Inside the Mind of God
Breaking Down the Doors of Perception, Part 3
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B Y   D R.   M A N J I R   S A M A N T A - L A U G H T O N,   M D

Chapter 6:
There Goes the Neighborhood

Section One: The End of Locality

A Unified World
Have a look around you. What do you see? Chances are you are reading this in a room, perhaps in an office. What is around you? Take a moment to list the objects in your mind. Maybe there are people around you. Where are you in this scene?

By now you should have a list of objects in your mind. You have also just signed up to a particular way of thinking - that all these objects and people are separate from you and from each other. Making a list of objects implies that there are separate objects to list. You may not have been aware of it, but you have been working within a certain scientific viewpoint that says that the world is made up of separate constituent parts. Astonishingly, this viewpoint is being superseded by a new scientific paradigm: one that says that the universe is deeply connected and not separate at all.

Have a look again at the objects around you. It seems obvious that they are separate from each other and yourself. At the level of our everyday reality, this is what we experience - there is no reason to think any differently.

It is easy to understand how this reasoning has been part of the scientific method for hundreds of years. In our everyday life we see a world made up of separate units and objects. When scientists began to consider what type of structure lay at the heart of these objects, they had no reason to doubt that the same rules applied at smaller levels too. Hence the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks who believed that 'stuff' was made of tiny solid particles.

In a world made up of discrete objects, the only way in which connection can occur is through physical touch or by exerting a local force, as is the case with electromagnetism. We see this is the case with even the most powerful magnets; the objects that are attracted to large magnets have to be within a certain distance - the further away, the more the attraction of the magnet tails off.

The only exception to this rule in this classical world was the force of gravity. According to Newton, gravity works instantaneously, no matter the distance between objects, something that has perplexed physicists for some time.(1) We shall be discussing gravity in more detail later in this book. For the moment, we shall simply say that gravity was the exception to the rule in the classical world of local forces.

Aside from the anomaly of gravity, the idea that objects could be connected at a distance was not even considered under the classical paradigm. Separate objects were seen as separate objects. What has changed to make this not so? Our everyday experiences make it seem obvious that we live in a world of separate objects and it is hard to imagine anything different.

There Goes the Neighborhood
The change began with the era of quantum physics. Until then, local effects ruled. In our previous discussion on quantum physics we have mentioned the fact that a particle can be seen either as a wave or a particle. This type of uncertainty applies to other qualities as well, namely position and momentum (which is to do with the movement of a particle). The idea that we can never know both qualities of a particle with absolute accuracy is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.(2)

If we try to measure one of these qualities, then this changes the accuracy of our measurement of the other quality. So the more we know about the position of the particle the less we know about its momentum. If we try to measure the momentum more accurately then we lose the accuracy of the measurement of the position.

The method by which we measure a particle affects the information we can gain from it. This leads to a strange situation that we do not see in our everyday life - we can only estimate where something is likely to be. At the quantum level we can only say the probability of where a particle is. The accuracy of this measurement is dependent on the method used. This has led to the weird quantum world where we could say with 70 per cent accuracy that a particle exists on the palm of your hand but it also could exist anywhere: on the top of the Eiffel tower for example. At the quantum level, the concept of position is not one of absolutes, but of possibilities.

This is not how we experience our lives. We see an object where we see an object. We don't perceive it as 70 per cent probably there, with a chance it is also on top of the Eiffel tower. The quantum world seems far removed from our daily experience, but oddly enough, our everyday objects are made up of this very world! Why we don't see the coffee table popping in and out of existence is still a matter of debate, along with the entire meaning behind quantum physics.

Despite the weird implications, the principles of quantum physics are widely used in our modern technological appliances. What these principles actually mean for our reality is not so widely discussed. In fact, many find this type of questioning irrelevant, saying that the quantum reality only occurs at a very small level and has no bearing on our everyday lives. Yet these small quantum objects make up the very objects that we see around us. At a fundamental level, the coffee table is made up of particles displaying quantum behavior. What does that mean for how we view reality?

Spooky!
We have just looked at how, in the quantum world, we can never be 100 per cent certain of the position of a particle; we can simply talk about the likelihood of it being at a certain place. We have also discussed how the qualities of the particle can be affected by the method with which we look at it. So the qualities of the particle and the measurement of it are intertwined.

Before we actually measure the particle we cannot be sure what state it is in. Until then, it is as if the particle can exist in many states at once, something physicists call superposition. This is not how we experience objects: we do not see them as being many states at once. Some of the early quantum physicists did not like this idea either. Erwin Schrödinger even put forward a famous thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box that contained a substance that could kill it. Whether or not the substance is actually released is subject to a random process, such as radioactive decay. If the decay occurs then the cat dies; if it does not, then the cat remains alive.

Because the cat is placed in a sealed box away from the outside world, until the box is opened nobody can know if the poison has killed the cat. Schrödinger said that before the box is opened, the cat is in a state of both being alive and dead at the same time. It is the act of observing the cat that makes it into either. It must be stated that Schrödinger did not really do this experiment and was merely pointing out the seemingly absurd nature of quantum behavior by using the analogy of a cat being both alive and dead at the same time.(3)

But this is how Nature works at a deep level: particles can exist in a state of superposition until we look at them. It is this extraordinary state of affairs which led physicists to realize that our world may not be so separate after all. Part of this journey began with Einstein who was not happy with what quantum physicists were saying about our world. He famously said "God does not play dice," referring to the uncertainty involved in measuring the properties of particles.(4) With his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he set up an experiment aimed to try and disprove the quantum effects, but in doing so uncovered something rather spooky.(5)

We have said that a particle can be in a state of superposition, which means it is in many states at once, until the process of measurement determines its state. It is possible to link two particles in an experiment so that they become related to each other. (I shall not complicate this text by explaining the technicalities of how this is done.) This is called entanglement. The particles end up having equal and opposite spin. One is spinning one way - let's say it is spinning up, and the other is spinning the other - let's say it is down. The two particles have been through the entanglement process and will forever be linked. They must henceforth always have equal and opposite spin.

Figure 4 - Pair of entangled particles

What is strange is that you don't know what state either particle is in until you actually measure them. Until then, both the particles are in a state of superposition. What Einstein realized was that if you have a look at the first particle, it collapses into a definite state of up or down. However, because the two particles have undergone the entanglement process and are linked, something rather odd occurs. Even though the second particle has not been measured, the act of measuring the first particle determines the spin of the second, as their spins will always be opposite. It is as if the first particle somehow managed to communicate its state of spin to the other. Even weirder, the particles do not have to be anywhere near each other, yet still have this instantaneous connection; they could even have moved so far apart as to be on other sides of the universe, the effect would be the same.

Einstein did not like this at all: he called it "spooky action at a distance." One of the reasons for his objection was that if particles can communicate and send signals to each other instantaneously, regardless of distance, then they would be communicating faster than the speed of light, which would be violating his theory of relativity. He saw this as a problem and it is one that has been named after Einstein and his colleagues: the EPR paradox.

It was John Bell, an Irish physicist, who proposed a way to test the EPR paradox in the 1960s; it remained theoretical until being tested by experiment. His proposal is sometimes known as Bell's theorem. The experiment was actually performed by Alain Aspect and team in the 1980s.(7) They showed that entangled particles do display these spooky non-local connections.

Einstein seems to have been proved wrong, the universe seems to be spookier than he had envisaged it. Since Aspect and team performed these experiments, the idea of non-local connections is becoming more commonplace. There is even a strong trend in physics to utilize faster-than-light communication in a new, faster type of internet.(8) The idea of non-local connection is not only here to stay, but could become a vital part of our everyday technology.

Can You Say Om?
Having established that distant parts of the universe can be connected instantaneously no matter how far apart, most physicists just got on with figuring out how to utilize this effect. However, the quantum world yet again leads us to a new philosophical horizon; how do distant parts of the universe know what each other are doing?

The physics of non-locality has been firmly embraced by mystics who cite this as scientific proof of the ancient spiritual idea that the universe is one entity. This idea of oneness means that the separation between objects is an illusion and that everything in the universe is actually from one source. It is as if the objects we see around us and also ourselves emerge from this one source, seemingly separate, but remaining connected. Although members of the scientific community, including the late physicist Richard Feynman, often dismiss this line of reasoning, some physicists actually embrace this idea.(9)

The non-local connections do seem to point to a deep unified quality of the universe. If parts of the universe know what other parts of it are doing, could it be that the universe is actually one? If quantum physics tells us that the universe is all about how we interpret it, then a connected universe is one way of interpreting the non-local behavior of quantum particles.

Whilst most physicists tend to ignore the more philosophical implications that non-locality has on their universe, a British physicist named David Bohm took a great interest in it. Bohm himself was interested in Eastern mysticism and even engaged in dialogue with the Indian mystic, Krishnamurthi.(10) He believed that the world we see around us, that appears disconnected, is actually a reflection of a much deeper reality. In this deeper reality which he called the implicate order, everything is one unified whole.(11) It is the starting point for everything in the universe and actually, it still unites everything. It is only our perspective that sees everything as separate.

Figure 5 - People are all outgrowths of the one underlying reality.

Figure 5 is a simple version of this idea. People are all outgrowths of the deeper reality. They view themselves as separate and can interact with each other as separate beings when in fact they are emergent from a united ground substance. Depending on your perspective you can see them as separate or, if you look a little deeper, you can see them as remaining part of the whole. They are united and separate at the same time. Bohm called this separateness, the explicate order. It is an idea that is very hard to put into words, because we are so used to things being one thing or another and not both things at once depending on perspective.

Bohm's way of viewing non-locality also solves Einstein's paradox of information traveling faster than light speed between two distant paired particles. According to Bohm's view, the particles, although seemingly separate, have always been and remain part of the unified whole. It is simply our perspective that sees them as separate, but if we were to travel deeper into reality we find that they are connected. So at some level the particles never separated. They remain part of the one ground substance. The reason why the information can pass between them instantaneously is that the information does not have anywhere to go!

This all sounds very esoteric and it is no wonder that many books linking physics to ancient mysticism have become popular in recent years. Science has always been about the search for knowledge in order to understand our universe. These types of interpretations of physics are arising from physicists themselves. Although many may balk at the apparent mysticism of this type of work, it is simply not good science to ignore this completely. We have entered an era when the concept of a unified world exists not only in mysticism, but also in science.

Non-Local Consciousness
Having established the idea of non-local interactions in science and that information can travel across the universe instantaneously, we can now combine this with the earlier idea in this book that consciousness is fundamental. As we remember, physicists such as Amit Goswami say that consciousness is more fundamental than matter and that matter arises from consciousness.(12) We also saw how this view made sense of a lot of the conundrums in biology: how dumb molecules know what to do.

If consciousness imbues everything and non-local connections are possible, then non-local connection of consciousness is possible. In effect this means that awareness is not limited to the immediate surroundings; awareness and influence are possible over a vast distance. So a thought that someone has in Antarctica for example, could instantaneously affect someone in Africa. This would all remain speculative had it not been for some pioneering research into varying aspects of non-local communication.

Indeed, the evidence is so compelling and plentiful that we should all be speaking with telepathy! Despite this, the scientific establishment has rejected a lot of this type of research. Some of the reasons for this shall be explored later in the section of this chapter dedicated to the subject of skepticism. As we shall see, the common complaint that there is no evidence for the effects of non-local consciousness is simply not true. The real problem may be the apparent lack of a scientific mechanism for these effects.

Yet we have already derived a mechanism for non-local consciousness using only principles that appear within the realm of science. So what happens when we have both evidence and explanation? What does it mean for the human race if we can no longer deny that the influence of our minds extends beyond local constraints of time and space? We shall examine some of the area of scientific study that has accumulated which points to a world of non-local consciousness.

Join us next month for more
from Punk Science!

© 2006, Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, MD, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted with permission from Punk Science: Inside the Mind of God by Dr. Manjir Samanta-Laughton, published by O Books (ISBN 1905047932). Available for purchase from your local bookseller, or any of the following online locations: www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.o-books.com.

For more information, check out www.PunkScience.com.

References for Chapter 6, Section One
(1) Saviour E. Instantaneous (non local) Action without violating Causality. Blaze Labs 2004
http://www.blazelabs.com/f-p-inst.asp [cited January 2006].
(2) Heisenberg W. Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory. (Dover Publications) 2003.
(3) Al-Khalili J. Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 2003.
(4) Born M, Einstein A. The Born-Einstein Letters. (Macmillan) 1971.
(5) Einstein A, Podolsky B, Rosen N. Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete? Physical Review. 15 May 1953; 41: 777.
(6) Bell J. On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox. Physics.1964; 3: 195.
(7) Aspect A, Grangier P, Roger G. Experimental realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm gedanken experiment; a new violation of Bell’s inequalities. Physical Review Letters. 12 July 1982; 49:2: 91.
(8) Mullins J. Entangled Web. New Scientist. 20 May 2000; 26-29.
(9) Sykes C. (ed). No Ordinary Genius. (Weidenfield & Nicolson) 1994.
(10) Bohm D, Krishnamurti J. Ending of Time. (Harper Collins) 1985.
(11) Bohm D. Wholeness and the implicate order. (Routledge classics) 2002.
(12) Goswami A. The Self-Aware Universe. (Tarcher/Putnam) 1995.