I’ve got an exciting announcement to make… (finally!)

It’s been quite the book project, but the wait is about to end!  Various editions of The Unobservable Universe will begin releasing as soon as this weekend! 

The release of the book culminates a very long multidisciplinary project.  The breakdown looks like this:

·        34 years of study, research, thought experiments, and sleepless nights;

·        4 weeks of writing (after 34 years the book was largely composed in my mind and waiting to be expressed!);

·        6 months of rewriting, editing, artwork development, and formatting.  The manuscript was also reviewed by scientific peers and general readers, and their comments were used to further refine the manuscript.  Some of those reviews appear on the book’s cover.

I just received my proof copy of the paperback edition this week, and I’m really pleased with it.  A few final refinements are being made right now to the production version before it releases in May.

Needless to say, the first release will be the FREE PDF eBook for those who have “LIKED” the Facebook page.  I really appreciate your patience and I want to show my gratitude by getting the book into your hands first!

Here’s the expected release schedule:

·         On or before May 1 - FREE PDF eBook for Facebook fans.  Once I post the coupon code to the Facebook page, remember to enter it at checkout to make certain that you get the eBook for absolutely FREE.  Please keep in mind that only a limited quantity of 1,000 PDF eBooks are being given away, so check your copy out early!  This affordable edition of the eBook will remain available for only $4.99 (only on the book’s Web site) after the FREE copies are distributed.

·         On or before May 8 – The remaining eBook editions:  EPUB, MOBI, Kindle, rPDF.  List price: $19.99

·         On or before May 15 – The full, unabridged MP3 audio book edition.  I narrated the book myself, with the help of other voice talent (my wife, Janna, and my step-daughter, Tauby), and I expect the recording to be about 14 hours in length.  (Let me know if you think I still have a strong New York accent or if living in the southwestern region of the country for the past 20 years has tempered it a bit.)  List price:  $29.99

·         On or before May 22 – The trade paperback edition.  Final page count is 330.  List price $24.99

The various versions of the book will be sold through a wide variety of distribution channels, including Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Borders.com, as well as through the book’s Web site at www.theunobservableuniverse.com.  (Autographed copies will only be available through the book’s Web site.)

SPECIAL PRE-ORDER PRICING:  Special pre-order pricing of only $12.49 for any edition will remain in effect until the release of the paperback.  No matter what, the special pre-order pricing will remain in effect at least through May 14.  After the pre-order pricing ends, each edition of the book will be available at a discounted price.

You will soon be able to read the book and find out for yourself why I feel so confident that researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have not discovered the Higgs boson, as some rumors had speculated this past week.  (The Higgs boson is the mythical particle that theoretical physicists and mathematicians speculate as the foundation for the property of matter called "mass."  Interestingly, many scientists have chosen to refer to the Higgs boson as the “God” particle, which seems somewhat ironic to me and only serves to further obscure, at least in mind, the increasingly subtle differences between scientific doctrine and religious dogma.)

Future blog articles will now begin to focus on important issues and insights relating to the origin, nature, and evolution of our universe, as well as the relationship between each living entity and the incredible world that surrounds it.  Please invite your friends and colleagues to follow my Blog.

Don’t be shy!  I look forward to receiving your comments and questions!  Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences as you read the book either on my Blog (scottmtyson.blogspot.com) or through the “Contact Me” page on the book’s Web site.  Post your reviews of the book on my Blog and portions of them might be selected to be included in the next revision of the book!

You are each welcome to attend the official book release party in Albuquerque on May 15 where you will be able to get an autographed copy of the paperback edition!  Click on the “Events” tab on the book’s Facebook page to get all the details.

And finally, begin considering the possibility that you might soon acquire a very different perspective of your world!

Thank you for your continuing interest and support!

Breaking the cosmology and cosmogony molds

There are certain aspects of my book that I believe to be somewhat unconventional, in that they don’t conform very well to the prevailing culture of scientific compartmentalization and the expectations that go along with it.  My book describes the means by which to achieve not only the unification of the four fundamental forces but also the unification of quantum mechanics with relativity and the unification of special relativity with general relativity.  These are the traditional faces of the "unification problem."

The real issue in dealing with the unification problem is that you “can’t get there from here” – science and philosophy have been organized into specialties and sub-subspecialties that I contend are too compartmentalized to deal with the dimensions and scope of the current unification challenges.  The current compartmentalization and expectation schemes currently in place are the result of prior events and prior thinking.  They don’t lend themselves terribly well to overcome the issues of unification, and others, for which they were neither designed nor intended.

In fact, this assertion is the main reason I expect a great deal of harsh criticism and commentary − at least, initially − from today’s rigid science culture.  Had the current culture and structure of science been suitable for overcoming the challenges it faces − such as unification, for which they have already had ample time and opportunity − it likely would have resulted in new epiphanies and understanding that overcome the limitations of today’s science and the plentiful paradoxes abounding about our universe.

If I were forced to choose a single compartment or genre which best describes the content of the book, then I suppose I might choose natural philosophy, the foundation from which the scientific method itself emerged about two millennia ago.  Yet, the content of the book also necessarily focuses heavily on other topics more usually associated with physics, cosmology, and cosmogony, and their fundamental tenets.  The book also covers quite a bit of content normally associated with biology, psychology, linguistics, ontology, and metaphysics.

Nonetheless, the book is full of scientifically verifiable predictions and does contain some key equations that could be used as the basis for empirical experiments and observations, as well as for new mathematical models.  Please keep in mind that the book was designed to appeal to a very broad audience in large part because of the wide range of disciplines it covers.  On a more personal note, I found that writing to a broad audience was also quite a lot of fun for me, which enabled me to finally write the book after decades of intent.

The content of the book, including the theories and hypotheses I propose, are thoroughly consistent with validated scientific truth and understanding.  This perspective is covered at some depth repeatedly throughout the book.

However, you should not expect to see some alternative to Einstein’s field equations (EFE), which quite thoroughly describe the phenomena we observe.  Einstein’s field equations are only part of a far larger context; the equations themselves don’t provide any real insight into their physical basis.  Rather, the content of my book focuses largely on the underlying physical basis not only for the EFE but for all phenomena observed in our universe.

The theories and hypotheses contained within my book provide both philosophical and physical bases for unifying general and special relativity, for unifying quantum mechanics with relativity, and for unifying the four fundamental forces into a singular, cohesive framework.

The book covers an enormous amount of ground, and it has to for a number of good reasons.  First, I designed the book to be stand-alone; you don’t need to fulfill any prerequisites to read, understand, and enjoy it.  I hope I succeeded in achieving this for the broadest possible spectrum of readers. 
Next, I had to provide firm foundations for concepts that appear later in the book.  Finally, there’s quite a bit of unlearning that’s required to perceive the universe in an entirely new way, so I had to present a very deliberate, structured, and entertaining set of incremental steps to prepare readers.  If it could all have been summed up in a short sentence, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have written a 120K-word tome.  I may not be the world’s most succinct person, but even I would have a terribly difficult time expanding a concise statement by something like a factor of 10,000!

I do expect to follow-up this book with one targeting the physics community, which will focus far more heavily on mathematics and contain sufficient equations to delight the most hard-core physicists and mathematicians.  One of the physicists who reviewed my book has already asked to co-author this next project and I’m not terribly interested or motivated in writing such a book myself.

In closing, String Theory and parallel universes are among the awesomely fanciful and completely unverifiable theories that have been proposed by theoretical scientists and mathematicians. They are, however, very entertaining. I hope you will consider the theories I propose in my book not only entertaining and thought-provoking but that they offer the added benefit of being scientifically verifiable, which really ought to count for something in the science community.

Does this sound reasonable to you?

Some thoughts on space-time dilation

Einstein’s Special Relativity is heavily based on the work of other scientists, most notably Poincare, Maxwell and Lorentz.  Of particular interest to any discussion of space-time dilation is that the Lorentz Transformation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation) unequivocally captured the dilation of space and time that became the cornerstone of Einstein’s Special Relativity.

In essence, Einstein built upon the work of Lorentz and others to provide a description of space-time that shows that it is not the sole, exclusive property either of the observer or of the universe, but rather that space-time is a property shared in some way between each observer and his/her external universe.

In sharp contrast, the biologist Dr. Robert Lanza attempted to portray space-time as the exclusive property of the observer, in his book Biocentrism (BenBella Books, 2009).  (http://www.amazon.com/Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe/dp/1935251740/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298577713&sr=8-1)  Although I don’t subscribe to Dr. Lanza’s perspective, he asks really thought-provoking questions in his book that made it a splendid read which expanded the range of my thinking.

The discussion of the relationship between the observer and the external universe is perhaps the single largest component of my soon-to-be-released book, The Unobservable Universe.  (http://www.theunobservableuniverse.com)  In my book, I propose that this intimate relationship (between any individual observer and his/her external universe) is very different than the one traditionally described by either relativity or quantum mechanics.  I propose an alternative perspective on the process of perception, which is essential to the development of a better understanding of the elusive observer/universe relationship.

No matter what, science has pretty definitively established over the past 150 years or so that space-time is NOT a sole and exclusive property of the “external” universe and that the perception of space-time varies quite predictably and consistently with the state (inertial reference frame) of the observer.

The real question is not about how the perception of space-time varies with the conditions of the observer, but why it takes the form it does.  This is where you’ll find the really interesting stuff to ponder, in my opinion.

Now, I’d like your opinion. What do you think about the form of the relationship that we perceive for space-time dilation?