A Hand up Man's Back?, Those 'certain' will laugh, and yet... look above, a Cosmic Spirograph

'I believe I can see the future
Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose
But then again
That might have been a dream'
- Trent Reznor

'We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets. If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them.'
-Karl R. Popper

'Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want'
-Devo

'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.'
-Kyle Reese

'Is there a sacred geometry weaving through time and price or is the market a random walk? It seems to me if there is any threshold of geometry which runs through the market then all math leads to Rome. Number is as number does.'
- Jeff Cooper

The scene in the university's financial aid office looked like a siege. Holding the notice in my hand while standing in front of a harried staff member I asked why I had been summoned to 'meet' with a financial counselor. 'Please take a seat and wait to be called' was mumbled but there were no seats and judging from the faces of folks that were coming out of the 'Pink Floydish' assemblage of doors was quite certain that I did not want to know the answer to my query.

Soon enough my number was up ... literally. The counselor in a quiet voice explained that due to new requirements from the Reagan administration anyone making over ~$4000 a year was judged as ineligible for the majority of available student aid programs. Considering that I had come to university with only $500 in my pocket and was working over 40 hours a week my princely annual recompense of ~$4500 had counter intuitively spelled my financial doom.

My first introduction to trickle down economics.

The snapshot of the resignation on my 'counselor's' face as she broke the news is a visceral memory. In the middle of her pronouncement that my college career was effectively over she was interrupted by a knock on the door and left the room for a moment.

My eyes met the top left hand corner of the room and my brain shouted, 'Think you stupid son of a bitch. Think damnit....'

Don't know how long she was out of the room but when she returned I was in tears. 'I can't go home' I blubbered, 'my father will beat the hell out of me. He is an abusive alcoholic.' BS worthy of an Academy Award.

An hour later was on the phone with my Dad, who was the antithesis of what I had described to the counselor, 'Son if anyone calls me from your school I promise I will be the most obnoxious most vile fellow they have ever talked to.'

I qualified for continuing to receive financial aid under a special circumstances 'hardship' exemption.

10 years later was on the third floor of my house waiting for a phone call from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. Had spent the last year researching and filing a local and inter exchange tariff and negotiating the interconnection agreement with the incumbent LEC. My liaison with Bell was calling congratulating me that my tariff and interconnection agreement had been approved by the public service commission and that all that was left was a pittance necessary for a 'deposit' in order to initiate services as a competing local exchange carrier.

Trouble was, the monies requested were more than equal to the aggregate after-tax income I had earned in my life.

Unawares as to whether my voice was betraying my trembling hands and beating heart, I said, ' Well certainly do appreciate your call and recognize your need to ask for a deposit. However per your tariff if a customer has had services with you for over a year and if they have paid their bills on time then you are required not to ask for a deposit if additional services are ordered. In fact, this line I'm talking to you on has been established under my company for 13 months and if you check your records you'll see the bill was always paid on time.'

The rep chuckled and said he would call back, which he did to notify me that no deposit would be required.

So I ask you gentle reader was it the sun, and the moon, and the planets that guided my path or was it the luck of a determined Irishman and the random distribution of fate?

What is the Truth?

Is it the flip of a coin, a Bachelier Universe, or the flight of an arrow, a Mandelbrotian universe?

Or is there a third way?

As a former counsel once said to me, there's your story, there's the other side's story and then there is THE story.

Or more appropriate to this posting, as opined by the venerable Jeff Cooper, 'Is there a sacred geometry weaving through time and price or is the market a random walk? It seems to me if there is any threshold of geometry which runs through the market then all math leads to Rome.'

If the truly wise man knows nothing is Truth the process of unlearning?

As mentioned in my last post,

'ah, but there is a fly in the cosmic ointment, Kepler's assertion that the radii of the spheres accurately corresponds to the distances between the planets and his discovery of a 'congruence' between musical intervals and planetary relationships, the modern proof of Pythagorean tenets, has been dismissed in part due to the lack of a rigorous demonstration that such a relationship is not anything more than a random distribution.

Wouldn't it be nice if say there was a theory that offered to us that the formation of our planetary system was guided by the influence, or force, that led to the arrangement of orbital velocities in such a way that, with a 99%+ certainty, there is an explicit correspondence to the numerical relationships of musical/harmonic intervals?'

In what may be a seminal tome by Hartmut Warm entitled, Die Signatur der Sphären (Signature of the Celestial Spheres), the author claims that:

'The order and movement of the planets in our solar system corresponds very accurately to simple geometrical figures and musical intervals, although in a different way than assumed in conventional concepts. One of the keys for an explanation is to be found in the analysis of the harmonical arrangement in the semiminor axes of the elliptical orbits, whereas earlier models and calculations were based on the semimajor axes.'

In reviewing Kepler's work Herr Warm asks 'whether and how strong the assumed planetary harmonies differ from a random distribution. In a series of numerical proportions, which can be derived from parameters like distance, velocity etc., you will always find several that come close to musical intervals like 2/1, 3/2 etc.' and concludes that upon examining Kepler's planetary harmonies 'we can see that there is no deviation from a random distribution. But Kepler can be excused in his failure to properly elaborate his basic ideas, because the probability calculus was unknown in his time.'

If you've made it this far gentle reader, it's time to buckle up....

'Thus the mentioned analyses seem to explain why modern astronomy refuses the concept of a “harmony of the spheres" (Kepler's notions concerning these ideas are described in the scientific literature as “daydreams” or the like.) But as yet nobody – at least to the author's knowledge – has attempted to include the semiminor axes into consideration. At a certain point in time each planet in its revolution around the Sun has exactly the distance of its semiminor axis b from the central star. The velocity of the planet at this point almost precisely equals the arithmetical mean of the extreme velocities (which occur at the aphelion and the perihelion, i.e. at the farthest and the nearest points of a planet on its elliptical orbit around the Sun). If we put the velocity at the distances of the semiminor axes and that in the aphelion into correlation, we find a highly significant correspondence with musical intervals.

Now 13 of 17 possible correlations lie near or very near to the musical intervals. If we employ statistical methods of calculation, this accumulation can appear only with a probability of 1/10,000 (if we take into account, that there are about 10 possibilities to constitute relations from the different parameters mentioned above, the resulting probability still is only 1/1000).

Thus the ancient notion of a “harmony of the spheres” and especially the fundamental ideas of Johannes Kepler have been confirmed for the first time, and this in a manner that can principally be verified by everyone.

It is not a genuine proof, because this is something the probability calculus will never be able to deliver. Nevertheless we can state in other words, that at the formation of our planetary system there must have been an influence, or force, which with a probability of at least 99.9 % led to an arrangement of orbital velocities that corresponds to the numerical relationships of musical-harmonic intervals.'

Flight of the arrow baby! And if one were to tie a string to that arrow?

The pictures above are what Herr Warm describes as 'Raumgeraden, or link lines (i.e. the imaginary connecting lines between two planets within a fixed period where one can see the geometrical forming principle repeating itself.'

The description of the pictures starting from the bottom and working up are as follows:

1) Raumgeraden (link lines) between Venus and Earth, continually plotted in 3-day periods (1000x). Scale in million km. Sun in the centre of the co-ordinate plane. About eight years. © Keplerstern Verlag

2) Raumgeraden (link lines) between Jupiter and Uranus, continually plotted in periods of 60.781 days (1000x), total space of time 166.4 years. © Keplerstern Verlag

3) Mars-Jupiter Raumgeraden (link lines) at Mars/Uranus conjunctions (1000x), starting on 22-09-2001, total space of time 1923.88 years (selective enlargement 3/1). © Keplerstern Verlag

4) Earth-Jupiter Raumgeraden (link lines) at Earth/Uranus conjunctions, (750x), starting on 11-08-2000, total space of time 759.03 years (selective enlargement 10/6). © Keplerstern Verlag

5) (The purty one in color..) Neptune from Saturn-centered view at Jupiter/Neptune-conjunctions, 700x. total space of time approx. 8947 years. © Keplerstern Verlag

For more info please check out www.keplerstern.com. An English translation of Herr Warm's book should be available summer of 2010.

Très cool.

Think outside the cave!