Hi:

When I was a kid, my mother, who was a devout woman, took my brother and me to religious revival meetings. At the end of the meetings, we sang a song very slowly...."Almost Persuaded, Christ to Receive".... and were reminded by the pastor of the dangers of almost, but not quite getting to the point in our lives where we, from our hearts accepted Christ as our personal savior. As a kid, I was quite impressed, and I'm sure so were most of the older folks!

"Almost" has an almost (tongue in cheek ) impending uncertainty about it. If I say that someone walked across the railroad tracks in the path of a train and "almost" made it, what does THAT mean, anyway? We know what it REALLY means...that they didn't make it at all. If I say, "I almost won the lottery", it may mean I won a few hundred or a few thousand bucks, but when you get down to it...I didn't really win. If we say; "I almost drowned", we feel good- but you didn't really drown after all, now did you?

Almost is a very powerful word in science. It means, "Gird up your loins, men and women", because the universe is about to upset your apple cart! For example, we say; "Oh, that precession in the orbit of Mercury is ONLY 43 arc seconds per century!" ....and then someone says: Yes, and now watch THIS new geometry explain that! Massed photons, however infinitesimal the exact value give one universe. Massless photons do not result in the same universe. Instantly propagating gravity gives a nice neat, orderly universe.

Gravity propagating at "c" produces an ALMOST perfectly accurate model of gravity (to at LEAST 30 Decimal places) - but in the light of the horizon problem we can conclude it is wrong. We KNOW it is wrong, because when extended cosmologically, gravity propagating at the speed of light doesn't result in a universe that makes sense, and at the bottom line, we scientists look for sense and order in the universe, right? (Authors Note: 9/14/2002...The propagation velocity of gravity is the subject of some very current astronomical experiments using Jupiter and quasars. Had General Relativity gravity been confirmed, the world would have been informed within days. Any delay means "negative" or "inconclusive". All attempts to find gravitational waves propagating at the "speed" of light have to this date, been inconclusive.)

What I want to look at (briefly) is Guths ALMOST instant inflation at the outset of creation. This, of course not only "happened" during the Planck Era and within the Planck Realm, it IS, essentially the Planck Realm which even from our frame in space/ time sits now at the bottom of our scalar reality, and quite interestingly is detected by us as "almost" instantly propagating "gravity". So, in this model, gravity is not propagated instantly, but ALMOST instantly! Exactly HOW almost IS almost? The field people will define that number as it relates to the universal parameters, for it is VERY important..remember our apple cart?

Almost instantly propagating gravity eliminates the horizon problem completely and gives a very satisfactory cosmology which fits field observations, both at the astronomical and submicroscopic levels, quite well. Yet almost instantly propagating gravity opens a door to the unknown. It implies that what we call "singularity" is NOT geometric singularity in its essential nature, but rather CAN be scientifically described. We are not constrained to use zeros, infinities and geometric points in its description.

Almost instantly propagating gravity also implies, not surprisingly, (there are no closed systems- perpetual motion machines- in the universe we observe; even solar systems form and terminate) that the universe as a whole is NOT a completely closed system from an engineering standpoint either. Consciousness, observing from the other side of the two sphere, imposes order, structure and complexity on the universe...and may extend somewhere else.

What I am saying right out, right now, is that there may be a reality measurable by our own parameters, beyond the universe we know and understand, connected with our own...something describable, tangible and real. This "something" is most likely the third three space of a triad geometry, but the major implication is that beyond what we immediately observe, there is something else , and more, and more.

Best Wishes,

Sam Cox