Becky's Futurecast

By Becky "Sha" Shamen

   With the elections and all the turkeys behind us, we begin looking forward to the holiday season and the end of another year. December is a time for recalling things from our past and making hopeful predictions of what the future will bring.

   This year had plenty of ups and downs, but we also had two rewarding, memorable experiences. For a half century, I have been an amateur esoteric scientist. I took delight in telling friends things that science didn't know, but would soon discover. My favorite stories were 1) that the true shape of the universe would be found to be a giant donut and 2) that scientists would soon begin to prove there is a god (or supreme designer). Admittedly, these are some fantastic topics, but in SL, with it's preponderance of sci-fi nerds, they are great "ice-breakers" and have generated many great chat sessions. This year, I found a number of videos, on line, that science was now beginning to echo my theories. One group of scientists had even shown where our galaxy, the Milky Way, was located on the donut. My joy was short lived, when I remembered that I had never written them down and so could not prove that I had predicted them in advance. Oh well, there's still a silver lining. Now that science was accepting my introductory logic, I can point out some of the logical extensions to the theories. Hopefully, by getting it on paper this time, I can enlighten the world or, at the very least, entertain the nerds among our readers.

   We aren't trying to write a book here, so we will just give some short thumbnails of the theories that we think science will be discovering in the near future.

THE MATRIX

   There is Energy and there is Form, a.k.a. Matter. We keep finding increasingly smaller bits of matter, but there seems to be no end in sight as too how small or big matter can be. Where is the dividing line between Energy and Matter? If Energy can not be created or destroyed, it is Eternal. What is causing the eternal to be confined by the dimensions of time/space? The connection is neither and both finite and infinite. It is only a mental image. Science will come up with a math formula that will take a whole blackboard to write, but this same thought can also be expressed in the form of a simple, short sentence, such as "To be or not to be..." or "I am becoming that which I will become". Words and numbers aren't even required, as long as you "get the picture" in your mind.

THE FOURTH DIMENSION

   If you ask most people what the fourth dimension is, they will, incorrectly, say Time. If the first dimension is "here to there", the second dimension is perpendicular to it or "left and right". The third dimension will be perpendicular to the first and second or "up and down". Keeping with this series, the fourth dimension will be perpendicular to all of the first three or "bigger and smaller", or Scale. This understanding of dimensions may seem unimportant, but as the world's thinking begins to take it into account, many new doors will open to science.

DARK MATTER

   Science observes the behavior of the matter in the universe and finds it behaves like there is much more matter than they can see. Science will soon discover that it is like the matter that we can see, but with an added twist, which they will call "Nutation" or wobble. If you spin energy, like a top, that spinning form is what we call matter. If we could "freeze-frame" these units of matter, we would see that the spinning energy is never evenly distributed around the center of rotation. The imbalance of energy is like putting a bowling ball in a washing machine, during the spin cycle. Every unit of matter has a slight wobble to it. Although the frequency or rate of nutation can have a wide spectrum of speeds, there are certain speeds that will be harmonically in tune with other speeds and they will stand apart, like notes in a musical scale. You could be standing next to a person or object and not be able to see it, if the matter in your eyeballs is wobbling at a different rate than the matter that the person or object is made from. Like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, they are there, but you can’t see them. Operators of web fed printing presses, like those used for printing newspapers, use strobe lights to see the printed images as they speed by. Science will soon develop machines to view other forms of matter. Individual humans can develop the ability to see other forms of matter, because their bodies are made up of matter of the different nutational rates. There are various yoga exercises that can help develop an awareness of other grades of matter.

SPEED OF LIGHT

   The speed of light is not a constant. It is already known that light slows down as it gets near mass. What is yet to be discovered is that light also changes speed relative to the scale of the matter being looked at. If you could shrink down in size, to where a single quark is the size of the whole universe, it would take light the same amount of time to cross from one side of the quark to the other as it does to cross the entire universe. Scientist will figure this out, using theory, because they can never build actual machines that can zoom in to the needed frame of reference. Thought is the only thing in the universe that can travel faster than light.

"Sha"

Editor's Note: Following handing in this article, Becky informed me that due to circumstances in real life she felt she would be unable to write further articles for at least until after the end of the year, possibly longer. Hopefully after a short period of rest she will be able to write again.