John Smith

"Frank Wilczek was recently asked: "If you could ask a super-intelligent alien one yes-or no-question, what would it be? His response: "P versus NP. That basically contains all the other questions doesn't it?"" Here we exploit the inclusive nature of P versus NP to argue that time-travel, UFOs, and other paranormal phenomena are physically possible, and why the failure of human beings to understand them is born of a failure of human intelligence. Just as the ant is kept by its narrow intelligence from any but a dim understanding of the world of the man, the man in turn is kept by his narrow intelligence from any but a dim understanding of higher worlds.

In this note a new approach is used to reveal the hidden features of the face of the man imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, and then Microsoft's facial recognition technology is used to make comparisons between this criterion-face and various representations of the face of Jesus of Nazareth.

Richard Feynman said in the 80s: "There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e- the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of G-d" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!" In fact, Armand Wyler had pointed out in 1969 that (9/16\[Pi]^3)(\[Pi]/5!)^1/4 is close to 1/137, but failed to convince anyone that his explanation of the connection -that the number is a property of a 7-dimensional space-time- was viable. In this note, it is suggested that the reason for the closeness of another expression to 1/137 is, not a numerical curiosity, but -ironically- an indicator of the truth of a multi-dimensional physical theory.

The prospect of an up-coming quantum computer revolution is big news these days, with some technologists predicting that a scalable quantum computer is a mere 4 - 5 years away. It has even been claimed -by D-Wave co-founder Eric Ladizinsky- that this prospective revolution will be civilization's next big revolution. The truth is that quantum computers that are anything more than toys are, not merely difficult to engineer, but mathematically impossible, and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between classical and quantum physics...

Biblical chronology has since the advent of the scientific revolution generally, and particularly since the publication of On the Origin of Species in November 1859, fallen into disrepute. This is in no small part because the bible tells of a human race that is much younger than evolutionary chronology requires. It is a matter of great irony therefore that in November 1859 a work was published on the seemingly unrelated topic of the prime numbers which contained a hypothesis (the Riemann Hypothesis) whose truth implies that the time-frames of evolutionary chronology are inflated. When we take account of this inflation, some puzzling conflicts between genealogy and genetics (such as the apparent descent from multiple recent patriarchs of men belonging by birthright to the Jewish priestly class, the descent from multiple recent patriarchs of Jewish men generally). More significantly, light can be cast on genetic divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and on the identity and location(s) of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

A skeleton excavated in 2012 is almost certainly that of the English king, Richard III (1452 -1485), and mtDNA (which is passed from mother to child) extracted from the skeleton matches mtDNA taken from descendants of Richard's sister Anne of York. However Y-DNA (which is passed from father to son) extracted from the skeleton apparently doesn't match Y-DNA taken from descendants of Henry Somerset the 5th Duke of Beaufort, who according to history descended from Richard's 2nd great grand father Edward III (1312 - 1377). The implication according to geneticists, and the media, is that there is a "false paternity event" somewhere between Edward and the Somersets. In this note, a formula for calculating the time of the most recent common ancestor is introduced, and some of its consequences outlined. This formula is attached to a mathematical framework within which it is possible that the traditional genealogy is correct. If this framework is the right framework for understanding of genetic inheritance, then it has been wrongly assumed that Y-DNA mutation rates are line-like, constant and smooth. I propose that they are wave-like and decrease erratically in the direction of the future, and that the contrary impression is an illusion created by an over-focus on the relatively constant and smooth nature of genetic change in the present and the near-present.

In November of 1859, 2 highly influential works were published. One was a 500 page book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin, the other was an 8 page paper by Bernhard Riemann entitled On the Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity. On the face of it, they are unrelated, but it is a great irony that the central idea of Darwin's work (Evolution) is contradicted by the central idea of Riemann's work (The Riemann Hypothesis). In this note, the origin of this contradiction is traced, and it is argued that Riemann got the better of the unintentional but historic dispute.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the world has been under the sway of the philosophy of atomism, which holds that the parts are prior to the whole, and so that the world is an empty receptacle in which material objects are placed like furniture in an empty room. This philosophy however contradicts the General Theory of Relativity according to which the fundamental condition of the universe involves no space and time and therefore no matter, and has numerous undesirable consequences. It is argued here that the alternative conception -that the whole is prior to the parts, and that space disrupts light rather than the other way around- coheres with theory and with observation, and that it is supported by mathematical principles by reference to which several problems of physics can be solved.

The principle of the Separation of Powers, according to which -broadly speaking- power ought to be shared amongst a diverse group of people, is often presented as a recipe for justice, and it yet that is really not the case. In so far as the members of this group tend to disagree, it tends to be a recipe for judicial impotence, the inability to impose justice because of the barriers constituted by the existence of dissenting influences. More particularly, this principle stands in a way of a ruler or a government that is able to dispense perfect justice.

Physicist, and founder of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP),  John P. Jackson. has proposed that the image features of the Shroud of Turin were produced by radiation emanating from the body in the Shroud at the moment of resurrection. To many, the concept of resurrection is patently absurd, but it is argued here that any apparent absurdity is the result of a conflict between this concept and a false world-view in terms of which resurrection contravenes physical laws. Jackson has proposed also that "the Shroud image presents, if you will, some type of "new physics" that ultimately requires an extension or even revision of current concepts." The purpose of this note is to show that, if certain deep-rooted but inadequate concepts are extended and revised, we will be able to explain the resurrection, and the image on the Shroud, in a way that coheres with both with the biblical account of the life of Yeshua ben Yosef (a.k.a. Jesus of Nazareth) and with science.

Riemann's prime-counting function R(x) looks good for every value of x we can compute, but in the light of Littlewood's result its superiority over li(x) is illusory: Ingram (1938) pointed out that 'for special values of x (as large as we please), the one approximation will deviate as widely as the other from the true value'. This note introduces a type of prime-counting function that is always better than li(x)...