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WHOLE SUM INFINITY
The Ionasphere:
www.geocities.com/iona_m and http://ionamiller.chaosmagic.com
Copyright 2004; All rights reserved
THE WHOLE SUM INFINITY
Merging Spirituality and Integrative Biophysics
By Iona Miller, 8-2004
“We can assert with certainty that the Universe is all center, or that the center of the Universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” Giordano Bruno
“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research would it?”
--Albert Einstein
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.” --Einstein
Heavy Meta
We all have a metaphysics, a worldview, whether we are aware of it or not. Science can and should contribute to that worldview of how things are and work, but should not monopolize it. We should locate scientific understanding within a wider view of knowledge that gives equally serious consideration to other metanarratives and forms of human insight and experience.
Perhaps we must learn to respect both domains to understand fully the world in which we live. We can conveniently call the scientific perspective “physics” and the stereoscopic view “metaphysics,” which goes beyond (“meta”) the purview of science alone. Both provide what we can call a “working” knowledge of reality for getting things done, whether they are an entirely accurate reflection of Reality, or not.
There is no unique way to go from physics to metaphysics. Although the reductionist scientific view does not determine the full nature of the existential field, it imposes certain requirements and restrictions on it. Both systems function as socially-structured language games. But even the most reliable map reveals virtually nothing about the detail of the terrain.
Both scientific and metaphysical theories or models must be beautiful: elegant, economical, and coherent, despite any application of their criteria. Metaphysics must explain the entire set of phenomena fundamental to human experience. This can be done, as in physics, from a top-down or bottom-up approach.
In science, top-down means from the cosmological to the subquantal level of observation. In metaphysics, we work from the biological/emotional/mental to transpersonal or archetypal levels of experience and expression. In physics, matter/energy is foundational, while metaphysics considers consciousness even more fundamental. Quantum or nonlocal mind models also reflect the later. We can examine a wide or narrow view of the nature of Reality and our own nature, both scope and detail.
Full Circle
Is physics coming around full circle back to Natural Philosophy after only 500 years? The so-called new physics is described even by its practitioners as “mystical”. Sir Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, wasn’t merely a scientist, but also an experimental alchemist. Alchemy was the search for the Godhead in matter. Newton presumed that matter and energy were animated from and infused by a more fundamental dynamic that was behind them both, a negentropic source perhaps too fine to observe that fed the fires of the universal engine.
Newton hypothesized that any body can be transformed into another of some kind, including its intermediate grades of qualities. Buckminster Fuller proposed much the same in Synergetics I and II, demonstrating it geometrically in a series of dynamic subatomic transformations, beginning and ending with what he poetically called Cosmic Zero.
Today we refer to that negentropic source as the vacuum potential, vacuum fluctuation, zero-point energy, or synergetically (Fuller) as Vector Equilibrium Matrix. It is the dream of many that mankind can tap this ocean of potential as a free energy source that increases our survival potential. Metaphysicians suggest harmonizing or resonating psychobiologically with this low amplitude resonance enhances spirituality. It is the groundstate of consciousness.
‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is. Nous is, curiously, the French term for ‘we’ or ‘us’. And, indeed, we are That. This metaphysical Source of all that exists lies at the threshold where Nothing becomes something, where the universal becomes the particular.
Normally, it would be considered philosophical at best and solipsistic at worst to attempt in this modern era to illuminate our understanding of the nature of the microcosm with such an archaic non-scientific term. We might expand our philosophical concepts using physics or science models, but can we gain as much by illuminating our scientific paradigms with ancient or modern philosophy? Perhaps we can because throughout history, we have all struggled to find words and concepts for our common human perceptions and apprehensions of Truth.
Such is not the usual realm of science, but that of Transpersonal, Jungian or archetypal psychology, which examines the deeper meanings of concepts which are metaphors of our existence, an artistic or aesthetic as well as deductive method. Aristotle considered ‘nous’ a faculty of the human soul. Today, soul is studied in the domain of these sacred psychologies. Through metaphysics we contemplate both exterior and interior perceptions of the underlying structure of the universe.
When Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Jung, he encouraged us to find “a neutral, or unitarian language in which every concept we use is applicable as well to the unconscious as to matter, in order to overcome this wrong view that the unconscious psyche and matter are two things.” Psyche and soma are indissolubly wed in nature and our nature, and must be considered in an adequate account of reality.
Can we be scientifically conservative and metaphysically bold, simultaneously? It means walking the narrow edge of Occam’s Razor. Often metaphysical ideas are metaphorical and burden us with false assumptions and irrational quantum leaps of logic. It is not that our subject should be rational and linear, but these arguments are constructed such that if you believe this underlying premise, it is assumed certain outcomes result. At best this is the old mechanistic model of causal or classical physics, not the counterintuitive quantum world.
But the vacuum potential appears to be much more than a metaphor. It is the most fundamental phenomenon we are currently capable of perceiving. It provides us with a new paradigm for our very existence, one that recognizes wholeness, connectedness, integration, and participation in the universal scheme. Every ‘thing’ from concepts to objects --including the universal waveform originates from the fertile and “whole sum” womb of spacetime. This is also the domain of nonlocal mind.
Most scientists will tell you that wavefunctions, universal or otherwise, do not really exist, except on paper. But it may be that wavefunctions really exist and are akin to the “mind of God”. If the wavefunction is consciousness and our personal wavefunction is connected with it in a constrained or limited fashion, too much information appears as noise. But the connection suggests a relationship between intelligence and spacetime.
Let’s Do the Spacetime Warp Again
Andrei Linde of Stanford has suggested the expanding fractal universe generates emergent information that could be poetically considered an evolving universal intelligence. If so, it is an emergent property of spacetime as is every thing. But seemingly-separate things are a construction of our minds [maya, illusion], an overlay of what is essentially one unbroken movement, a dynamic verb, not a group of nouns.
The largest component of our corporeal existence is the vacuous space between the atoms that make up our physical bodies which are far from solid from the quantum perspective. We are undergird and literally in-formed by that pervasive infnite informational flow.
Could this be the ancient Greek’s “universal harmonious wisdom” resonating as human consciousness? If so, are we listening to its integrative message? in terms of our paradigms, our technology, our ecology, our ethics? The bottom line is that tapping this soulful source, both through aesthetic and technological means may be the key to our survival as a species.
Commonly translated as ’mind’ or ‘intellect’, the Greek word nous is a key term in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus.What gives nous its special significance there is not primarily itsdictionary meaning - other nouns in Greek can also signify themind - but the value attributed to its activity and to the metaphysicalstatus of things that are ’noetic’ (intelligible and incorporeal) asdistinct from being perceptible and corporeal. In Plato’s laterdialogues, and more systematically in Aristotle and Plotinus, nous isnot only the highest activity of the human soul but also the divineand transcendent principle of cosmic order. In a notoriously obscure chapter (III 5) of his work On the Soul,Aristotle distinguishes nous as ’a capacity to become everything’ fromnous as ’a capacity to make everything’, in the way that light makespotential colours actual. This ’active’ nous, called ’immortal’, has often been identified with the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover, whose life is ’athinking of thinking’ (see Aristotle ). But Aristotle probably regardedhuman thought as being godlike rather than as being a product of theUnmoved Mover, who exists as an eternally transcendent thinker. For Plotinus, nous comprises ’primary reality’, the domain ofintelligence and intelligible beings. He construes this domain as an’emanation’ from the ineffable One, the ultimate principle of everything.Taken universally, nous corresponds more or less to a syncretism ofPlato’s Forms with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.
Everlastingly contemplating the One, nous is construed as an equivalence betweenthought thinking itself and intelligible beings as the only true thinkables.The activity of nous ’overflows’ into ’soul’, the principle of embodiedlife. As a lower level of reality, soul can only think things by treatingthem successively and separately. Human beings live primarily at thelevel of ’soul’, but they also, by virtue of their immortal and’undescended’ self, have access to identification with nous and therebyto a mode of being in which thinker and thought are completely unified.In this transcendent condition, the mind is reality itself. --Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Buckminster Fuller had his own notions of the morphing dynamics of energy/matter in the womb of spacetime. Fuller re-discovered nature’s own pulsating flux and means of self-assembly. He lamented that classical science is based on Cartesian coordinates and the structurally incoherent cube, rather than nature’s tetrahedral forms and structural tensegrity. He taught us that energy has shape and that shape emerges from the vacuum potential. As the Heart Sutra implies, form is not other than void and void is not other than form.
The special-case geometrical shape chosen arbitrarily by the engineering-structures-eschewing pure scientists for their energy-measurement accommodation, that of the cube, is structurally unstable; so much so as to be too unstable to be classified as a structure. Unwitting of this mensural shortcoming, Planck's constant inadvertently refers to the cube, implicit to the gram, as originally adopted to provide an integrated unit of weight-to-volume mensuration, as was the “knot” adopted by navigators as a velocity unit which integrates time-space incrementation values.
Spacetime for scientific philosopher Fuller meant:
526.01 There is no universal space or static space in Universe. The word space is conceptually meaningless except in reference to intervals between high-frequency events momentarily "constellar" in specific local systems. There is no shape of Universe. There is only omnidirectional, nonconceptual "out" and the specifically directioned, conceptual "in." We have time relationships but not static-space relationships.
Time and space are simply functions of velocity. You can examine the time increment or the space increment separately, but they are never independent of one another. Space is the absence of events, metaphysically. Space is the absence of energy events, physically. Space is the antithesis of solid. Both are misnomers. Solid (or mass) refers to locals of too high an event frequency for our physical members to penetrate or conceivably tune in. Space refers to locals of an event frequency per volume too low for our apprehending equipment to tune in. Space is all the observer's untuned-in information. Space is finite as a complementary of finite Scenario Universe. As a co- occurrent, complementary function of finite but non-unitarily-conceptual and non- unitarily-tune-in-able Scenario Universe, space is finite. Space does not have definable properties. Only systems have definable characteristics. The cognitive awareness of space derives from definition of system characteristics whose topological interrelationships inherently and coherently divide Universe into insideness microcosmic space and outsideness macrocosmic space. Systems have 32 topological characteristics Space is the integral of all the frequencies that are too low for tune-in-ability. Space is the aggregate of all the vector equilibrium nulls of all magnitudes and frequencies of all isotropic vector matrixes always potentially articulatable in all directions from any point of origin. Space is never linear. Physics finds that Universe has no solid things surrounded by, and interspersed with, space. Life is an inventory of tuning-ins and tuning-outs of experience. Birth is the first tuning in; death may not be the last. Systems divide all of Universe. Thought divides all of Universe. Thought is inherently systemic__whose inherency always has its coherency of space. Only systems can communicate space. Space is systems-defined-and-deferred awareness of potentially tunable otherness.
Fuller considered humanity a micro Universe; unfolding eventuation is physically irreversible yet eternally integrated with Universe. Our experience of time is relative to our mesocosmic size:
Local variability within total order synergetically explains and defines the experience ``time," which is relative size experience. The magnitude of the event characteristics is always accounted in respect to other time cycles of experiences. The cosmically permitted and experientially accommodated actuality of the individual's unique variety of sensorially differentiated local in time-space experiences also accommodates the experienceability in pure principle of individually unique physical life in concert with the only metaphysically operative, cosmically liaisoned, weightless, abstractly conceptual mind, by means of all of which physically and metaphysically coordinate experienceable principles it is experimentally discoverable how genetic programming accomplishes the ``instinctive" conditioning of subconscious, brain-monitored, relative pulsation aberration and transformation controls, which are all reliably referenced entirely subconsciously to the eternally undisturbed, cosmic-coordination regularities unbeknownst to the individual biological organism "experience." The only instantaneity is eternity. All temporal (temporary) equilibrium life- time-space phenomena are sequential, complementary, and orderly disequilibrious intertransformations of space-nothingness to time-somethingness, and vice versa. Both space realizations and time realizations are always of orderly asymmetric degrees of discrete magnitudes. Physics thought it had found only two kinds of acceleration: linear and angular. Accelerations are all angular, however, as we have already discovered. But physics has not been able to coordinate its mathematical models with the omnidirectional complexity of the angular acceleration, so it has used only the linear, three-dimensional, XYZ, tic-tac-toe grid in measuring and analyzing its experiments. Trying to analyze the angular accelerations exclusively with straight lines, 90-degree central angles, and no chords involves pi and other irrational constants to correct its computations, deprived as they are of conceptual models.
Nonlocal Mind Paradigm
The model of nonlocality helps us supercede mechanistic notions of space and time. The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superceded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm.
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatmoic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously paradoxically, without losing our individuality.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner, Mishlove, Radin, May, Motoyama, Sidorov). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing. Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities unlimited by physical constraints.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously from chaos within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form complex patterns among themselves as they interact.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical, essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe or one another, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field). Nonlocal mind operates at the most fundamental level.
The WHOLE SUM Cosmos
There is a pre-physical, unobservable domain of potentiality in quantum theory. It is the basis of fundamental interconnectedness and wholeness of Reality. This cosmos is, indeed, greater than the Whole SUM of its parts.
Theories of the physical vacuum will eventually prove useful in understanding life. For example, it may link biology and consciousness. Rather than an inconsequential epiphenomenon, consciousness is a causal factor in biology. The body is a colloidal suspension that can act like an amorphous liquid crystal, resonating and superconducting in a variety of ways.
Biophysics contends that more in terms of conceptual integration may be learned from the study of life than from the study of nonliving matter. More than molecular biology or bioengineering technology, it is its own field of fundamental research in physics. Its own epistemological and philosophical understanding aims at understanding, not just mastering life
Quantum mechanics determined the primacy of the inseparable whole. Holism is intrinsic to any quantum theory for biology. Descriptions of isolated systems are permissible only under experimental conditions. Holistic properties are defined mathematically in EPR [Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen] correlations. It implies fundamental interconnectedness within the organism, between organisms, and with the environment.
Holistic biophysics is therefore an integrative subject, a specialized but transdisciplinary pursuit. Quantum biology must refer to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, since organisms are open systems best described by complexity. Issues include coherence, macroscopic quantum states, nonlocal interactions, nonlinearity, communication networks, self-organization and regulation, field models, interconnectedness, and consciousness. Field-thinking and field-models are central to bioelectromagnetics.
The Nature of Nothing
The vacuum is filled with virtual photons whose motion constitutes the “zero-point energy”. This “cosmic zero” may be related to consciousness in some as-yet-unknown way. ZPE fluctuates because this fundamental domain is not smooth but consists of virtual particles boiling into and evaporating out of existence. But where did all these photons in the vacuum originate from? They originated on all the other particles throughout the universe.
All the charged particles in the cosmos are doing the same jitterbug dance that causes electrons to radiate and absorb photons like crazy. Zero-point energy is made up of photons created by all those electrons in distant stars. Virtual photons in space are created by the motions of other electrons, mainly by “distant matter,” Each zigzag of a local electron is actually a nonlocal communication between it and distant matter (Swanson).
The local forces of physics have their origin in the distant matter of space. This amount of matter increases as the square of the distance away. There are enough electrons in cosmos to create the vacuum energy we measure, and to absorb all the photons produced by local particles. We are connected to the distant matter and forces that arise from this connection.
The distant matter of the universe can be displaced or disturbed in different patterns, called “modes.” They resemble the vibrational modes of a bell when it vibrates after it is struck. These fundamental vibrational modes can be excited and can resonate. These modes have symmetry and can interact with geometric shapes.
It is possible for every local, nearby electron (or any other particle) to interact nonlocally with the distant matter virtually instantaneously. Radiation can travel backward in time as well as forwards. Photons which travel backwards in time are called “advanced waves.” Photons which travel forward in time are called “retarded waves.”
As we look further away in space, we are also looking backward through time into deep time. Feynman-Wheeler suggested as electrons zig zag, they create photons which radiate away traveling forward in time. Later, it is absorbed by electrons in the distant matter which accelerate and in turn radiate a photon which travels backward in time [actually spacetime], converging back at the original electron’s location almost simultaneously with the first photon’s radiation.
Instant coupling, the concept of photons traveling backward in time equally balanced by those going forward in time, is deeply embedded in contemporary physics. When electrons point toward one another, their velocities create an interaction over huge distances that is narrow and intense. They push one another backwards at near the speed of light.
Mutual interaction leads to a finite exchange of energy and momentum in the form of a very sharply spiked photon, a photon “pulse” It is these photons that make up the “zero-point energy” of space. The coupled photons produce a very, sharp, short pulse or spike of electromagnetic energy at the smallest unit of energy exchange. Every interaction between electrons consists of one or more photon pulses.
At the Planck scale, space-time structure of the universe begins to break up. Smaller scales than this make inertia and position meaningless. Synchronizing the phases of the photon pulse combines them into “wave trains” or “quantum wave packets”, actually made up of many photon pulses from elementary exchanges between electrons.
Interestingly, this means the electrons are communicating both forward and backward in time, much like in the quantum handshake of Cramer’s transactional model of QM and Sarfatti’s post-quantum physics. They send and receive signals across the universe virtually instantly. The nature of spacetime is such that the further away we look, the further we see into the past.
Each quantum photon consists of many photon pulses, which are collectively the ZPE of the vacuum of space (Swanson). Electrons can synchronize together in a collective effect and undergo a “phase transition.” Random motions are then superimposed on synchronized motions and collective oscillation occurs, which is a long range temporal order.
Quantum Jitterbug
Each particle sees itself in the center, surrounded by distant matter. The central electron only sees an electron out at the edge when their velocities line up and this only occurs when they are “in sync.” The key is when their periodic motions remain in step with each other. In this “phase locking” all electrons in the coupled system orbit around their average position at the same frequency. This is the womb of quantum mechanics, but we don’t see the inner workings, just the “fuzzy ball” of probability on the outside.
The phase conditions for stable orbits [Higgs’ Phase] will only be right at certain spots. The places at which stable orbits can occur will form a regular array resembling “crystal structure” at very small scales in space, so electrons actually “jump” from one such point to another. Frequency has a very definite physical meaning. It is the rate at which the electrons (or any particles) orbit their center of mass location.
Electrons are either in phase and able to see and interact with each other, or out of phase and therefore effectively invisible and unable to exert force on one another. Unsynchronized particles appear as “quantum noise.” Other nearby parallel dimensions normally only interact with ours through quantum noise. However, consciousness appears to interact across these parallel dimensions.
Coherence between parallel realities can be thought of as hyperdimensional structure which crosses dimensions. It is nonphysical yet has physical manifestations. Higher dimensional structures can be designed which, by their shape and topology, are stable. Such forms may be a possible model for consciousness and the soul. The hypercube is one such hyperdimensional structure that has a long mystical tradition (Merkabah; Cube of Space, Star Tetrahedron, Diamond Body).
The key is to understand what makes up these higher dimensional geometrical structures. The answer is phase variation in spacetime. Normal space is “in phase” from point to point at this deep level, but it experiences small departures from the common resonant phase of all particles. These departures can become systematic. When mapped in spacetime they can form three-dimensional and higher dimensional geometric structures. These “phase structures” can cross several parallel universes, and become the physical basis for “subtle energy” and paranormal phenomena.
Electromagnetic waves are a collection of synchronized photons of different frequency and amplitude. Radiation is constantly pouring in and flowing out, balancing on average. The electron goes forward and backward in a seemingly random pattern in space and time, in order to balance all the radiation coming in and flowing out.
This balanced radiation pattern is analogous to the interference pattern of a hologram. A 3-D pattern of energy created by regions of interference is what we see as an image. There is creative and destructive interference. An electron and every particle is a “hologram,” produced as the result of the actions of the electron to preserve the balance of energy (Miller et al, 1973).
To be more than ethereal like a technologically produced hologram, it must have mass created by including the photons traveling backwards in time from the future. This is a 4-Dimensional hologram, which is an integral aspect of every particle and real physical object.
Biophoton Emission
If we want to manipulate the particle, electron or whatever, all we need to do is manipulate its 4-D hologram. The brain is a holographic structure which makes an ideal antenna for receiving holographic wave patterns. The brain processes information holographically. This supports the idea that the brain may be a sender and receiver of holographic signals.
“Bose particles” are photons which like to be in the same state; they become entangled or entrained, sharing a frequency. The body creates coherent light. In the cell structure of the body there are membranes which act as conductors of microwave, infrared and visible light. These structures store coherent photons [biophotons] which play a fundamental role in life processes.
Our bodies use light and coherent vibrations to carry out many life processes. The stored coherent photons can be shaped and controlled to affect external photons and external vibrational patterns. The Bose principle extends the idea of entrainment to our own hyperdimensional being. Because of Bose statistics, these patterns or structures of energy simulate other “mirror” structures in the distant matter.
Brainwaves show that the brain becomes more synchronized and coherent in mediation. Based on our 4-D holographic model, the mind has enormous power to affect reality. 4-D type holographic signals are primary communications, “in-formation”.
The DNA in our cells can naturally produce coherent waves, which contain both forward-time traveling waves and matching backward-time traveling waves in phase conjugation. They generate coupled photons which radiate out along the axis of the double helix in both directions [biophoton emission].
What is DNA; where did it come from; how does it function to create life, to create us?
We have some of the biochemical answers, but we can look deeper into biophysics for our models. We propose that DNA functions in a way that correlates with holographic projection.
DNA projects a blueprint for the organism that is translated from the electrodynamic to the molecular level. Further, research strongly suggests DNA functions as a biocomputer. This DNA-wave biocomputer reads and writes genetic code and forms holographic pre-images of biostructures. We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings.
Each cell is a tiny radio transmitter capable of sending phase conjugate waves into the past and into the future. The real power of DNA and the use of phase-conjugate waves is just a matching pattern of advanced and retarded waves transmitted in phase by billions of cells. The strength of the pattern increases as the square of the number of cells acting in unison. A millon cells transmitting a desired visualization in unison will have a thousand billion times more power than a single cell.
A million DNA cells broadcasting at random just produces noise. All the signals cancel out. But a million DNA cells broadcasting coherently and in unison generates a paranormal power, such as that exhibited by adepts with mindbody control.
DNA molecules of each cell can be brought into coherence by emitted light and sound (Gariaev). This enables the brain, when quiet and coherent, to combine together the signals of many DNA molecules so the desired image or visualization can be brought into being. At the core of this model is synchronous interaction of particles across great distances and time, which may explain many paranormal effects as changes in quantum noise. This model offers a way to understand consciousness, which is much more than the physical body.
PART II: Quantum Bioholography
Integrative Biophysics of DNA
For the time being, the twisted staircase of DNA is explored in the realms of molecular biology and biochemistry. Based on opening this world of biological organization, we can conjecture what mysteries an even deeper look at the functional basis of living matter might reveal.
This is the domain of biophysics, realm of both particle and wave interactions -- fields. It has been demonstrated that DNA is electrically conductive; much like copper wire it can carry a charge. It is believed this live-wire vital capacity may have been the charge transfer that gave life a jump-start. DNA’s ability to transport charge helps minimize genetic damage from oxidation (Lawton, 2003).
The same fundamental physical laws that govern matter and the Universe also govern living organisms. Even a sound biochemical theory can be replaced by an even better, more fundamental, biophysical theory. It is still important to study properties at their own levels, not just as consequences of more fundamental scientific disciplines.
Where are we going? Who knows how future generations of man may be engineered from the 3.3 billion “letters” of the human genome? We have been looking to the genetic code for the secret of life. Perhaps we should be listening to the “genetic ode”, the EM song of life that reverberates throughout our being, the audible life stream.
The Holographic Universe
We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings. DNA is not only the driver of evolution but even more fundamental quantum mechanical symmetry-breaking forces (King, 2003).
If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability.
“Something” appears to emerge from virtually “nothing” which physicists have come to describe as a sea of infinite potential. They call it quantum foam, vacuum potential, or zero-point energy; we can call it the vacuum substructure. Subatomic particles wink in and out of existence on a continuous basis, like some subatomic froth. This “something” appears paradoxically in wave/particle form. This world is not transcendent to matter, but underlies it as a coherent unity, much like ecology underlies biology.
Within this context, some physicists (Miller, 1975; Bohm, 1980) have strongly suggested that the nature of reality is fundamentally analogous to that of a holographic projection. The optical process called holography uses interference patterns. Holography describes transformations of light and optical information mathematically in wave mechanical terms.
The superposition of a split beam of laser light led to the laboratory development of holograms, or recordable holographic images demonstrated by Dennis Gabor beginning in 1949. In 1971, Karl Pribram applied this metaphor to neuropsychology, suggesting it was more than analogy, that the brain actually encodes information as holograms. The pattern holds the form.
Holograms contain all the information needed to reconstruct a whole image. Holograms contain many dimensions of information in far less space, like a compressed file. They hold that information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies. Thus, shining a coherent light (reference beam) or laser through the fuzzy-looking overlapping waves of a 2-dimensional hologram can create a virtual image of a 3-dimensional figure.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms. All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality.
Criss-crossing patterns occur when two or more waves ripple through each other. In the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, waves of probability originate in the past, present, and future. Events manifest when waves from past and future interfere with each other in the present. That pattern creates matter and energy. The universe emerges from the rippling effects of immense numbers of criss-crossing interference waves. The geometry of the fields is more fundamental than the fields or emergent particles themselves.
Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. This information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space. Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images.
Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them – lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger,1987; McFadden, 2002). The universe is a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.
This “Holographic Concept of Reality” was first suggested by Miller, Webb, and Dickson in 1973, and later touted by David Bohm (1980), Ken Wilber (1982), Karl Pribram (1991), Michael Talbot (1991), and others. In this holistic theory, the Universe is considered as one dynamic holomovement, a grand Unity.
The part is not only contained within the whole, the whole is contained in every part, only in lower resolution. So, following the axiom of “As Above; So Below” we can expect biology to be based on the same physical foundation of creation. Miller and Webb hypothesized precisely this in “Embryonic Holography,” also in 1973. At the time, of course, such notions were untestable. But, with continuing revolutions in technology, now we are closer to modeling and demonstrating this creative process.
DNA as Holographic Projector
In a hologram, wave fields interfere with one another to lay the foundations for the reconstruction of the image of an object. But how are the wave fields produced? The term holography comes from the Greek roots meaning “entire” and “to write”. In holography, the image is projected by a coherent light source split into both an object wave and the reference wave background.
This dichotomous nature is reflected in the particle/wave nature of the DNA molecule, which can be “read out” with biophotons from chromosomes to set up a holographically produced wave field. This superposition of wave fields (object wave and reference wave) creates a wave guide for the formation of biological structure. The image is constructed according to the reference information contained in the genes. The reconstructed object wave is identical with the object wave field. The reconstructed wave fields reproduce exactly the recorded ones (the DNA with genetic code).
Russian research in genetics led scientists to begin looking experimentally at the helical structure of DNA as a possible holographic “projector” of the DNA code. Thus, the existential blueprint described by the spiral staircase of DNA is translated into a complex EM field that guides the molecular growth of the organism. Miller, et al, suggested as much three decades ago, and outlined possible mechanisms of this quantum biohologram at both the cellular and whole organism level.
This process emerges from a domain more fundamental than the standard genetic code triplet model. Biophysics can now describe how our form emerges directly from the void, the vacuum substructure. In essence, we emerge from the cosmic void -- pre-geometrically structured nothingness. DNA is the projector of that field which sets up the stress gradients in the vacuum substructure to initiate dynamic unfolding. Genes function as holographic memories of the existential blueprint.
At the moment of ovulation there is a definite shift in the electrical fields of the body of a woman. The membrane in the follicle bursts and the egg passes down the fallopian tube. The sperm is negative with respect to the egg. When the sperm and egg unite, the membrane around the egg becomes hyperpolarized, shutting out other sperm.
It is at this moment that the electromagnetic entity is formed. The fertilized egg cell contains all the holistic information necessary to create a complete operational human being. The biohologram begins to function at conception and ceases only at death. Our contention is that the DNA at the center of each cell creates the multi-cellular creature hologram by expressing and projecting the DNA in the center of the cells.
The biohologram projected by the embryonic nervous system forms a three-dimensional pattern of resonant structures. These structures behave as acoustic waves, acting as field guides for flowing matter and energy. The holograms are “read” by electromagnetic or acoustic fields that carry the gene-wave information beyond the limits of the chromosome structure. In this new understanding, DNA and the chromosome apparatus is the recording, storing, transducing, and transmitting system for genetic information at both material and physical field levels.
DNA-Wave Biocomputer
The Gariaev group (1994) proposed a theory of the DNA-wave Biocomputer. They suggest (1) that there are genetic “texts”, similar to the context-dependent texts in human language. (2) The chromosome apparatus acts simultaneously both as a source and receiver of these genetic texts, respectively decoding and encoding them. (3) The chromosome continuum acts like a dynamical holographic grating, which displays or transduces weak laser light and solitonic electro-acoustic field. In other words, the code is transformed into physical matter guided by light and sound signals.
Complex information can be encoded in EM fields, as we all know from coding and decoding of television and radio signals. Even more complex information can be encoded in holographic images. DNA acts as a holographic projector of acoustic and EM information that contains the informational quintessence of the biohologram. Quantum non-locality of genetic information is fundamental.
The nervous system acts as a coordination mechanism that integrates DNA projection of the rest of the cells in the system, aligning these cellular holograms. The biohologram, projected by the brain, creates standing and moving electromagnetic wave patterns at different frequencies of the spectrum in order to effect different biochemical transformations. There may be specific electrostatic fields, or there may be electrodynamic field varying at various frequencies, from low (radio waves) all the way up the spectrum into visible light (biophotons) and beyond.
Genes are located on chromosomes in a linear order within the cell nucleus. Chromosomes have the ability to transform their own genetic-sign laser radiation into broadband genetic-sign radio waves (the encoded signal transforms from light to sound). The polarization of chromosome laser photons is connected non-locally and coherently to polarizations of radio waves.
Through this mechanism a new field structure is excited from the physical vacuum by an intrinsic creativity that emerges through DNA. The genome genetic and other regulatory wave information is recorded at the polarization level of its photons and is non-locally transferred or played out through the entire biosystem by the polarization code parameter.
Only 3% of the 3 billion base pair genome encodes the physical body. The four-letter alphabet of genetic elements includes Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Guanine (G), and Thymine (T) or Uracil (U) components of DNA, arranged in three-letter “words” that tell the cell what proteins to manufacture.
These genetic characters are distributed in the genetic text in a fractal distribution, i.e., reiterated. So, the nucleotides of DNA molecules are able to form holographic pre-images of biostructures. This process of “reading and writing” the very matter of our being manifests from the genome’s associative holographic aspect in conjunction with its quantum nonlocality.
Rapid transmission of genetic information and gene-expression unite the organism as a holistic entity embedded in the larger Whole. Gene-expression is the mechanism by which new patterns are called into being. The system works as a biocomputer, a wave biocomputer.
This biogenesis mirrors the cosmic process of creation. The holographic dynamic underlies both processes of cosmological creation and biogenesis. Chemical bonding is a consequence of the non-linear inverse square law of electromagnetic charge interaction in spacetime. Charge interaction precedes quantum chemistry perturbations of bonding energetics. Despite being genetically coded, molecules form fractal structures both in their geometry and dynamics. Generating core biochemical pathways gives rise to the fractal structures of proteins, nucleic acids and tissues.
Theories of biogenesis, such as Panspermia, are strongly supported by the fact that organic molecules and amino acids, as well as the nucleotides A, U, G, and C have been detected in meteorites. It is a fecund universe, at both the cosmic and human scale.
Quantum Bioholography
Hypothesis: The organization of any biological system is established by a complex electrodynamical field that is, in part, determined by its atomic physiochemical components. These, in part, determine the behavior and orientation of these components. This dynamic is mediated through wave-based genomes wherein DNA functions as the holographic projector of the psychophysical system, a quantum biohologram.
In the mid-1980s, physicist Peter Gariaev first noted a DNA phantom effect in his experiments. DNA was bombarded with laser light. When removed physically from the scattering chamber, its electromagnetic signature, a ghostly holographic after-image apparently remained. What is measured is light scattering from the DNA phantom fields.
No other substance has been found to emulate the effects of the DNA molecule. As long as the chamber is not disturbed, the effect is measurable for long periods of time. Evidence suggests a relationship to the phenomena of endogenous bioluminescence, liquid crystals, and superconductivity. Bioluminescence is the emission of photons of light produced when certain energized electrons drop into a lower or ground state. Humans emit a variety of electromagnetic radiations across the emission spectrum, indicative of the energy state of the organism.
In the nuclei of each cell of the human body, the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) carries the structure of our whole body. It is the blueprint not only of our physical form, but also of the processes that our form undergoes in terms of survival. The primal vacuum is the matrix of our existence and proportionately our most fundamental reality. In essence, we emerge from pre-geometrically structured nothingness. DNA is the projector of that field which sets up the stress gradients in the vacuum or quantum foam to initiate the process of embryonic holography.
DNA Phantom
The Gariaev group has discovered a wave-based genome and DNA phantom effect that strongly supports the holographic concept of reality. This main information channel of DNA is the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns. First, they emerge in the acoustic domain, secondly in the electromagnetic domain.
DNA seems to embody the capacity to produce a field experienced by other DNA in the body, linking all holistically together. This dynamic is linked to the cellular level via mechanisms of RNA transfer and enzymatic action in the cell. DNA and RNA are likely to be in non-local communication, possible because DNA molecules in chromosomes are in a state of substance-wave duality.
So, DNA codes an organism both through DNA matter and by DNA wave sign functions at the laser radiation level. Wave information is recorded at the polarization level of photons and is non-local. It is transferred throughout the biosystem by the polarization code parameter, eliciting holistic response patterns.
Gariaev claims to have demonstrated subtle fields emerging from the quantum foam or vacuum potential, making the effect quantifiable and measurable, objective. He found the phantom effect by irradiating DNA with a target UV wavelength of 338 nm. Poponin (1995) went on to suggest that some new field structure is being excited from the physical vacuum by an intrinsic ability that emerges through DNA.
Gariaev discovered the DNA Phantom Effect in 1985 when he worked in correlation spectroscopy of DNA, ribosomes and collagen in the Institute of Physics, in the Academy of Science of the USSR. He was first able to publish his results in 1991, leading to a book in 1994, Wave Based Genome.
He demonstrated a dynamic new field in the vacuum substructure by bombarding it with coherent laser light and coupling it to conventional electromagnetic fields. The experimental protocols for this procedure have been reproduced in Moscow from ideas developed at Stanford, and are currently in another replication by experimental physicist Louis Malklaka.
You Turn Me On: I’m a Radio
In analyzing any complex adapative system, we follow what happens to the information; in this case the genetic information. The quantum hologram is a dynamical translation process between acoustical and optical holograms. DNA and the genome have been identified as active “laser-like” environments.
Roughly speaking, DNA can be considered a liquid crystal gel-like state that acts on the incoming light in the manner of a solitonic lattice. A soliton is an ultra stable wave train that arises in the context of non-linear wave oscillation. Oscillations are set up when DNA acts as a rotary pendulum kindling other oscillations.
Chromosomes can transform their own genetic-sign laser radiations into broadband genetic-sign radio waves. This is the main information channel of DNA, the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns, first in the acoustic domain, then in the electromagnetic domain. The quantum hologram is the matrix of the translations between acoustical and optical holograms. The human biocomputer can be modeled through the marriage of quantum mechanical and complex dynamics.
Other researchers soon obtained similar results, and not only based on photons. Multi-frequency physical fields are now teleported. Based on this data, it’s possible to suppose that photon fields, emitted by chromosomes as sign fields, can be teleported within or even outside the organism’s space. The same is true for wave photon fronts, which were read from the chromosome continuum similar to reading from a multiplex hologram. If photons are transformed into radio waves through the EPR-mechanism, then this phenomenon is vital. In fact, the importance of quantum non-locality existence for a genome is hard to overestimate (Gariaev, et al, 2001).
Basic assumptions of Gariaev, et al included the following:
The genome has a capacity for quasi-consciousness so that DNA “words” produce and help in the recognition of ‘semantically meaningful phrases.”
The DNA of chromosomes control fundamental programs of life in a dual way: as chemical matrixes and as a source of wave function and holographic memory.
Processes in the substance-wave structures of the genome can be observed and registered through the dispersion and absorption of a bipolar laser beam.
Quantum Teleportation
The polarizations of chromosome laser photons are connected non-locally and coherently to polarizations of radio waves. The signal can be “read out” without any loss of the essential information in the form of polarized radio waves. The genome is a quasi-hologram of light and radio waves that create the background necessary for the appropriate expression of genetic material.
Gariaev argues that the genome emits light and radio-waves whose delocalized interference patterns create calibration fields or “blueprints” for a system or organism’s spacetime organization, in a coordinated response typical of living systems. Gariaev asserts that quantum non-locality and holography is indispensable to properly explaining such realtime dynamics.
Other research suggests the fundamental interaction of internal and external fields is the right track. Joseph Jacobson (2002) at MIT, found a way to switch cells off and on with radio waves. His team also "unzipped" and manipulated DNA with a radio-frequency pulse. The same approach worked on proteins as well, and proteins orchestrate nearly all cellular chemical processes.
Thus, genes can act as quantum objects exhibiting the phenomenon of quantum non-locality/teleportation. This robust dynamic assures information super redundancy, cohesion and the organism’s integrity, and thus viability. Gariaev’s experiments suggest that DNA does indeed behave like a single quantum, which induces a “hole” temporarily in the vacuum when the DNA sample is physically removed from the vacuum chamber.
Quantum Bioholography says that DNA satisfies the principle of computer construction. It carries a copy of itself, its own blueprint, while the mechanism engineering the DNA replication is the biophotonic electromagnetic field. The “letters” of the genetic texts A, G, C, U are held invariant.
The existence of the genetic text constitutes the classical signal process of quantum teleportation. It facilitates the quantum mechanical signal processes of both the copying of the DNA as its own blueprint, and of the construction and homeostasis of the organism in a massively parallel way by means of quantum teleportation.
So, the marriage of the 50 year old study of DNA with the 50 year old science of holography has given birth to the model we call the quantum biohologram. The discovery of Gariaev of the phantom DNA and the DNA-wave biocomputer strongly suggests that this is more than a model but actually the physical mechanism for our appearance from virtually nothing. In one way you could say we “came out of nowhere.”
But here we are, nevertheless. It is solely because of our DNA’s ability to transform its genetic blueprint into a physical reality – embodying simultaneously our inherited past and our future. Sure, we can now create ersatz life, but we cannot create the fundamental elements from which it arises, which are the gift of the universe, cooked in giant supernovae aeons ago. It’s like that old joke where the scientist says to God, “We can now make an Adam out of clay” and God says, “No, first you have to make your own dirt!”
REFERENCES
Gariaev, Peter, Boris Birshtein, Alexander Iarochenko et al. (2002), "The DNA-wave Biocomputer", MS, Institute for the Control of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, and Wave Genetics, Inc., Toronto, Canada; also see http://www.emergentmind.org .
Gariaev, P.P. (1994), Wave Genome, Public Profit, Moscow, 279 pages [in Russian].
Gariaev, P.P. (1993) Wave based genome, Depp. VINITI 15:12. 1993, N 3092?93, 278pp. [in Russian].
Jacobson, Joseph et al. (2002), "Remote electronic control of DNA hybridisation through inductive coupling to an attached metal nanocrystal antenna", Nature (2002) 415:15-155.
Kelleher, Colm A. (1999), “Retrotransposons as Engines of Human Bodily Transformation,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, 13, no 1, Spring 1999, pp. 9-24.
King, Chris (1999). “Fractal Neurodynamics and Quantum Chaos: Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Though Novel Biophysics,” Fractals of Brain; Fractals of Mind, Advances in Consciousness Research 7. http://www.dhushara.com/book/paps/consc/brcons1.htm#anchor217145
Marcer, P. and Schempp, W. (1996). “A Mathematically Specified Template for DNA and the Genetic Code, in Terms of the Physically Realizable Processes of Quantum Holography” Proceedings of the Greenwich Symposium on Living Computers, editors Fedorec, A. and Marcer, P., 45-62.
Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain; reprinted in the hardback book Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, editor. 1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris; again in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 5, 1992. 93-111. Boynton Beach, FL, Tom Lyttle, Editor. Also in JNLRMI 2002 at emergentmind.org
Miller, R. A., Webb. B., “Embryonic Holography,” Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, Ed. Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in Lyttle's journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156. Also in JNLRMI 2003 at emergentmind.org
Miller, R.A. (1974), "Bioluminescence, Kirlian Photography and Medical Diagnostics"; Mankind Research Unlimited, a formerly unpublished, proprietary paper.
Miller, R. A., Iona Miller, and Burt Webb (2002). Quantum Bioholography: A Review of the Field from 1973-2002. JNLRMI, Oct. 2002.
Miller, Iona (1993), “The Holographic Paradigm and the Consciousness Restructuring Process,” Chaosophy ‘93, O.A.K., Grants Pass.
Patel, A. (2000), Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code, Proceedings of the Winter Institute of Quantum Theory and Quantum Optics, 1-13 January, S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Calcutta, India.
Poponin, Vladimir, “The DNA Phantom Effect: Direct Measurement of A New Field in the Vacuum Substructure.”
Presman (1970), Electromagnetic Fields and Life. New York: Plenum.
Pribram, Karl (1971), Languages of the Brain, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs: New Jersey.
Pribram, Karl (1991), Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, Hilldale: New Jersey.
Pullman and Pullman (1963), Quantum Biochemistry, New York: Interscience, 1963. .
Swanson, Claude (2003). The Synchronized Universe. Poseidia Press: Tucson, Arizona.
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“THE UNIVERSE IS OBSOLETE”
A Gallery of Multiverse Theories
By Iona Miller, O.A.K., 8-2003
“The key idea, the central core of all the quantum paradoxes, is that possibilities-universes conspire. It’s a quantum conspiracy.”
--Fred Alan Wolf, Parallel Universes
No Boundaries
So you think you have “boundary issues”? We have been challenged to overcome provinciality and learn to think regionally, nationally and globally. Global thinking is still a challenge. Now the siren call of Mystery invites us to explode our cosmic boundaries.
The limits of our observable universe (14 billion light-years and roughly 100 billion galaxies) have erupted out the top end and penetrated the infinitely small. Our universe may be even older, but time as we know it did not exist, nor can we see through the Big Bang to gauge it.
This universe is characterized by certain interacting life-supporting values (Rees):
1). The strength of the force that binds atomic nuclei making atomic structure possible; 2). The strength of the forces that hold atoms together; 3). The density of material in the universe; 4). Cosmic antigravity that controls the expansion of space; 5). The amplitude of ripples in the expanding universe that seeds macro-structures such as galaxies, solar systems, and planets; 6). The number of spatial dimensions (3-D).
How can it be a “uni-verse” if ours is only one of many? Universe used to mean “All that there is.” That attribution has been co-opted by the term multiverse, although technically there can be many multiverses. We are reluctant to believe that parallel universes are a true description of nature.
Still, we (along with our myriad of virtual clones and alters) are invited to embrace this wider canvas, this grander vision. Our vision of the multiverse is more vast than even a few years ago as there is evidence for many possible forms a universe can take.
There is a greater collective, more than one universe embedded in higher dimensional space or hyperspace. Our worldview must change to a multiverse view, even though it may be difficult to wrap our minds around the notion. The multiverse is the set of all possible universes throughout time, including our observable universe. Physicists say the multiverse resembles boiling water with bubbles that form and rapidly expand.
Our place in cosmic history depends on the delicate interplay between the very big and the very small. Chaos and complexity theory have shown us that patterns tend to repeat and persist (like fractals) at all levels of observation: “As above; so below.”
There is a hierarchy of observational levels: subquantal, quantal, photonic, atomic, electromagnetic, chemical, cellular, organismic, planetary, solar systems, galaxies, universes. At both ends of this open-ended spectrum, we can infer what we may not observe.
Many Mansions
We have found other worlds looking both ways, through the lenses of cosmology and quantum physics. Observations demand we change our worldview to include these parallel universes. Whether we look above or below, we see our universe with its 100 billion galaxies embedded in an even larger reality, the multiverse, with separate closed volumes of space and time.
Infinite space far exceeds the limits of our observable universe. Webs of parallel universes are equally possible. We can image them like balloons connected to one another by rubbery necks of spacetime, wormholes. The regions inside and outside the balloons and wormholes are outside spacetime. They don’t exist.
In shows like Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Quantum Leap, and Sliders the heroes traverse wormholes and black holes, travel through time, enter alternate dimensions, battle their own alter egos, or mysteriously begin living different life stories. Many of our common ideas about the nature of parallel universes come from these well-worn scifi themes.
We get the idea we might be able to detect them, share information with them, interact with them, even pop in and out of them. Most people embrace a single simple notion of parallel universes, if any. But there is no convergence of alternate views of parallel universes.
The truth of these theories is that they are far more complicated and numerous than any scifi, comic or movie has depicted. Attempts include Superman’s “bizarro world”, Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”, Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, Frederick Pohl’s The Coming of the Quantum Cats, “Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension,” Jet Li’s film “The One,” LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Paltrow’s “Sliding Doors”, Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Gregory Benford’s Timescape, or the Carl Sagan storyline, “Contact.”
Also, the movies Frequency and The Dead Zone, Outer Limits episodes “A Stitch in Time”, “Tribunal,” “Patient Zero,” and “Decompression”, and a new scifi story “Divided by Infinity” by Robert Charles Wilson. You can probably think of many more.
As you read this you could be splitting into a virtual infinity of alternatives, unseen worlds each unaware of the others. In most theories, you are unlikely to see your other selves, even if you can imagine their existence. Physics calls this their “non-fungible” nature, which means they cannot be viewed or experienced. But don’t worry about comprehending this; it has nothing to do with fungi although many-worlds seem to sprout like mushrooms. Perhaps in some parallel universe, you’ve already gotten it.
If you find the notion of an endless progression of universes sprouting from one another hosting an infinity of unconscious doppelgangers unsettling and hard to fathom, you are not alone. Even physicists who embrace the concept find the idea deeply disturbing.
Most researchers now believe the many worlds hypothesis is an accurate view of reality, backed by well-tested theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics. It makes our paradigm of the observable universe obsolete, even though only a century ago we couldn’t see out of the Milky Way or into the atom.
Many Worlds; Many Theories
There is not just one theory of parallel universes, but a variety of them ranging from bubble universes, accelerating universes, expanding universes to branching universes. We are confronted with self-reproducing universes, mini-universes, chaotic universes, alternative universes, quantum universes. The fabric of our universe is flat, as shown by the acceleration of space (Goldsmith).
Nearly every luminary in the field, from cosmologists to theoretical physicists, seems to suggest a different variant. That is hardly surprising since there are also a variety of theories about the fundamental nature of the known universe. Different theories account for different assumptions and observations, make different predictions, and lead to different conceptual and mathematical models.
For example, Princeton’s Paul Steinhardt argues for the “ekpyrotic model,” an extension of string theory called M-theory. In M-theory fundamental objects are two-dimensional membranes living in eleven-dimensional spacetime. It can contain objects of five-dimensions.
In M-theory our universe and others result from collisions between membranes in this 11-dimensional space. Unlike the universes in the “quantum multiverse”, these universes can have completely different laws of physics, anything is possible; all potentials can be realized.
Before the Big Bang our universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces. One of these sheets is our universe; the other is a parallel universe. Random fluctuations in this unseen companion universe caused it to distort and reach toward our universe. The energy of the collision was transferred into the matter and energy of the Big Bang.
In superstring theory there are 10 dimensions, but most of them are thought to be tightly curled up. Now scientists say the extra dimensions aren’t as small as they originally thought. One or more of the extra dimensions could be perhaps a millimeter across.
If so, our visible universe is one of “parallel universes” crammed into this unseen space. It looks big in three dimensions, but could be tiny in other dimensions. We can’t travel between them, since the matter and energy of our universe are confined to our standard three dimensions. But, many big universes could fit in such a small area, like sheets of paper stack together.
Another theory, “quantum cosmology” seeks to marry the irreconcilable theories of relativity with quantum mechanics, which it claims applies to the entire universe at all times and to everything in it. There is no fundamental difference between observer and observed. The wave function of the entire universe can’t collapse each time an observation is made.
In cosmology there is only one system that is measured only once. In quantum cosmology, the universe appears from quantum fuzz, tunneling into existence and then evolving classically. Both the no boundary and tunneling proposals predict the conditions necessary for inflation.
Together parallel universe theories constitute a virtually unbridled proliferation of universes, dimensions, membranes, superpositions, timewarps, Hilbert and hyperspaces. Splitting and merging, some are near; others impossibly far off. Some are similar to our local universe, others quite bizarre.
Tegmark’s Levels
Cosmologist Max Tegmark (2003) has classified different types of parallel universe theories into four levels:
LEVEL I (“Beyond the Cosmic Horizon”) is that of your alter egos and some of these worlds with our duplicates are far off in our local universe. Since cosmic expansion is accelerating you will never see your alter ego. Almost all universes of the Level I multiverse are empty and dead.
Even with the same laws of physics, different initial conditions yield different results. All histories not forbidden by conservation laws are virtually mandatory; they will occur in unquestionably real regions. Imagine our lives have an infinite number of alternative scripts. If we try to see what’s going on, everything changes to complementary possibilities.
LEVEL II (“Postinflation Bubbles”) is that of Andre Linde’s and astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan’s self-reproducing bubble universes, breeding more and more inflationary universes, which we cannot contact. There is a rich froth of bubble universes infinite in space and time. Space as a whole is stretching forever, but some regions stop and form discrete bubbles.
In this infinite set of Level I multiverses there are different particles, physical constants and spacetime dimensionality perhaps due to different symmetry breaking. In Steinhardt’s M-theory model the multiverse is produced by the cycle of birth and destruction of universes, reminiscent of the Hindu myth of Vishnu dreaming up an eternal chain of Brahmas, each an innumerable creator of a universe.
Lee Smolin suggests another multiverse that mutates and sprouts new universes through black holes rather than through brane physics. Our universe is a calm bubble in an infinitely large, chaotic eternally-inflating multiverse. Linde likens the universe to a growing fractal, sprouting self-reproducing inflationary domains which spread and cool into other universes.
Bubbles are created from the quantum foam of a “parent universe.” Bubbles may also originate from false vacuums, which decay producing new “bubble” universes at an accelerating rate on an infinite tree of bubbles. Our universe is a typical branch on the tree in a real wider space.
LEVEL III (“Quantum Many Worlds”) is the many worlds of Everett’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. Tegmark says this multiverse level adds nothing new to I and II except more indistinguishable copies of the same universes. Tegmark assigns this level to the superposition of classical worlds, located “elsewhere,” embodying different ways events could have unfolded. In the multiverse all universes share the same spacetime.
The same stories play again and again in unreachable quantum branches. Each story line we follow meaningfully connects a single future event to a past event. We can’t predict the future because we become aware only of the story line with the greatest probability. MWI is a two-way street: not only do we exist in more than one world, every event in the universe affects us. Everett never explained why we are stuck on just one branch.
When we see things with a fresh eye, we enter a parallel universe, reinventing ourselves. Only our viewpoint changes but new meaning emerges. Intimately involved with our histories, countless parallel universes accommodate all the possibilities that quantum physics contains. Containing all possibilities, these universes are static, so change and time are illusions.
The paradox of Schrodinger’s Cat is used to illustrate this interpretation. When an observation is made, new universes are created from among all possible outcomes. When two parts of the universe interact, all possible results (superpositions) become real.
Our copies remain unaware and uncontactable in worlds of their own. Only one reality lasts long enough for us to notice. We switch realities with every passing moment as our wave function is repeatedly split due to interaction with quantum systems, but all we notice is slight randomization, uncertainty.
LEVEL IV (“Other Mathematical Structures”) is that of pure mathematical structures, a sort of Platonic paradigm of ideal forms but based on different laws of physics and altogether different equations. Mathematical structures, such as a dodecahedron, are abstract, immutable entities existing outside of space and time.
Every mathematical structure is a parallel universe, according to Tegmark. But, “the elements of this multiverse do not reside in the same space but exist outside of space and time.” This is the realm of abstract geometries, manifolds, vector spaces, tensor spaces and other equations. In Level IV, entities aware enough can subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physicaly “real” world, according to Tegmark.
Plato thought mathematical forms were the true reality, but that we perceive reality imperfectly as in his allegory of the shadows on the wall of a cave. His notion was a top-down theory. We may or may not eventually find a mathematical structure to match our own universe. Instead we may find the limits of the effectiveness of mathematics.
Rudy Rucker also claims this mindscape exists as a physical reality. Like Plato, he believes in a world of ideas separate from the mental and physical. Consciousness can explore this realm of all possible thoughts just like the body explores the universe. We all share the same mindscape just as we share the same universe.
That’s Life
Our virtual duplicates are like our everyday universe, occupying a region of spacetime, containing conventional and exotic matter, galaxies, stars and perhaps life. Only some parallel universes foster the emergence of life. A major proponent of Level III many worlds, physicist David Deutsch argues this point on his list serve (Fabric of Reality, August 16, 2003):
“It is uncontroversial that, of all the environments that exist and have ever existed, only a tiny proportion are suitable for life to evolve. However, there are vastly more in which life can survive once, for whatever reason, it is present there. For instance, life (in the form of astronauts) has survived on the moon – and there seems little doubt that it would be possible for life to survive indefinitely on the moon even in the absence of support from earth. In fact, I think it is a reasonable working hypothesis that life can (given enough knowledge) survive in almost every naturally-occurring environment.”
“If that is so, then it puts a different light on the first statement, that only a tiny proportion of environments are suitable for life to evolve. For by “suitable for life to evolve” we mean that there is a reasonable probability that life will evolve there. However, there is presumably always a non-zero probability that life will form spontaneously in any given environment.”
“And [there is] a much smaller – but still non-zero – probability that [life] will form spontaneously with any given finite amount of knowledge. And hence there is always a non-zero chance of life coming into existence in almost any environment and thriving there. . .’tapering’ realities in the multiverse do not count as universes because they do not correspond to a quasi-autonomous information flow.”
“Anyway, the upshot is that it is quite plausible that life, worthy of the name, has existed and thrived, somewhere in the multiverse, since the big bang. It is also quite plausible that it hasn’t.”
Some theories of parallel universes emerge from cosmology, others from quantum mechanics. All of them represent attempts to model our universe accurately with the known laws of physics. The trouble is, our knowledge of nature’s laws is incomplete, and our theories of Cosmos suffer from our blind spots. We don’t know the conditions or constraints for the generation of universes. Nature isn’t confined to the limitations of our perceptions. Our theoretical models are incomplete.
Stretching the boundaries of empirical knowledge, recent findings have forced the idea of multiple universes on scientists. Physicists have inferred that many worlds exist, some with potentially different physical conditions, laws, and matter. Their existence, implied by cosmological observations, solves some difficult paradoxes in quantum physics and cosmology. To deny them complicates physics even more.
Astronomer Royal, astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees (2000, 2001) says, no complex entities could evolve in universes that lasted only for a short time, that were always in thermal equilibrium, that contained nothing but radiation, or that had only two spatial dimensions.”
Parallel universes might be utterly unlike our own, having different particles (such as mirror matter or dark matter) and forces. Perhaps they are confined to membranes with fewer or more dimensions. They may have identical properties to our own universe, yet be folded to appear very distant. Dark matter could be composed of ordinary matter, even ordinary stars and galaxies, shining brightly on their own fold, yet emitting no apparent light in our universe.
Splitting Image: A Gallery of Multiverses
In Buddhism, the universe is perceived as timeless, eternal with no beginning or end. It is rooted in the Void. In Vedic cosmology, ours is one of countless universes clustered together like foam on the surface of the Causal Ocean. An enveloping shell of subtle primeval elements separates each. In the Judeo-Christian vision the universe begins with Light.
Some modern theories mirror these metaphors, but multiverses are more than metaphorical. In the beginning was nothing but hyperspace with fluctuations in nothing. Bubbles emerged and began expanding rapidly, producing our universe. As Kaku (2003) says, “The Judeo-Christian genesis takes place within the Buddhist nirvana, all the time, and our Multiverse percolates universes.”
Shall we imagine chains of universes, bubbles within bubbles, endless proliferations of universes reiterating in fractals? Do baby universes sprout from black holes or are there isolated island universes in other dimensions? We can take the top-down view of cosmology and superspace. Superspace is John Wheeler’s original name for what is now called quantum foam. It consists of pure massless charge flux, pure scalar waves.
Or, we can take the bottom-up view of the infinitely small quantum worlds, or string-theory. Are there anti-matter universes? Are these meta-universes divergent or aligned with our own; are they close at hand or far, far away? Are there more multiverses as time goes by???
Alan Guth of MIT created the inflationary theory of ever-expanding universes. As the visible universe expands, it gives birth to new universes. Since inflation is eternal, the creation of new worlds is also eternal and “in an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen, will happen,” he says. “In fact, it will happen an infinite number of times.”
The multiverse already has an infinite history, far exceeding that of our local universe, which is around 14 billion years old. Everything that can happen does, somewhere in dimensions we will probably never fathom.
In the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, all possibilities exist and simply are. Life only exists in a small subset of the sets of universes. Not every embryonic universe forms hydrogen or carbon essential for molecular biology, life as we know it.
Hugh Everett III first proposed his many worlds theory in the 1950s to overcome the need for an observer to collapse the wave function of the Copenhagen interpretation. The wave function rotates in an abstract infinite-dimensional space called Hilbert space.
Collapse is a change in our knowledge of the system through measurement, and interaction of observer and observed. The wave function is a quantity that encodes the probabilistic information about such variables as position, momentum and energy.
In Everett’s theory (the “relative state” formulation), the universe is one holistic wave function. There is no collapse from possible to actual, just a set of amplitudes in which all possibilities throughout spacetime remain as superpositions. Each world splits into equally real multiple possibilities after each and every event. Our doppelgangers live on other quantum branches in infinite Hilbert space.
All possibilities are physically real in their own dimension, though virtual entities to an observer in another dimension. Ordinary existence, from possible to actual, arises from quantum decoherence. Decoherence mimics wave function collapse, but preserves unity.
Decoherence is the term for disappearance of the multiple additional possibilities. Interaction of object and environment destroys certain states faster than others. Vacuum fluctuations generate superpositions of all possible initial conditions. They coexist simultaneously, but decoherence causes them to behave classically viewed within separate quantum branches.
David Deutsch, who developed quantum computing, is the most prominent supporter of Everett’s many worlds interpretation (MWI). Quantum computers theoretically use atoms from parallel universes for their calculations. Deutsch says that different times are the same as different universes. “The universes we can affect we call the future. Those that can affect us we call the past.” All outcomes are present.
This reminds us of Einstein’s statement: “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.” The many-worlds branch toward the future creating an apparent arrow of time.
In the branching tree of alternative histories, the outcome of one branching profoundly affects probabilities of subsequent branching, and even the nature of alternatives subsequently available. Different possible histories each have their own probability according to Murray Gell-Mann.
In Andrew Gray’s History Selection formulation of MWI, history is selected over all space and time. Particles “decide” which equi-probable branches to take by choosing the least destructive path avoiding interference with another particle at some stage in the future.
The particle seems to “know” what will happen if it goes one way or another, and chooses the highest “survival” potential. It somehow seems to perceive the whole of its space-time world line with its actions now influenced by what can happen in the future. They somehow avoid interference in a non-causal way by selecting from all probabilities.
We cannot control the fates of our other selves in the multiverse. But if someone dies, they can still be alive in another universe. This suggests intriguing questions about free will, reincarnation, immortality, and perhaps the supernatural. Shall we take comfort that there are some worlds where we don’t make our worst mistakes, where we don’t lose our loved ones or die prematurely?
Wormholes, Sprouts, Strings, Bubbles, and Handshakes
Our universe could be just one of a manifold of all possible universes. Perhaps the universe tunneled from nothing. Quantum tunneling allows objects to pass through barriers that are impassable according to Newton’s classical laws of physics.
In 1962 John Wheeler discovered the Einstein-Rosen bridge, later known as wormholes. Sidney Coleman, theoretical physicist from Harvard, investigates the nature of the vacuum and its relation to the cosmological constant.
Wormholes are tubelike regions of space that connect one region of the universe to another. Wormholes may contribute information to our universe in the form of values for the constants of nature, or fix the energy density of the vacuum, the cosmological constant.
Coleman says, “the cosmological constant is zeroed out by wormholes; invisible, submicroscopic rips in the fabric of spacetime that tunnel out of our universe, linking it to an infinite web of other universes.”
Dark matter, the invisible gravitating substance that possibly makes up part of the missing mass of our universe may reside in parallel universes. Such matter would affect our universe’s gravity and is necessarily “dark” since our species of photon is stuck on our membrane (flat universe). Photons cannot travel across the void from the parallel matter to our eyes, though it may look normal to inhabitants of its own universe.
Stephen Hawking invented quantum wormholes in 1988. Just as quantum mechanics says there is a certain probability that particles can appear from nowhere in a vacuum, quantum cosmology says there is a certain probability that a small chunk of space and time can suddenly pop into existence.
A wormhole is a fluctuation in the spacetime field, just as a virtual particle is a fluctuation in an energy field. The wormhole can connect to any of an endless number of preexisting parallel universes otherwise inaccessible to us. In 1989, Kip Thorne showed a region of space containing a negative mass-energy could stabilize wormholes.
David Bohm’s notion of the holomovement includes an enfolded and manifest world, and a something-from-nothing philosophy. Is there one massive holographic field that actually exists in nature?
Specific waveforms can be exact representations of spatiotemporal objects. Does the non-material implicate realm underlie our reality, an immense multidimensional wave function? Bohm also invokes the notion of the “pilot wave” in his interpretation claiming a quantum wave guides particles along their trajectories.
Thomas E. Bearden is the darling of the ZPE (zero-point energy; vacuum potential) free-energy crowd. He is a stalwart defender of crosstalk with other dimensions, which interact with our own in extraordinary circumstances. He has concentrated on the properties of the vacuum as spacetime. He describes a hyperworld as a 3-space or 4-space rotated one or more orthogonal (90 degree) turns away from the ordinary world, constituting an entire subquantal level in a virtual state.
What appears real in one parallel world is a virtuality in its 90 degree companions. In Excalibur Briefing, he uses his model as a theoretical framework for vacuum energy, mind, and matter. He describes the relation to hyperspace of the panoply of paranormal phenomena from UFOs and cattle mutilations, to the whole range of psi abilties, apparitions, and psychotronic weapons that add hyperdimensional aspects to their function.
Moving beyond simple inflationary models, Andrei Linde of Stanford created a self-generating universe theory with complex elements. He calls it “the self-reproducing inflationary universe.” He views our universe as one of many sprouts of a growing fractal, sprouting inflationary domains that sprout more inflationary domains, each spreading and cooling into a new universe.
According to this theory our universe came from a singularity. A universe can come from as little as an ounce of vacuum. Universes sprout into existence by the billions in dimensions we can’t see. Those with excessive gravity are crushed; with weak gravity no stars form. In an expanding bubble closed universe, inside is normal space, outside is energy super-saturated space of the initial conditions. Connections are possible only through wormholes.
Maybe our universe is just a bubble in an endless chain of big bangs, bubbles within bubbles. Each new universe is a separate closed volume of space and time. Quantum fluctuations in inflationary expansion have a wavelike character.
When these waves “freeze” atop one another, their effects are magnified. These stacked-up quantum waves disrupt scalar fields, the underlying field that determines the behavior of elementary particles. They exceed a sort of cosmic critical mass and start birthing new inflationary domains.
Bubble universes are presumed approximately uniform. The laws of physics are the same in most of them. Multiverse has a common time for the primordial froth as a whole. Because of the infinity of universes, therefore stars and planets, Earth-like planets must exist in infinite number. That implies also infinite numbers of each of us. Right now an infinity of all humans exists in all possible variations.
John Cramer describes a transactional theory where information passes backwards and forwards through time. Quantum handshakes between the future and the past create reality. Past emitters and future absorbers interlace past and future together. The non-linear collapse of these wave/particle complementary pairs creates a single world history, but past events are not causal.
Greene and others have invoked string theory, suggesting that rather than particles, matter is the resonating tip of vibrating strings or tiny one-dimensional filaments curled up into virtual nothingness in 7 dimensions in addition to our three common dimensions of space plus time. In superstring theory we live in a nine-dimensional space. We notice three of them while the others remain curled up so tight they are unnoticeable.
In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku describes the 10 dimensions of universe with string field theory. Strings have just one dimension, length. Fundamental objects in this theory are one-dimensional strings living in 10 dimensional spacetime. The vibrating string drives all subatomic particles. When they collide they create atoms and nuclei, jump-starting chemistry.
Kaku says, “If you kick the string, then an electron will turn into a neutrino. If you kick it again. . .it will turn from a neutrino into a photon or a graviton. And if you kick it enough times, the vibrating string will then mutate into all the subatomic particles.” String fans tend to be particle physicists.
In Surfing through Hyperspace, Clifford Pickover, (physicist and mathematical artist), conjectures on the nature of four-dimensional beings: “A 4-D being would be a god to us. It would see everything in our world. It could even look inside your stomach and remove your breakfast without cutting through your skin, just like you could remove a dot inside a circle by moving it up into the third dimension, perpendicular to the circle, without breaking the circle.”
“A hyperbeing can effortlessly remove things before your very eyes, giving you the impression that the object simply disappeared. The hyperbeing can also see inside any 3-D object or life form, and if necessary remove anything from inside. The being can look inside our intestines, or remove a tumor from our brains without ever cutting through the skin.”
Fred Alan Wolf, (1988) also helps us speculate about all the wild ramifications and paradoxes of such views. In Parallel Universes he delves deep into the mysteries of the various theories. We live in a cloud of positional universes; the fog of time is parallel universes. Wolf says, “we need all the points in the cloud to have any stable universe, in the same way that we need a single electron to exist as a cloud in an atom in order that the atom have a stable energy.”
“The key idea, the central core of all of the quantum paradoxes, is that possibilities -- universes conspire. It’s a quantum conspiracy,” among the infinite worlds. The whole world is connected through the existence of all these parallel universes. But many nuances have developed in the last 15 years since Wolf’s publication. New experiments and observations have been made. Both Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds) and Sir Martin Rees (Multiverse) have new books on the multiverse coming out soon.
As Above; So Below
Hermetic philosophers used an axiom attributed to Hermes Trismegistus as the basis of their metaphysical worldview. Their axiom, “As Above; So Below,” implied that what is true of the most exalted or superior realms of nature is also true of the most finite. They also believed in finer planes of consciousness: a plenum filled with hierarchies of supernatural beings, some far removed, and others close at hand.
They spoke of a branching Tree of Life filled with primordial dynamics, and a spiritual field with four levels of force that permeates all. In their vision the universe of energy and matter emanated from the primordial state, impenetrable veils of negative existence, becoming progressively denser. They attributed existence to resonance and the transformations of Light and Sound. They recognized four primary elements, which we can correlate with the four fundamental forces: strong force, weak force, gravity, and electromagnetism.
Even though superstition filled gaps in knowledge about the nature of these other worlds, in essence they are surprisingly close. Only in the last century has science been able to affirm these ancient intuitions. As man looked inside himself, he saw the basic essence of reality and struggled to describe it in common terms. Even in science, there is always a gap between reality and the descriptions of it.
But the multiverse is not metaphysical (notions that cannot be proved or disproved), but quite scientific. It is studied in the fields of quantum cosmology and high energy physics. The normal laws of physics were “unborn” at the birth of this universe, because of the incredible density of energy. Some physicists speculate that compacting a mere ounce of matter could ignite a big bang that would create a universe we could never see.
In the Beginning?
These ancient intuitive ideas are echoed in another scientific creation theory: In the beginning was the Void. Sound waves originated in the first instant of the universe’s life, when the cosmos underwent an extraordinary expansion. No one really knows what drove it, but by stretching the very fabric of space, it magnified a weird subatomic phenomenon, the spontaneous materialization of particles from a complete vacuum. Vacuum fluctuation underlies both cosmology and quantum processes.
Vacuum-spawned particles flickering into existence from the void were energized by the Big Bang to remain in the real world. This sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like throwing a stone into the dense particle pond of the early universe. It sent out ripples. These pressure waves rippling through the gas were nothing more than sound waves. The entire universe rang like a bell.
The particle fog cleared and the universe became transparent. There was no longer enough pressure to support the sound waves. But now photons traveled freely through space, (“Let there be Light”). Before fading forever, those echoes of creation’s thunder left their mark on the cosmic microwave background. These sound waves compressed the particle soup in some regions of the cosmos and rarefied it in others. The resulting temperature patterns show the universe just as it was when the particle fog – and the sound waves – vanished.
The first moments of cosmic history show the ambient energy was so great that the entire universe was in a false vacuum state. The energy of the false vacuum acts as a kind of antigravity, and caused space to balloon at an exponential rate. During inflation the universe was nearly empty, its energy content having been swallowed up into the false vacuum.
Once it decayed to a classical vacuum, its excess energy precipitated like raindrops into the myriad hot particles of the Big Bang. The universe has never stopped inflating and is actually accelerating space and expanding the cosmos faster than we believed likely before 1998.
When scientists look backward in deep time and try to look through the Big Bang, they cannot apply normal rules. Even the bizarre notions of quantum mechanics don’t apply, let alone the mechanistic rules of Newton. Some speculate that our universe came either from a void, or a white hole -- a singularity (Hawking).
Others suggest it is the result of the collision of two bubble universes in a frothing stew of similar self-contained bubbles (Linde). Still others contend it comes from a non-material realm of pure information (Siegfried). Bohm’s implicate order is actually a quantum fuzz or superdense quantum vacuum. We know the Big Bang happened because the universe is still expanding, even accelerating (Goldsmith).
What’s the Matter?
Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet said, “The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden.”
Physical reality is not absolute. Materialism is as dead as communism. Science has tried to find the fundamental building blocks of matter, but has been stymied. It simply depends on the assumptions and theory you use with the level of observation: cosmological, molecular, atomic or subatomic. Now the quark (theoretically point-sized), long thought the smallest unit discernable, is giving way to finer distinctions – a whole new level of the makeup of matter.
In The Quantum Brain, Jeffrey Satinover describes, “a world in which one can comfortably argue the dynamics of interference among multiple universes both forward and backward in time; can ask seriously, as did Feynman and Wheeler, whether every electron in the universe is the same one, just reappearing through multiple loops in time…”
Lee Smolin is not a fan of MWI, but he describes its anomaly: “…only an observer who lived outside the universe who had somehow the same relation to the whole universe that we may have towards some atoms of gas in a container, could observe this quantum state of the universe. . .it is only such an observer who could know all of reality.”
Creation may come from nothingness (ex nihilo), but it doesn’t travel very far from it when closely examined. It only and ever manifests as quantum potentiality, though it appears particle-like. This includes both the so-called organic and inorganic matter. The universe is more like a dream than concrete.
In fact, there is no such thing as solid matter at all, no hordes of tiny particles. All manifestations are reduced to probability waves in quantum mechanics. We have suggested elsewhere (see “Helix to Hologram”, Nexus) that the so-called material world is a projection of a frequency domain, fields within fields, tuned with resonance, light and sound. This holographic concept of reality requires the unperceived information background as its basis. Both particle and field exist only in the implicate order.
Light is even more ephemeral. As Wolf (2000) describes, “When we see light, we really don’t see light at all; we see an effect appearing as a result of light pushing and pulling on the mattter making up our sensory bodies. We see matter moving. Light itself is really out of this world and, as far as I can tell, out of any parallel world we wish to think about.”
The most theories provide is the best explanation. Explanation not prediction is the point of science. We explain the world in terms of embedded hierarchies of substructures and superstructures. Each appears as a thing in itself with specialized functions and dynamics. Physics determines what can be computed, including the information capabilities of matter and energy underlying physical dynamics and deeper sub-quantal levels.
Reality consists of continually diverging and converging waves unfolding from the information level, but that is another story, as is the physics of consciousness. The mind arises from the laws of matter. While some scientists are trying to describe matter as consciousness others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.
A thought of a thing is not that thing, but it is not nothing either. Our thoughts about the ultimate nature of reality affect that reality at the metaphysical level. As intuitive Jorge Luis Borges said, “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” All that can happen, must happen.
However, according to researcher Matt King (9/14/03, Fabric of Reality list),
“The decisions we make do effect the proportion of outcomes in the multiverse. That is, if you decide not to speed when driving down the road, you will kill less children (across the multiverse) than if you are regular speeder. And if you are a regular speeder, you will be killing children (somewhere in the multiverse) even if by chance you never experience it yourself.”
“So what? Consider the driving force behind evolution, that is the ‘desire’ of genes to replicate (or put more properly, the propensity of things that do not replicate not to exist for very long). In a single universe view, this is achieved by reproduction.
In a multiverse view, you can spread your genes the furthest by making good (safe) decisions that keep you alive; that way your genes are safely transported by your body to a very wide variety of locations (universes). You can’t make decisions without a consciousness to make them, however basic. Perhaps consciousness, with its sequential view of time, is therefore a biological response of our genes to the multiverse?
Or perhaps the physical form of a gene encoded in deoxyribonucleic acid is not the beginning of our evolutionary process, but the end of another, whose quest was to find a stable enough structure to propagate information through the multiverse?”
The outdated notion of our universe is an idea, not a reality. As an idea it has been proven obsolete.
REFERENCES:
Bearden, Thomas (1988); Excalibur Briefing; San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis (1941), “The Garden of the Forking Paths” in The Garden of the Forking Paths.
Deutsch, David (1997); Fabric of Reality; London: Penguin.
Edelman, Gerald M. and Giulio Tononi (2000); A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination; New York: Basic Books.
Gell-Mann, Murray (1994); The Quark and the Jaguar; New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Goldsmith, Donald (2000); The Runaway Universe; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books.
Greene, Brian (1999); The Elegant Universe; New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hawking, Stephen (1988); A Brief History of Time; N.Y.: Bantam.
Kaku, Michio (1994); Hyperspace; N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday.
Kaku, Michio (2003); “Parallel universes, the Matrix, and superintelligence”; KurzweilAI.net, June 26, 2003.
Lemly, Brad (2000); “Why is there life?” Discover, Vol 21, No.11, Nov. 2000.
Miller, Iona (2000); “Exotic Matter and Energy: Surfing the Primordial Gravity Waves”,
Miller, Iona and Miller, R.A. (2001); “As Above; So Below: the Mysteries of Quantum Metaphysics”
Overbye, Dennis (2002); “The universe: Is ours one of many?” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2002.
Pickover, Clifford (19); Surfing through Hyperspace; Oxford University Press.
Rees, Martin (2000); Just Six Numbers; New York: Basic Books.
Rees, Martin (2001); Our Cosmic Habitat; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Satinover, Jeffrey (2001); The Quantum Brain; New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Siegfried, Tom (2000); The Bit and the Pendulum; New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Smolin, Lee (1997); The Life of the Cosmos; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Tegmark, Max (2003); “Parallel Universes”, SciAm, Vol. 288, Number 5, May 2003, pp. 40-51.
Thuan, Trinh Xuan (2001); Chaos and Harmony; N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, Fred Alan (1988); Parallel Universes, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wolf, Fred Alan (2000); Mind Into Matter; Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Moment Point Press.
“Taming the Multiverse”; New Scientist, July 26, 2001
“Parallel Universes”; BBC, Feb.14, 2002
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