Bubbles and stuff

We live in a polarised society.  Within the big bubble of the whole community, people live in social bubbles with invisible boundaries.  These bubbles intersect, and everyone lives in a lot of social bubbles.

New Whig exists in the interstices between the bubbles. Society is like a great foam, full of Social Bubbles.  We are all surrounded by Energy-Fields.  Energy is little understood by Science and even less by most people.  Just as objects of Mass in close contact and moving in unison are equivalent to a single Mass, so people who are socially joined combine their personal Energy Fields.  All Energy is subject to the irrational Wave/Particle Duality, and while we usually think of our Energy being located in a particular spot, namely within our physical bodies, our interactions with other people and with our Social Groups, our Social Bubbles, can only be explained in terms of Energy Fields that exist like bubbles round groups of people.

Foam is the most common structure in the universe.  Indeed, on a large scale, the Universe is a foam, just like the top of frothy, soapy water or where waves break on a sloping beach.  When Astronomers map the zillions of Galaxies that have become visible with orbiting telescopes and whose distance can be quite accurately estimated, we find that it is not an even, grainy distribution, but maps onto huge bubbles, many hundreds of times larger than any galaxy, and while these bubbles appear to be utterly empty, the galaxies we do see are all located in the interstices between the galaxies.  The structure of human cells is very similar: figure and ground.

Where a few bubbles meet there is a multi-filamented nucleus-like blob, and it is within these interstices that galaxy clusters form.  Galaxies can also form along the filaments that exist between three bubbles, some of which are like long tubes, and reach eventually to another blob where another galaxy cluster will form.  How large this foam might be is impossible to say, as our perception is limited to the range in which light can travel before the size of the foam reaches a scale where the foam-expansion exceeds the speed of light.  For indeed, the celestial foam is expanding.  It is like shining a spotlight on a small area of soap foam, counting the zillions of bubbles and then wondering how far the foam extends beyond the light.  We might well imagine that the foam is vastly extensive on a scale that we cannot imaging, and that it, itself is but a speck on the footstool of something yet vastly greater still.   So, Foam is universal.

Within Societies, people (and social creatures including ants and bees) are like the particles in the wave/particle duality, and we all see ourselves that way, but in the real world, there are Energy Fields that interact.  Social Bubbles are made up of groups of linked individuals.  Families are the paradigm. Australia is currently updating its Social Definition of a Family, with some adherents to the Ancient Traditions trying to enclose everyone within their social bubble, while fearing they will either be excluded from what used to be an almost universal social bubble or they will be forced to include within ‘their’ social bubble some elements that are presently outside the impervious barrier.

[Editor’s Note: I came up with this heuristic, mental model of Society decades ago, but it sat on my virtual shelf of un-written books.  It is far too complex to describe in full here, and I suppose my use of some terms has put everyone off. Naum Tered]

The difference between Social Bubbles and soap foam is that the people are within the bubbles.  However, if mathematically we replace all the people, who might be like the non-dimensional, dot ‘centres of gravity’ with the fields they represent, then we have something like the big, open bubbles that make up the universe just like the unseen bubbles in bread and cake. 

Because we all belong to many different bubbles, it is hard to imagine them if they are all transparent, but assigning colour to the bubbles means it is possible to imagine them intersecting with each other.  A two-dimensional version is often used to illustrate Sets and for other organisational reasons and sometimes called Venn Diagrams.  If we want to be really clever we can imagine these bubbles existing in four dimensions where it is possible for otherwise impossible connections to exist, though in some perceptions, seven dimensions is more meaningful.

Politics is like a big balance, where the Social Bubbles on each side weigh up against each other.  Boundaries between the bubbles are not smooth but fractal, and individuals from each side move into the domains of each other, perhaps due to their participation in some other Social Bubble all together, so that they form tendrils that spiral about each other on the boundary.