13. Curriculum Vitae

 

Born in 1934 - Hamm/Westphalia. Moved 1938 to Rostock where father was engineer at Heinkel Aircraft Factories. 1945 fleeing from the "Russians": from Rostock to Hamm. 1946-55 "Huma-nistisches Gymnasium" - good teachers in languages,  less good teachers in mathematics and physics etc. 1955-1962 at universities of Mainz, Neuchatel and Münster. Subjects: Anglistics, Romance and East Asian languages and literatures and general linguistics. Academic teachers, among others: Georges Redard, Karl Schneider, Heinrich Lausberg, Harald Weinrich, Helmut Lüdtke,  Hans Robert Jauß, Jost Trier,  Bruno Lewin, Tilemann Grimm, Eberhard Zwirner, Karl Horst Schmidt, Peter Hartmann. 1961-1964 teacher at Gymnasium in Unna, Dortmund and Münster. 1963-1968 "Studienrat im Hochschuldienst" at the English Seminar, Münster University. 1962 PhD, dissertation "Zur Theorie des Lautwandels". 1968-1999 Professor at Ruhr-University Bochum: chair of Anglistics and (from 1972 onwards) also of General Semiotics. Faculty members were in part much interested in semiotics, thus, it came by no chance that the faculty bestowed its first honorary doctorate on Roman Jakobson (Harvard University). Since my student days, Roman Jakobson had been  a sort of  "Leitbild", as regards  wide-ranging scholarly interests:

 

   

 

  

On the occasion of Jakobson's honorary doctorate,  our first interdisplinary colloquies were organized (1980).  In 1984, the "Bochum Semiotic Colloquy (BSC)" was founded. In the course of 14 years, there were hundreds of guest speakers featuring Paul Davies, Karl Pribram, Thomas A. Sebeok, Paul Bouissac, Roland Posner, Rupert Riedl, Yoshihiko Ikegami, Monica Rector, René Thom, Jean Petitot, Gerhard Vollmer, Emmanuel Anati, Juan Delius, Julian Jaynes, Jan van Hooff, Rik Pinxten,  Erhard Oeser, Karl Grammer, Martin Krampen, Günther Schiwy, Colwyn Trevarthen, György Szepe, Gerhard Vollmer, Rudi Keller, Eero Tarasti, Vilmos Voigt, You-Zheng Li,  Vjacheslav Ivanov  etc. Among them also  a lot of friends: Roland Harweg, Udo L. Figge, Karl Eimermacher, Helmut Schnelle, Winfried Nöth, Thomas Winner, Götz Wienold, Gian-Franco Arlandi, Christian Metz, Bernard Bichakjian, Gabriel Altmann etc.

       In 1988, we had a symposium at Villa Vigoni, Lake Como (where J. W. von Goethe once sojourned). Here is a picture:

 

Villa Vigoni 1988

 

I am second from the left in the front row. To my left: my friend Rolf Kloepfer, Professor of Romance languages, to my right: Myrdene Anderson, Professor of Anthropology etc.  etc. -  In 1990, we had a symposium on "Language in the Würm glaciation", a topic that involved the Evolution of Language and Long-Range Reconstruction. The following picture shows from left to right:

Robin Allott, Jan Wind, Tatjana Chernigovskaya, Udo L. Figge, Vitalij Shevoroshkin, Walter A. Koch, Bernard Bichakjian, and Eric de Grolier.

 

 

Ruhr-University 1990

 

In the latter years, my associates were all working in areas connected with the evolution of language. On the following photo, taken on the occasion of an excursion to the Neandertal (1997), we see the following persons: fom left to right: Anja Gebert, Claudia Bald, Ingrid Braun, Sandra Kölking, Walter A. Koch, Claudia Steinbach, Anke Möller, Andrea Schulz (as to the "evolutionary" dissertations of the latter two, cf. "References"):

 

Neandertal 1997

 

 

 

 

After my emeritation, I became more and more attracted to topics connected to the philosophy of physics. My physics educa-tion had been extremely bad, if nil. However, I keep being fascinated by a New Physics and its philosophical implications.

 

 

    

 

"I have, in my recent writings, used the word prehension to express this process of appropriation. Also I  have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an occasion of experience. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe..." (Alfred North Whitehead 1938: 151; cf. 11. References).

***

"All motion is spiral." (Walter Russell)

***

"One can picture the cosmos as Indra's Net, described in the Avatamsaka Sutra as an unbroken Web of Life, interconnected and self-reflective at every point, with every sub-component containing the whole ". (cf. yin-yang).

 ***

"As the aether flux (movement of ZPF) becomes subluminal, because it is slowed down by interactions with "normal matter", it will "self-organize" to become electrons." (R.N.Boyd on the Genesis of Matter).

 ***

"This is a wave universe" (Milo Wolff 1990)

 ***

"All physically real objects are either tensors, spinors or twistors in the theory of relativity". In the subquantum foundations of reality we find three kinds of waves: translational, rotational, and torsional (cf. Gennady Shipov).

***

"Because the 'real' world of matter - that is, of energy bound in mass - is so much less energetic than the vacuum (ZPF), the observable universe is not a solid condensate floating on top of the vacuum, but like a set of bubbles suspended in it. In terms of energy, the material world is not a solidification of the quantum vacuum, but a thinning of it."(Ervin Laszlo).

 ***

Occultism affirms that in all things both great and small, whether a universe, a sun, a human being, or any other entity, there is a constant secular cyclical diastole and systole, similar to that of the human heart.

***

Fritjof Capra (1975:224) describes the Chinese concept ch'i. It reminds us of description of the structured vacuum, ZPF or the ensemble of etherons which form the subquantum foundation of our universe: "In Chinese philosophy, the field idea is not only implicit in the notion of the Tao as being empty and formless, and yet producing all forms, but is also expressed explicitly in the concept of ch'i... The word ch'i literally means 'gas' or 'ether', and was used in ancient China to denote the vital breath or energy animating the cosmos... The Chinese physical universe in ancient and medieval times was a perfectly continuous whole. Ch'i condensed in palpable matter was not particulate in any important sense, but individual objects acted and reacted with all other objects in the world ... in a wave-like or vibratory manner dependent, in the last resort,  on the rhythmic alternation at all levels of the two fundmental forces, the yin and the yang."

 

***

"According to the absorber theory, originally advanced by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler, any electron may become the emitter and the absorber of certain waves which serve as orientation."(W.A.Koch 2007:296). In fact, electrons, as any other unit, emit two types of waves: one (without time and filling the whole of space) for orientation, one (taking time and direction) for transmitting, exchanging waves (energy etc.). The first type are scalar (or torsional) waves, the second type are vectorial ones.

 

***

 Empedocles posits two cosmic forces which work upon the elements in both creative and destructive ways. These he personifies as Love (Philia) - a force of attraction and combination - and Strife (Neikos) - a force of repulsion and separation.

 ***

"All Motion is Vortex" (John Keely) (cf. Moore 2001 and Dale Pond 1996).

***

A.N.Whitehead

 

"The ultimate fact of immediate actual experience are actual entities, prehensions and nexus".

Alfred N. Whitehead 1929: 24)

 ***

"Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist." ( Ludwig Wittgenstein 1922:30).

 ***

"The world is everything that grasps".( Walter A. Koch 2009: 10).

 

 

"I believe that the vacuum is  highly structured coherent energy, which feeds the atom and poduces the dynamics that enables us to see particles and electrodynamics." (Nassim Haramein 2011:71).

***

 

In the context of the pilot-theory of the Haramein-Rauscher Metrics, quote by C.N.Yang: "Einstein's general relativity theory, though profoundly beautiful, is likely to be amended... somehow the amendment entangles spin and rotation"  (italics mine).

 

"If evolution in each local universe starts with a clean slate, the evolution of life in local universes is a Sisyphean effort: it breaks down and starts again from scratch time after time. But local universes are not subject to this ordeal. In each universe, complex systems leave their traces in the vacuum, and the informed vacuum of one universe informs the evolution of the next. Consequently, each universe creates conditions favourable to the evolution of life in successive universes." (Ervin Laszlo 2004: 139).

 

 E.O.Wilson  (1999:56) sees in the natural contiguity of all subject-matter the reason for "consilience": "Everybody's theory has validity and is interesting". There is no better plea for transdisciplinarity.