The Universal Order of Design - the Tetrahedron

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE MOLECULAR WORLD

In Arthur M. Young's theory of process in his book, The Reflexive Universe, he subdivides all of existence into seven planes of existence:

In previous blogs I have corrected the above diagram (I should probably make my own), where the first plane concerns space-time, and light belongs with the subatomic particles in the Standard Model. The fourth plane is the molecular world, and as with each plane, it can be further divided into seven substates. In some of these substates, we can go further and discover seven more "sub-substates." I say state, substate or plane, but these are all the same words for a discrete level of order. Between two discrete levels of order, there is nothing. It is similar to how Planck discovered how energy is not continuous, but comes in discrete packets known as "quantum". Thus we have quantum physics. Young's book was written in the mid-70s, and as far as I can tell, the theory has been sitting there collecting dust.  So let's review the seven substates of the molecular world, which Young took from Charles Price, a well known chemist at the time:

1. Metals
2. Simple Compounds (Salts, Ionic Bond)
3. Nonfunctional Compounds (Covalent Bond)
4. Functional Compounds
5. Nonfunctional Polymers
6. Functional Polymers (Proteins)
7. DNA, viruses.

And since I no longer have that book, The Reflexive Universe, its hard for me to check up on the definitions of these levels. I was able to reconstruct the list from some youtube videos of Arthur M. Young which I put in a previous blog entry in this series. So my first reaction is, what is a nonfunctional and functional compound, and what is a nonfunctional and functional polymer? I am not seeing these definitions anywhere in scientific literature. I am guessing that a nonfunctional polymer is a non-biological polymer, and thus there is a similar meaning for nonfunctional compounds. But I am not seeing this distinction in molecular classifications. Young talks about this in his recorded lecture, and it puzzles me. So, lets take a look at each substate of the molecular world, this is what I can find:

1. Metallic bond - delocalized electrons not associated with a particular atom or molecule, common in metals. Its what allows metals to conduct heat and electricity.
2. Ionic bond - an electrostatic bond between ions. An ion is an atom where the number of electrons does not equal the number of protons.
3. (?? - some other stuff goes here)
4. Covalent Bond - a bond between atoms where electrons are shared to complete the outer electron shell
5. Polymers - a chain of repeating molecular units, not including the biopolymers.
6. Non-genetic Biopolymers - polypeptides (proteins), polysaccharides
7. Genetic Biopolymers - polynucleotides (DNA & RNA), and viruses. 

When Young says "Metals" he is in reality talking about the Metallic bond. We are missing a category of molecules, and I am marking that with "other stuff" - just as I did when I reviewed the subatomic world, and filled in a gap with quarks. The last time I made use of ionic and covalent bonding was to answer a question on a chemistry test in high school, so those two categories check out. The reason why I remember is our chemistry professor forced us to write a poem that contained elements of the periodic table. I believe mine was a love story of two elements that bonded together, but she gets bored of him and decides to bond with another element. Seeking revenge, her original bonded element then kills her new found partner. The detectives arrive, and they have to figure out which element of the periodic table killed her lover. Similar to The Tell-Tale Heart of Edgar Allen Poe, going through the elements of the periodic table begins to drive the suspect insane (as chemistry did to many of my classmates). He finally gets up and screams, "Iodide it, you Acetate!".  He gets thrown into prison, and tries to bribe the guard to escape. "How much to pass the gate? / Why of course, one mole of silver permanganate." So it ends. I can't believe I remembered that.

If we look at the fifth substate of molecules, simple molecules start to repeat their pattern, growing into a long chain: these are the polymers. The sixth and seventh categories are known as biopolymers - those that appear in biological organisms. The seventh is the most interesting, as that includes the double-helix of the DNA, which was only discovered after the scientist first had a dream about it. It also includes viruses - and there are millions of them. Very few have been mapped out. It is debatable whether or not viruses are living organisms - they are at the cusp between the molecular world and where living organisms begin. Although they require a host cell to replicate, there are some theories which state that life began from viruses.

So the first observation I made is that the classification of molecules is dependant on the types of bonds they make - metallic, ionic or covalent. I poked around, and discovered there is another type of molecular bonding, called "Van der Waals" forces - which are also called "weak" bonds, as these are intermolecular bonds - weak bonds between molecules, not atoms. So for the first four types of molecules, let's correct Young's diagram (again) to obtain the following molecular classifications:

1. Metallic bond - delocalized electrons not associated with a particular atom or molecule, common in metals.

2. Ionic bond - an electrostatic bond between ions. An ion is an atom where the number of electrons does not equal the number of protons.

3. Intermolecular ("weak") bond (e.g., Van der Waals force, Hydrogen bond, Halogen bond, Aurophilicity...)

4. Covalent bond - a bond between atoms where electrons are shared to complete the outer electron shell.

And now, for something very weird. Recall that different planes of existence correspond to each other. That is, the sequence of order between different planes of existence will show similar patterns. Recall that, Young wrote his books in the mid-70s, and thus he did not know what to put within the subatomic plane. And so I decided to fill in the subatomic plane with the current scientific knowledge that we have now. Here are the first four substates of the subatomic world (see previous blog entries):

1. Graviton. Gravitational force.
2. Photon. Electromagnetic force.
3. W/Z Bosons. Weak nuclear force.
4. Gluons. Strong nuclear force.

By correspondence, just as the first four substates of the subatomic plane are the force carrier particles (gauge bosons), the first four substates of the molecular plane are governed by its type of bond. Force carrier particles, and molecular bonding, correspond to each other. Just as in the atomic world, molecules get more and more constrained by each bond. Moreover, even the order of the forces, and the order of the bonding, correspond with each other:

1. Gravitational force and Metallic bonding. In Metallic bonding, electrons are delocalized, travelling in a lattice structure. Gravity operates in the "grid" of the space-time medium, and has infinite range. You can say gravity is "delocalized".

2. Electromagnetic force and Ionic bonding. Ionic bonding is electrostatic, thus is based on the electromagnetic force.
3. Weak nuclear force and Intermolecular "weak" bond. Here, separate scientific disciplines call this "weak" - both are weak at long range, but become very strong at short ranges.
4. Strong nuclear force and Covalent bond. Both are the strongest force and bond respectively. One tightly binds the nucleus of atoms, the other tightly binds atoms together to form molecules.

This correspondence between two separate planes of existence - the atomic and the molecular, which can be verified by science, just blew me away. Of course scientists will say the four forces of the subatomic world have nothing to do with the four bonding types of the molecular world. But they correspond with each other, and missing puzzle pieces to Young's theory are beginning to fall in place.  I would not have seen this if I didn't start collecting my thoughts in this blog. This means if we know one thing about one plane of existence, it may be possible to extend our knowledge into other planes of existence - or at least make educated guesses. Why is this happening? This is not an area that science has attempted to explain: everyone is busy in their own box of discipline, and so no one to my knowledge has even noticed this. It is a different way of approaching scientific knowledge. It is based on a theory that everything in the universe corresponds to each other, how small parts are a microcosm of the whole.

Just to remove any doubt, I decided to checkup on how modern chemistry classifies molecules. I looked up "classification of molecules". I found this scientific article entitled,  A classification of molecules, phases, and transitions as recognized by thermal analysis . In it, is the following diagram:

It is called "Grimm's tetrahedron of bonding". And we see there the Metallic bond, the Ionic bond, Weak bonds, and Covalent bond. And from the gist of the article, I gather that although we know a lot about chemistry, the knowledge we have has become increasingly fragmented and unordered. So what is that tetrahedron? That's a geometric shape with 4 sides. Recall that Young represented the molecular world with the tetrahedron? But I don't think he mentions this tetrahedron of bonding, I think he used that just to represent a geometric shape for the fourth plane of existence, the molecular world.

So what is this "Grimm's tetrahedron of bonding"? Why are the four bonds put together in a geometric shape? For this I found an excellent educational website on chemistry, called, The Chemogenesis Web book. Here is some information on the Grimm Tetrahedron:

"William Jensen reports, below, that Grimm and Dehlinger developed an early form of tetrahedron in the nineteen thirties. However, this knowledge appears to have been forgotten."

Sadly, this insight into molecular structures was left alone, until revived in the mid-1990s (see video below on some of the history of this concept). The tetrahedron of bonding is very useful for mapping out the classification of molecules. There is an article entitled Tetrahedra of Structure, Bonding & Material Type, which covers this in detail. Here is the tetrahedron again:

This shows how most people know of the first three kinds of bonds, but forget about the weak intermolecular bond. Which explains why Young (or Charles Price) missed it.  What about the 6 edges of the tetrahedron? Those correspond to molecules that have intermediate types of bonds, here are examples, where molecules appear on edges between the bonds that define them:

There are even more colorful diagrams: there is a PDF printout where you can print out a colored tetrahedron, to map out all the classifications of molecules. Here is a summary of how this concept was developed throughout the 20th century, and how it is useful to understanding the molecular world:

Some high level chemistry concepts are summarized well on the Chemogenesis web site, I highly recommend it, as it would have been very hard for me to find this material. So what about the polymers and biopolymers?  Unable to escape their bonding, molecules start to repeat their structure, become mobile, and move out and escape to become life forms. On the web site an analysis is done to show what material belongs at each corner of the tetrahedron. I will quote from the web site:

"But what about the fourth corner, Network Covalent? The most electronegative element that forms a network covalent material is carbon, 2.55."

Carbon is tetravalent - meaning that it has four electrons in its outer shell to from covalent chemical bonds. Moreover, according to Wikipedia,

"Carbon is...the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen."

Thus, the tetrahedron, the four moleculuar bonds, the four electrons in the outer shell of the carbon, carbon the fourth most abundant element by mass in the universe: we keep seeing the number 4, 4, 4, 4. In Young's model of the Reflexive Universe, the molecular world is the fourth plane of existence. It is from carbon that higher life forms exist: thus we have carbon-based life forms.

OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF THE TETRAHEDRON

Earlier I said that the tetrahedron was a representation of the molecular world, before I knew of Grimm's tetrahedron, or a classification of molecules by the tetrahedron. I am doubtful if Young was aware of this - even though in the youtube video, he uses a tetrahedron to represent molecules. There is a geometric corresponence for the first four planes of existence, as stated before. To recap:

1. Space-time = a geometric point. A point represents scalar particles (the Higgs-Boson is a scalar).
2. Subatomic particles = a line. Either a line represents a particle traveling in a wave, or something more fundamental: that particles are ultimately strings.
3. Atoms = a triangle. Three particle types make an atom: proton, neutron, electron. Moreover, the smallest atom, hydrogen, is composed of just three of these particles.
4. Molecules = a tetrahedron. Independent of this theory, chemists use a tetrahedron to classify molecules. There are four bond types between molecules.

So the implication of this pattern, is that it favors string theory. It is also an indication that if we see a pattern in one plane of existence, we can derive or guess patterns in lower or higher planes of existence. And this is what Swedenborg called the Doctrine of Correspondences. We say, "As above, so below." The smallest thing is a microcosm of the universe in more ways that we can imagine. Thus physicists, who seek to unify all the forces into one grand unified field theory, may be missing the point: its as if a chemist would like to see only one kind of bond between molecules. At a lower level, there is one kind of bond, but we should recognize that its different manifestations are a nature of a discrete degree of order. It would not be useful to a chemist to reduce things to one bond at a lower order.

As another example of how one part explains the whole, we see that the first plane of existence is that of space-time. From that, we can derive that the first substate of the subatomic world is the graviton. The pattern lends support to the existence of the graviton particle, which has not yet been directly observed, except perhaps gravity waves. Now lets take that to the atomic world. There are two atoms in the first substate: Hydrogen and Helium. These two elements are used to form stars. And when large stars begin to die, they become black holes, and create the largest known gravity wells in the universe. One small part explains the whole.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE NUMBER 2 AND ITS MULTIPLES

According to Swedenborg, the number 2 and its multiples signify love, as the marriage between two beings. Marriage love is the highest form of love. Now look at this pattern:

Plane 2 = Subatomic particles. Gauge bosons are force particles, which attract other particles to form the atomic nucleus.
Plane 4 = Molecules. Bonds between atoms. Four bonds define the classifications of molecules. Highest stage of molecules: DNA and viruses.
Plane 6 = Animals. Animals are distinguished from plants in that they have sexual intercourse. The DNA molecule is transmitted to unite the genetic material of the male and female in order to multiply the species.
Plane 8 = Love.

So, we progressively see increasing orders of bonding, until we reach the highest form of bond, Love. The reason why I make it higher than plane 6, is that despite what some may think, sex is not in itself love. It is a natural form of love. So in marriage love, one first progresses from "a love of sex" to "the love of one of the sex." Swedenborg explains this in his work, Angelic Wisdom concerning Marriage Love. Unlike animals, only humans can reach this state. Or, humans can choose to remain in natural pleasures as animals do. Marriage love is hidden in the external natural form. But the eighth plane of order, Love, does not exist in our diagram. We only have seven planes of existence. Also recall, that in the atom there are a maximum of seven electron shells:

If the atom is the microcosm of the whole of existence, then what does the nucleus represent? I would say this: the atomic nucleus, and the 8th plane of existence, is one and the same, and represents God. God is the center of everything, and God is Love. Once we understand the discrete degrees of order in creation, we can better understand the Creator who made it.