Oldershaw's SELF-SIMILAR HIERARCHICAL ORDER

Extending hierarchical theories beyond the immediately observable world into micro and macro-worlds, Robert L. Oldershaw painted an intriguing picture of a meta-universe whose dimensions extend beyond the knowable. Yet, he never seemed to lose his plausibility.

If we were to arrange each class of objects found in nature in a sequence based on mass, then we would discover a pattern. ...The most important feature of that pattern is that there are special classes of objects that punctuate the sequence at widely spaced intervals; atomic, stellar, and galactic systems. The most distinguishing characteristics of those special objects is that their masses fall within relatively narrow limits. They are the basic building blocks of nature.

Self-similar cosmology uses the same basic rules of hierarchy theory we have met in previous writers. In particular he noted, "If you remove one level then you eliminate all the levels below it and can no longer form the objects on any level above it," This is a principle which applies to a great many of the descriptions we have met in this work, but it is not always self-evident from the descriptions used. Building from this basis he proceeded to develop a case for "self--similarity" by comparing the Milky-way Galaxy and the Solar System with the hydrogen atom.

1. (A) Both systems are dominated by a very massive rotating nucleus. The sun, and the Galactic nucleus.
(B) The hydrogen atom consists of a proton nucleus and an orbiting electron,
2. (A) Both systems include a fairly small number of considerably less massive satellites which orbit the nuclei in nearly circular orbits roughly aligned with the equatorial plane of the nuclei.
(B) Bohrs Law, which gives the approximate orbital radii at which we may find the electron has recently been found analogous to the Bode-titus Law wúhich gives the radii of the planets. This suggests that the distribution of orbital mass in the hydrogen atom might be similar to that of the solar system. i.e. 72% of the mass occupying the principle orbit, but the other 28% distributed in additional quantized orbits. This would account for the paradoxical effect of finding "one electron" in several states simultaneously.

In order that speculation not get too wild he clarified these concepts. "This does not mean that the solar system is a gigantic atom, or that the hydrogen atom is a microscopic galaxy, wúhat it does suggest is that these three represent analogous structures and internal motions. They are self- similar rather than 'equivalent except in size'."

Obviously Robert Oldershaw's ideas are the most speculative that we have examined, yet they do not violate principles developed by others as long as we keep our imagination under control, He explained, "One can viewú nature as having a well- ordered hierarchical architecture of which scientists have so far observed the atomic, stellar, and galactic scales. The objects of the different scales play composite-component roles. The most fundamental representations of each scale share similarities and perhaps many of the other classes of objects found on a given scale also have self-similar counterparts on the other scales."

The grand sweep of Oldershaw's thought is brought out fully in this summation:

The self-similar hierarchical cosmology offers a modified interpretation of the fact that our large-scale environment appears to be expanding. In the new theory there is no stipulation that nature's hierarchy is limited to the scales that we have defined; this assumption, in fact, would have an anthropocentric bias which physicists have sought to avoid since the time of Copernicus, It is quite possible that the hierarchy extends beyond the galactic scale and that galaxies are the component building blocks on a larger "meta-galactic" scale.