William C. Mullen's Speech

Naxos Conference of Quantavolution 2012

Go to: William C. Mullen's speech (transcript)
Prof. William C. Mullen (Bill) gave an informal talk, addressing himself mostly to the younger crowd in the audience, before presenting the DVD of Symbols from an Alien Sky. His speech is transcribed here, in all its savory spontaneity.

See Bill Mullen on You Tube:

Excerpt of Bill Mullen's Speech (9'45")
BILL MULLEN:I will begin by telling you of a remarkable scientist some of you know, Tony Peratt, who works at the Nasa laboratory of plasma physics at Los Alamos. He has collected a most amazing series of plasma physics images, three-dimensional, juxtaposed to two dimensional petroglyphs of which he has hundreds of thousands, and icons and archetypes and so on, and they are not like anything you see. They may or may not have humanoid components, but there is always more to it than human, for instance a man all over the world with two white dots on the sides, right here - do you see two white dots on the sides of me? You will see it in plasma physics laboratory images.

I want to begin with two homages to people who foresaw all of this, Immanuel Velikovsky and Al de Grazia. Just one paragraph for each, and then I will alternate between expounding the basic principles and show you visuals which should convince you in a moment of "visual intuition." I will also be talking about visual intuition in complexity theory, the "son" of chaos theory. Has anyone here studied complexity here? Aha! I am guaranteed to bring you something new! Which of you if any were present at the conference at which the following anecdote I am going to tell you occurred? I am telling you the anecdote, you tell me who and where, and who was there? Right, so...

The Portland Group has conferences. They show images. They are about mythology. They are images from early man. Petroglyphs, coins, freeses from Mesopotamia, Greece, all over. Tony Peratt had a friend, I do not know who. I do know that Al and Ami invited him to Bergamo, and that he was right there, in Bergamo, 2004, four years after the conference I believe at which he had this decisive, serendipitous, amazingly coincidental insight.

Someone, I don't know who, perhaps you'll know, said: "You must come to one of our conferences about world catastrophes in human memory, when man was around, things from the sky impinged on the biosphere and all hell broke loose." And for whatever reason, perhaps you too will know best, he went but he was somewhat bored, according to Scott Mainwaring. Scott is a lovely man with a ponytail who lives in Montana, the son of Bruce Mainwaring, an older man in Pennsylvania to whom we are much endebted. Scott, when I was at the Paris Conference, afterwards, I believe - we became flâneurs on the streets of Paris - he told me the following amazing anecdote: Tony Peratt, let me tell you, was so bored that he was checking his email, and so on, and suddenly he looked up at the screen and thought: "Oh my God, the shapes on that screen are my shapes, generated in my plasma lab and are top secret, someone has hacked into my computer and I am going to be, you know, kicked out of Los Alamos!" - it was terrifying! What happened? And he said: "What are you showing up there?" And someone, the presenter whom you may know, Dave Talbott, said: "Petroglyphs..." And Tony Peratt said, "but these..."  and I don't know what he said, but these were the same shapes as he had generated in his plasma lab. He has about 81 shapes that morph from one to another depending on the amount of electric current he applies. And he was seeing one after another of these shapes in early man's writing, drawing, pictographs. So they began to talk, and within a year he was converted to the fact that early man was looking up there and ah..., seeing plasma shapes that morphed from one into another and so he got a team, and he decided to check out some petroglyphs and I believe that Ami was a great factor in saying that in Italy, in Valcamonica [near Bergamo], were the hugest petroglyph collection in Europe, so Tony went down for that, to make a long story short, he now has into hundreds of thousands petroglyphs all over the inhabitable continents, which he studied, photographed and put a GPS on, and they are all facing the same direction, Southeast of the South Pole of our Earth. He concludes, in his published works, which is highly technical, in the International Engineering and Electrical Something... which you have to pay to subscribe to, and I did, he concludes that in the Stone Age something like an aurora borealis in the South-South-East of the South Pole in the sky, of a size a thousand times as great as ours, was up there, was awesome to early man...

They recorded as it morphed from one shape into another over a certain amount of time.
Now, can I pause and ask Ami and Al if you remember what conference and what year and what presenter he saw when he looked up and saw when he was checking his email, who he asked, and the answer was: petroglyphs - I imagine it...

AMI: - No, I heard it from Ian Tresman, we were not there, we were certainly not there...

BILL: So, I would suspect it's Dave Talbott in Portland, where they had these conferences like yours, Al, every few years. Because Dave Talbott, who has been studying mythology ever since 1970 at least, and Wal Thornhill, who is a plasma physicist, collected, and together they published, a series of books, this one (showing the book), 2005, has in the back a DVD from which you'll see selections, and then in 2009, really not so long ago at all, Dave narrated, Wal made appearances in this DVD from which we'll also see selections: Symbols from an Alien Sky, look at the desert in the Southwest of the United States, look at something in the sky which you don't see now but which is recorded in thousands of petroglyphs and other things around the world. The "alien sky" is the sky in the past, and something happened that made these things disappear.

Now, final player before I make my homage to the great predecessors, is the assistant, and now independent scholar Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs, we call him Rens. Rens was on his team, Tony Peratt's, there are many wonderful pictures of him on all the continents beaming in enthusiasm as he puts a GPS on these two hundred thousand petroglyphs and Rens has just come out with his magnum opus which is in four volumes. The title for the four volumes is Traditional Cosmology - the Global Mythology of Creation and Destruction. Volume one, which I have, has a sixty page preliminaries on methodology, which Al has taught us is essential, he learned it at Chicago, so, we know what his methodology is, as he set it out.

Then the first volume proper is: Formation, the second is Functions, the third is Differentiation, and the last is Disintegration. "Disintegration" of what, you may ask? Surely it will be of these great forms in the sky, at which for a certain amount of time man could look at without anything but awe because it was affecting the earth. We don't see it now, it must have disintegrated and its disintegration is the subject of, I would say, Al's Chaos and Creation, and Solaria Binaria, two books in the ten volumes Quantavolution Series, Velikovsky in his Worlds in Collision has a version of one episode of it, in Talbott it is The Saturn Myth as another, and suffice it to say, Tony Peratt has decided not to go further with this just now for various reasons, and Rens is working on it, but even these four volumes are not the exciting scenario, they are an encyclopedia of traditional mythology assembled from everywhere on the inhabitable earth, and only if they are universal not diffused, but found in places which would never diffuse to each other, like the aborigenes in Australia, the Greeks... So, he is, as he puts it, assembling data the way an indo-european linguist would assemble words and see the cognate structure and root and reconstruct a proto-indo-european language - you first have to assemble the words which are in a family together - that's what these four volumes are, and, who nows, then Rens will write a volume that tells us what he and Tony Peratt have talked about, but never published: how the great aurora borealis, the mega-aurora borealis disintegrated and affected mankind and, my friends from the back! caused deluges and conflagrations and combats in the sky, like Saint Michael and the Dragon - I was telling them that's what this conference is about, so all of the catastrophes over which our common ancestor in the adventure Immanuel Velikovsky labored, Al labored and Talbott labored, are waiting to be given a fresh interpretation with the specific use of these plasma physics shapes. Now comes my homage, before I begin properly.

How many of you have read Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision? Four, alright so you're not in on it, I can say anything I like and the others won't say a word. He is quoted in Thunderbolts of the Gods, at the end of this book, saying the following: - there's a picture of the cranky old man looking like a prophet Isaiah, or... - he says: "I became sceptical of the great theories concerning the celestial motions that were formulated when the historical facts described here in this book were not known to science. The accepted celestial mechanics nowithstanding, the many calculations that have been carried out to many decimal places..." - I'll return to that phrase - "...or verified by celestial motions by the predictive power of newtonian physics under stable conditions stand only if the sun is as a whole an electrically neutral body and also if the planets in their usual orbits are neutral bodies. Fundamental principals of celestial mechanics, including the law of gravitation, must come into question if the sun possesses a charge sufficient to influence the planets in their orbits or the comets in theirs." An electric charge in Newtonian celestial mechanics, [which is] based on the theory of gravitation, in newtonian celestial mechanics, electricity and magnetism, for you can't have one without the other, play no role. This, you know, was published in 1950 and even earlier.

Now, Al took principally two books of Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval, and, ah, forged boldly - here in Naxos right, without a computer? - ahead to ten books and I wish to quote to you things I garned from his online version of everything he wrote, which makes it very easy for me to cut and paste, from "Solaria...," from Chaos and Creation, the opening volume, which is a kind of a wagnerian prelude to the nine other volumes.

He says: "A complicated natural system of sheaths..." - very important term for plasma physicists who use it - "...sheats surround bodies in space. It  grades, neutralizes and balances charges,  keeps cosmic bodies in a state which we come to regard as ‘normal.'"That is, the time is lengthened, geological and biological processes and our very existences can occur. " Ralph Juergens, another major player for Velikovsky and Al for developing an electrical model of these catastrophes and the whole solar system, Ralph Juergens, in 1974-75, in a book or paper or something has described the space "sheaths" system in connection with the encounters between Earth and Mars. And it would be explained below: "In all the, quote-unquote, ‘amazing' observations that we make about the ‘world' quote-unquote, surely the continuous series of electrical relations that extend from the universe through the galaxy and sun and planets in space, though the atmosphere, through the rocks, throughout our bodies, including the most extreme interior of every cell, must be among the most astonishing. " It's a beautiful statement. And it is alive and well not only here, but on the West Coast across the pond, in the Electric Universe conferences. And I give you one more: "radioactive elements from chaos and creation existed in great quantities in the periods you reconstructed as human past, but under the electrical and magnetic conditions of the great tubal atmosphere..." - "tubal" after I'll have to explain later - "the rates of decay into other elements were high." This rapid decay which diminished with the general de-electrification of what Al calls "Solaria Binaria" - you wrote this book with Earl Milton, that book - which book did you co-author with Earl Milton? Was there one?

AMI: Solaria Binaria, yes!

BILL: So, Earl Milton, who died all too young, like Ralph Juergens, was a hard science electrical...

AMI: ...astronomer!

BILL:...He was an astronomer, but he knew how to work out with Al the electrical properties of the celestial system, and larger scales and smaller scales. I start over: "...Radioactive elements existed in great quantities at the time of Solaria Binaria we discussed, but under the electric and magnetic conditions of this great tube atmosphere, their rates of decay into other elements were high. This rapid decay which diminished with the general electrification of this complex array of stars and the sun may account for the great ages obtained in tests for the radioactive minerals today. Their decay "constants" have continually and drastically slowed down..." So should Gunnar give a talk on chronology, and you say: oh, but no, no! It's all set by radiocarbon dating! Al will say: that is a process which radically changed in the results it gives you, because of the de-electrification of the former solar system and of an Earth highly electrified!  So, that's the way of letting go of your fixed ideas about scientific dating systems.

Now, I have not paid my homage to hundreds of other passages from Al, but I am going ahead to my central thesis: and it will combine complexity theory, which I shall explain, with plasma physics catastrophism and quantavolution. What is common to both is that they are not the product of formulas or alghorithms with calculations and input of data through formulas and are grinding them all to many decimal points mathematically at all. That can follow, but it doesnt drive it any.  What drives plasma physics catastrophism and complexity theory is visual intuition, that phrase is the center of my talk: visual intuition: you see it and you get it. Right? Now, what do I mean?

Let me start with complexity theory. In 2001, Steven Wolfram - wolf plus ram - published a book on his own, he was already a millionaire for having given the world a program with lots of scientific uses called "mathematica," published in his late forties a book which he wrote and printed with 800 pages of main body and 300 pages of highly technical notes for specialists, of the 800 pages about half are text, which I find very decently written for a scientist, but I was able to follow him, and the other half are computer graphics about things he sees on his computer and classifies and theorizes about it. Already when he was in his early teens he became a child prodigy in complexity theory by taking certain things you can generate on the computer and sorting them into four categories which are decisive for the theoretical basis of complexity theory. So let me explain. Has anyone seen the Game of Life? Chris, Ilya, Paula... Chris can you tell me what the game of life is?
(Short discussion about the "Game of Life.")

CHRIS: You have a screen and dots, pixels, so to say, and it's all about neighbors...

BILL:Neighbors...?

CHRIS: Well, there's a screen and if any pixel has more than two neighbors they die out, if it is exactly two they will stay as it is, it will stay as it is, and... I don't know all the rules, but for whatever I can bring - there is a strange thing that happens whenever you apply that rule, it applies itself over and over again to all the pixels on the screen, and it will assemble into stable parts which will move from one stage to the other or will just kind of, like little bacterias, move over and maybe die out eventually, and there are parts which kind of stretch like bacterias do [...] and in the end it will all come to some stable point at the end of the game, so to say, you... if you are unlucky, you have no pixels at all anymore, and if you are lucky you have some alternating figures which are stable and don't move anymore...

BILL: Right. That's the game, but if you take the analogy to evolution there is no stable end which keeps from morphing. So I am going to use the visuals describing that which Wolfram calls the crucial experiment: take a chess board - and take as the top line the first stake in time where there is one black piece and the rest are the center and the rest are white squares. Or red, if you like. Suppose the rule, the simple rule is that simple elements like n white squares in a row is that if the two white squares adjacent to the black one, if the two squares adjacent to the black one are white, then in the next line they become black. And then you have three blacks and you use the same rules then you have five blacks and you have a pattern, right? A nice fixed pattern of black against white. That's one possible way these things, these simple elements with simple rules, evolved - he has 214 sets of simple elements and simple rules. Another one, even duler, is that in due time they all become black with all that monotony.
And now to the truly interesting ones.

The third, let me use this wall, the third, if you imagine this chess board, might have simple elements and rules such that, over on this side, they develop a repeating pattern, which will go on forever, and in a space which you like to triangulate, or whatever, form a triangle, this forms a side, but down here they get crazier and crazier and, after a certain number of applications of the central rules to the central elements, you get a line which has a pattern over here but things which for all purposes are random! If you landed there, you would not be able to deduce the simple elements and rules that generated this welter of random things. In other words, you could not reconstruct that it was simple elements and simple rules that generate this complete randomness which you cannot work your way back to the origin of.

Now that might seem interesting enough, but most interesting is the fourth, called "complexity" or "complex patterns." So, over time some elements and rules may produce partial patterns, areas of monotony, areas of randomness, but against these backgrounds, shapes appear, each like its predecessor, but also unlike its predecessor, the way we Americans think of Canadians, similar, but somewhat different - so when you, your visual intuition, tells you that there is a pattern but the patterns keep slightly changing and never settling down. It goes on and on and on. It is complex against the background of monotony or patterns. Your visual intuition tells you that they are morphing from one thing to the other which is similar, but the analogy: evolution and life forms... you could never take the origins of life and from it predict precisely the life forms that evolved. Not could you see the life forms which we see today and with perfect accuracy say that it began with simple elements and simple rules, and they work on all the categories of cells, but the games are over. So that's the analogy to life. So what is this all about? It is about seeing in nature, in mathematics, in logic, in computer images the same things, simple elements with simple rules that can produce enormously complex patterns, so complex that we cannot reduce them to an equation or an algorithm, we cannot compress them so that our computers will predict what they will do. You just have to sit back and watch the story unfold. Says Wolfram. Like history. 

Now he takes this and apply it as I say to physics, biology mathematics, logic, quantavolution, you name it, he shows how mollusk shells in three dimensions, which you can enter into, have precisely sixteen possibilities according to the computer and all sixteen are realized in nature. Afterwards I can go online and show you his book and his pictures. Seeing will be believing, there. But since it is not my main topic, I just rest with an exposition of it, so that when terms such as complexity, or another term is self-orgazination... these complex things seem to organize themselves from the original rules and that's it. Self-organization, also found in nature, and complexity are terms which the plasma physicists need to use too. Okay? And at that point what they are showing to you, which I am about to show you, are plasma shapes in three dimensions, petroglyphs in two dimensions, and you get it, you see the plasma shapes generated in the laboratory and you see the petroglyphs.

Moreover, I need to add one more amazing thing about plasma phenomena. The technical term is: they are scalable throughout the universe. The layman says that the same plasma shape can be found in subatomic particle and/or atom or a solar system, now or in the past, and the strength of the electric current you plug in to make this shape will also affect the duration of this shape. Such that the bigger the current, the bigger the shape and the longer it lasts. So a galaxy which has a billion, billions years of life span according to conventional measurements can have that shape, a spiral galaxy, you can generate that shape in a lab, and it will last a few minutes.  Now, if we could put the shades down, and turn the lights off and let the oracle descend from the DVD which is in the back of Thunderbolts of the Gods...

See also:

The 2009 Conference of Quantavolution in Kandersteg, Switzerland

Go to: the site of the Conference

The 2008 Conference of Quantavolution at Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, in Paris.

Go to: the site of the Conference

Contact

m u l l e n @ b a r d . e d u

grazian-archive.com

Go to Alfred de Grazia's archive
Go to Q-MAG, the magazine of Quantavolution
Go to: top of page

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Tuesday, October 02, 2012contact: d e g r a a m i @ g m a i l . c o m