THE SHAPE OF INFORMATION: How to Talk to an ET
(c) 2000, 2002 Stan Tenen

Below is the Abstract to The Shape of Information: How to Talk to an ET, as published in the peer-reviewed Noetic Journal, Vol. 3, #2.  The complete article is available in PDF format.  (An HTML version will also be published shortly.)

The Noetic Journal also published Mr. Tenen's 1999 article, The God of Abraham: A Mathematician's View, in Vol 2 #2.

Abstract

Whether or not there actually are extra-terrestrials, it is worth considering what it would take to communicate with self-aware beings from thousands of light-years away in space, because this may shed light on how we can understand formal records (sometimes called "sacred") left for us by human civilizations thousands of (earth) years away in our own past.  For this reason we ask:  What if ancient, traditional, "sacred" numbers, letters, and symbols were, somehow, exactly what they meant?  This claim of intrinsic natural universal meaning is, after all, one of the claims generally made.  Usually these claims are easily dismissed, or they are reduced to the trivial by interpretations that explain them away as vestiges of numerology, gematria, and mythological meaning.  This essay attempts to outline an alternative view.  We find that the natural geometry of the cosmological, quantum-mechanical, and personal information gradients of all information systems follows the same topology, and can take the same geometric form.  At the quantum-mechanical level, we find the twice-around orbit of the Dirac String Trick gives us a pair of spiral vortices, and Arthur M. Young's 3-turn torus-hypersphere model of the photon-which he relates to the quantum of personal choice-gives us a similar set of spiral vortices.  At the cosmological level, the negentropic star-plant-planet information-gradient described by Roger Penrose takes the same form.  And at the personal level, our human hands, which are the form(s) we use to project our choices into the world, can also be idealized by the same spiral vortex form(s). In all three cases, cosmologically "as above," quantum-mechanically "so below," and in the middle on the "earth plane" where we live, we find the negentropic information gradient takes the same form-and this form shows up throughout ancient symbolism and at the root of the three great "sacred alphabets" in the Western traditions.

Keywords: Cosmology, Language, Meaning, Quantum theory, Information
 

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