INTRODUCTION
This website puts forward a hypothesis, or possibly model is a better word, for the way in which information is carried across both time and space. I call it Duplication Theory because, firstly, it is less of a mouthful than hypothesis, and secondly, when I completed a first rough draft in 1979, I was not aware that it was more a hypothesis rather than a theory. My explanations are generally in the first person singular since any hypothesis on such an ambitious scale has to be based on conjectures which are necessarily very subjective. My prime interest is to provide an explanation for the mechanism of memory since it seems to me that if this was once achieved then many other imponderables of the mind's workings would then fall into place. I am also aware that although major advances have been made in the understanding of the rules of nature by those cleverest people in the world, the physicists, yet nobody has yet managed to put up an explanation of the operation of memory in any convincing detail.
I am told that what I have produced can best be described as an observation theory which is probably about right. I use principles of physics in the development of my thesis but I am no trained physicist and of course I have to make a number of assumptions in building up my arguments. Not the most credible background for putting up a basis of explanation for memory, a subject which has defied all attempts to date at any sort of generally accepted explanation, but then since the physicists and other life scientists have signally failed to come up with convincing possible answers despite having made such trenchant advances in other areas of understanding, perhaps a radical outside view might stand a chance of some form of resolution. The proposals involved give rise to a principle of how form and order increase: negative entropy in short. But then if these assumptions are made, a basis of explanation transpires not only for memory but also a number of other allied phenomena such as intuition, self consciousness, the significance of ritual and group behaviour, and a number of other seemingly disconnected phenomena.
If the relatively technical description of the mechanisms involved (section B) seem indigestible to the reader with little interest in technical terms, then they should perhaps go straight to section H, the Narrative account of the way in which I developed my proposals and what I was doing at the time that caused me to reach my conclusions in a very arbitrary and haphazard manner over a number of years.
I have put the summary of Duplication Theory in two forms below, the first being such a bald statement of its workings that it might well appear incomprehensible. As a result I have also given a second summary more in terms of its results which might be easier to assimilate.
SUMMARY
1 That the creation of form and order out of chaos is no more than the repetition of similar intervals in space is pretty much self evident, but why this should be so seems to have been little considered. The theory is based on an analysis of the significance of this duplication process.
2 The theory shows, from an implication of the Uncertainty Principle, how a specific structure, changing its shape over time, will tend to resonate with a later similar structure in the same or a similar location, so the later will move its component particles to duplicate the motions of the earlier. Thus it is possible to transport information through time via a system of resonance.
3 If huge numbers of similar intervals in time rather than space are considered, effectively series of identical actions or events, then the same analysis explains the resonance of these repeated events through space, otherwise familiar as electromagnetic radiation
4 the theory can be summarised in two sections thus:
Equal intervals in time, similar actions, tend to duplicate themselves through all space at one moment in time (this statement is no more than the familiar transmission of radio waves); and
Equal intervals in space, similar structures, tend to duplicate themselves through all time in one location (an effect not yet countenanced by established science). It is significant that each is a direct corollary of the other, the words space and time being interchangeable.
5 Conclusions derived from such observations indicate there is an ordering process in nature, to counterbalance that of entropy. This is manifested by the escalation of orderly structures which become more complex as time passes. This negative entropy is the basis of life and other phenomena associated with increasing complexity.
6 the theory leads to a basis of explanation for a number of phenomena, amongst which are the mechanisms of memory and many aspects of the nature of thought, as well as the way in which life evolves. It has implications for the understanding of inertia and the possibility that the universe is bounded and finite; that the velocity of light is variable and mediated by that of the rate of expansion of the universe.
SUMMARY MORE IN TERMS OF APPLICATIONS OF THE HYPOTHESIS
The 'theory' shows how a specific structure which changes its shape over time, will tend to resonate with a later similar structure in the same location, so that the structure of the later object will move its component particles to duplicate the motions of the earlier structure. Thus it is possible to transport information through time by a system of resonance, a process not yet countenanced by current science other than in some esoteric effects of quantum physics.
Since the universe is expanding, the notion of the same location in space can only be regarded as relatively the same location. In a small but very complex system such as the brain, structures of firing synapses producing patterns of thought will be resonating in relatively the same location with respect to the scale of the components involved. Thus it is possible for the brain to operate a resonance system on which a mechanism for perfect recall or eidetic memory might be based, and from that an abbreviated version for everyday working memory.
The theory is based on an analysis of the Uncertainty Principle to show that although it is impossible for one structure ever to exactly replicate another, when close approaches are made to perfect duplication, a resonance effect will manifest itself, and the more complex the structure the greater the potential for information to be transported across time. Such a structure resonance effect would not only be a basis of explanation for memory and a number of other effects connected with the mind, it would also provide an answer in part for the way in which life evolves. It also transpires to be a negative entropic effect in that it acts to increase complexity of form and order, whereas entropy ensures that systems become more random as time passes.
Reinforcement for the theory is provided by the consideration of large numbers of similar structures in time, similar events, the finest example of which is perhaps alternating current comprised of the similar motions of trillions of identical electrons along a conductor. This produces the familiar effect of radiation which is no more than the potential for duplication of these identical source events in all space at the same time, or as simultaneously as light velocity allows. The two forms of resonance can be described tersely: "Equal intervals in space -similar structures- tend to duplicate themselves through all time in one location. Equal intervals in time -similar actions- tend to duplicate themselves through all space at one time." Interestingly the words time and space are interchangeable, the one being the corollary of the other, and the one effect always containing an element of the other, structures never always in motion.
final Introductory Comment
Before I started on the first version of this paper, I had been greatly encouraged by Erwin Schrödinger's short book "What is Life" which together with his similar booklet 'Mind and Matter', I read in the late 1970s. The following extract seeks to explain, that there must be a tendency or potential to organise matter into complex structures, to counter entropy.
'It appears that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the 'statistical mechanism', which produces 'Order from disorder', and the new-one, producing 'order from order'. To the unprejudiced mind, the second principle appears to be much simpler, much more plausible. No doubt it is. That is why the physicists were so proud to have fallen in with the other one, the 'Order from disorder' principle, which is actually followed in nature and which alone conveys an understanding of the great line of natural events, in the first place of their irreversibility. But we cannot expect that the 'Laws of Physics' derived from it suffice straightaway to explain the behaviour of living matter, whose most striking features are visibly based to a large extent on the 'Order from Order' principle. We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or, are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super physical law? No, I do not think that. For the new principle that is involved is a genuinely physical one: it is in my opinion, nothing more else than the principle of quantum theory over again. To explain this, we have to go to some length including a refinement, not to say an amendment, of an assertion previously made, namely, that all physical laws are based on statistics.'
If an 'order from order' principle could be derived it would at once become a fundamental paradigm to explain the phenomenon of life, although that is not the particular problem I first sought to explain. The problem that I sought to resolve was that of the mechanism behind memory, although it later transpired that the two are closely connected.
This website was first put out in spring 2007, and it has been updated as time passes. The amendments are as follows: section F, Cosmological Update, has been inserted to update section E, Cosmological Implications, which section should really have been radically revised but has been left in its original form, if only to show how the shape of the hypothesis can be altered to accommodate new information. Section G, Experimental verification, was also updated in May 2008 when I read of the results of a fascinating experiment in