 2007

ROBERT POPE: A NEW LETTER

Aristotle’s works on Ethics and Politics was designed to establish a practical science to guide ennobling government and Robert Pope can be now be considered to be one of the founding fathers of that science. Apart from such recognition emmanating recently from the School of Human Communications at Murdoch University, a London based scientific research institute has echoed similar sentiments.

The Santilli-Galilei Association of Science in London has posted a letter from Robert Pope dated 13th, Nov, 2007. The subject matter of this letter is about Pope’s Science-Art theories being developed in collaboration with the Science-art Department of the University of Florence.

The association of Pope and Robinson’s worldview outlines a Vision Physics that both his Science-Art Centre and that of the Florentine University have linked to quantum entanglement science. The Santilli - Galilei letter, posted on the Net, leaves little doubt that the methodology to generate rigorous human survival simulations, as a reflection of Aristotle’s vision of a pragmatic humanitarian science, is coming into focus.

Monday 10 December 2007

THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL

Yesterday, December 9, Rosemary and I decided to take her son Steve down to Byron Bay, which he hasn't visited for about five years when he last stayed with us. It had been quite a stretch since we were last there too.

It's about a thirty minute drive to Byron from Pottsville. The speed limit is 110kph. It's a great freeway and a scenic drive. Yesterday was very hot. In Byron I should have turned left toward the beach and the Byron Hotel. Instead I turned right and we parked just past the roundabout opposite a great icecream parlour. Rosemary and I bought two large scoops each and walked back up to the beach with Steve following. The hotel bar was packed with maybe 200 people. They were jiving to the beat of a large black Samoan woman who was screaming into a microphone trying to make herself heard. She was succeeding, but only just.

Steve used to be an investment banker in Sydney. In 1998 he decided to quit his job and travel the world for a life of adventure. During this time he started writing films and ended up writing eleven screenplays. He also produced and directed a low budget film and did a lot of work editing it. He became intrigued with the question of what made a film successful.

He chose 2007 as the year to stop being a perpetual traveller and focus on building his financial wealth. He was going to begin by making documentaries but fate had other ideas, as fate so often does. At a Hollywood party he met a man who finances films. This man got talking about projects he was working on and Steve gave him some advice based on his experience in banking, which not only proved very valuable but was different from what he’d been told by other people. The two men formed a friendship in which they talked more and more about films. Steve soon realized that his own knowledge of finance and film was quite an unusual combination. He had five years of finance experience and an Honours Degree in banking and finance; he also had nine years studying film and he’d written all those screenplays. He observed that most people in Hollywood who work in film financing understand financing but not the creative side of things, and most people who work in the creative side of film understand creativity but they don’t understand financing.

Steve started asking his friends to send him projects they were looking at so he could look at them as well, and very soon he was reviewing significant Hollywood films and giving his opinion of them from a commercial point of view, and the people were following his advice in choosing whether or not to invest. His financier friend in the meantime was talking about a particular film that he was working to raise some money for. He was having trouble finding someone to invest in this project. Steve thought it strange that he would be going out and looking for people to invest in the film, because his experience was that in Hollywood everybody wants to invest in films.

So Steve asked an important question: "Who are the people who don’t go looking for money? Who are the people who have money looking for them?" And the response was, "The hedge funds." Steve decided that he would set up a hedge fund to invest in films. His friend didn't want to do this himself, for fear it would infringe on his privacy and change his lifestyle. The two men agreed that, given Steve's knowledge of film and of finance, and given his friend's experience in the film industry and his huge list of contacts, some ongoing relationship between the two of them would be beneficial – on the basis of course that the friend remains a silent entity and people aren’t approaching him about financing films.

So Steve sat down and wrote out a list of his thoughts on what makes a film profitable and what sort of criteria he had to have as an investor in films. When he’d finished, he found he'd written 16 pages of notes. From these he developed a very scientific set of questions about what a film should have in order to be financially successful, and from that list he found he could do a scientific analysis of films to see if in fact his model of what makes a film profitable matches with films already made.

He's in the process of completing the analysis and so far the model is accurate in determining whether a film will or won’t make money, based on a very specific, measurable set of criteria. The great thing is that this sort of work can be completed anywhere in the world, and he doesn't have to be in Hollywood right now. These days, laptops and mobile phones allow people to operate anywhere.

Steve's primary purpose in coming to Australia was to visit his Mum. What he didn't know was that she now co-facilitates the WordsFlow writers' group in Pottsville where we live. Naturally she invited him to come and address the group on screenwriting. He shared all sorts of nitty-gritty stuff, and held them enthralled.

With even greater synchronicity, his visit coincided with me getting the go-ahead from a local film company to turn my book Jorell into a movie. The next step is to write a synopsis and a screenplay. I was uncertain where to start, then Steve turned up with all the know-how! What I discovered was the basic fact that just because I'd written a book with what looked like good visual potential and plenty of topical drama – set in the scenic environment around Mt Warning, with a dispute between loggers and greenies – that didn't necessarily mean it would make a great screenplay in its present form. "They're called movies because they move," says Steve, and, "What's your target audience?"

So we're now deep in discussion – with some time out for him to revisit Byron Bay, which he calls "the heart and soul of Australia" because it's such a microcosm of quintessentially Aussie lifestyles. This will be the first Christmas he's actually spent with his Mum in 25 years. Then he's off to Sydney for New Year's Eve, and out again to Los Angeles early in the New Year.

Saturday 20 October 2007

POPE LINKED TO OTHER SCIENTISTS

(No, not THAT Pope!)

Further to my previous blog post, it seems important to mention that Robert Pope is linked to other scientists with similar ideas.

A research group in the USA has been publishing for some time about 'Avoiding Extinction' through a science of fractal evolution. Several years ago this group recognised Professor Robert Pope as Australia's leading philosopher in this field of endeavour.

They argue along the same lines as the Max Plank Institute's astrophysicist Professor Peter Kafka, who is quoted in my interview with Pope. They express the opinion that unless we understand the fractal basis of evolution, then the science we have can only accelerate civilization toward extinction.

Dr Bruce H Lipton, a former professor at the Johns Hopkins University, America's first research university, is a cell biologist and the proponent of a new theory of biological evolutionary science, 'Fractal Evolution'. Dr Lipton has collaborated on biological research with Theodore D. Hall Ph.D. a former college professor and the author of the book Avoiding Extinction, about fractal evolution.

Professor Pope tells me that in early 1994, Dr. Lipton posed the (obviously rhetorical) question: 'Darwinism is not scientific. So why is it still our orthodox evolutionary science?'

Monday 15 October 2007

THE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE

Rosemary and Andrew Wade talk to Professor Robert Pope.


It's Blog Action Day and we've been asked to blog on the subject of the environment. More and more people are now becoming greatly concerned about the state of this planet. Professor Robert Pope, of the Science-Art Centre in Northern New South Wales, Australia, believes that an erroneous fixed worldview lies behind the attitudes and behaviour which are damaging our world in so many ways. The environmental destruction is part and parcel of a broader decline which can be traced to this worldview. After talking with him, we'd say it is in effect a cosmic view!

Who is Robert Pope?

He has been a senior seismic geo-draftsman involved in oil and mineral exploration in outback Australia, an award-winning artist, the founder of a successful art school for Indigenous Australians, Artist-in-Residence at the Universities of both Adelaide and Sydney, and a special Australian Science-Artist delegate to the World Summit Meeting of Science held in Trieste to honour the 100th anniversary of the birth date of Albert Einstein. Most recently he established his Science-Art Research Centre near Mt Warning in Northern New South Wales.

And that's only scratching the surface! Here in richer detail are the highlights of an unusual life as documented over a quarter of a century ago by ABC National Television's The Scientists – Profiles of Discovery – Pope the Catalyst (1979).

In the present context we'd like to stress Robert Pope's 'quest to develop ancient Greek philosophy of art into a new discipline of Creative Physics' and to draw your attention to two points from the above article:

1) During the visit to Trieste, 'Einstein's colleague, Kun Huang, agreed with Robert Pope that the 20th Century world view had been incorrectly formulated and posed a lethal threat to civilization. It was incorrectly governed by a physics law that demanded the extinction of all life in the universe rather than linking evolution to the workings of an infinite universe. Professor Huang proposed that the ancient Greek ethical logic that contradicted the 20th Century world view was represented in geometries found in the fossil record. He proposed that by comparing the patterning changes to Greek life geometry over evolutionary periods of time new physics laws governing healthy biological growth and development might be identified that would not lead to human extinction.'

2) 'The recent discovery that Sir Isaac Newton's unpublished "more profound natural philosophy to balance the mechanical description of the universe" used the universal physics principles upholding the ancient Greek ethical science confirmed the importance of Robert Pope's work.'

Interview

We interviewed Robert at his Science-Art Centre on Thursday October 11. Here is Andrew's transcript:

Professor Robert Pope says there are four key questions concerning the state of the Universe. He began our interview by showing me some internet references on his laptop.

RP: It may be easier to understand if I do four quick Google searches so you can get an instant picture of what is going on right now with our culture. We’re going to be talking about the biggest 'con' ever in science. Your readers can judge for themselves from what we find out. Very quickly we’re going to be finding out what scientific law is controlling Australian culture. We’re also going to look at where it came from, and we’ll look at an alternative scientific view of this law and some research that is being conducted by Hamburg University now. Then we’ll look at the social implications of this law as written about in an educational article published in the Australian on March 8 last year.

We’re now going to ask the first question on Google, by punching in "The Supreme Metaphysical Law of the Entire Universe". As we can see, Google brings up many responses to this, the first one will suffice. You can see that it’s called The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s a basic law of physics, and according to this law the whole universe is in a state of decay moving towards total destruction.

We also note that all calculations and all equations that are written must obey that law. We find out, just by running our eyes over the Google search page, that Albert Einstein called it the premier law of all sciences and Arthur Eddington, his colleague, called it The Supreme Metaphysical Law of the Entire Universe. The point that he made here is that under this law all life sciences can only be about species following a path to inevitable extinction.

Q: Is there an alternative view?

RP: Yes. Peter Kafka, Professor of Astro Physics at the Max Planck Institute, and a scientist of high repute, wrote six essays on the principle of creation and the accelerating global crisis. He calls the Second Law of Thermodynamics 'Diabolus', the Devil (page 40) – which in his view isn’t evil so much as illogical. Scientists, technologists and politicians are telling us its destructive purpose without fully understanding what they’re doing.

Professor Kafka calls The Supreme Metaphysical Law of the Entire Universe, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, useless (page 54). The solution to the problem lies in this: when people can no longer tolerate the ugliness of our age, we can be sure that strange, beautiful attractors are near (final paragraph page 119).

Q: Can you define 'strange, beautiful attractors'?

RP: The strange attractor refers to an infinite fractal phenomenon, which demonstrates that human evolution is governed by a balancing of both creative and destructive energy systems. This completely collapses the old idea that evolution is only governed by destructive energies.

Q: Thank you. So, you were talking about a solution to the problem?

RP: We’re now going to look at what that might be. We’re looking at an article: Bernard Bolzano’s Contribution to Logic and Ontology. It’s from a group of scholars from Hamburg University, and we see that in its treatment of logical series of elements it far surpasses anything that the world literature has to offer in the way of a systematic sketch of logic (first sentence). So we can assume that Bolzano’s Theory of Science, written in the 18th century to correct Immanual Kant’s aesthetics, is probably reasonable. Kant had not seen these problems; Bolzano solved them. These solutions were made possible, and were the source of a new approach to the content and character of fundamental knowledge (third paragraph). Other reviewers from the Hamburg scholars found that Bolzano’s logic could be taken forward into modern science, and it runs into fractal logic, which embraces Professor Peter Kafka’s solution, The Strange Beautiful Attractor. So now we’re getting into a science called Quantum Biology.

We now find an article written by Professor Julian Cribb. published by The Australian in 2006, March 8th, titled Muzzling of Science. Professor Cribb is Professor at the University of Technology in Sydney, where he’s Editor of the R and D Review. He points out that a censorship exists which is persecuting leading Australian scientists. This censorship is against any criticism of the fixed worldview – which of course is controlled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the Supreme Law of the Entire Universe if you want to go religious.

Professor Cribb points out that 'unpopular' refers to any of those fields of science which challenge the existing fixed worldview formed by Governments, business, special interest lobbies, or 'that most anonymous and unaccountable of research controllers, the stake-holders'.

[RP, quoting Professor Cribb]:

'This process of keeping science from the public, and the network of threats – overt and implied – that protects it, is undermining democracy. A democracy without access to balanced and truthful information on which to base its decisions is little better than a crude Third World dictatorship in which the people are compelled to accept the dictator’s interpretation of the world, however false and fanciful.'

Q: This sounds serious. What can be done about this?

RP: Well, there were two discoveries that changed everything. The first big discovery was in 1980 – the discovery of fractal logic. The second discovery was that the human skull is now evolving. There are numerous cases of children throughout the world in whom the lower teeth are not aligning with the upper jaw. This is easily fixed by a procedure called dental aesthetics in which the vibrations of the skull are transferred to the lower teeth.

The changing shape of the skull is being caused by a turning force existing in the sphenoid, the bone behind the nose. And of course we have 200 million years of fossil records of sphenoid activity to find out what the sphenoid is on about and where it wants to go. What I’m suggesting is that if we want to survive we simply have to know where the sphenoid bone wants to take us. And this is the basis of a lost science from the Greek, which was about establishing a science for ethical ends to guide democratic governments – and as we have seen, we have not got a democratic government at all. We’ve got a plutocracy based on money and greed and submission to a kleptomaniac elite. That’s the best way to describe it. It’s a parasitic procedure that is common in biology.

The importance of fractal logic is that the ancestor to fractal logic was the 5th Century BC philosopher Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras used consciousness to make his fractal worldview, which means the link with the living process to infinity – which is forbidden overtly by the Christian Church, and by the global economic rationalism which, as you’ve seen, demands that all life must be destroyed.

What is important now is that all of the universities in ancient Greece that were associated with the Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy, had one single objective, and that was to fuse 'Ethics' into the work of Anaxagoras, and what you get now is a lost science in which evolution goes to infinity as a fractal expression. That worldview is overwhelmingly scientific rather than the one we have, the fixed worldview which is the 20th century worldview based on the obsolete understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is the whole crux of the problem.

Now we go back to the sphenoid bone. If you make a different model of the universe than the one allowed by the worldview of total destruction, you can do what we did last century and develop formulae to simulate optimum biological growth force through space-time to find out what physics laws it’s obeying. We [at the Science Art Centre] did that for sea shells, and the world’s greatest research institute selected two papers, written by the Centre's mathematician, for reprinting, next to authors such as Louis Pasteur and Francis Crick. What we discovered is this, that the fixed worldview cannot provide optimum growth and development for biology at all. It is only possible to generate distorted biological growth and development, which describes a global cancerous situation.

Now the interesting thing about our work is that we used the sea shell fossils which contain the ancient 'Sacred Geometry' which is the precursor to infinite fractal geometrical logic: Golden Mean geometry of ancient Greece, which went to infinity. That’s what we’re forbidden to think about in today’s Australia. We are not allowed to think and reason about linking evolution to the workings of an infinite universe.

In the mid-14th Century the most stupid Physics that you could imagine came into existence, called 'Angel Physics'. Thomas Aquinas, as history's 'Doctor of Physics' wrote that he was given a magic white girdle that he did 'gird himself' with so that he did not need sex with a woman. From that silly Physics, which placed the Earth at the centre of the Universe, and forbade the Earth to move around the Sun, a legal decree was proclaimed that women and female children could be imprisoned, tortured and burnt alive as witches, and this nonsense at western universities went on for three hundred years.

Then in 1600 the Roman Church burnt the great scientist Giordano Bruno alive for teaching about an infinite Universe, and the Ethics associated with it. He taught that at Oxford University. The English scientists cold-shouldered Bruno, and when he got back to Rome they got him. The reason I mention this is because in 1600 the East India Company was founded in England, which became one of the world's most powerful business or corporate developments. It took over the much of the Empire for the British Government. Now we realise that at that time state religion allowed no one to reason about an infinite Universe. During the 18th Century Reverend Thomas Malthus, when he was appointed as a financial adviser in economics to the East India Company, fitted out Charles Darwin on his voyage of HMS The Beagle. This voyage was about securing future food supplies for the British Empire. Darwin's resulting theory of evolution obeyed the Church's law, which prohibited any science that linked evolution to infinity – which, as you can see, is a law that has since collapsed. So both the religious theories of evolution and the Darwinian one are based on false physics assumptions.

As the power of the Church waned during the industrial era, global corporate greed and development took over. We are now stuck with the same terrible law in a different disguise. It's a very serious situation because, as the Church denied the essence of democracy, so does the logic upholding the global corporation's economic rationalism deny democracy. The existing censorship of any research and development in science that challenges the fixed worldview, as has been mentioned above from Professor Cribb's Muzzling of Science feature article in The Australian, is now undermining democracy itself.

The continued demand that the living process cannot be linked to the workings of an infinite fractal universe is no longer to be tolerated by science. The scientific prize-winning work that we did in seashell evolution over a 20 million year time span can now be directly linked to the work of the infinite evolving forces of the sphenoid bone. It can be shown that unless the DNA is moving toward infinity, it can be classified as devolving. The sphenoid bone can be considered to be linked to the unique seashell design we identified as being part of a 20 million year process of evolutionary purpose. So what we seem to be looking at is that, in the ancient seas, small creatures were trying to get out of the sea to walk on the land. And we know now from the fossil record, that – I think it's 90 million years ago – the sphenoid bone was moving its form to bring small monkeys out of the trees to walk upright on the land. The seashell design mentioned above allowed the sea creature to float upright, and its design can be located within the human ear in contact with the sphenoid bone.

We now have enough mathematics, we have enough ethical logic – which is completely missing from our science today – to generate the human survival blueprint. There is no time to argue with the stakeholders of technological development. We will need their goodwill support and it is necessary to be able to demonstrate that the new science and technology will offer them more than they can possibly imagine from within their limited worldview.

I think what we need to do is to consider that there are a lot of good people – a lot of religious people, a lot of good business people – who really want to help. In Australia I can attack physics policies of the Church, but in the same breath I say, 'God bless the Salvos' or the people running the Church Opportunity Shops. All their efforts are ethical and essential. What I'm trying to say is that, when you weigh up all their innate natural moral efforts, we find that they are being made inefficient by science – a science that's been absolutely contaminated with stupidity. We need these good people, whether they're religious or not. As long as they're moderate and can reason, they will be the people to help solve this problem. It is all about a lost science of ethics which is very, very real. And good luck to them!

Thinking how little time we've got, I feel like a grumpy old man – but after all, it's not a lost cause, because I think the sphenoid bone knows exactly where it wants to go and the sooner we realise this, the sooner we can get out of the present global crisis.

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Some of Robert Pope's papers on this topic are online:

The Aesthetics of Evolutionary Science
and
The Fractal Logic of Evolution