Subtitled: turtles all the way down. It was mentioned here recently that the info 'pusher' we luv to hate, Wiki-the-omniscient, bless its pea-pickin' heart, now has an entry for the "Turtles all the way down" ... which refers to an infinite regression in understanding the nature of the universe.
What appear to be infinite regressions however, can sometimes have a flipping point (as distinguished from a tipping point) and in reality become cyclical, but in an unusual way. If you are of a certain age, and became hooked on TV in the early days of that perniciously addictive (de)vice, then you may remember a cranky character named "Charley Weaver"... here is what he resembled: http://ralphspubilliniclub.com/images/CHARLEY%20WEAVER.jpg One of Charley's more memorable shticks was based on having handy a giant ball of string (BS). Back before "duct tape" defined the essence of manly-men - those who could fix almost anything expeditiously; and before better-adapted fasteners became commonplace- it was string, or twine, which was the favored method of holding the working-man's life together without professional assistance. And a ball of saved-twine became somewhat the default visual metaphor for "thrift". My grandparents certainly had their ball of string ... though nowhere near the girth of Charley's. Anyway, it occurs that the wound-string metaphor is also apt in many ways for visualizing the quantum world ... make the layered-quantum world. It has relevance to Robin's lissajous model of the electron and to string theory. Here is a way to do what a different kind of with 18 loops: http://www.groupkos.com/eso/tiki-browse_image.php?galleryId=6&sort_mode=hits_desc&imageId=45&scalesize=240 Here is my unconventional way to explain this Lissajous, cyclical, infintie regression that is not really a regreesion. In orbital mechanics, a Lissajous orbit is a quasi-periodic orbital trajectory that an object can follow around a three-body system. It is called quasi-periodic because, although it seems like it will repeat itself, the period for this can be very long. since often there is an offset that doesn't show up at first. In contrast to more familiar curved paths that lie entirely in the plane of two primary bodies, like the sun and earth - with 3 bodies (throw in the moon) and you will have a Lissajous orbital which can be traced , there will be one plane and another perpendicular to it, and the result is that follow a Lissajous curve. Halo orbits also include components perpendicular to the plane, but they are periodic, while Lissajous orbits are not. And moreover - there could be "quanta of quanta" - such that even though a particular value appears to be not subdividable - at least from one POV (the one in 3-space from which it is being viewed) it is subdividable from another POV or dimension in which there is a sub level of quantum values. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with Mills and Ron Burgoin's paper on fractional quantum states: http://www.iscmns.org/asti06/Bourgoin%20RECIPROCAL%20QUANTUM%20STATES.pdf I intend to flesh out this line of thought with relevance to strings, at a future date, but for now I will leave you with this bit of Americana: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biggest_ball_of_twine Jones
