More on eight... probably more than you ever wanted to know. Yesterday I posted a suggestion, not quite to the level of hypothesis, that builds on a NASA finding - that there is natural but "hidden" cycle of magnetic pulses on earth, which comes from the Sun when their two magnetic fields briefly align (reference included below).
There are many implications to this finding by NASA, but my initial one was that this natural resonance could "set" a kind of internal clock for any evolving species which needed an internal clock... We know insects use magnetic fields for location and navigation, so it is not a huge leap to take that further up the chain: that this regular pulsation could possibly be 'sensed' by the subconscious brain, and perhaps it is a hidden part of our species' development. And one presumes- that evolving hand-in-hand, along with advancing intelligence, there is a survival benefit to having both an internal clock (and eventually an external clock so that all of us are in step); and furthermore, that way back in prehistory- this internal clock influenced the way we allocated time: into minutes and hours (along with borrowing the more obvious cosmological events like the lunar cycle of 12). This influence would have factored-in the importance of a musical octave, as being relevant to larger and smaller lapse; so that 8 minute pulses reduce to the "minute" on the downside and the "hour" on the upside. The accuracy is only approximate, and consequently, the upside octave was shortened slightly, so as to fit in 12/24 scheme - which is the final mathematical division of solar day. Anyway, I haven't yet been able to shoot this suggestion down - but thanks to Vince Cockeram, I am reminded of a most obvious causal connection to the period itself: eight minutes. I am embarrassed to say I missed it on the first go-around, but maybe that is a good thing - as in getting it all reconciled - htere is another mystery which was not there before. To paraphrase the basic info which you were taught early on in grade school: If you're at a concert sitting 330 meters away from the orchestra, then the sound you are hearing is about 1 second old. This is because sound travels in air at about 330 meters every second. Light travels much much faster travels ~300,000 kilometers per second and the sun is approximately 150 million kilometers away on average, so it takes light about 500 seconds to get here, which is over 8 minutes. When you look at the sun, you are seeing an image of the sun 8 minutes ago. The distance from the Earth to the Sun varies because the Earth's orbit about the Sun is elliptical.At it's closest, the distance is 91,402,000 miles and it's farthest distance it is 94,512,000 miles.This gives an average distance of 92,957,000 miles. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. Dividing the average distance by the speed of light gives 499.01225 seconds which is 8.3168708 minutes. Rounded off, let's say 8 minutes and 18 seconds. Oops. This is a slight problem in reconciling this actual period to the period NASA found, and that opens up an even broader question and inquiry - is the magnetic pulse slightly super-luminous -- or is the light pulse slightly retarded, or are they unconnected but coincidentally close ? ...and furthermore, is this all related ultimately to the various theories of "electrogravity"? i.e the magnetic pulse seems to arrive slightly faster than corresponding light, somewhat as if it were being "pushed" perhaps by a gravity wave to a higher acceleration than corresponding visible photons of light. OK I will try to flesh this out more later on, but suffice it to say that in supernova, where we see both the flash and feel both the gravity wave billions of miles away, the gravity wave gets here first (by less than one percent but still?)... Yet, in the past, cosmologists have written-off this slight anomaly in a very shaky and suspect way - they attribute visible light to acutally being slowed or retarded due to intersellar "dust" and stray hydrogen etc. That is most unlikely and one could logically suspect that the interstellar mass should affect the gravity wave more than the light wave. I think they "could be" wrong since they base evertyhting on the assumption that lightspeed applies to gravity (gravitons) equally well as to photons. It may or may not! ... but in truth we do not know for sure in 2008 ! IOW lightspeed "probably" does apply, since the variance is so slight and so close; but that cannot be assumed IF this information from NASA is correct (about the much closer to home disparity, mentioned herein). More on this later. Jones Below is the provocative story from NASA about a cyclical "magnetic portal" between the earth and the sun. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/30oct_ftes.htm It is associated with an approximate eight-minute-cycle. Funny, they do not mention Schumann Resonance in this article but maybe that resonance is too "fringe" for NASA... or maybe they are google-challenged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances In trying to determine if there was a broader relevance to this 8-min cycle, I spent some time googling, but nothing really stuck out as being both relevant and very basic (in an historical sense that would tie it to the present worldwide standard). There is a small chance that the period of time we associate with an hour is somehow related to this cycle, if only on a subconscious level. After all, an octave is a very basic resonance in music, and the "eight minutes" is only approximate for the magnetic windowing - so if were slightly less, especially in prehistory, then there is a rough fit to the eight cycles giving this time period (now known as an hour) as a standard period that early man had not problem with accepting across various cultures ... but that synchronicity would be much more convincing if there were a "natural" resonance on earth which was timed accordingly -- so that we do not need to bring the "subconscious" into this. Anyway - If there is a natural ~8-min cycle, which would have been evident to early civilizations, I haven't found it yet. The Ancient Egyptians are credited with establishing the division of the day and night into 12 parts, although this arrangement might not have "taken" worldwide (as consensual) i.e. as the universal standard period for an "hour" of time lapse - had not both China and India done the same thing in prehistory approximately - all using 12 divisions. The importance of 12 has been attributed to the number of lunar cycles in a year and/or the 12 constellations in the zodiac signs. But - in order to base a full day on that - and going back to first principles - then why is the present hour not equivalent to 120 minutes, so that you get twelve divisions in the full day - instead of 24 in a full day ? Is that consideration - of a natural lapse of time - the place where the 8 subconscious repetitions of the 8 minute cycle could fit in? Dunno. However. it could go even further down the chain of resonance to the next lowest level. The Schumann Resonance is more familiar to many of us, since there are energy implications. This a set of peaks in the ELF portion of the Earth’s electromagnetic field spectrum. ELF - Extremely Low Frequencies (or ELF) refers to a band of radio frequencies from about one to 300Hz. Schumann Resonance is often said to be related to precisely 7.8 Hz, but that seems to be incorrect- as there is apparently no single Schumann peak and sometimes the 7.8 disappears in favor of another. However, given the ~8 Hz is the most common resonance in that range - and the ~.125 Hz of the NASA study is an 8X8 multiple of Schumann, and both are magnetic in orientation: the tentative conclusion is that they be possibly related to each other, and to early civilization; and it all gets most interesting as to "a natural lapse of time" in the evolved subconscious mind (if you can overlook the slight lack of precision). Is it all coincidental? Jones
