Science of The Sages
Science of The Sages
Science of The Sages
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175
Karina Library, 2012
Karina Library
PO Box 35
Ojai, California 93024
I’m indebted for the assistance of Natalie
Gray in manuscript preparation, and to
Michael Lommel for design, editing and
guidance. —RW
…a spirit is manifest in the laws
of the Universe—a spirit vastly
superior to that of man, and
one in the face of which we,
with our modest powers, must
feel humble.
—Albert Einstein
Table of Contents
Introduction .............................................9
Prefatory Note .......................................11
9
basing their judgments or conclusions on factual evidence.
Whether one looks out at the mysteries of a vast cosmos
or narrows the view to the counterintuitive behavior of a
subatomic particle, I would not be alone in maintaining that
nonduality is the basic principle that explains the Whole—
the “spirit” of what is “manifest in the laws of the Universe,”
to borrow a phrase from Einstein.
Comprehending the nondual teaching, I know from
experience, is not “rocket science.” And understanding
what physicists are reporting regarding such discoveries as
“entanglement” is available even to magazine readers. What
follows, here, brings together cutting-edge science revelations
with revealing ancient insights clarifying ultimate Reality.
I am confident you will not fail to see the connection.
Robert Wolfe
May 1, 2012
Ojai, California
10
Prefatory Note
11
If you were a physicist or cosmologist, you would use the
shorthand called exponential notation: rather than write out
one trillion—1,000,000,000,000, involving twelve zeroes—
you would write 1012 (or say, “ten to the twelfth power”).
Similarly:
one thousand 103
one million 106
one billion 109
12
Cosmic Birth
13
Even before the photons of light had materialized, the
expansion was proceeding, according to science’s calculations,
at about a hundred times what would become the speed of
light.
The end product:
“…all matter and all the gravity in the observable
universe indicate that the two values seem to
precisely counterbalance. All matter plus all gravity
equals zero. So the universe could come from nothing
because it is, fundamentally, nothing.” *
*
Astronomy professor Mark Whittle elaborates: “The total mass/energy of the
universe equals zero: the universe sums to nothing. This is comparable to what
one associates with traditional spiritual-based cosmologies. This also gives us
insight into how the universe came into being: perhaps it came from nothing.”
14
with respect to each other, though that speed limit holds as
a physical principle of limitation relative to space itself in
our region of the cosmos, and as far as we know, the whole
cosmos.
* Physics professor Robert March: “John Wheeler insists that during the early
moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so small that quantum fluctuations
must have played a major role.”
15
different types of particles; forming, interacting and
disappearing, in an incessant sea of activity….Nor
is this quantum picture just an intellectual model.
Very real physical effects occur, as a consequence of
this fluctuating vacuum.”
Due to fluctuating physical effects, expansion slowed
over time; and with the emergence of atomic particles, the
universe became transparent about four-hundred thousand
years after the Big Bang.
The vacuum energy presently accounts for about three-
fourths of everything in the universe. In 1998, it was
determined to now be expanding at an accelerating rate
again.
As Whittle puts it, “It is making more of itself.” And as
this space expands, it does not become more dilute, but
(unlike matter) continues to maintain the same density. And
because there is not anything outside of the space which is
expanding (in other words, it is not ballooning out into a pre-
existing space), there is not anything to stop its expansion.
“There’s something almost Zen about this.”
“When you grasp the remarkable properties of vacuum
energy,” says Whittle, “you can’t fail to be stunned.”
He adds, “The universe is amazingly similar in every
direction.” When we look back in space to the origin of the
Big Bang, we don’t look in some particular direction. For as
far as we can see, in any direction we look, we are looking at
a remnant of the Big Bang.
This remnant is called microwave radiation, and it is
essentially the signature of the left-over heat generated in
the Big Bang. If you were able to see microwaves (as some
of our telescopes and detectors can), you would be observing
the diminished glow of the Big Bang wherever you looked
out into the night sky.
16
If the universe were an eighty-year-old person, says
Whittle, you would be able to see today (as our telescopes
are able to do) back to the twelfth hour after that person’s
conception.
There are galaxies which can be seen with the naked eye
that are three million light-years away. The Hubble Space
Telescope, launched in 1990, has allowed us to image objects
that are four billion times fainter than the faintest object
that can be seen with the naked eye. Hubble has taken more
than a half million images, such as those of galaxies that are
500 million light-years distant.
We have been able, in the last hundred years, to understand
what was happening in the universe some thirteen billion
years ago. But, due to the opaque primordial conditions, we
will be blocked from seeing into the first 380,000 years after
the Big Bang.
So, when we look back into space, for the origin of the Big
Bang, the view is sealed off from us when we reach the point
(in the space that expanded) where the foggy gas had not
yet become transparent.
The space we are looking back over (in any particular
direction) indicates a time span of 13.7 billion years to the
origin of the Big Bang. In terms of the distance which light
(the initial glow of the Big Bang) travels in a year, this
suggests a distance in the universe of 13.7 billion light-years
(as a form of measure).
However, space itself has been rapidly expanding during
the past 13.7 billion years (when the radiating light was
emitted).
Whittle: “…the universe extends well beyond our
(‘fourteen billion light-year’) visible horizon. Current
measurements indicate the universe’s (curvature) radius is
17
at least 150 billion light-years; but inflation theory suggests
it may be much bigger.” *
(“Radius” would be a measure from our planet outward
into any one direction. The same measure outward in the
opposite direction would be “diameter”; in other words,
double that of the radius.)
“The Earth shrinks into insignificance in the vastness of
the universe.”
* Writer Bill Bryson quoting Astronomer Royal Martin Rees: “This visible
universe—the universe we know and can talk about—is a million million
million million (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across. But
according to most theories the universe at large—the meta-universe, as it is
sometimes called—is vastly roomier still. According to Rees, the number of
light-years to the edge of this larger, unseen universe would be written not
‘with ten zeroes, not even with a hundred, but with millions.’”
† 186,000 mi./sec.; 11,160,000 mi./min.; 5.88 trillion mi./yr.
‡ We have observed stars whose light has taken 13.14 billion years to reach
us—traveling, of course, at more than five trillion miles per year.
18
So, travel at the speed of light for a year (5.8 trillion
miles) and travel for 13 billion years at that pace, and you
will cover only the portion of the universe that we can “see”
in one direction.
19
The cosmic expansion is still occurring—and accelerating.
Galaxies, beyond a certain distance, recede from us (and
other galaxies) faster than the speed of light; the only light
that reaches us, from this horizon, is from some thirteen
billion light years away. About a thousand objects have
been observed passing beyond this (superluminal) horizon.
Because it is space itself that is expanding, from the point
of view of those objects, we are racing away from them at
faster-than-light speed.
“Imagine a light beam that is farther than the
distance of 14 billion light-years, and trying to travel
in our direction. It is moving toward us at the speed
of light, with respect to its local space; but its local
space is receding from us faster than the speed of
light. Although the light beam is traveling toward
us at the maximum speed possible, it cannot keep
up with the stretching of space. It is a bit like a
child trying to run the wrong way on a moving
sidewalk. Photons, at the Hubble distance, are like
the Red Queen and Alice, running as fast as they
can just to stay in the same place.
“….As a photon travels, the space it traverses
expands. By the time it reaches us, the total
distance to the originating galaxy is larger than a
simple calculation based on the travel time might
imply—about three times as large.”
20
“…suggest we’re at the beginning of a very long
process that will eventually result in what appears
to be an empty universe. Trillions of years from
now, matter will be so widely spread out that the
average density will be much less than a single
electron per quadrillion cubic light-years of space.
That’s so close to zero density that there’s no
meaningful difference.”
Specifically,
“Stars will burn out, galaxies will disintegrate, and
the universe will end, eternally dark and lifeless.”
21
In terms of the content of what’s between celestial objects,
Corey Powell observes in God in the Equation:
“If you scooped up a block of empty space 250,000
miles on a side—about the distance from the earth
to the moon—you’d find just about one pound of
energy inside, assuming you could find a magical
technique for weighing it. In that same box of space,
you’d find roughly half a pound of ordinary matter,
mostly hydrogen atoms. The universe is very nearly
empty.”
It takes about eight minutes for the light from the sun to
reach Earth; from the closest star, 4.3 years;* from the North
Star, 460 years; from the nearest neighboring galaxy, 2.4
million years.
22
would be one millionth of a billionth of the universe’s
expanse.
23
As in the “not this, not that” tradition of the East,
the definition of infinity basically tells you what it’s not;
without any limitations or boundaries. As such, the Infinite
(or Eternal) has commonly been a stand-in name for the
Absolute, or God. Being without limitation, it is said in the
East that the Absolute can both be existent and nonexistent.
The notion of a god in heaven limits that figure to a
particular locale: an infinite god would be equally present
everywhere, being indivisible and having no definable parts:
in heaven, hell, and on earth. Early biblical bookplates
depicted God—above an orb representing (outer) the
universe and (inner) the world—outside of both cosmos and
earth, not present in, or permeating, these precincts.
With the use of the word “omnipresent” as a description
of God in religious texts (and “infinite,” “formless,”
“indivisible”), it became clear to some spiritual savants that
there could be no definable central point anywhere at which
one could deem God to be explicitly present (such as in a
temple or church or mosque, or a heaven).
Holding just this sort of view (and proclaiming it), the
Dominican-trained Giordano Bruno was burned at the
stake, in Venice in 1600 A.D., by the Inquisition. Thus it
seems somewhat ironic* that (less than four hundred years
later), “In 1952, the Vatican embraced the picture of the
expanding Big Bang universe as a natural conception of the
Christian idea of creation out of nothing.”
Barrow’s scientific studies, of issues concerning the
apparent infinity of the universe, lead him to state,
“[Cosmic] expansion looks unstoppable. It will propel
the universe into an ever-expanding future where all
forms of life, no matter how complex or advanced,
24
appear doomed to extinction….Acceleration to
infinity sounds exciting, but it marks the end of
everything that we value.”
He quotes Olaf Stapleton, “Interference was included in
His original plan.”
Says Barrow, “Infinity…appears on the stage only when
the crucial questions of existence are raised, [and] challenges
us to contemplate…all that we hold dear.”
Infinity constrains, by it’s very nature, what we can
know of it in our limited understanding. Though we might
hypothetically learn whether the universe is actually infinite,
such learning might take an infinite time. Barrows quotes
Neils Bohr: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the
future!”
25
stars (like our sun). Cosmologists remind us that this
quantity is about as many grains of sand as would fill a
cubic meter (close to forty inches per side). Our neighboring
galaxy, Andromeda, has about three-hundred billion stars;
and there is a galaxy estimated to have eight-hundred billion.
On a comparative scale, if Earth’s orbit around the sun
was reduced to the size of a pinhead, our galaxy would be
about as wide as the United States.
If our galaxy (a hundred thousand light-years across) was
reduced to the size of the United States, its stars would be
the size of human cells—each separated by the length of a
football field.
Reduce our galaxy to twenty yards across, and Andromeda
galaxy would be another six hundred yards distant. (And,
at that scale, the distance to the limit of the visible universe,
in any direction, would be approximately 2,500 miles.)
26
some 518 thousand miles per hour—about one thousandth
of the speed of light. Too, our galaxy is in motion toward
Andromeda galaxy at around 288 thousand miles an hour.
More yet, our local group of galaxies is speeding toward
the constellation Virgo. “Alien astronomers in a galaxy a
hundred million light-years away,” says science writer Bob
Berman, “would see us whizzing in the opposite direction”
at more than five million miles per hour.
“Or are they moving away from us? The usual
interpretation is that the space between us is
increasing, so everybody is moving and yet nobody
is actually moving. That’s another way of saying
that there is no center to the Big Bang. It happened
everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps all we can say for
sure is that we’ve come a long way, yet we’re still
going nowhere—fast.”
27
Four galaxies, in a particular cluster of galaxies, are in a
collision which will result in a merger that is ten times as
large as our Milky Way galaxy.
28
A report in the Los Angeles Times (7-26-03) gave the
calculation of an Australian astronomer and his team,
stating: “There are approximately seventy sextillion—that’s
7 followed by 22 zeros—stars in the known universe.”
A star “cluster”—not even a galaxy—can contain about
a hundred thousand stars. (Daylight would be constant in
such a location.)
29
written, there was not even the mathematical means to
comprehend such things as the age of the universe.
Right now, we can see more galaxies than we’ll ever again
be able to see, because many are disappearing (due to
cosmic expansion) beyond the outer horizon which is within
our view.*
The particles that form your body have been around for
billions of years. They are products of a universe which,
scientists have determined, is composed seventy percent by
something called dark energy, which we as yet have learned
little about. Another twenty-five percent of the universe is
comprised of dark matter, which likewise we know little of.
Then another four percent is matter with the composition of
atoms, but which is not illuminated in a form visible to us.
All the atomic matter which is visible to us (galaxies, stars,
planets, comets, debris) represents only about one half of
one percent of the balance. So, all of matter as we know it,
makes up only as much as five percent of the cosmos!
And so, closer to home, we have matter and antimatter
among the products of the Big Bang, after the cooling of
the crucible that was so intensely hot that “it makes no
difference if it’s Fahrenheit, Celsius or Kelvin.” Nor did the
speed of light make any difference at a time when developing
processes preceded the existence of photons, thus light itself.
And yet, what can we say definitely “exists” today? Even
the Big Dipper which man has known throughout history
is in flux, as the stars which compose it move in relation
to each other. Similarly, what astronomers call “the Virgo
cluster of galaxies” is a mental construct; the galaxies that
we see as a “cluster”—the light from each arriving in real
time—radiated their light from different times in cosmic
* A hundred billion years from now (give or take a year or two) there will be
no galaxies visible beyond our own.
30
history. Even the Earth’s rotation has not been constant,
having rotated much faster in its earlier stages.
Primack and Abrams comment, “Einstein (and many
other scientists) have shown us that things are not as they
seem.”
31
will long since have vanished….Finally, though,
all that will be left in the cosmos will be black
holes, the burnt-out cinders of stars, and the dead
husks of planets: the universe will be cold and
black….Eventually, even these will decay, leaving
a featureless, infinitely large void. And that will be
that….
“What we call the universe, in short, came from almost
nowhere in next to no time,” and to emptiness it is predicted
to return. “The universe, once ablaze with the light of
uncountable stars, will become an unimaginably vast, cold,
dark and profoundly lonely place.”
32
point, space-time ends, and the pull of gravity becomes
infinite.” According to astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman,
“Space isn’t sitting there stationary outside the hole.” Even
space-time, and the light that’s in it, is being swallowed by
the hole—in addition to matter that’s in its vicinity.
Astrophysicist Andrew Hamilton on black hole details
(via Steve Nadis in Discover, June 2011):
“Black holes are massive objects that have collapsed
in on themselves, creating a gravitational suction so
intense that their insides become cut off from the
rest of the universe. A black hole’s outer boundary,
known as the event horizon, is a point of no return.
Once trapped inside, nothing—not even light—
can escape. At the center is a core, known as a
singularity, that is infinitely small and dense, an
affront to all known laws of physics….
“A black hole, Hamilton realized, could be thought
of as a kind of Big Bang in reverse. Instead of
exploding outward from an infinitesimally small
point, spewing matter and energy and space to
create the cosmos, a black hole pulls everything
inward toward a single, dense point.”
And physicist Brian Greene:
“It is common to speak of the center of a black hole
as if it were a position in space. But it’s not. It is a
moment in time. When crossing the event horizon
of a black hole, time and space (the radial direction)
interchange roles. If you fall into a black hole, for
example, your radial motion represents progress
through time. You are thus pulled toward the black
hole’s center in the same way you are pulled to the
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next moment in time. The center of the black hole
is, in this sense, akin to a last moment in time.”
The black hole of Andrew Fabian’s study is said to now
have a mass one hundred million times that of our sun,
with a circumference of more than a hundred million miles.*
This compares to the black hole that appears to exist at
the center of the Milky Way galaxy which is estimated to
weigh in at only 2.6 million suns. “There may be millions of
black holes floating around our own galaxy, each five or ten
times as massive as our sun, and roughly fifty miles around.”
The “event horizon” of a black hole may be, according to
estimates, six miles across or even six-thousand light-years
across.
34
Not until 1990 did we know of other planets around other
stars than our own. The indications are that more than half
of the stars in our galaxy have planets around them.*
35
Centauri, 4.3 light-years away.” (Reduce Earth to about the
size of a pea, the star would be nearly 10,000 miles distant.)
“The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are
those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are now
flying away from us at about thirty-five thousand miles an
hour,” says Bill Bryson.
These twin probes (which have given us fly-by details
from Jupiter and Uranus, as well as while passing Neptune)
have been sending data for thirty-four years. Voyager 1 is
now nearly eleven billion miles away, one day to head out
of the solar system and into interstellar space. Signals take
more than twelve hours to reach us. But if it were to reach
the nearest star within a human lifetime, it would need to
be traveling at 10,000 miles per second.
36
provide the sort of stability necessary for the long
and successful development of life. This won’t go
on forever. The Moon is slipping from our grasp at
a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two
billion years it will have receded so far that it won’t
keep us steady….”
* Jupiter’s mass equals that of all the planets combined, in our solar system,
with room to spare.
37
half times higher than Mt. Everest, and a canyon about as
wide as the U.S.
While Earth has one moon,* Jupiter has 63. There is an
asteroid that has two moons. As to asteroids, we know of
more than ninety thousand. A couple of Mars’ moons may
have been asteroids. One of Jupiter’s moons, the largest in
the solar system, would be a planet if it was orbiting the
sun.
We have landed probing or robotic craft on Mercury,
Venus and Mars. We have a photo of Earth taken from
within about thirteen thousand miles of Saturn (showing
just a small orb, lit by the Sun). We have close-up pictures
of water-worn pebbles on Mars. We have a photo taken
thirty-three inches away from a rock of ice on Saturn’s
moon, Titan (nine billion miles from here).
* Only sixty-nine years after the 1903 Wright Brothers flight, our astronauts
drove a four-wheel cart twenty-two miles on Earth’s moon.
38
According to science writer Andrew Grant, “[She] combined
cold nitrogen, methane, and traces of carbon monoxide and
exposed the mix to microwaves (which simulate the sun’s
ultraviolet rays) and oxygen (which rains down on Titan from
eruptions on the nearby moon Enceladus). The resulting
concoction contained amino acids, the fundamental units of
proteins, as well as the five chemical bases that constitute
DNA and RNA.
“Perhaps the most notable aspect of Hörst’s
experiment is what she left out: liquid water, which
is crucial for terrestrial life but absent from most
of the cosmos, including Titan. ‘In the right kind
of atmosphere, you can have extremely complex
chemistry going on without water,’ she says.”
39
standards. Even here on Earth, there are life forms that
have surprised biologists, when they were first encountered.
According to the book One Universe: “The pinhead-sized
tardigrade, which lives in moss and mud in roof gutters and
the cracks of paving stones, can withstand pressures 6,000
times greater than at sea level, and temperatures from near
absolute zero* to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. It also survives
complete dehydration, as well as laboratory exposure to a
vacuum and to intense X-rays. Some tardigrades have been
revived after lying dormant in dried moss in museums for
more than 100 years.”
And colonies of cyanobacteria exist beneath Antarctic
ice. “Researchers liken these conditions to those on Mars.
Dormant ancient microbes, and even plants such as moss,
can remain preserved in ice, resuming metabolic activity
after thousands to millions of years.”
Discover magazine:
“Phosphorous is a key component of DNA, but late
last year a team of NASA scientists announced
they had found a bacterium that could use arsenic
instead. ‘What else can life do that we haven’t seen
yet?’ wondered lead researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon.”
Bill Bryson:
“Scientists in Australia found microbes known as
Thiobacillus concretivorans that lived in—indeed,
could not live without—concentrations of sulfuric
acid strong enough to dissolve metal. A species called
Micrococcus radiophilus was found living happily in
40
the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging itself
on plutonium and whatever else was there.”
Life Extension magazine:
“Most people think radiation is toxic to all living
organisms. Not so with a bacterium called D.
radiodurans, whose ultra-high levels of antioxidants
superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase enable
it to thrive inside nuclear reactors. Radiation
acutely kills by inflicting free radical damage to
life-sustaining cells. Due to its naturally high
antioxidant status, D. radiodurans can withstand a
radiation dose that is 3,000 times greater than what
would kill a human.”
And this, just in: “Scientists recently discovered a species
of bacteria that live entirely on caffeine.” (Discover, 9-11)
41
life forms surviving the interplanetary trip. Among them,
a bacteria—Deinococcus radiodurans, which Warmflash is
“quite sure will survive the trip.”
Among their company will be tardigrades (defined as
“water animals often regarded as primitive arthropods;
invertebrates with an exoskeleton, similar to insects”). At
about 1½ millimeters long, you’d have to enlarge one by
500 magnifications for it to be as wide as your four fingers.
As a space travel candidate, says Warmflash, “They are
extremely resistant to radiation, temperature extremes and
even the space vacuum.”
42
of those crashing into a suitable place—Earth, for
instance—and you have the basic elements you
need for life.”
43
Earth Life
45
2.5 million years ago: Homo habilis species, first
makers of stone tools
2 million years ago: Homo erectus
1.8 million years ago: Migration begins out of Africa
1.6 million years ago: The use of fire
195,000 years ago: Homo sapiens (us)
72,000 years ago: Sewn clothing now worn
35,000 years ago: Cave paintings by Cro-Magnons
10,000 years ago: Agriculture and villages
5,000 years ago: Writing developed
Between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, the species H.
heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and H. florsiensis are
considered to have existed. So, including H. habilis and H.
erectus with the latter three, five out of six of our species
have become extinct, with only H. sapiens surviving—so far.
And between H. habilis and H. erectus there is believed to
have been another species, Homo ergaster. Thus it may be
that six out of seven human species have failed to survive.
46
hominids began walking upright approximately five million
years ago, so that’s where our human traits began to evolve.
Hominid brains began to increase in size, from that of
about the size of a chimpanzee’s, possibly as recently as two
million years ago, nearing our present size at least 160,000
years ago. The maturation of a larger brain made children
dependent for a longer time, and may have had an impact
on the stability of social interrelations.
Shaping a tool from a stone requires a certain amount
of imagination, as does the making of a spear; bone-tipped
spears may be as recent as fifty thousand years ago. Barbed-
bone fishing hooks have been found that are estimated to be
ninety thousand years old.
Today, species of life are becoming extinct at a disturbing
rate, due to the traits of one species in particular.
One of the questions that new discoveries have not yet
shed light on: did this dominating, self-interested species—H.
sapiens—account for the demise of some of the five or six
other human species that existed before it? Why is our
species the only living survivor? And what can that tell us
of the potential demise of this species?
47
“And every one of those cells knows exactly what
to do….Blown up to a scale at which atoms were
about the size of peas, a cell itself would be a
sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported
by a complex framework of girders called the
cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millions of
objects—some the size of basketballs, others the
size of cars—would whiz about like bullets. There
wouldn’t be a place you could stand without being
pummeled and ripped thousands of times every
second from every direction….The proteins are
especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into
each other up to a billion times a second. Enzymes
(themselves a type of protein) dash everywhere,
performing up to a thousand tasks a second. Like
greatly speeded-up worker ants, they busily build
and rebuild molecules, hauling a piece off this one,
adding a piece to that one….
“Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different
types of proteins, and of these about 2,000 types will
each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.
‘This means,’ says Nuland, ‘that even if we count
only those molecules present in amounts of more
than 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum
of 100 million protein molecules in each cell. Such
a staggering figure gives some idea of the swarming
immensity of biochemical activity within us.’ It is all
an immensely demanding process. Your heart must
pump 75 gallons of blood an hour, 1,800 gallons
every day, 657,000 gallons in a year—that’s enough
to fill four Olympic-sized swimming pools—to keep
48
all those cells freshly oxygenated. (And that’s at
rest. During exercise the rate can increase as much
as sixfold.)…At any given moment, a typical cell
in your body will have about one billion ATP*
molecules in it; and in two minutes every one of
them will have been drained dry and another billion
will have taken their place. Every day you produce,
and use up, a volume of ATP equivalent to about
half your body weight. Feel the warmth of your
skin. That’s your ATP at work….
“Finally, cells communicate directly with their
neighbors to make sure their actions are
coordinated…. Indeed, if not told to live—if not
given some kind of active instruction from another
cell—cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need
a lot of reassurance…. Indeed, some organisms
that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular
organization that makes our own look carelessly
pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by
passing them through a sieve, for instance), then
dump them into a solution, and they will find their
way back together and build themselves into a
sponge again. You can do this to them over and
over, and they will doggedly reassemble because,
like you and me and every other living thing, they
have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.
“Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even
the simplest are far beyond the limits of human
ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for
example, you would have to miniaturize about
the same number of components as are found in a
* A nucleotide present in, and vital to, energy processes in all living cells.
49
Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just
five microns across; then somehow you would have
to persuade that sphere to reproduce.”
50
after the favored ant species moves in, then stops producing
them if the colony dies out.”
Ants are, also, planned victims of parasites, according to
ecologist Steve Yanoviak. A form of nematode doesn’t resist
being eaten; once ingested, it turns the ant’s rear end red,
like a ripe berry. This seems to act to attract birds, who eat
such an ant—and thus carry and spread the nematode’s eggs
via its feces. Ants feed on the feces, and the cycle continues.
51
A team of German researchers, according to New Scientist
magazine (5-24-2008) trained a Border Collie to recognize
the meanings of hundreds of words. “He could go into another
room and retrieve an object he had been asked for, and was
even able to do so when asked to retrieve an unfamiliar
item from a set of objects for which he had already learned
names.”
52
described to me, she placed Kanzi and Panbanisha,
his sister, in separate rooms where they could hear
but not see each other. Through lexigrams, Savage-
Rumbaugh explained to Kanzi that he would be
given yogurt. He was then asked to communicate
this information to Panbanisha. ‘Kanzi vocalized,
then Panbanisha vocalized in return and selected
“yogurt” on the keyboard in front of her,’ Savage-
Rumbaugh tells me.”
53
From a Princeton University text, Margins of Reality
(Jahn and Dunne):
“Other scientists and philosophers have pondered
whether atomic structure may be characterized
by its own intrinsic form of consciousness. By the
definition of consciousness proposed (by us)—‘any
functioning entity capable of generating, receiving,
or utilizing information’—atoms and molecules
would certainly qualify; for they have the capacity
to exchange information with each other and with
their environment, and to react to these in some
quasi-intelligent fashion.” *
54
like the tendril of a vine, by the neuron’s leading part—
feeling around as it reaches for the next point to grip in
its upward climb, and pulling the cell nucleus behind it.
Once in the cortex, it releases its grip on the glial fiber so
that another upward-mobile neuron can follow behind it.
Early on, the trip takes only a day*; as the brain expands, it
begins to take as long as two weeks.
The magazine article says, “There are a hundred billion
neurons in the adult human cortex, and all of them got
there by migrating” from their original birthplace to the
cortex, climbing a radial thread almost like a snail climbs
a beanstalk. This proceeds for about three months, during
which neurons establish the locations of their axons and
dendrites.
55
on the number of synapses in the brain and their
typical firing rates, yield processing speeds within
a few orders of magnitude of this result, about 1017
operations per second. Although it’s difficult to
be more precise, this gives a sense of the numbers
that come into play. The computer I’m now using
has a speed that’s about a billion operations per
second; today’s fastest supercomputers have a
peak speed of about 1015 operations per second (a
statistic that no doubt will quickly date this book).
If we use the faster estimate for brain speed, we
find that a hundred million laptops, or a hundred
supercomputers, approach the processing power of
a human brain.”
56
“…the most abundant of all the cells in the
brain….And they speak in a chemical language
of their own….They have at least some of the
requirements for processing information the way
neurons do….They are also the most mysterious. A
single astrocyte can wrap its rays around more than
a million synapses.* Astrocytes also fuse to each
other, building channels through which molecules
can shuttle from cell to cell.”
* There are some one hundred trillion synapses, or neural connections, in the
human brain—more than a thousand times the number of stars in the Milky
Way.
† Smithsonian magazine: “By borrowing a gene from fluorescent jellyfish and
inserting it into the DNA of worms or mice in the lab, scientists have made
neurons glow.”
57
smaller than a grain of sand. A team at Harvard
University has built a computerized system to
manipulate worms—making them start and stop,
giving them the sensation of being touched, and
even prompting them to lay eggs—by stimulating
their neurons individually with laser light, all while
the worms are swimming freely in a Petri dish.”
58
according to one calculation, you may have as much
as twenty million kilometers of DNA bundled up
inside you.
“The simple amoeba, just one cell big and without
any ambitions but to exist, contains 400 million bits
of genetic information in its DNA—enough, as Carl
Sagan noted, to fill eighty books of five hundred
pages.
“‘Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal,
plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will
use the same dictionary and know the same code.
All life is one,’ says Matt Ridley. We are all the
result of a single genetic trick handed down from
generation to generation nearly four billion years,
to such an extent that you can take a fragment of
human genetic instruction, patch it into a faulty
yeast cell, and the yeast cell will put it to work as if
it were its own. In a very real sense, it is its own.”
Discover magazine:
“If uncoiled, the DNA in all the cells in your body
would stretch 10 billion miles—from here to Pluto and
back….Aside from bacteria, the smallest genome
belongs to the intestinal parasite Encephalitozoon
intestinalis, with a trifling 2.3 billion base pairs.”
David Freedman in The Atlantic magazine (July/August
2011):
“If you think genes don’t affect how people behave,
consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular
set of genes, the probability that you will commit
a violent crime is four times as high as it would
be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times
59
as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to
commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to
be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to
be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming
majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent
of death-row inmates do….By the way, as regards
that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of
them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome.
If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.”
* “There are roughly 100 trillion cells in the human body, but of those
100 trillion cells, roughly 90 trillion of them are actually different kinds of
bacteria—which means that only 1 out of every 10 celss in your body is
actually your own.” —Biology professor Bruce Fleury.
60
In just the past thirty years, we’ve seen some remarkable
developments, including: AIDS first reported; first computer
virus released; first artificial heart transplant; a new pure-
carbon molecule discovered; ozone hole detected in our
stratosphere; Challenger space shuttle explodes, killing
crew; Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown; interstellar space
probe Voyager 2 passes Neptune; Hubble Space Telescope
launched; intergovernmental panel warns of climate-warming
change; comet observed slamming into Jupiter; FDA
approves genetically modified tomato; “top” quark, keystone
of subatomic nuclei, discovered; planet detected orbiting a
sun-like star; lamb cloned from an adult sheep; Sojourner
rover begins Mars exploration; Deep Blue computer beats
grandmaster at chess; dark energy identified; adult brains
discovered to grow new neurons; West Nile virus enters U.S.;
lab-grown bladders implanted in dogs; Wikipedia introduced;
water ice detected on Mars; a tsunami devastates Indonesia;
Huygens space probe lands on (Saturn moon) Titan; first
face transplant performed; skin cells converted to stem cells;
Swine Flu pandemic; synthetic bacterium engineered….
Enough, for one generation?*
† Considered to be 64.5 million years ago, before the emergence of the first
primates.
61
on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico created waves that were
miles high. Dinosaurs in distant locales were knocked off
their feet by the ground impact, which left a crater more
than thirty-eight miles wide.
Within the first three hundred miles, life was extinguished.
Vegetative fires killed more life, over hundreds of thousands
of acres. Tidal waves threw oceanic fish and sea vegetation
onto land, where more life forms died. Volcanic activity
was stimulated in parts of the world, even on the opposite
side, where more living forms were engulfed in lava. Smoke
and ash limited vision, in wide areas, to a few feet; many
more animals died of asphyxiation, and plants died from
deprivation of nine months of sunlight. A rotten stench
pervaded the atmosphere.
Many remaining life forms starved; some others attacked
and ate survivors. Rain caused erosion; and there were two
wintry years; the cold and wet conditions killed more life.
Four-fifths of the species of animal and plant life succumbed;
especially animals of more than fifty pounds, including all
non-avian dinosaurs.*
62
In March 2004, an asteroid nearly a hundred feet
across “shot past Earth, not far above the orbit occupied
by telecommunications satellites.” (Search “2004 FH” at
Wikipedia and you can watch it pass through our night sky.)
On November 8, 2011 (reported Associated Press), an
asteroid a quarter-mile wide—“bigger than an aircraft
carrier”—passed within 202,000 miles of Earth, “just inside
the moon’s orbit…from the direction of the sun, at 29,000
miles per hour.” Named 2005-YU55, astronomers had been
tracking it since noticed six years prior; if one that size were
to hit the Earth, they calculate, “it would blast out a crater
four miles across and 1,700 feet deep,” possibly result in a
magnitude 7 earthquake, or raise an ocean tsunami seventy
feet high.
* There is at least one asteroid that is 35 miles long (called 243 IDA).
63
meters across,* but it could hit with about 60,000
times the force of the Hiroshima bomb—enough to
destroy an area the size of France.”
Citing a researcher, Mark Boslough:
“If, as Boslough thinks, most asteroids and comets
explode before reaching the ground, then this is
another reason to fear that the conventional thinking
seriously underestimates the frequency of space-rock
strikes—the small number of craters may be lulling
us into complacency….I asked William Ailor, an
asteroid specialist at The Aerospace Corporation,
a think tank for the Air Force, what he though the
risk was. Ailor’s answer: a one-in-ten chance per
century of a dangerous space-object strike….And
as Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology
officer of Microsoft, put it, ‘The odds of a space-
object strike during your lifetime may be no more
than the odds you will die in a plane crash—but
with space rocks, it’s like the entire human race is
riding on the plane.’”
64
An asteroid hit, according to one astrophysicist, is “the
top thing on the cosmic list of things to worry about
happening.”
That’s because “fewer than one percent of the projectiles”
have been located by us, so far. The manager of NASA’s
Near Earth Object Program reports that the prospective
“population is very large.”
65
the first 10-32 second of the universe’s life.” What are the
prospects of it occurring again? “(Until we) develop a better
theory of physics, there is no way to judge its likelihood.”
66
ring of stars called Gould’s Belt. If a dark cloud
headed right into (and through) Earth, that might
have dire consequences too. In theory, dark matter
particles could interact with each other, giving off
gamma radiation. Afsar Abbas, a physicist in India,
suggests that the radiation would not only cause a
wave of mutations but also heat up Earth’s interior
and trigger massive volcanism, leading to a double
extinction. Odds: indeterminate. Dark matter is so
elusive that an event could be starting right now
and we might not know it.”
67
And as for sources of power even during repair, electricity is
required for natural gas and fuel pipelines. Coal-fired power
stations will exhaust their reserve, meanwhile, in about a
month. Nuclear power stations are programmed to shut
down immediately in the event of serious grid problems,
and not allowed to restart until the power grid has been
restored.
No power for heating, cooling or refrigeration, will affect
the manufacture of medicinals; there are a million people
dependent on insulin alone.
A Cornell plasma physicist says the situation “would be
like a Hurricane Katrina, but ten times worse!”
Help from Europe, where the electricity grids “are highly
interconnected and extremely vulnerable to cascading
failures”? The U.S. could be in for a loss of tens of millions
of lives, says the magazine. Quoting one authority, “It could
conceivably be the worst natural disaster possible.”
So, we’re not just talking about the computers at your
bank being down. We’re talking about the electric grid
nationwide—hampering any sort of recovery.
The head of NASA’s planetary division has said of a CME
hitting Earth’s magnetic shield: “The Earth can’t cope with
the plasma” from a solar storm. “The CME just opens up
the magnetosphere like a can-opener, and matter squirts
in.”
68
world” (Scientific American, July 2011), while “keeping
operators from knowing that anything is amiss” until fatally
too late.
“…a coordinated cyberattack on multiple points in
the grid could damage equipment so extensively that
our nation’s ability to generate and deliver power
would be severely compromised for weeks—perhaps
even months….Computers control the grid’s
mechanical devices at every level, from massive
generators fed by fossil fuels or uranium, all the way
down to the transmission lines on your street. Most
of these computers use common operating systems
such as Windows and Linux, which makes them as
vulnerable to malware as your desktop PC is.”
Nichol says: “According to a 2004 study by researchers at
Pennsylvania State University and the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., an attack that
incapacitated a carefully chosen minority of all transmission
substations [as few as eight percent] would trigger a
nationwide blackout.” And he points out that even “military
bases rely on power from the commercial grid.”
A sidebar, in the magazine, gave examples of real-life
cyberattacks:
January 2003: The Slammer worm bypasses
multiple firewalls to infect the operations center at
Ohio’s Davis-Besse nuclear power plant. The worm
spreads from a contractor’s computer into the
business network, where it jumps to the computers
controlling plant operations, crashing multiple
safety systems. The plant was off-line at the time.
69
January 2008: A senior CIA official reveals that
hackers have frequently infiltrated electric utilities
outside the U.S. and made extortion demands. In at
least one case, the hackers were able to shut off the
power supply to several (unnamed) cities.
“Malicious software called TDSS,” reported Discover
magazine (September 2011), “has conscripted more than
4.5 million computers” into a consolidated network—
“practically indestructible because it can operate without a
central command center.”
The director of a research institute concerned with
computer security, Scott Borg, says of cyberattacks
(Scientific American, November 2011):
“After lying dormant for months or years, malware
could switch on without any action on the part of
those who launched it. It could disable emergency
services, cause factories to make defective products,
blow up refineries and pipelines, poison drinking
water, make medical treatments lethal, wreck
electric generators, discredit the banking system,
ground airplanes, cause trains to collide, and turn
our own military equipment against us….The
malicious part of the malware might be the sequence
of operations that causes a normal instruction to
be carried out at exactly the wrong time….We
don’t actually know how to scan for malware. We
can’t stop it, because we can’t find it. We can’t
always recognize it, even if we are looking right at
it….The very computers we are using to search
for malware might be the vehicles delivering it….
If the first time a malicious program operates it
turns your missiles back at you, fries your electric
generators or blows up your refineries, it won’t do
70
much good to recognize it by that behavior….We
are stopping most malware, most of the time. But
we don’t have a reliable solution for the cases where
it might matter most.”
71
fifty megaton bomb in 1961. “Active weapons in the U.S.
arsenal” have a “range of yields”—up to 475 kilotons.
As with an asteroid, you might have anywhere from ten to
thirty minutes of warning to finish up whatever you’re doing
that’s important.
72
Atomic Unreality
* Werner Heisenberg
73
And, in the overall purpose of his article, he had something
of more direct interest to describe:
“Any microscopic object will always possess a residual
random jiggle, thanks to quantum fluctuations.
Radio, television and cellular phones all operate by
transmitting or receiving electromagnetic waves.
Visible light is the same thing; it is just a higher
frequency form of electromagnetic waves. At even
higher frequencies, beyond the visible spectrum,
you find ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays.
All are electromagnetic waves which are really
just different frequencies of light….And if you
add up all these ceaseless fluctuations, what you
get is a background sea of light whose total energy
is enormous: the zero-point field. The ‘zero-point’
refers to the fact that even though this energy is
huge, it is the lowest possible energy state. All
other energy is over and above the zero-point state.
Take any volume of space and take away everything
else—in other words, create a vacuum—and what
you are left with is the zero-point field. We can
imagine a true vacuum, devoid of everything, but
the real-world quantum vacuum is permeated by the
zero-point field with its ceaseless electromagnetic
waves….Since it is everywhere, inside and outside
of us, permeating every atom in our bodies, we are
effectively blind to it. It blinds us to its presence.
The world of light that we do see is all the rest
of the light that is over and above the zero-point
field.”
74
Light is described, scientifically, as electromagnetic
waves—energy—with perfect velocity. Most of us have a
general comprehension of, say, a speed of one hundred miles
per hour. Light travels 660,000,000 miles per hour. At some
186,000 miles-per-second, it could circle our globe seven and
one-half times in one second.
75
While David Bohm (like some others) has suggested that
matter is a form of light which has “condensed” at less than
light speed, a former University of Pittsburgh professor,
Dr. Ernest Sternglass, has concluded that photons can
be converted into matter, and matter into photons. Such
processes appear to be involved when gamma rays strike our
atmosphere, and can be produced in a particle accelerator.
The following is not the only such account one can find,
in the spiritual literature, of the palpable sensing of the glow
of energy within all matter, but it’s succinct and verbally
clear. Robert Rabbin reports:
“The sun was just rising above the mountain ridge
across the valley. I sat on a concrete planter that
surrounded several coconut trees, and fell very
silent.
76
“My head became heavy with silence and my body
began to disappear, to dissolve. In another moment
there was only breathing, not just my breathing—
the respiration of the body—but a breathing of
everything around me. I entered that breath of all
things and disappeared.
“In this breath was a light, a white light. It emanated
from everything. It was everywhere. The leaves
and flowers of plants, stone walls, the clumps of
dirt, the muddy water, the people beginning to
pass by—awareness of breathing and light, yet no
perceiver, no body, no self. And tremendous order
and intelligence! Such precision and purpose—each
thing related exquisitely to the next—everything
defined within itself and in relation to everything
else, ordered and sustained by the breathing and
the light which had no source but was everywhere,
streaming, busy and yet unmoving.
“This lasted for two days, after which I did not want
to talk for a long time.
“The residue of this experience is with me to this
day.”
77
all of the beam to enter the chamber (traveling at 186,000
miles a second) before any of it reemerged. The light was
only delayed for one thousandth of a second before bursting
out again at full speed, but it would otherwise have traveled
186 miles in that interval.
In a subsequent experiment, reported by Discover
magazine, “Physicists at the University of Rochester have
coaxed light into traveling backward—and, weirdly enough,
to do so faster than light itself.”
A pulse of light was beamed through an optical fiber.
Writes Alex Stone:
“Just as one light pulse enters, a second pulse appears
at the opposite end, as if by magic. This second pulse
then splits in two, with half propagating backward
and the other half exiting the fiber. The overall
effect is that ‘the pulse appears to leave before it
enters,’ says physicist Robert Boyd, who designed
the experiment. No physical laws are violated
because the information in the pulse never breaks
the light-speed barrier. In recent years, physicists
have also learned to slow light or to ramp it up past
the usual speed of 186,282 miles per second.”
78
“There is general agreement that the quantum
vacuum is where everything, that we now know,
came from; even the matrix of space and time.”
So states particle physicist and Oxford professor Frank Close
in The Void (taking his title from the Rig-Veda).
How relative space and time, he muses. If someone on
a distant star looks at our own star, our sun, she will be
receiving this image of light which has traveled space at a
time before humans even existed. At the same time, we are
seeing its rays as they were originated eight minutes ago.
* “Virtual particles” are not unreal; they have the potential to become real.
79
So, according to this, the “quantum foam” connects the
empty space within the atoms in human bodies to the most
remote regions of the cosmos.
* “In the early universe, one could say the vacuum was fully alive.” —Mark
Whittle
† Physicist Heinz Pagels: “…what I embody—the principle of life—cannot be
destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code…”
80
Scientists (physicists in particular) sometimes have to
calculate incredibly short durations of time or miniscule
distances in space.
The lower limit on time is called Planck time: 10-43
seconds, or one 10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a
second; written out, 0.(42 zeroes)1.
Because there is a lower limit to a measurable unit of
time, we are not able to extrapolate the physical condition
(which would have existed in the span of time) up until
10-43 seconds following the Big Bang. After that hiatus in
time, we are able to determine, for example, that at 10-40
seconds after the Big Bang, the universe would have been a
millimeter wide in extent.
Similarly, scientists find a lower limit on the extent of space
(which is subject to measure), called Planck length: twenty
powers, or “multiples”, less than the width of a subatomic
proton.* (It is difficult for us to grasp what these multiples
signify. If a millimeter—less than a sixteenth of an inch—
represented the figure one million, then one billion would be
represented as a meter—or about one yard.) Brian Greene:
“For a better feel, note that if an atom were magnified to be
as large as the observable universe, the same magnification
would make the Planck length the size of an average tree.”
* “Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold
something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, rather more than the
number of seconds contained in half a million years.” —Bill Bryson
81
The quantum leap* in an electron lasts for only about one
hundred quintillionth of a second (called an attosecond).
That is to one second as one second is to three hundred
million years.
But that’s not the smallest unit of time, in the context of
physics: that is so-called Planck time—less than a trillionth
of one trillionth of an attosecond (or 10-43 seconds).
In a Discover magazine article (June 2007), Tim Folger
says that’s not the half of it: “Time may not exist at the
most fundamental level of physical reality.”
Time, of course, is relative to start with: “The past,
present and future are not absolutes.” Einstein too said,
“the distinction between past, present, and future is only a
stubbornly persistent illusion.”
A physicist in France, Carlo Rovelli, points out, “All
particles of matter and energy can also be described as
waves....An infinite number of [waves] can exist in the same
location.Ӡ So, what is the relevance of time to particles which
“could all exist piled together,” enveloped in a simultaneous
instant?
Time depends upon a subjective observer. Folger: “There
is no clock ticking outside the cosmos.”
Rovelli: “It may be that the best way to think about
quantum reality is to give up the notion of time‡—that the
fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” §
* “If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, I should be
sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.” —Erwin Schrödinger
† “A wave is not a material object but a form.” —Physics professor Robert
March
‡ “In the Absolute, there is neither time, space, nor cause-and-effect.”
—Swami Vivekananda
§ “There is no present, no past, no future.” —Physicist Fritjof Capra
82
If there is no time, what does this say about the “eternity”
of death—or even the existence of “life,” which we presume
to have a beginning and end?
83
type of experiment which the observing scientist chooses will
determine the path the photon takes, according to Wheeler’s
calculations. Well, more than a calculation: “It has been
demonstrated in a laboratory,” says Folger, in what is called
a “delayed-choice” experiment.
As Stanford physicist Andrei Linde says, “When we look
at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it
were there ten-plus billion years ago.” The universe and its
observer are a unitary system. “You can say that the universe
is there only when there is an observer who can say that.” A
camera could film the universe, but the universe still would
not “exist” until a human consciousness acknowledged that
what the camera filmed truly exists. Without the universe,
we are not existent; and the contrary is equally true.
So, as the universe depends on the observer for reification,
so too Wheeler suggests does the nature of atomic matter or
energy, subject to the wave-function collapse, depend upon
what the observer chooses to observe—however far in the
past the constituent particles were generated.
84
A nanometer—one thousandth of a micrometer (or 10-9
meters)—reaches nearly the limit of size that technicians
can work with. One tenth of a nanometer (10-10) is about
the width of an atom (all atoms are roughly the same size);
this is called an angstrom, used in measuring the length
of light waves. Think of planet Earth in comparison to an
apple (10-10); this is equivalent to an apple in comparison to
one atom.*
The orbit of electrons around the nucleus of an atom is
about 10-10 meters in diameter—so, there is a remarkable
amount of space between the core of an atom and the
electrons which define its outer limit. Thus the nucleus of
the atom is ten thousand times smaller than the atom as
a whole (or typically 10-14). If the atom were as wide as a
football field—electrons in the end zones—a grape, midfield,
would be the nucleus. As a physicist expresses it, “An atom
is mostly empty space. Even hard, solid objects [such as
your bones] are mostly empty space.” (Thus it is estimated
that billions of neutrinos can pass through our bodies, in
their cosmic travel, every second, unaffected.)
These distinctly-orbiting electrons “sense the presence
of other electrons.” Consequently there are “interactions of
electrons in one atom with electrons in another atom.”
The protons and neutrons, which comprise the atom’s
nucleus, are bonded by what is called the nuclear force, or
“strong force.” So, particle physics is the study of atomic
forces and particles; and the subatomic scale involves the
principles of quantum reality (or “mechanics”).
More at the fundament of the nucleus than even its
core of protons and neutrons are quarks, which have no
* The Greeks were positing the existence of atoms at about the time of
Buddha. But as late as 1800, atoms still were not known to be an existent
fact.
85
internal structure* that is yet known: “We may be looking
at a bottom-most layer of the world.” What is called the
“carrier” of the strong force which holds the quarks together
is a particle dubbed the gluon.
A (theoretical) particle field is thought to exist in the
atom’s empty space between the quarks and electrons; the
particles inhabiting the field are known as Higgs bosons.
“The Higgs, however, has been established mathematically
but not physically. We have no direct evidence of the
existence of a Higgs particle.”
The Higgs field is believed to exist not only in atoms, but
everywhere, even in outer space, as a uniform background.
A particle physicist has described it this way:
“When I walk through the room, then, I’m walking
through a sea of the Higgs field. What would be the
effect on me? That depends on the interaction of
the particles in my body with the Higgs field. One
of the things that would happen as I’m walking, if
the particles in my body are interacting with the
Higgs field, would be some sort of resistance to my
motion.”
It is thought, in fact, that this as-yet-unverified particle
is what provides mass to all particles, including those that
comprise your body, and results in inertia.
What is called the electric force holds electrons to the
atom’s nuclei, and allows atoms to bind into molecules.
“The electromagnetic force is responsible for the structure of
everyday matter.” The force carrier for the electromagnetic
force is the photon.†
* There is at least one thing that physicists have found to be inseparable:
coupled quarks are not divisible.
† There are about 400 million photons per cubic meter (a little larger than a
cubic yard) of space. There are a billion photons for every atom.
86
The carrier for the force of gravity is thought to be a
particle named a graviton.
Though physicists regard as real the electrons, protons,
neutrons and quarks, these are not objects which can be
separately seen, in physical terms.
Physicist Werner Heisenberg: “The atoms, or the
elementary particles, are not real; they form a world of
potentialities and possibilities, rather than one of ‘things’ or
‘facts’.”
What is “not real” has not even “substance.” Physicist
Fritjof Capra: “Atoms consist of particles, and these particles
are not made of any material stuff. When we observe
them, we never see any substance; what we observe are
dynamic patterns continually changing into one another…
interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web….These
patterns do not represent probabilities of ‘things’, but rather
probabilities of interconnections.”
Capra says, “Subatomic particles…do not exist as isolated
entities, but as integral parts of an inseparable network of
interactions….To find out what the ‘constituents’ of these
particles are, break them up by banging them together in
collision processes (involving high energies)….The resulting
fragments are never ‘smaller pieces’ of the original particles.
Two protons, for example, can break up into a great variety
of fragments (when they collide at high velocities) but
there will never be ‘fractions of a proton’ among them. The
fragments will always be entire….”
And of that debris—those ashes of matter, the raw
elements of which your body is comprised—the physicist
Joliet-Curie once calculated: the nuclei of all your atoms
(which compose 99.9% of an atom’s mass) could be packed
together into the volume of a minute speck of free-floating
87
dust*—the kind you notice when sunlight streams through
the window of a darkened room.
Even then, how unique are “your” raw materials? Physicist
Heinz Pagels: “The truth is that the entire material universe,
with all its variety, is entirely made up out of quantum
particles which are completely identical.” Physicist Nick
Herbert echoes: “All quons, in the same state, are exactly
alike….There is no difference whatsoever between electron
#123 and electron #137.”
In fact, your identity is ultimately even more indistinct
than this. Herbert: “The quantum world is not made up of
‘objects’. As Heisenberg puts it, ‘Atoms are not things’.”
Physics professor Robert March: “We cannot understand
the universe until we understand the atom.”
* Or, you could pack the entire human population into a sugar cube.
88
“…we can divide matter again and again, but we
never obtain smaller pieces, because we just create
particles out of the energy involved in the process.
The subatomic particles are thus destructible and
indestructible at the same time.”*
Particles collide; annihilate; absorb particles; and emit
particles. Matter and energy are simply relative aspects of
an undivided wholeness.
89
break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what
God himself made one in the first creation.”
A God that made the quark would have
had supreme eyesight. “We think the quark is
10-20 times smaller than a proton,” says Mark Whittle;
something like the size of a bacteria relative to the breadth
of our solar system.
* There are molecules in outer space that have as many as thirteen atoms.
90
the naked eye. If you expanded the dot to 6,215 miles wide,
you could see the atom’s nucleus (central core).
The nucleus of a hydrogen atom is a proton. An electron,
gyrating around the proton, defines the outer limit of the
atom. The electron is a thousand times smaller than the
proton. The electron is one ten-millionth the size of the
atom as a whole.
The proton contains quarks. To see a quark, you would
need to expand the dot (or period) to twenty times more
distant than the moon (which itself is 238,850 miles away).
Thus, each atom is composed of (“particulate”) components
which are infinitesimal. An atom is 99.9999999999999
percent empty space. “Its emptiness is profound,” says
particle physicist Frank Close.
“You” are composed of atoms.
91
Bryson gives these details: “Because they are so long-
lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has
almost certainly passed through several stars, and been part
of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We
are each so atomically numerous, and so vigorously recycled
at death, that a significant number of our atoms—up to a
billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once
belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from
Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other
historical figure you care to name.”
Whittle also notes, “Atoms are, in a sense [as you] actually
thinking about themselves.”
Atoms, of course, form molecules: many, many.
Bryson says, “At sea level, at a temperature of 32 degrees
Fahrenheit, one cubic centimeter of air (that is, a space
about the size of a sugar cube) will contain 45 billion billion
molecules. And they are in every single cubic centimeter
you see around you.” This figure is also given (by others) as
“one, followed by nineteen zeroes,” or “the number of grains
of sand in a cubic kilometer” (or about .62 mile on each
side).
92
and Antarctica. In 1998, a few thousand of them were
snagged by a detector in Japan. (The sun is a major source
of neutrinos in our solar environs.)*
When Enrico Fermi submitted a paper on neutrinos to
the journal Nature, in 1934, it was rejected on the grounds
“it contained speculations too remote from reality to be of
interest to the reader.”
93
(Not only matter, but energy too is affected by gravity.)
94
Quantum Reality
95
Watson continues: “Clays are extraordinary, layered,
crystal structures which have (built into them) what amounts
almost to an innate tendency to evolve....Clay has plans.”
Clays have the ability to absorb other molecules; foreign
atoms, such as aluminum, become built in among silica in
a molecule of clay. Acquired characteristics can be passed
on because of a clay’s capacity to (not reproduce, but)
replicate. Clay’s “memory” lies in its ability to maintain
a pattern; such patterns allow some clays, like micas, to
induce “ammonium ions and alcohols to solidify into
organic components.” Certain reactions could give rise to
the formation of “membranes and other cell structures. Cell
walls could indeed evolve at a later stage...that guard the
borders of the modern cell.”
“Modern proteins,” says Watson, “may have inherited
their most-important attribute from ancestral clay.” Mother
Earth, he says, may be our parent, rather than just our
planet.
Further on in the book, Watson gives two accounts
that appear to have some relevance to the effect which
consciousness has on reality, in its environs: not, in this
case, a scientific observer who affects the outcome of a
particle physics experiment, but of an effect which is more
reminiscent of the across-space interconnection, known as
quantum entanglement. (Note that it is not claimed that
these experiments have been replicated.) The two accounts
follow, as excerpts:
“Helmut Schmidt of Duke University has been
involved in several pioneering attempts to track
down elusive phenomena. Most of his experiments
involve the use of sophisticated electronic apparatus
with human subjects, but he has recently tried out
one piece of equipment on a cat. Schmidt linked a
96
binary random-number generator in his home to a
heat lamp in a garden shed, so that the light turned on
and off at strictly-random intervals. When the shed
was empty, it did just that, showing no tendency to
generate unusual sequences, and keeping the light
on exactly half of the time. But when a cat was
confined to the shed in cold weather, the machine
kept the warm lamp (in the unheated room) on far
longer than could be expected according to chance
alone.”
97
of the first mouse, it was able somehow to transmit
this information to the second thirsty mouse, who
then pressed the appropriate lever to give them
both the desired reward.”
Watson:
“We are compelled to reexamine all definitions of
mind, which see it only as a nebulous entity at the
end of a one-way street of sensory traffic....It now
becomes necessary for a comprehensive reappraisal
of the role of conception in structuring reality.
Quantum physics already includes consciousness
as an essential ‘hidden variable’ in its equations
[though] unlikely to make much difference to the
way in which most of us deal with reality on an
everyday basis.”
He goes on to say:
“I am not necessarily suggesting...that the outer
planets didn’t exist until we began to look for them.
But neither am I prepared to dismiss this possibility
out of hand....All the methods of detection are man-
made. In detecting, we may be creating that which
we seek to find.”
Watson continues:
“Cyril Hinshelwood, a Nobel laureate in physical
chemistry, has suggested that a more-appropriate
name for the particles might be ‘manifestations.’
That sounds right. In purely physical terms, they
98
have little reality...they appear and disappear....
Perhaps they exist only in consciousness....The
desire for conviction produces its own data, its own
manifestations....”
He cites the Zen students asking the master if it’s the flag
or the wind that moves. The reply, “It is your mind that
moves.”
Watson:
“What we regard as ordinary physical matter is
simply an idea that occupies a world-frame common
to all minds. The universe is literally a collective
thought....”
99
of matter at all….Two waves can pass through each
other (on a medium) without changing their form.”
* “For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory:
they cannot possibly have understood it.” —Niels Bohr
† From an interview with Josephson published in In Search of the Dead,
Jeffrey Iverson.
100
an inseparable network of interactions….For the
Eastern mystic, all things and events perceived
by the senses are interrelated, connected, and
are but different aspects or manifestations of the
same ultimate reality. Our tendency to divide
the perceived world into individual and separate
things, and to experience ourselves as isolated egos
in this world, is seen as an illusion which comes
from our measuring-and-categorizing mentality.
It is called avidya, or ignorance, in Buddhist
philosophy and is seen as the state of a disturbed
mind…a basic oneness is also the most important
common characteristic of Eastern worldviews. One
could say it is the very essence of those views, as
it is of all mystical traditions. All things are seen
as interdependent, inseparable, and as transient
patterns of the same ultimate reality….”
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And neither energy nor matter can be accelerated to
greater than the speed of light,* at least in our region of the
universe.†
A particle’s “wave function” tells us that it does not
reside at some particular point in space during the moments
when it is not being “observed,” or (in scientific jargon,
“measured”). To this extent, it can be said that a particle
does not specifically “exist” when it is not observed: “They
have no independent, enduring reality.” ‡ It is not just that
we don’t know where they are. Eminent physicist John
Wheeler has stated that this quantum principle “destroys
the concept of the world as just ‘sitting out there’....In some
strange sense, the universe is a participatory universe.”
As a consequence of a conscious action, observation,
particles of energy and matter are evoked from a condition
of potentiality or possibility to states of tangible materiality
and its subsequent events. The phenomenon is called by
scientists “wave function collapse,” the collapse in which the
expectation of our observation becomes an actuality. When
you set out to measure, with your laboratory equipment, a
particle as a wave, it appears as a wave; were your intention
to measure a particle as a particle, it would be present in
that form.
“This is a staggering conclusion...when one remembers
that all of the material universe is comprised of
subatomic particles!...our most fundamental branch
of science implies (the) world cannot even be said to
exist outside of the subjective act of observation.” §
* The speed of light is not to be confused with the frequency of light waves,
which is in the range of ten trillion oscillations per second.
† Once operating fully, the Large Hadron Collider is expected to accelerate
protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light.
‡ Zen Physics, David Darling.
§ Ibid.
102
Rainer Maria Rilke makes this same point in a poem:
103
words, a photon “somehow knew what [preference, or choice]
lay ahead.”
The sense of a quanton “being aware of what is going
on around it” is reflected in the physics term “nonlocality.”
Darling: “Nonlocality amounts to zero-delay [instant]
communication between two particles, no matter what their
separation in distance.”
Cause an atom to emit two separate photons, at the same
time but in opposite directions. If the electric field of one
of them is vibrating in an “up” polarization, the other—
by the nature of known physical properties—will always
be polarized in a “down” configuration (or vice versa).
But until a measurement is performed (if any), the state
of polarization of either quanton is undefined (not simply
unclear at this point). Measure (or observe) the polarized
state of either of the quantons (wave-function collapse)* and
the (alternate) state of the other quanton is instantaneously
a determined fact, or actuality—“irrespective of the distance
between the particles”; this effect is “real and inescapable.”
Faster than any energetic signal could travel between the
pair—that is, faster than the upward communicable limit
of the speed of light—the pair has an immediate awareness
of each other’s manifested condition, enough so to present a
determined state of being.†
It is mind that “thereby makes matter real....The universe
[from which our minds originate] creates itself, out of itself,
moment by moment.” Darling adds: “‘Subject’ [mind] and
‘object’ [matter] cannot be treated apart....”
104
Motion and rest, energy and mass, time and space are all
relative, science tells us:
“the world cannot be accurately viewed as a complex
of distinct things....Nothing stands apart....
Incredibly, modern physics—which is the most
advanced product of our dualistic way of thinking—
has shown that dualism is no longer tenable.”
Ironically, it is the “reductionist”—divisive—nature of
science which has itself led to such a discovery: through it,
“we have found that reality has no boundaries.”
105
“If there was any doubt at the turn of the twentieth
century, by the turn of the twenty-first, it was a
foregone conclusion: when it comes to revealing
the true nature of reality, common experience is
deceptive….What we’ve found has already required
sweeping changes to our picture of the cosmos.
Through physical insight and mathematical rigor,
guided and confirmed by experimentation and
observation, we’ve established that space, time,
matter, and energy engage a behavioral repertoire
unlike anything any of us have ever directly
witnessed.”
Fritjof Capra:
“Both concepts—that of empty space and that of
solid material bodies—are deeply ingrained in our
habits of thought, so it is extremely difficult for
us to imagine a physical reality where they do not
apply. And yet, this is precisely what modern physics
forces us to do…space and time are constructs of
the mind. The Eastern mystics treated them like
all other intellectual concepts; as relative, limited,
and illusory.”
Vlatko Vedral, theoretical physicist (who ends his book
Decoding Reality by quoting the Tao Te Ching):
“Quantum physics is indeed very much in agreement
with Buddistic emptiness….Everything that exists,
exists by convention and labelling and is therefore
dependent on other things. So, Buddhists would
106
say that their highest goal—realizing emptiness—
simply means that we realize how inter-related
things fundamentally are. Exactly the same is true
in other Eastern religions. Less well known in the
West is Advaita Vedanta—a Hindu philosophy that
emphasizes the total oneness of the Universe. In
this view our perceptions of separate entities is just
an illusion—Maya. Even the Universe as a whole
only exists by labelling, and not by itself….In
quantum physics, as we have argued, particles exist
and don’t exist at the same time. Here I don’t just
mean that they exist in different places. I mean
that, even in one place, a particle can exist and not
exist simultaneously….[The Cappadocian Fathers
of the fourth century] proclaimed that, while they
believed in God, they did not believe that God
exists.”
Niels Bohr is reported to have said, “A shallow truth
is a statement whose opposite is false; a deep truth is a
statement whose opposite is also a deep truth.”
107
lithium salt (another metallic chemical element, used in
thermonuclear explosives) found that the atoms, which
act as tiny magnets, were lined up to create a stronger
magnetism than would be expected, evidently revealing
that the atoms were in an entangled state. “It seems that
quantum entanglements can influence,” says Clegg,
“…a whole magnetic structure...something that
could be touched and picked up, not an incredibly
tiny particle….*
“What’s more…other properties of the salt,
including its heat capacity, were influenced
by entanglement...and even a small amount of
entanglement can produce significant effects in the
human-scale world—the ‘real’ world of tangible
physical objects!”
When the gas helium (one of the earliest of elements to
form) is cooled to nearly the most extreme temperature
(about -460 degrees Fahrenheit) it becomes a “superfluid,”
with no viscosity at all. Viscosity is “resistance to flow,” high
in molasses, lower in water. Says one physicist, “If you were
to flap your hand around in a superfluid, it would be like
flapping your hand in a vacuum. It’s like there’s nothing
there.” There is no resistance at all to physical motion. “If
you start a ring of superfluid spinning, it will go on spinning
forever; there is no friction to stop it,” Clegg states. “Most
famously, superfluids will spookily attempt to climb out
of containers, as there is no friction to resist the random
motion of the molecules.”
108
When some metals, such as aluminum or mercury, are
cooled to similar temperatures, they have no electrical
resistance when transmitting current, thus are called
superconductors. “Place a lightweight magnet above a
superconductor, and the magnet will levitate—floating in
space.” The magnet causes the material to generate its own
magnetic field.
Such startling discoveries are further evidence of quantum
mechanical effects.
“Entanglement...even now troubles many scientists,” notes
Clegg. It “seems just as odd to physicists as it does to the
rest of us.” [Its] “unsettling omnipresence” is what caused
Einstein’s famous criticism of the very idea, Clegg reminds,
when he considered it to be “spooky action at a distance,”
which one might remark of voo-doo. Einstein emphasized
that the only reality, for him, was “a world which objectively
exists.” *
109
insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or
cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in
the distance by an invisible player.”
Says Isaacson, “Einstein...forced us to change the way we
think about nature”; for starters, time, space and motion.
“Quantum mechanics does something similar.”
Einstein had great difficulty relating to some aspects of
quantum theory, which developed after his groundbreaking
work. That a particle could be in a superposition of two
potential states simultaneously, he considered as realistic as
a pile of gunpowder being at the same moment “exploded
and not-exploded.” * Even until his death, he did not accept
the proposition which later experiments proved. As Isaacson
states it,
“…the timing of the emission of a particle from a
decaying nucleus is indeterminate until it is actually
observed. In the quantum world, a nucleus is in a
‘superposition,’ meaning it exists simultaneously as
being decayed and undecayed until it is observed,
at which point its wave function collapses and
it becomes either one or the other. This may be
conceivable for the microscopic quantum realm,
but it is baffling when one imagines the intersection
between the quantum realm and our observable
everyday world.”
By the end of 2005, Cornell physicist N. David Mermin
was referring to the counterintuitive behavior in the quantum
world as “the closest thing we have to magic.” In 2006, New
Scientist magazine reported, “A simple semiconductor chip
has been used to generate pairs of entangled photons.”
* Yet Einstein is reported to have said, of his theory of relativity, that he did
not arrive at “these fundamental laws of the universe through my rational
mind.”
110
In entanglement, though two particles may be separated
by “billions of miles,” affirms Isaacson, they “remain part of
the same physical entity,” so “there is no traditional cause-
and-effect relationship.”
It remains a paradox to many that Einstein perceived
“a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible
player,” and yet could never accept the extent to which that
tune might be being intoned on the level of physics.
Einstein’s position was that “whatever we regard as existing
(real) should somehow be localized in time and space,” as
opposed to a particle being merely a probability; or a wave
spread out, in principle, through the whole universe. The
indeterminate nature of a particle must be a consequence,
it was suggested, of some extraneous information which was
not yet known, “hidden variables.”
A couple of quotations of Einstein (in Corey Powell’s God
in the Equation) are of interest, in the context of his dismay
over entanglement:
“When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether,
if I were God, I would have arranged the world in
such a way…. If this Being is omnipotent, then
every human action, every human thought, and
every human feeling and aspiration is also His
work….”
Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been affirmed,
comments astronomer Hugh Ross,
“…to better than a trillionth of a percent precision.
And even stronger evidence exists for special
relativity; it has been affirmed to a precision of
better than a ten millionth of a trillionth percent.”
Says Brian Greene of quantum physics:
111
“In the more than eighty years since these ideas
were developed, there has not been a single
verifiable experiment or astrophysical observation
whose results conflict with quantum mechanical
predictions…. Like floodwaters slowly rising from
your basement, rushing into your living room, and
threatening to engulf your attic, the mathematics of
quantum mechanics has steadily spilled beyond the
atomic domain and has succeeded on ever-larger
scales.”
112
Quantum Reality
Shall I look at Her
Or shall I not?
Honey
Someday You gotta show me
How You do that.
113
“At the moment of observation [measurement],
the observer and observed make a single, unified
whole….Each time we attempt to observe [an
electron], we become linked to it so that we can no
longer say which is us and which is the atom.”
So, where then is the “actor” and the “acted upon”?
114
“Bohm got his doctorate under bizarre circumstances
at the University of California, Berkeley, during the
Second World War. Because he had left-leaning
political interests, he was not allowed to join the
Manhattan Project to work on the atomic bomb
with many of his colleagues. However, his doctoral
dissertation covered a subject of significant use
to the Manhattan Project, so it was immediately
classified and he wasn’t allowed to present it or to
receive his doctorate. Luckily, Robert Oppenheimer,
who headed up the Manhattan Project, had been
Bohm’s supervisor and was able to get Berkeley to
accept that the dissertation was a success, without
it ever being officially read.”
115
devoutly religious men….What humanity owes to
personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks
for me higher than all the achievements of the
enquiring and constructive mind.”
Bell’s Theorem, and the experiments it has continued
to engender, represents the scientific paradigm-shift of
the modern age. While an assistant professor at Princeton
in 1951, Bohm suggested a simplified manner in which
the proposition of quantum nonlocality (to be known as
entanglement) could be experimentally tested. It was this
proposal which John Bell, in 1964, developed in a practical
form, upon which successful experiments where subsequently
performed.
Bohm was interviewed by Rutgers philosophy professor
Renée Weber, author of Dialogues with Scientists and Sages,
in which his description of a quantum field or vacuum
suggested to her “the void of Buddhism, the Abyss [‘primeval
void’] of Christian mystics.”
“In nonmanifest reality, it’s all interpenetrating,
interconnected, one,” Bohm said. “Forms may develop
out of that which is beyond form.” And, “In my view, the
implications of physics seem to be that nature is so subtle
that it could be almost alive or intelligent.” He conceded,
“In this definition, it begins to overlap with the area the
mystics are interested in.”
Weber: “It will sound to people as if this is a
description of religion—that we are
constantly grounded in something
‘infinite.’ Where does it differ from what
the great mystics have said?”
116
John Briggs has also written in detail about David
Bohm’s views. In 1959, Bohm perused a book by spiritual
teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said that “the cosmos has
no fundamental divisions.” More specifically, Krishnamurti
often stated (as had ancient spiritual texts), “The observer
is the observed.” Since Krishnamurti visited England on
a regular basis, Bohm arranged to talk with him. Their
friendship lasted until Krishnamurti died in 1986 (six years
before Bohm); an example of their dialogues can be found in
the book The Ending of Time, published in 1983.
Briggs says of Bohm’s quantum view: “Consciousness is
woven implicitly into all matter, and matter is woven out
of consciousness.” Thus, an individual’s consciousness is
interwoven with a holistic consciousness.
As Bohm himself came to say, “In quantum experiments,
we find that the observer is the observed.” What connects
all objects into one system, Bohm suggested, is
“…a whole field…a field of active information….
Information guides activity….
“That’s what I mean when I say there’s a basic
mindlike quality to particles….There is mind even
down at the quantum level.” *
117
Bohm and colleague Basil Hiley, in 1975, published a
technical paper in Foundations of Physics, “On the Intuitive
Understanding of Nonlocality, as Implied by Quantum
Theory.” The point of it (in sixteen pages) was to call
associates’ attention to entanglement’s stimulation of “the
radically new notion of unbroken wholeness of the entire
universe,” and “the challenge of understanding what all this
means.”
Bohm spelled out what this new discovery means, in a
separate writing that was less technical than the paper cited
above: “In considering the relationship between the finite
and the infinite [or you could read, the relative and the
Absolute]…the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no
independent existence. It has the appearance of independent
existence; but that appearance is merely the result of…
thought. We can see this dependent nature of the finite
from the fact that every finite thing is transient.” In other
words, the relative appears from, and disappears into, the
non-transient Absolute; as the particle appears from and
dissolves into the quantum field, or vacuum.
“Our ordinary [relative-oriented] view holds that the…
finite is all that there is. But if the finite has no independent
existence, it cannot be all that there is.” Forms are dependent
upon the formless ground of being, for their arising.
“We are, in this way, led to propose that the true ground
of all being is the infinite, the unlimited; and that the infinite
includes and contains the finite.” The unlimited ground
of being is all-encompassing, all-inclusive of any limited,
impermanent forms.
“The [relative] finite is all that we can see, hear, touch,
remember and describe: basically, that which is manifest,
or tangible.” Matter, energy, time, space, causation, and all
118
other conceptions are in this category of forms that have
limitation.
“The essential quality of the infinite [or Absolute],
by contrast, is…its intangibility. This quality…
suggests an invisible but pervasive energy [a
dynamic presence], to which the manifest world of
the finite responds [because it infuses all]…and
this is never born and never dies.”
119
Cause-and-effect thinking limits us, and mystics say that
we must transcend such dualities.
“Understanding what really happens inside…a quantum
system may be beyond the powers of human beings.”
120
whatever the initial photon does. Even though each
outcome is determined randomly, and even though
the photons are far apart in space, if one photon
passes through, so will the other.”
Such findings present “a frontal assault on our basic
beliefs as to what constitutes reality.” Before we measure an
electron’s position, it does not have a definite position, until
“the moment we ‘look’ at it”; it isn’t “that we don’t know
the position…the act of measurement is deeply enmeshed
in creating the very reality it is measuring!”
In regard to the discovery of quantum entanglement,
Greene says, “This is an earth-shattering result. This
is the kind of result that should take your breath away.”
Reality operates in unbroken wholeness. The detection of an
entangled photon’s “spin” causes its partner photon (even at
tested distances of more than six and a half miles)
“…to snap out of the haze of ‘probability’ and take
on a definite spin value…that precisely matches…
its distant companion. And that boggles the mind!...
They are part of one physical system…parts of one
physical entity…but do not stand in a traditional
cause-and-effect relationship….No matter what
holistic words one uses…[they] stay sufficiently ‘in
touch’….What unknown mechanism enforces this
with such spectacular efficiency?”
Any less bizarre universe “may exist in the mind, but not
in reality…the data rule out this [cause-and-effect] kind of
universe….By virtue of their past, objects…can be part of
a quantum-mechanically-entangled whole.” A whole which
shows evidence of having no disconnected ‘parts’.
“Two things can be separated by an enormous amount
of space and yet not have a fully independent
121
existence. A ‘quantum connection’ can unite them,
making the properties of each contingent on the
properties of the other. Space does not distinguish
such entangled objects. Space cannot overcome
their interconnection. Space, even a huge amount of
space, does not weaken their quantum-mechanical
interdependence.”
122
Anton Zeilinger and associates showed, in 1999, that
molecules—not only atoms—exhibit wave-like properties.
And in 2011, researchers (at Zeilinger’s University of Vienna)
observed quantum effects acting on a molecule of 430 atoms.
“Until the past decade, experimentalists had not
confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a
macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely
do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone
ever suspected. They may operate in the cells of
our body.”
In 2010, quantum effects were found to be involved in
photosynthesis, in two species of marine algae.
“People have long wondered whether birds and other
animals might have some built-in compass…. A
bird’s eye has a type of molecule in which two
electrons form an entangled pair, with zero total
spin….These molecules are indeed sensitive to
magnetic fields, because of electron entanglement.
According to calculations that my colleagues and I
have done, quantum effects persist in a bird’s eye for
around 100 microseconds—which, in this context,
is a long time…. Do any instances of larger and
more persistent entanglement exist in nature? We
do not know, but the question is exciting enough to
stimulate an emerging discipline: quantum biology.”
A mysterious intelligence is clearly at work, at the very
least at the scale of molecules in particulate matter.
“You can set up the particles to have a total spin
of zero even when you have not specified what
their individual spins are. When you measure one
of the particles, you will see it spinning clockwise
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or counterclockwise at random. It is as though
the particle decides which way to spin, for itself.
Nevertheless, no matter which direction you choose
to measure the electrons, providing it is the same
for both, they will always spin in opposite ways, one
clockwise and the other counterclockwise. * How do
they know to do so?”
Vedral concludes:
“…if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum
physics, it will show the world to be even more
counterintuitive than anything we have seen so far.”
* Bill Bryson: “It is as if, in the words of the science writer Lawrence Joseph,
you had two identical pool balls, one in Ohio and the other in Fiji; and the
instant you sent one spinning, the other would immediately spin in a contrary
direction at precisely the same speed.”
124
of an external intelligence….” Such new insights
are relieving us of “myths that have been passed
down to us from past generations.”
Smolin says:
“There is an affinity between the ambition of
theoretical physics and…of metaphysics. Both
have often presumed that there is some absolute
truth to be discovered about the world…the true
essential—the true Being. Both…search for a
transcendent and timeless actuality, beyond the
appearances of the world…. A tradition that asserts
that the world we see around us is not completely
real….There is no way to…fly on the wings of
logic, to ascend to the absolute world of what really
is….In the end, perhaps, there must remain a place
for mysticism.”
Quantum mechanics is telling us, he says,
“…that the world can only be described…as an
entangled whole….The real strangeness of quantum
mechanics emerges when we apply it to systems
that contain more than one thing….Whenever two
systems [such as particles] have interacted, their
description is tied together no matter how far apart
they may be.”
If two photons, flying away from each other, are measured
(observed) at about forty-three feet apart (as in an early
experiment), that space is 1011 power bigger than the atomic
domain itself.
“The entangled nature of the quantum state reflects
something essential in the world.” That the properties of one
particle are independent of another “is wrong—disproved by
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experiment. This makes it one of those rare cases in which
an experiment can be interpreted as a test of a philosophical
principle!...
“Given any one electron, its properties are entangled
with those of every particle it has interacted with…
quite possibly from the very moment that particles
were first created in our universe.” *
Smolin says of the impact when he first learned this truth:
he was “struck that there were atoms in my body that were
entangled inextricably with atoms in the bodies of every
person I had ever touched!”
If we were to learn more, at this point, about a particle—
such as an electron—it would involve
“…the relations between that electron and the rest
of the universe….Any physical theory from this
point on that represents progress beyond quantum
mechanics must be an explicitly cosmological
theory….If we want to give a complete description
of an elementary particle, we must include…every
particle it may have acted with….This means that
we can only give a complete description of any part
of the universe to the extent that we describe the
whole universe.
“We who live in the universe, and aspire to understand
it, are then inextricably part of the same entangled
system. If we observe some part of the world, we
become entangled with it in the same way that any
two particles that interact become entangled; so that
* “About 100 microseconds after the Big Bang, the protons and neutrons in
your body were created.” —Mark Whittle
126
a complete description of ourselves is impossible
without incorporating the other.”
Otherwise, we are,
“…then apparently in conflict with the results of
experimental physics. Quantum mechanics works
very well in every context in which it has so far been
tested”; if we are to apply it on a universal scale,
“there can be no place outside it for an [uninvolved]
‘observer’ to stand.” *
We can also contemplate the possibility that both “time
and change are illusions.”
127
Consciousness
129
transition. “The universe…does not comply with human
reason,” Schroeder says. “A kilogram of air has the same
gravitational effect as a kilogram of steel.”
“Physics has demonstrated,” he states, “that a single
substrate underlies all existence….The universe was born
as an undifferentiated unity,” originally perhaps much
smaller than a mustard seed. “We are stardust come alive;
and somehow, conscious of being alive….
“The beginning of our universe marks the beginning
of time, space and matter.…Whatever brought
the universe into existence must predate time.…In
other words, it is eternal.”
The four elements that produced the stars (suns) created
the cauldrons across the skies which spewed out the
remaining eighty-eight stable elements which form matter,
some matter changing from one form to an entirely different
form in the process (gold to lead, for example). Oxygen
and hydrogen combined to produce something different
from either gas: water. Some forms of this amazing product
would act differently than the product itself: ice floats in
water; floating ice serves as a thermal insulator for the water
below, in effect preventing the oceans from becoming solid
blocks of ice.
With as many as twenty-three atoms combining in
molecules that make amino acids, a basis for living matter
was formed. Attempts by scientists to combine similar
molecular structures “has been one long study in failure.”
A protein is a string of several hundred amino acids. They
have something akin to an instinct for assembly. “But where
did they get their smarts? Since when do carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus…have ideas of their
own?”
130
In your head, there are a million billion dendrites,
branching parts (the protoplasmic filaments) of a nerve cell.
“I urge you to count to a billion, a million times….At one
number each second, with no breaks for resting, that task
will occupy you for the next 30,000,000 years.”
“The truth,” says Schroeder, is
“…that our material existence is more fiction than
fact….Physics has touched the metaphysical realm
within which our physical illusion of reality is
embedded….Science has discovered a reality it had
previously relegated strictly to the mystical. It has
discovered the presence of the spiritual….”
He quotes Groucho Marx (caught in a delicate situation):
“Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?!”
131
“What does it say about things made of atoms?...Is it
that quantum theory does not apply to big things?
No….The workings of everything is quantum
mechanical.”
This includes a quantum effect known as “superposition,”
in which a quantum system can be said to exist in two states
at once, such as potentially being in two locations.
“Recall our atom hitting a partially-reflecting/
partially-transmitting mirror, and ending up with
half its waviness captured equally in each of two
separate boxes. (According to quantum theory, the
atom does not exist in one particular box before you
find a whole atom to be in one of the boxes.) The
atom is in a superposition state, simultaneously in
both boxes. Upon your looking into one box, the
superposition state (waviness) collapses into one
single box. You will randomly find either a whole
atom in that one box, or that box will be empty.
(You can’t choose which!) If you find the one box
empty, the atom will be found in the other box.”
Continuing:
“Increasingly large objects are being put into
superposition states, put into two places at the
same time. Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger has
done this with large molecules containing seventy
carbon atoms,”
…and he anticipates doing so with mid-sized proteins.
“Truly macroscopic superpositions containing many
billions of electrons have been demonstrated, where
each is simultaneously moving in two directions.”
132
Most startling of all quantum effects is what is known
as the “delayed-choice” experiment, of particular interest to
renowned physicist John Wheeler. He proposed a set-up where
the choice, of whether to observe for outcome A or instead
outcome B, was not made until after the particle experiment
was underway: for example, if plan A was (subsequently)
chosen, the particle would need to have presented as, say,
“spin up”; and if plan B was chosen, “spin down.” What if
the experimenter didn’t choose which property to observe,
until after a particle had passed a certain point of “phase”
no-return; did the particle determine beforehand which
experiment would be enacted?
“Wheeler’s experiment was done with photons….
Quantum theory’s prediction, that the later choice
of experiment determined what the photon did
earlier…was confirmed….Quantum theory is
saying that our later choice of observation creates
the particle’s earlier history—we ‘cause’ something
backward in time!”
The authors state:
“There is a universal connectedness….Any
‘objects’ that have ever interacted continue to
instantaneously influence each other….Mystics
have talked of ‘reality’ and ‘separability’—or its
opposite, ‘universal connectedness’—for millennia.”
When an experiment proves universal connectedness
between twin-state photons, it
“…means a lack of reality or separability for
everything such photons could possibly interact
with. That is everything….
133
“The experiments showed that the properties of
objects in our world have an observation-created
reality; or that there exists a universal connectedness;
or both.”
134
inanimate universe [of matter and energy] may not
be as detached from the potentialities of life and
intelligence as scientists of the twentieth century
have tended to suppose.”
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman: “I believe that
consciousness and its contents are all that exists.”
135
If the brain was to receive “influence” (a term of Bohr’s)
from the quantum field (or vacuum, as it’s sometimes called),
what would that say about free will? Recent research on
decision making demonstrates that, at the neuronal level,
we often make a commitment to a course of action even
before we become consciously aware of it.
“In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet had his subjects
flex their wrist at a time of their free choice, but
without forethought. He determined the order
of three critical times: the time of the ‘readiness
potential,’ a voltage that can be detected with
electrodes on the scalp almost a second before any
voluntary action actually occurs; the time of the
wrist flexing, and the time the subjects reported
that they had made their decision to flex (by
watching a fast-moving clock).
“One might expect the order to be (1) decision, (2)
readiness potential, (3) action. In fact, the readiness
potential preceded the reported decision time. Does
this show that some deterministic function in the
brain brought about the supposedly free decision?
Some, not necessarily Libet, do argue this way.”
Through both consciousness and quantum entanglement,
is it possible that there is some connection with the creation
of the universe?
“Quantum theory has ‘observation’ creating the
properties of microscopic objects. Physicists
generally accept that, in principle, quantum theory
applies universally. If so, all reality is created by
our observation. Going all the way, the ‘strong
anthropic principle’ [a theory] asserts the universe
is hospitable to us because we could not create a
136
universe in which we could not exist….Quantum
cosmologist John Wheeler, back in the 1970s,…
asked ‘Does looking back [to the Big Bang] “now”
give reality to what happened “then”?’”
How likely is it that the universe appeared by mere
chance, irrespective of us “observers” who happen to flourish
in it? “To produce a universe resembling one in which we
can live, the Big Bang had to be finely tuned. How finely?
Theories vary. According to one, if the initial conditions of
the universe were chosen randomly, there would only be one
chance in 10120 (that’s one with 120 zeros after it) that the
universe would be livable. Cosmologist Roger Penrose has
it vastly more unlikely. The exponent he suggests is 10123.
By any such estimate, the chance that a livable universe
like ours would be created is far less than the chance of
randomly picking a particular single atom out of all the
atoms in the universe! *
“Can you accept odds like that as a coincidence? It would
seem more likely that something in yet-unknown physics
determines that the universe had to start the way it did.”
Freeman Dyson: “Life may have succeeded—against all
odds—in molding the universe to its purposes.”
* “There are something like ten million million million million million million
million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty
zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe.”
—Stephen Hawking
137
scientists suggest that the remarkable degree of
coherence displayed in living systems might depend
(in some fundamental way) on quantum effects, like
entanglement,”
so states Dean Radin in Entangled Minds.
“Others suggest that conscious awareness is caused,
or related in some important way, to entangled
particles in the brain. Some even propose that the
entire universe is a single, self-entangled object.
The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole
[has] been one of the core assumptions underlying
Eastern philosophies….Western science is slowly
beginning to realize that some elements of that
ancient lore might have been correct.”
As Radin says,
“The bottom line is that physical reality is connected
in ways we’re just beginning to understand….Today
we know that entanglement is not just an abstract
concept….It has been repeatedly demonstrated as
fact, in physics labs around the world since 1972….
Entangled connections are proving to be more
pervasive and robust than anyone had previously
imagined.”
As stated in New Scientist magazine in March 2004:
“Physicists now believe that entanglement between
particles exists everywhere, all the time; and have
recently found shocking evidence that it affects the
wider, ‘macroscopic’ world that we inhabit.”
Organic molecules with an array of atoms have been
successfully entangled; as have clusters of six entangled
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photons; it has been determined among the atoms of chunks
of salt about ⅜ of an inch square that were entangled,
“…photons, shot through sheets of metal, have been
shown to remain entangled after punching through
to the other side. Photons also remain entangled
after being sent through 50 kilometers of optical
fiber: and while being transmitted through the
open atmosphere.”
In the second edition of Quantum Enigma, Rosenblum
and Kuttner report on other quantum developments that
have come to light, such as these two accounts:
“In 1997, researchers at MIT put a clump of several
million sodium atoms, at low temperature, in a
quantum state called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
They then put this single clump two places at once,
separated by a distance larger than a human hair.
That’s a small separation, but it’s a macrosscopically
seeable one. The whole clump was in both places at
once.”
“A March 2010 article in Nature News is titled
‘Scientists Supersize Quantum Mechanics: Largest
Ever Object Put into Quantum State.’ The
object was a metal paddle only a thousandth of
a millimeter long, but visible to the naked eye in
the same way you can see a tiny dust mote in a
sunbeam. The little cantilever was cooled to an
extremely low temperature until it reached the most
motionless state permitted by quantum mechanics,
essentially standing still. It was then ‘excited’ to
be in a superposition of that motionless state and
simultaneously in a vibrating state. The paddle was
moving and not moving at the same time.”
139
Dean Radin points out,
“…there’s no theoretical limit to how large an
entangled object can be….We’re still thoroughly
permeated by entangled particles. Physicists have
even speculated that entanglement extends to
everything in the universe….Some, further speculate
that empty space, the quantum vacuum itself, may
be filled with entangled particles.* Such proposals
suggest that despite everyday appearances, we might
be living within a holistic, deeply interconnected
reality. To be clear, these speculations are being
proposed by traditional physicists, not by starry-
eyed New Agers or mystics.”
He declares,
“…we now know that fundamental properties
of the world are not determined before they are
observed….The common-sense assumption that
ordinary objects are entirely and absolutely separate
is incorrect….Unmediated ‘action at a distance,’ in
quantum reality, is required.
“The new reality has dissolved causality, because the
theory of relativity revealed that the fixed arrow
of time is an illusion, a misapprehension sustained
by the classical assumptions of an absolute space
and time….The new reality has abandoned the
assumption of continuity, because the fabric of
quantum reality is discontinuous; at small scales,
space and time are neither smooth nor contiguous.
And finally, absolute determinism has been fatally
challenged, because it relies on the assumptions of
* Astronomy professor Mark Whittle: “Particles are present, in a sense, in
latent form in the vacuum of space.”
140
causality, reality, and certainty; none of which exist
in absolute terms anymore.”
Continuing:
“Quantum reality is holistic; and, as such, any
attempt to study its individual ‘pieces’ will give
an incomplete picture….Few physicists today
doubt that quantum theory* provides an accurate
description of the observable world…[it] is so
preposterously precise…the either/or logic of
common sense no longer holds, in the quantum world.
Until our language—and logic—evolve to (more
easily-grasped) complimentary [interrelated] ideas,
it’s likely that we’ll continue to experience confusion
and paradoxes [apparent self-contradictions].”
One view among scientists today is
“…that consciousness is the fundamental ground
state—more primary than matter or energy, [which]
resembles ideas originating from Eastern philosophy
and mystical lore. But a notable subset of prominent
physicists, including Nobel laureate physicists
Eugene Wigner and Brian Josephson, John Wheeler,
and John von Neumann have embraced concepts
that are at least mildly sympathetic to this view.
Physicist Amit Goswami, from the University of
Oregon, has strongly promoted this view.”
The results of Bell’s Theorem have “been described as
the most profound discovery in science”; as late as 2004, the
experiment was repeated yet again; over an effect distance
of thirty miles. Physicists Abner Shimony (a professor of
141
both physics and philosophy) and John Clauser, involved
in the earlier research, are quoted: “The conclusions from
Bell’s Theorem are philosophically startling….”
Radin notes, “in principle, any physical object” could be
used in the experiment: “billiard balls, or humans.” When
finally you understand what this experiment tells us,
“Your gut suddenly drops….[The word] profound
isn’t strong enough….Physicists are either
thrilled or disturbed (sometimes both)*….The
experimental evidence has now convinced the
majority of physicists…something unaccounted for
is connecting otherwise ‘isolated’ objects.”
He quotes one of the founders of quantum theory,
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who coined the term
entanglement:
“Hence this life of yours which you are living is not
merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a
certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so
constituted that it can be surveyed in one single
glance.” (Or “observation”?)
Radin concludes:
“It would be astonishingly unlikely to find that one
small domain, the one that our bodies and minds
happen to inhabit, are somehow not best described
as quantum objects. As historian of science Robert
Nadeau and physicist Menas Kafatos (both from
George Mason University), describe in their book
The Nonlocal Universe: ‘All particles in the history
of the cosmos have interacted with other particles,
* “We should trust what these [quantum] theories have to say.” —Professor
Mark Whittle
142
in the manner revealed by the Aspect experiments.
Virtually everything in our immediate physical
environment is made up of quanta that have been
interacting with other quanta in this manner, from
the Big Bang to the present….Also consider…
that quantum entanglement grows exponentially
with the number of particles involved in the original
quantum state, and that there is no theoretical limit
on the number of these entangled particles.’”
Radin:
“We don’t know how big an ‘influence’ has to be, to
cascade our brain states into one set of subjective
experiences, versus another.” But the possibility has
been suggested that “human experience is indeed a
part of the quantum reality.” *
While our comprehension has only been recent, what we’re
comprehending is an inseparable reality that is far more
ancient than even man’s earliest intuition of Oneness—and
may be the producer of that very intuition.
143
particles, they will present as particles; if measuring for
waves, they will appear in wave form. Our bodies, including
our brain, are composed of subatomic particles.
As a consequence of the experimental proof of Bell’s
Theorem (also referred to as Bell’s inequalities; and
sometimes as EPR, after Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen who were
catalysts for Bell), it is now scientifically recognized that
quantum particles/waves, once (observed to be) “entangled”,
can affect one another—though remote from one another
in space—simultaneously. This recent revelation suggests a
supernatural intelligence which must be present universally
(“non-local,” as the physicists say).
Is the uncanny intelligence, which is displayed by
subatomic particles, an inherent element in all that is
saturated by them—which is to say, the entire cosmos? Is
our own individual consciousness thus inseparable from the
intelligence governing the cosmos, through every entangled
(interconnected) quanta?
Physicist Roger Penrose,* a colleague of Stephen Hawking,
wrote Shadows of the Mind to initiate a tentative exploration
of the reaches of quantum interconnectedness. He says there
are parts of the neurons in our brains that are configured
in such a way that they are likely engaged at the quantum
level.
As a science article has put it, Penrose proposes that
consciousness “is a byproduct of quantum processes operating
in the brain…[that] can allow quantum phenomena to
influence how neurons behave.”
The three pounds of soft tissue that is the human brain
amounts to about two percent of the body’s mass, yet
utilizes twenty percent of the energy supplied by the body’s
144
volume of blood. The brain functions with just fifteen watts
of power—about as much as a refrigerator light bulb.
Comprising the brain are more than a hundred billion
neurons (that’s 1011 power); during the forty weeks of
gestation, approximately five thousand neurons are created
in the fetus every second, but of the resultant 150 billion,
some atrophy.
Of the (ten thousand trillion) cells in the human body,
the neurons are capable of communicating in ways which
result in more than a hundred trillion interconnections in
the cerebral cortex of the brain, the center of cognition.
There are about a billion such connective synapses per cubic
centimeter in the frontal cortex.
A neuron is, says science writer Susan Kruglinski, “an
elaborate processor, powered by neurotransmitters.” Each
of these cells “can receive up to 150,000 contacts from other
neurons” via more than fifty varieties of neurotransmitters,
that may be arranged in packets of five thousand molecules
each.
These electrically-charged chemical transmitters can be
activated by as little as 0.1 volt—1/100,000 the strength
of a static shock from a carpet—and can generate “action
potentials” in a neuron at the rate of three hundred per
second. These electric charges travel via a network of
connective axons, at up to 270 miles per hour. In a receptor
cell, they can create a change that is measured at a hundred
million ions per second.
What interested Penrose, in this context, is that running
along the length of the axons are microtubules that transport
neurotransmitter molecules. But otherwise,
“The tubes themselves appear to be empty—a
curious, and possibly significant, fact in itself….
‘Empty,’ here, means that they essentially contain
145
just water…. Not at all like ordinary water, with
molecules moving about in an incoherent, random
way. Some of it…exists in an ordered state….”
Think of a crystal.
These microtubules have a diameter of about 25-30
nanometers (nm: one billionth of a meter), compared to their
relatively long length of a millimeter (mm: one thousandth
of a meter; .03937 inch) or more.
“It seems not unreasonable to suppose,” Penrose says, that
the microscopic size*, and other conditions of the conduits,
“would strongly favor the possibility of quantum-coherence
oscillations within…the tubes.”
“Quantum coherence” describes large numbers of subatomic
particles collectively cooperating as a single quantum state.
Quantum behavior can include electrons, photons, atoms
and molecules.† Coherence can occur in the action of a laser,
and also in what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The “wave function,” in such case, is “of the kind that
would be appropriate for a single particle (Penrose),” but
the collective behavior of all particles is as a whole—and
this at a macroscopic (visible) level. Penrose says there is “a
distinct possibility of quantum coherence having a genuinely
significant role to play in biological systems.”
He had, in 1987, already described light-sensitive cells in
the retina of the eye (which technically is an extension of
the brain) that have the capability of responding to even as
few as one isolated photon. This led him, at the time, “to
speculate that there might be neurons in the brain, proper,
that are also essentially quantum-detection devices.”
* If an atom was the size of a marble, says Mark Whittle, our brain would,
proportionally, be twice the size of the earth, and synapses would be
thousands of miles long.
† More than 1,400 types of molecules are involved in synaptic transfers.
146
In 1992, renowned neurophysiologist John Eccles
posited quantum effects in synaptic actions, saying that an
appropriate location would be what is called the presynaptic-
vesicular grid, described technically as “a paracrystalline
hexagonal lattice in the pyramidal cells of the brain.”
What is significant to Penrose is that the interaction of
subatomic particles known as “entanglement” is “an effect
that does not fall off with distance,” as does gravitational
or electric attraction; it is oblivious of space separation and
time transition. The effect holds “no matter how distant
from each other” the interconnected particles may be, and
it appears that such condition persists forever. And an
implication is that everything in the universe is similarly
affected. “So long as these entanglements persist,” says
Penrose, “one cannot, strictly speaking, consider any object
in the universe as something that is on its own.” Phenomena
such as this “we must take seriously, as true aspects of the
behavior of the constituents of the world in which we live.”
His conclusion:
“Let us then accept the possibility that the totality
of microtubules in the…large family of neurons in
our brains may well take part in ‘global’ quantum
coherence…across the brain.”
147
Summation
149
(which could be said of the self, as well). Somewhere in this
process, self-conceived “individuals” have the opportunity,
chance, to recognize themselves for who they truly are: “In
this state, the false notions of a separate self have forever
disappeared,* and the oneness of all life has become a
constant….The intellect is seen merely as a means to clear
the way for a direct mystical experience…where reality
appears as undivided and undifferentiated….” †
The essential nature of reality is emptiness—
“…not a state of mere nothingness, but is the very
source of all life and the essence of all forms…. It
pervades all material things in the universe….
“…the process of enlightenment consists merely
in becoming what we already are from the
beginning.…[It is] the experience of all phenomena
in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness…
of the same ultimate reality—also one of the most
important revelations of modern physics.”
What the sages knew through the intuitive instinct,
physicists are affirming through the process of experiment.
‡
One starts from focusing on the immaterial, the other
from focusing on the material. What the mystic discovers is
intangible; what the physicist discovers—in the seemingly
tangible—is likewise intangible. Both discoveries have to be
described within the limits of inadequate language.
To speak of such fundamentals as space and time as
absolute and independent entities is inadequate (as sages
have maintained), because both concepts have now been
* “The true value of a human being,” proposed Einstein, “is determined by the
measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”
† Physicist Nick Herbert: “Reality is an undivided wholeness.”
‡ Both the word science and the word sage are based on Latin roots: sciens,
“to know,” as in to discern; and sapiens, “to know,” as in to taste.
150
abolished as physical principles; anything which we could
call a “time” measurement would vary in different parts of
our universe: as Buddhism has asserted, “all things change,”
everything is (at best) relative.
As Capra says, “The basic unity of the cosmos manifests
itself not only in the world of the very small, but also in the
world of the very large”: “sameness” would be the Buddhist
term.
“Being transient manifestations of the void [physics:
“field”], the things in this world do not have any fundamental
identity [of their own].” This, Capra points out, is also true
of the “self.” “Particles cannot be separated from the space
surrounding them”: rain drops, for example, do not condense
out of a vacuum; space not only manifests the single
raindrop but coordinates the activity of its counterparts in
the function of precipitation. Capra quotes a science text:
“The field exists always and everywhere…. It is
the carrier of all material phenomena [and their
interactions]. It is the ‘void’ out of which the proton
creates the pi-mesons.”
The coming into being, and fading away again, of the
particles “are merely forms of motion of the field,” not
activities initiated, or directed, by the particles themselves.
That the particle is not in control of its circumstances, as
isolated behavior, is demonstrated by the fact
“…that ‘virtual particles’ [a particular form] can
come into being spontaneously out of the void, and
vanish again into the void, without any nucleon (or
other strongly interacting particle) being present….
The vacuum [or void] is far from empty…”
151
…it is dynamic; a field is defined as “a physical quantity in
a spatial region.” Capra says it contains the potentiality for
forms, their formulation.*
The quantum field is viewed as the fundamental ground of
being, present everywhere in space; the presence of particles
are localized events, like ripples, in the field, “concentrations
of energy, which come and go”; their reality as an entity is
merely a temporary phenomenon.† He quotes Einstein: “the
field is the only reality”; it does not come and go.
Capra says of both Eastern sage and quantum physicist,
the view is of “physical things and phenomena as transient
manifestations of an underlying fundamental” reality, “the
only reality,” called a “field” by one and a “ground of being”
by the other. However, while a field might be regarded as a
form or entity, the ground of being is formless, it being from
which forms arise—“the essence of all forms,” the essential
nothingness that gives somethingness its identity (the two
together being called, in Buddhism, “suchness”). In that
nothingness is a potential for everything.
And, from which the definable forms arise, like particles,
to that they return. The vital process entails presence,
interaction, transmutation. Being and change are aspects of
one process.
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We tend to think of “life” as a kind of experience.* Matter
on the atomic level, says Capra, is “always in a state of
motion. Particles do not stand around passively.” The closer
we examine matter, even metal or stone, “the more alive it
appears.” Actively.† “Movement and rhythm [harmony] are
essential properties of matter,” the rhythm having to do
with co-operative patterns, which are ever-changing from
existence to nonexistence of form. The One manifests as
many; the many dissolve into the One: Chuang-tzu called it
“transformation and change.”
“This ultimate essence,” remarks Capra, “cannot be
separated from its multiple manifestations”; movement and
being.
“In atomic physics, we even have to go beyond the concepts
of existence and nonexistence…which is most difficult to
accept.” It brings to mind paradoxical statements in such
as the Upanishads: “It is within all this, and It is outside of
all this.”
When we speak of Oneness, we must speak of the unity
of—actually, the transcendence of—conceived opposites.
When we deny fundamental Oneness and assert, for
example, the reality of “rightness,” we establish a conflicting
condition, “wrongness”; Buddhists call this “mutually-
arising.” Chuang-tzu: “When the ‘that’ and the ‘this’ cease
to be opposites, that is the very essence of Tao.” Opposites
are interdependent for their very definition, or “meaning.”
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When they are taken to be independent realities, conflict
ensues. Divisiveness is the root of strife (and striving).
The difficult matter for spiritual aspirants to comprehend
is that, as a sutra puts it, “form is emptiness, and emptiness
is form”: these are not mutually exclusive conditions but
merely perceived (“named,” as they say in Buddhism)
aspects of a singular actuality. When recognized as such,
“Oneness” is the present condition; transcendence of “name,”
or conceptual identity, is inextricably involved.
“A subatomic particle,” says Capra, “is not an isolated
object but rather an occurrence, or event.” Eventually it
is an interconnection to something related to its presence.
“The structure of a hadron, therefore, is not understood as
a definite arrangement of constituent parts, but is given by
all sets of particles which may interact with one another to
form the hadron under consideration.”
In an application of physics, “All particles are seen as
intermediate states, in a network” of interactions, “better
described as an event….” Capra quotes Buddhist scholar
D.T. Suzuki, “Buddhists have conceived an object as an
event, and not as a thing or substance.”
Most subatomic particles dis-integrate into other particles.
A particle at any particular moment can only be described
as having “a tendency to exist,” with transformation “a
tendency to occur.” Ashvaghosha: “[With] all forms of
material existence…we cannot describe any degree of
(absolute or independent) reality to them.”
Being interdependent, no part of the universe is more
important than any other. To the extent of what is essential,
every part bears the importance, or “meaning,” of all others.
As every reality is in the all, the all is in every reality. Thus,
it has been said: “In every particle of dust, there are present
Buddhas without number.” And thus D. T. Suzuki can state
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of the enlightened mind, “The Buddha…lives in a spiritual
world [or world of “spirit”] which has its own rules,” as does
the quantum reality. As Capra notes of physics, a “concept
can be given a precise mathematical meaning but is almost
impossible to visualize.”
Such is the paradox in the nondual teachings, that all
that is relative is within the Absolute, simultaneously as the
Absolute is within all that is relative. To realize this is to
realize that, in the ultimate reality, there is no division; not
anything is apart from anything else (thus, “distance,” and
“time” to traverse it, have no meaning—or are “illusions”).
Hence, Blake could say, “To see a world in a grain of sand….”
One who can accommodate that, can see the observer in the
observed (or vice versa).
The potential interaction of a particle, Capra points out,
can only be understood in terms of a relationship between its
presence and the presence of its observer, interdependently.
If we want to observe a particular particle, we may first have
to bring it into being (such as in a particle collider). In doing
so, we may create or destroy other particles. If we have a
different intent, the condition of the observer and what is
observed will both change interdependently. In the same
way that what is observed is arbitrarily defined by us, so
too is how we come to define the observer, our self. Different
observers do so in different ways, so there is nothing non-
elastic about what is defined as a self: it’s relative, just as
whether a quanton presents as a particle or wave depends
upon the manner in which one decides to observe it. What
you see is what you get.
Capra: “The structures and phenomena we observe
in nature are nothing but creations of our measuring
[comparative] and categorizing mind. That this is so is one
of the basic tenets of Eastern philosophy.” Change your
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state of consciousness, and what you get is what you see.
To have an attachment to any perceived reality is to go
astray. Buddhists call this “ignor-ance,” ignoring a deeper
truth. Ashvaghosha: “All phases of the defiled mind are thus
developed.”
Physicist John Wheeler said that instead of scientific
observer, we should say “participator.” He added, “In some
strange sense, the universe is a participatory universe”; he
was likely thinking of wave-function collapse.
To this, Capra adds: “Mystical knowledge can never be
obtained just by observation, but only by full participation
with one’s whole being.” The Upanishads say, “Where
everything has become just one’s own self, then whereby and
whom would one see?” True unity means, says Capra, “one’s
‘individuality’ dissolves into an undifferentiated oneness…
and the notion of [separate] ‘things’ is left behind.” This is
what D.T. Suzuki calls the “Absolute point of view”; a point
of view which an increasing number of scientists, like Capra,
are coming to contemplate.
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For some scientists, it’s about reading the mind of God.”
Physicists like Russell (the magazine said) “concluded
that the best place to seek scientific support for God is in
quantum mechanics.”
The magazine also referred to quantum physicist Antoine
Suarez:
“Most physicists accept entanglement as just one
more counterintuitive reality of quantum physics.
But Suarez claims entanglement tests conducted
with real photons in the lab suggest that quantum
effects must be caused by ‘influences that originate
from outside of space-time’….
“Whatever causes the twin photons to behave in
the same way, it must work independently of time.
‘There is no story that can be told within the
framework of space-time that can explain how these
quantum correlations keep occurring.’ Suarez says.
“These results have intriguing philosophical
implications, he notes, especially for the spiritually
inclined. ‘You could say the experiment shows that
space-time does not contain all the intelligent entities
acting in the world, because something outside of
time is coordinating the photons’ results.’”
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physics. If, on the quantum level, matter is revealed
to be less solid and definable than it appears, then
it seems to me that science is coming closer to the
Buddhist contemplative insights of emptiness and
interdependence. At a conference in New Delhi, I
once heard Raja Ramanan, the physicist known
to his colleagues as the Indian Sakharov, drawing
parallels between Nagarjuna’s philosophy of
emptiness and quantum mechanics.
“After having talked to numerous scientist friends
over the years, I have the conviction that the
great discoveries in physics (going back as far as
Copernicus) give rise to the insight that reality is
not as it appears to us.”
His conclusion:
“All things and events—whether material, mental,
or even abstract concepts like time—are devoid of
objective, independent existence.”
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as Judaism or Buddhism—in which subject and
object, mind and matter are more interfused than
opposed.”
Of cognitive theorist and philosopher Daniel Dennett, he
writes:
“The big mistake, according to Dennett, is to think
that there is some homunculus of a self sitting in
the theater of the brain and observing, or even
directing, the ongoing show.”
The article continues:
“If this view is true, where is the self or identity on
which even a broadminded religious believer might
base his notions of the soul? Here Christians and
others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in
which the self is correctly understood not as an
entity or substance….”
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not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in
a certain sense, the whole; only, this whole is not
so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single
glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins
express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet
really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi....[That
thou art.]”
And Malin quotes Roman philosopher Plotinus (c.
250 A.D.): “There is no two…(man) is merged with the
Supreme, sunken into it, one with it…which is to be known
only as one with ourselves.”
Malin sums up:
“The challenge of coming to the ineffable knowledge
of who I really am is the same as the challenge
of coming to the ineffable knowledge of the One.
This is so because, ultimately, I am the One. If one
accepts that ‘the One’ is a name indicating the real,
nameless source of what is, rather than an abstract
concept, then, oddly enough, the statement ‘I am
the One’ can be proved: If I were not the One, then
the level of ‘the One’ would have consisted of at
least two items, me and the One, rather than there
being truly one.”
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aqueous, it is not likely that anyone will challenge
us and assert that on the contrary its nature is
undulatory.
“Similarly, I assert that the nature of all reality is
spiritual, not material; nor a dualism of matter and
spirit….
“Interpreting the term ‘material’ (or more strictly,
physical), in the broadest sense, as that with
which we can become acquainted through sensory
experience of the external world, we recognize now
that it corresponds to the waves, not to the water
of the ocean of reality.
“My answer does not deny the existence of the
physical world, any more than the answer that the
ocean is made of water denies the existence of ocean
waves; only, we do not get down to the intrinsic
nature of things that way.”
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while showing hundreds of little pictures, of what is
in reality a single existent object—does not really
multiply that object.”
162
“The experience of oneness with the surrounding
environment is the main characteristic of this
(meditative) state. It is a state of consciousness
where every form of fragmentation has ceased,
fading away into undifferentiated unity.”
“The fragmented view is further extended to society
which is split into different nations, races, religious
and political groups. The belief that all these
fragments—in ourselves, in our environment and
in our society—are really separate can be seen as
the essential reason for the present series of social,
ecological and cultural crises. It has alienated us
from nature and from our fellow human beings.”
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Zukov quotes Henry Stapp:*
“Bell’s Theorem…shows that our ordinary ideas
about the world are somehow profoundly deficient,
even on the macroscopic level.”
Zukov concludes: “Everything, even ‘emptiness,’ is that-
which-is”; and both Being and Non-being: “There is nothing
which is not that-which-is.”
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misses this aspect of Reality. When seeing the world
as a collection of parts…we imagine boundaries
dividing these ‘parts’…such as making the
distinction between you and me….Through our…
dividing the world into this and that, we make it…
less full of real meaning….We insist that the world
must be this way or that way….And we wonder
why it doesn’t make sense….”
“An electron’s position,” here or there, “is not something
which really exists, until we look for it.” The so-named
uncertainty* principle,
“…is an essential ingredient of physical reality….
“Without the consciousness of an observer, the stuff
underlying this physical reality does not seem to
exist….Things are instead weirdly blended with, or
take their identity from, what they are not.”
Hagen points out,
“If we take two subatomic particles (say, protons)
and smash them together at extremely high speeds,
we find that the two original colliding particles fly
apart—along with two new additional particles
[which] didn’t exist anywhere, in time or space,
before the collision.”
Imagine smashing two watches together, and finding two
more similar watches among the debris. “How substantial
is matter—the book you’re reading now, or the hand which
holds it?”
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Further:
“The total amount of energy in the universe [the
‘positive’ energy in matter and the ‘negative’ energy
of gravity] adds up to about zero. If we could put
all of the universe in one place [e.g., on a scale], it
would add up to zero too.”
He quotes physicist Nick Herbert regarding the scientists’
dilemma, “If ‘quantumstuff’ is all there is and you don’t
understand quantumstuff, your ignorance is complete.”
Herbert says the “alternation of identities” [such as that of
particles] “is the major cause of the reality crisis in physics.”
Hagen states: “We don’t approach life from a perspective
of Totality and Wholeness [but] by seeing myself over here
and everything else over there.” Such divisive “reductionism”
presents us with fragmentary views of existence: there is me,
my brain, my mind, my thoughts, my actions, as if these
were separate components.
There is, prior to these distinctions, simply consciousness.
“Consciousness is necessarily antecedent to matter, as far as
any experience of matter can provide.” We were conscious
before we ever conceived of “brain,” “thoughts,” “self,” etc. Yet
we continue to suppose “that matter precedes consciousness”;
and we take objects to be of primal importance, though it
is consciousness which creates objects as “entities”—things
that have defined, individual existence, or “reality,” and
relationships between them (whether conceived as “material”
or “immaterial”).
Thus, the absolute Totality is reduced to “parts,” in our
cognition—such as me and you. This is the root of self-
centeredness, selfishness; conflict. It is also the root of man
being estranged from God.
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“There is no such duality. That there are two, and yet
that there are not two, occur at once and in the same
location,” * the relative appearing within the Absolute. This
applies, as well, to “me” and “consciousness”; there is no
individual “me” outside of consciousness. When the me
(subject) speaks of “my consciousness” (object), duality is
inevitably conceived. This self-division Hagen refers to as
the “big bang” of separative origin.
All objects are quantum objects, but they do not appear
to our mind’s eye as extra-ordinary, similar to the way that
you look in the mirror and do not recognize the product of
inter-stellar processes. While the extra-ordinary and what
we view as ordinary are the same, we overlook this reality.
The macroscopic and the microscopic are not in two different
universes.
To “measure,” which is what scientists do, is to fragment
reality. We want to become “conscious” of “reality,” while
consciousness has never been separate from reality. Without
comprehending the nature of Wholeness, we aspire to
discover Wholeness. We’re still in shock to discern that a
proton is both a particle and a wave, distinguishable only in
accord with what we happen to be looking for.
“Bell’s Theorem has led us to the discovery that…
though we conceive of a here and a there, such
conception is not supported…by experimental
results…‘two’ which are not two [even in] the very
fabric of time and space itself.”
Hagen quotes Nick Herbert: “Bell’s Theorem tells us that
it is…a reality to be reckoned with.” The irony is that, in
his initial intention,
* Physics professor Richard Wolfson: “Two simultaneous events are the same
event.”
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“Bell* aimed to validate the common notion that I am
separate from you [but] ended up proving precisely
the opposite…much to his surprise and chagrin!”
There is, Hagen says, just this—not that: “We
misapprehend what we actually take in.” We are very
familiar with the relative; it’s time we became acquainted
with the Absolute which permeates it. It isn’t the Absolute
which is an “abstraction,” it is the relative. The Absolute
is present in the mirror we call consciousness, as it were,
and the reflection (without lasting substance) is the relative
images, the perceived “this” and “that.”
“We’re not seeing things as they are,” Hagen says.
“We’re missing something”—what in the nondual teachings
is referred to as the transcendence of this and that (the
dualistic myopia).
For those who have transcended the dualities, “Actions
that spring from an awareness of the Whole…is utterly
beyond any everyday sense of…right and wrong, or pleasant
and unpleasant….
“We will either act out of our confusion” [that conceptual
distinctions are relevant], or respond to the Totality,
“…as it actually is, not as we would hope, desire,
imagine, or conceive it to be…. To live and act
from out of the whole, and not the part…. Then no
prescription or set of commandments is necessary…
because we have a clear view of Reality—and of the
universe.”
* The late John Bell was a particle theorist who mused, regarding physics
(emphasis mine): “Suppose…we find an unmovable finger obstinately pointing
outside the subject, to the mind of the observer, to the Hindu scriptures, to
God, or even only gravitation? Would that not be very, very interesting?”
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Zen master Shunryu Suzuki:
169
“At the subatomic level, all divisions and boundaries
imposed by us on the universe are in fact illusory—
including the split between mind and matter.”
What we think of as facts—measures and numbers—
are primarily abstractions. The aim of nondual realization
is to integrate the observer and the observed in a direct
and immediate way, bypassing all abstractions and
conceptualization.
“The deep, latent message of quantum mechanics…
is that there is a reality, beyond our senses, which
eludes verbal comprehension or logical analysis.”
“The wave and particle natures of light and matter
are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually
inclusive…aspects of reality….And so, one of the
central principles of modern physics is coincident
with…one of the most basic doctrines of the
Eastern worldview….”
“Zen and physics, then, seemingly so different, are not
so different after all,” like waves and particles. “Quantum
mechanics presently appears to be as profoundly paradoxical
and enigmatic as Zen.” A physics question can sound like a
Zen koan: if a tree falls in the forest, when there are no ears
to hear, does it make a sound?
“The ‘sages’ of both East and West now tell us [there] is
the one true reality.”
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either/or formulation. If we transcend the reductionist
labeling of a defined state of seeking and a defined state called
enlightenment, there is only a singular, undifferentiated
condition which is a present actuality, a perception of
“Oneness.” Darling avers, “There is only one reality.”
That reality “is all about direct experience, unadulterated
being….We are urged to lose ourselves and merge with the
whole.” He quotes Meister Eckhart: the omnipresence that
we call Being is all things.
Darling notes that with subjects who’ve had near-
death experiences, “in some cases, profound transcendent
experiences apparently took place after the person had been
pronounced clinically dead,” in apparent circumstance of
“the removal of the brain’s restricting influence [when] the
psychological walls of the self are broken down.”
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Because we have a sense of being, we associate that with
being one “self”—“within the undivided totality of what is
real…an overall system that actually has no parts.”
“Human beings…have been created by the
universe….And now they are beginning to see
beyond the ‘self,’ to the truth of their condition….
The signs of emergence of a…cosmic perspective
are evident [such as] in the esoteric philosophy of
quantum physics…. The only reality that exists,
it is becoming clear, is right in front of us; nothing
is hidden…. We have peered inside ourselves…in
search of a soul and have found nothing.
“The universe is one, and to see it as such is the
goal…of science.”
Our bodies, our brains, are
“…composed of atoms whose nuclei were
manufactured inside the intensely hot cores of giant
stars that exploded in the remote past….We are
nothing less than the universe in dialogue with
itself.”
Darling quotes “a hardened pragmatist,” the late biologist
J. B. S. Haldane:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere
byproduct of matter….I am already identifying my
mind with an absolute, or unconditioned mind…
and the more I do so, the less I am interested in my
private affairs….”
Darling suggests, “at death, we effectively rejoin the
unbroken sea of consciousness.” The brain’s function is
the limitation of things to objective status, such as “my”
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consciousness, dualistically pursuing subject and object, so
that the organism can operate in a relative world of bodily
needs and environmental supplies. But “selves come and
go, as brains come and go….We don’t really own or exert
will over our bodies and minds; we are simply aspects of
an endlessly-unfolding process….There is more to us than
brief, solitary lives…plurality of consciousness is only an
appearance.”
“…subject and object, life and death, you and I, God
and man are one….The plain fact is that we are already
one with the universe; we have never really been apart from
it. And only the presence of the ‘self’ prevents us from
seeing…who we really are.”
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“The cosmic religious experience
is the strongest and noblest
driving force behind scientific
research.”
—Albert Einstein
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