Welcome to Jerry Shifman's Home Page
I am a retired electrical engineer, living with my wife Reva Basch and four
cats on the north coast of Sonoma County in California. The purpose
of this web site is to present several heretical essays I have written
over the years; "heretical" in the scientific sense,
not the religious sense.
For instance, I find sleep -- and especially dreaming sleep -- very,
very strange. What an odd behavior pattern! Don't you find
sleep puzzling? Have you ever wondered why we dream? I have. It
may be far more important than we realize. In fact,
dreaming may be the entire point of life.
Really.
And here's one that's been with me for decades. What do you make of
gravity? Are you able to understand what's going on with gravity? As far
as I am concerned, this is the unsolved mystery of our age.
Back in the early 70s I started working on a radically different way
of seeing the world that provided an intuitive way of understanding
the mechanism at work behind gravitation. This eventually became the
essay titled "Neoetherics -- Visualizing Gravity."
In this essay I
explain in excruciating detail the thought processes I went through
in developing this hypothesis.
More recently I have prepared a second essay titled "Telling Fish
About Water." This new essay is shorter and more philosophical.
I suggest that you start by reading this one, then if you are
really interested, go back and read the earlier essay for all
the details. The short note called "Addendum" adds
some clarifying comments about the original Neoetherics essay.
A word of warning: these are both rather long essays, requiring
a considerable amount of concentration. Perhaps
you should wait until you have an hour or two to spend threading your
way through them.
In 1981 I had an opportunity to address a conference of Engineering
Managers, all of whom worked for companies involved in communications.
At that time it was just dawning on me that we were all hurtling
headlong into a new era -- and that this was not widely understood.
Here is the talk I gave. One explanatory note is needed: Some of the
numbers given in the paper for things like rate of data transfer and
capacity of an optical disk are now out of date -- but I have left the
paper as originally presented. My thesis is that the entire history
of life on earth can be viewed as a series of advances in communications.
I have more material I will put up here eventually, but this is all I
have the patience to htmlize right now. If you find any of this interesting,
let me know. I would particularly like to hear from anyone who can fathom
what I'm trying to say in the essays about gravitation.
This page built and maintained by:
Jerry Shifman(jerry@river.org)
Page last updated February 27, 2001.