Mayonnaise and the perception of reality

Jack Dikian

October 2012

How a jar of Mayonnaise helped overturn our perception of reality. For hundreds of years, we assumed incorrectly that materials, such as paint and mayonnaise remained viscous due to attractive forces that exist between neutral atoms and molecules.

The long held view that properties of such solutions are determined by van der Waals forces - long-range, attractive forces that exist between neutral atoms and molecules.

In the mid twentieth century the theory that was used to explain van der Waals forces, which had been developed by Fritz London in 1932, did not adequately reflect experimental measurements.

Casimir and Polder working at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven discovered that the interaction between two neutral molecules could be better described and interpreted in terms of vacuum fluctuations eventually leading to his famous prediction of an attractive force between reflecting plates. That is:-

What happens if you take two mirrors and arrange them so that they are facing each other in empty space?

Background

In the days of classical mechanics the idea of a vacuum was simple. The vacuum was what remained if you emptied a container of all its particles and lowered the temperature down to absolute zero. The vacuum therefore was/is a region that is devoid of matter or put another way - a volume of space that is essentially empty of matter. It’s what comes to mind when we thought about space as we were growing up.

Space is shockingly bizarre

According to quantum mechanics, all fields have fluctuations. That is, at any given moment their actual value varies around a constant, mean value. Even a perfect vacuum has a fluctuating field, the mean energy of which corresponds to half the energy of a photon.

Some 30 years after Paul Dirac formulated the famous Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of fermions and which led to the prediction of the existence of antimatter (however, unable to deal with more than a single electron) Richard Feynman, and others, attempted to take the understanding of the Atom further and help develop the theory of everything.

Their theory, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is a far-reaching and more accurate than any previous approximations and underpins almost everything we experience in the physical world – shapes, texture, color, and how everything interacts together.

Here, empty space (a vacuum) buzzes with matter and activity. Here, energy is said to be borrowed from the future and is used in the creation of a particle and an antiparticle. These particles, in turn meet in a fraction of a second and annihilate each other. So energy is borrowed out of nowhere, turned into matter self-destruct and returns back into energy all in a fraction of a second. This is happening everywhere countless times a second.

So according to QED, the everyday matter filling our physical world, the world we see and feel is a kind of left-over from the feverish activities virtual particles get up to in the “empty” void.

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Further reading

M Bordag, U Mohideen and V M Mostepanenko 2001 New developments in the Casimir effect Phys. Rep. 353 1 

H B Chan et al. 2001 Nonlinear micromechanical Casimir oscillator Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 211801 

F Chen and U Mohideen 2002 Demonstration of the lateral Casimir force Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 101801 

C Genet, A Lambrecht and S Reynaud 2000 Temperature dependence of the Casimir force between metallic mirrors Phys. Rev. A 62 012110 

S K Lamoreaux 1997 Demonstration of the Casimir force in the 0.6 to 6 micrometer range Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 5 

K A Milton 2001 The Casimir Effect: Physical Manifestations of Zero-point Energy (World Scientific, Singapore)

Search volume for depression

Here is the most recent Google search by volume for depression. The graph below shows search volume decreasing between 2005 and 2012.

A   SFgate.com          Docs warn about Facebook use and teen depression

B   ABC.net.au:         Germen goalkeeper suffered from depression

C   Newsday:             G20 action necessary to prevent global economic depression

D   Reuters UK:         Alcohol abuse may lead to depression

E  

F   Reuters UK:          Mice overcome fee and depression

G  Times of India:      Great depression of 2008


Search volume by regional source below indicates high interest in countries like Australia and the USA.

Male contact choice using female availability signaling using Internet-based dating services

Jack Dikian
ABSTRACT

October 2012

Recent observations have demonstrated a greater preference by males for females signaling high availability using Internet-based dating services even when little is known of other traditional mate-values such as personality, beauty, and biological quality.

It is generally accepted that the evolution of traits that signal mate-quality is more complex in females than in males because females usually provide the bulk of resources for developing offspring. Consequently, competition inter alia often benefits males most strongly, whereas being discriminating in mate choice often benefits females strongly.

The appeal of this evolutionary explanation lies in part in its simple scientific validity, but in part with its consistency with long-standing, deep-seated cultural stereotypes about the roles of men and women.

So what of indirect courting strategies such as that played out over the new interaction channels such as Internet chat rooms, and Internet-based dating services. Here, little reliance can be placed on ornamentation appeal, assortative mating, visualization, and or other pair forming strategies.

In the absence of such determinates, it was found recently that males used female availability signaling to establish contact with those females at a much greater rate than with those females who did not declare availability so plainly. The observed contact rate was approximately 4:1.

Women who had otherwise described themselves as average in everyway, except to declare themselves as highly available through the use of language such as seeking a ?casual relationship?, or a ?discreet affair? attracted 4 times as many contacts from males as those woman who expressed their desire for a ?friendship? or a ?committed relationship?

Key words: Female availability signalling, Internet-based dating, Male contact choice

Male contact choice using female availability signaling using Internet-based dating services

Male contact choice using female availability signaling using Internet-based dating services

Jack Dikian

ABSTRACT

October 2012

Recent observations have demonstrated a greater preference by males for females signaling high availability using Internet-based dating services even when little is known of other traditional mate-values such as personality, beauty, and biological quality.

It is generally accepted that the evolution of traits that signal mate-quality is more complex in females than in males because females usually provide the bulk of resources for developing offspring. Consequently, competition inter alia often benefits males most strongly, whereas being discriminating in mate choice often benefits females strongly.

The appeal of this evolutionary explanation lies in part in its simple scientific validity, but in part with its consistency with long-standing, deep-seated cultural stereotypes about the roles of men and women.

So what of indirect courting strategies such as that played out over the new interaction channels such as Internet chat rooms, and Internet-based dating services. Here, little reliance can be placed on ornamentation appeal, assortative mating, visualization, and or other pair forming strategies.

In the absence of such determinates, it was found recently that males used female availability signaling to establish contact with those females at a much greater rate than with those females who did not declare availability so plainly. The observed contact rate was approximately 4:1.

Women who had otherwise described themselves as average in everyway, except to declare themselves as highly available through the use of language such as seeking a ?casual relationship?, or a ?discreet affair? attracted 4 times as many contacts from males as those woman who expressed their desire for a ?friendship? or a ?committed relationship?

Coincidence and Synchronicity

Wikipedia describes a coincidence as a collection of two or more events or conditions, closely related by time, space, form, or other associations which appear unlikely to bear a relationship as either cause to effect or effects of a shared cause, within the observer's or observers' understanding of what cause can produce what effects.

So at what point should I stop and reflect upon a coincidence-cluster that has been bewildering me for months. It’s almost like the universe is conspiring to reverberate a word, a name, a label almost as quickly as I’m about to write that same word down.

Over and over again I’d be sitting back and writing a note, pondering over a choice of a word and almost magically that same word would be blurted out. It’d be someone on the TV, radio, or even a person across the room.

Now it just so happens that for years I have received supervision from a psychologist who had received much of his training in Jungian psychoanalysis. As well as me reflecting on these peculiar word coincidences I have been collaborating with a young practitioner in preparation for a forthcoming conference, where we’ve had to brush up on Schon’s work on a reflective practice as well as Glaser and Strauss’ Grounded Theory and emergence principles.

As we know Jung described Synchronicity as the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner.

Importantly, Instead it maintains that, just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by meaning.

Scientific reconsideration of Jung's difficult ideas has become more possible with the advent of recent developments in understanding the self-organizing features of complex adaptive systems.  In particular, the question of acausality in "meaningful" coincidences, especially those observed in the clinical setting, can be reassessed in terms of the concept of emergence, which explores holistic phenomena supervening from interactions among component agents.

In her article, Mayer (2002) suggests that Freudian and Jungian views of reality are well-poised at this juncture to enter into "a wider scientific and cultural conversation. Where some of the most lively and critically important questions about people and their relationship with the world are currently being asked". In her view, this dialogue centers on the way that an extensive range of phenomena—both physical and psychological—are being reconceptualized as "separate and separable versus connected and inseparable." She goes on to suggest that "Freudians have developed a view of the mind which . . . elaborates implications of its separateness and its unequivocally boundaried character," where as Jungians have "elaborated implications of the mind's connectedness: the nature of its quintessentially unboundaried character."

Mayer singles out the understanding of the transference, which, perhaps more than anything else, dramatically manifests the individual boundaried mind in action, as the clinical tool par excellence of psychoanalysis. In contrast, she locates the genius of the Jungian school in its attention to "the collective mind and what we might call the profoundly connected mind".

2002, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 47:91-99. Freud and Jung: The boundaried mind and the radically connected mind · Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D