Footnote Physicist

by Steven Gussman            In " The Cosmic Filament Structure As Seeded By Inflated Primordial Gravitational Wave Interference", I put forward the hypothesis that an interference pattern in microscopic gravitational waves in the early universe were inflated (including, crucially, in their amplitude) to seed the large-scale filament structure of the universe. 1   Soon after publication, I realized a fatal theoretical flaw in this hypothesis: the reason that it is typically thought that an expanding space-time flattens out is because the amplitude has an associated energy: my hypothesis would seem to break the first law of thermodynamics, that no matter-energy may be created nor destroyed.          After publishing my paper, I read The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture Of The Universe by J. Richard Gott, and published a small review of the work on my Instagram account: 2 View this post on Instagram A post...

by Steven Gussman   ASSUMPTIONS           Two broad assumptions will be made: 1. The Wheeler-Feynman hypothesis that anti-matter is merely matter moving backwards in time. 2. That any particle is intrinsically as likely to move in the forward-or-backward direction in the temporal dimension (yielding a space-like time-dimension, part a hyper-space-like four-dimensional universe). HYPOTHESIS           The arrow of time is modeled here as arising from the thermodynamic diffusion of particles in the single time-dimension. This diffusion in turn arises from the fact that, while there are no boundaries in the three classical spatial dimensions—diffusion there is not biased in any particular direction, and generally, matter diffuses outward in all directions (particularly as the universe expands), there is a one-sided boundary in the temporal dimension in which 13.8 billion years ago there is a barrier (whereas there is...

  About The Author                     Photograph designed by Steven Gussman and                     shot by Christine Abacan-Pinho on                     Canon EOS Rebel t5i (2017).                     Arts installation: “The Gateway” by Clyde Lynds                     (“tempered glass and stainless steel”) (2007) at                     fourth and Cooper, Rutgers University Camden campus. I           Steven Gussman is a scientist and video game developer living in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He graduated cum laude from the Honors College at Rutgers University Camden with a Bachelor's Of Th...

          As my dedication implies, I am very thankful to my heroes and teachers, past and present for the education they provided me, sometimes through classes, often times through books.  In my personal life, I want to thank my family and friends for their support and discussions over the years.  This is especially true of my sister, Dr. Katie Gussman, for all of her many modes of support; and of my brother, musician Jake Gussman, for our interesting discussions.  I thank my parents for rearing me, and especially my mother for all of the many sacrifices she made to take care of her children.           Several tools were useful in me in the creation of this books: Google Books (in particular, the ability to search key terms into books); Amazon and Barnes & Noble product listings for meta-data (such as publisher and publication year); YouTube's transcript function for making videos / podcasts searchable; Ope...

Dedicated To Mr. Callinan for giving me computer science Mr. Thompson for giving me physical law Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, and Neil deGrasse Tyson for giving me the philosophy of science and to my mother, Lillian for giving me life Return to the Table Of Contents

          “Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality           —where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided.  The           standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed.”           – Carl Sagan I PSEUDO-SCIENCE           Pseudo-science has the appearance of science, especially to the layperson, but none of the substance.  Precisely because the sciences have had so much success at explaining the cosmos, its philosophical competitors, and mere hucksters and salesman, have attempted to insert a patina of scientific language into their claims in the hopes that a patina of its convincing power will rub off.   Pseudo-science comes in three distinct flavors: the continued belief in a hypothesis, pos...

          “In the demon haunted world world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that           stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”           – Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan I           It is fashionable to claim that one cannot place limits on scientific inquiry and that anyone who tries is doomed to fail—that the scientific project is irreducibly stumbled-upon, with no hard-and-fast laws that must be abided. II   This is nonsense; of course the epistemology of science is a normative theory!   It is true that our knowledge of epistemology evolves over time. III   It is also true that this means that even epistemological knowledge is provisional (though I contend that it is necessarily much firmer than the bodies of knowledge it supports).  But both of those arguments are true of our knowledge of any topic; t...

          “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”           – Attributed to Ayn Rand I           “I do not mean that philosophers were ordinarily present in universities any more than prophets or           saints are ordinarily present in houses of worship.  But because those houses of worship are           dedicated to the spirit of the prophets and saints, they are different from other houses.  They can           undertake many functions not central to that spirit, but they remain what they are because of what           they look up to, and everything they do is informed by that reverence.  But if the faith disappears,           if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints ...