EDITOR’S NOTE: This series is excerpted from the bestselling book God’s Ghostbusters
Before we attempt to explore the fringes—and beyond—of our understanding of the physical universe (ghosts, aliens, vampires, etc.), it is of paramount importance to dispose of the baggage of our misconceptions and the mythology of what we have been erroneously taught in this age of deceit.
The puncturing of our delusions is what some might call “a painful blessing.” That sounds like an oxymoron, but it is absolutely vital for well-being, and a prerequisite for maturity.
Much of what we have been taught is in error: some from disproven myths, others from an agenda of politics and “political correctness.” In our current culture, even the very existence of “truth” has been abandoned rather than to persist in the search! When we don’t fully understand a phenomena, we wrap it in clichés and techni-speak. Metaphors reign where mysteries reside.
(The search for truth was regarded, at one time, the primary goal of mankind; however, having taught our children that they are simply the result of a series of cosmic accidents, we then wonder why they have lost any sense of destiny or accountability!)
Elusive Concepts
There are several concepts in mathematics which seem to elude any actual discovery within our physical universe. One of these is randomness and the other is infinity. They both deserve some preliminary tutorial comment.
Randomness turns out to be a concept which is more elusive than most people realize. In 1955, the “grandfather” of the “think-tanks,” the RAND Corporation,[i] made a technological milestone by publishing a book entitled, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. A layman might pick up a copy and discover that it was simply a collection of five-digit numbers, and would probably assume that this was some kind of joke or satire. Actually, it was regarded—at the time—as a useful, practical breakthrough.
It turns out that it is virtually impossible to obtain a significant supply of truly random numbers. Laboratory technicians have to resign themselves to dealing with what are actually pseudo-random numbers, because in the “real world,” any algorithm (or procedure) to obtain a “random number” involves non-random elements.[ii] The elusive quest for a supply of truly random numbers, by those pursuing extended simulations or other experimental pursuits, led to the RAND milestone publication. Relying on the most advanced computers available at the time, they exhaustively searched for—and removed—any traces of symmetry, patterns, repeatability, or predictability of any kind. To qualify as truly random, they had to remove any traces of design. In the information sciences, randomness and design are totally antithetical: they are definitively opposites. To attribute design to random processes is an ultimate absurdity.
We live in a culture that attributes the most elegant designs imaginable to totally random processes. A leaf, a bird’s wing, the human eye, or our digestive system, are virtually impossible to exhaust in an investigation of their teleology, elegance, and function. The capstone example is the human cell: our explorations of the DNA are only preliminary glimpses into a design sophistication that continues to challenge the most talented experts. To attribute to randomness the elegance of a three-out-of-four, error-correcting code, that apparently underlies all of life, represents some kind of limit to credulity.
The other elusive concept we seem unable to encounter within our physical universe is infinity.
Our Finite Universe
The great discovery of twentieth-century science was the realization that the universe is not infinite: it is finite! (It may be expanding, but it has a finite size.) And it had a beginning. That’s what gave birth to the various conjectures that deal with its inceptions: the “Big Bang”: “First there was nothing; then it exploded.” Metaphors reign where mysteries reside.
All “work” in the universe depends on a difference in temperature. From thermodynamics, we know that heat flows toward cold. And it does this with less than 100 percent efficiency. (These two sentences are simplifications of the first two “laws” of thermodynamics.) The resulting “inefficiency” is absorbed in raising the ambient temperature. If the universe was infinitely old, there wouldn’t be any differences in temperature remaining. It appears to be in the process of winding down, but it hasn’t completed that yet. Therefore, it had a beginning. And, inevitably, when the ambient temperature is uniform everywhere, it will, ultimately, have an end.
The inability to confirm the existence of infinity—in either the macrocosm of the astronomer or the microcosm of the quantum physicist—has placed an unwelcome limit on our cosmological speculations. Even the ambiguous comfort of any true randomness within the physical world has now been called into question by the new math of Chaos Theory. (This, too, would also seem to pull the rug out from under those who insist on ascribing the creation to an accident of “chance.”)
It is in this dysfunctional culture, in which most people have been misinformed about foundational concepts, that we will be attempting to understand what we really know about the physical reality we find ourselves in. We are stumbling within this interval between the miracle of our origin and the mystery of our destiny. And we are now beginning to realize that the most critical aspects that impact our destiny lie just outside the ostensible boundaries of the veil surrounding only a “virtual” reality.
We will focus our inquiry in two primary directions: the macrocosm of our universe, and the microcosm of our existence. Using the idiom of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to represent our “anthropic reach,” we will first explore the macrocosm—the largeness—of our known universe:
As we explore “largeness”—the macrocosm[iii]—we also discover that much of what we have been taught about astronomy is now known to be in error. Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Universal Gravitation elegantly codified the mysteries of planetary motion postulated by Johannes Kepler. However, astronomers have subsequently become excessively addicted to looking towards gravity as the fundamental explanation for almost everything. Many of the contemporary speculations of astrophysics result from self-imposed myths inferred from gravitational hypotheses:
- “There is a black hole in the center of that galaxy” (otherwise we cannot explain its level of energy output).
- “There is invisible dark matter in that galaxy” (otherwise we cannot explain how it rotates the way it does).
- “There is 96 percent of the universe that is made up of dark energy and dark matter we cannot see” (otherwise clusters of galaxies would fly apart because gravity alone can’t hold them together).
- “Pulsars are made up of strange matter” (otherwise we can’t explain their oscillator-like behavior).
- “Photographs of connections between two objects that have different redshifts are only chance alignments”[iv] (otherwise the Big Bang theories are refuted!).[v]
Unfortunately, most astronomers have never fully recognized the implications of James Clark Maxwell’s equations summarizing electromagnetism which can have 1036 times the influence of gravity alone.
To gain a grasp of the immense distances involved, let’s examine a scale model of convenience.
The Burnham Model
Robert Burnham Jr., in his Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System,[vi] suggests a convenient model to gain a grasp of the relative scales involved among the members of our celestial sky. (The distance from the sun to Earth is an accepted standard called an Astronomical Unit [AU]). The number of Astronomical Units in one light-year (63,294) happens to be approximately equal to the number of inches in a statute mile (63,360). In Burnham’s suggested model: One inch in the model will represent the distance from the sun to the Earth; and one mile in the model will represent one light-year.
The sun is about eight hundred and eighty thousand miles in diameter. In the Burnham model, an AU (93 million miles) is represented by one inch. Thus, the sun would be represented by a speck .0088 in. (about 0.01 inch) diameter: a tiny speck smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
All nine planets would thus fit inside a seven-foot diameter circle around that speck:
Mercury 0.4” radius
Venus 0.7” radius
Earth 1.0” radius (1 “AU” by definition)
Mars 1.6” radius
Jupiter 5.2” radius
Saturn 9.5” radius
Uranus 19.2” radius
Neptune 30.0” radius
Pluto 39.5” radius
The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is about the same size as the sun, and is four-and-a-half light-years away. That equates to an equivalent tiny speck 4.5 miles away in our model!
Let’s remember that gravitational force between two masses equals the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them. How much influence would gravity have on two specks of dust 4.5 miles apart? Virtually, none. (If we visualized them as golf balls, they would have to be over seven hundred miles apart! Gravity between them would also be negligible.)
Incidentally, in the Burnham model, our Milky Way galaxy model itself would be one hundred thousand miles in diameter!
Obviously, the effects of gravity at such distances are miniscule. However, the effects of electromagnetism can be 1036 times as great! What the plasma physicists have maintained for years is that the entire volume of our galaxy is filled with diffuse clouds of magnetized plasma—the fourth state of matter—electrically charged, ionized particles: 99 percent of all matter in the universe is in the form of plasma![vii] They follow the non-intuitive laws of James Clark Maxwell which most astronomers have avoided as too awkward and inconvenient.
A Holographic Universe?
The GEO 600 is an ambitious project attempting to detect gravity waves located near Sarstedt, Germany.[viii] Gravitational waves are extremely small ripples in the structure of space-time which had been predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, but have never yet been directly observed. The GEO 600, a laser interferometer of 600 meters arm length, with its sister interferometric detectors, comprises the most sensitive gravitational wave detectors ever created. They are designed to detect relative changes in distance of the order of 10-21, about the size of a single atom compared to the distance from the sun to the Earth.[ix]
However, some yet unidentified “noise” present in the GEO 600 detector measurements might be due to the instrument’s extreme sensitivity to small quantum fluctuations of space-time affecting the positions of parts of the detector.[x] It is now suspected, by some, that the Gravitational Wave Detector in Hannover may have detected evidence of a holographic universe, a concept that was originally advanced by David Bohm, a confrere of Dr. Einstein, who had a deep understanding of plasma physics.[xi] His speculations may be on the threshold of confirmation (which would be a discovery that vastly exceeds the significance of what GEO 600 was designed for).
But these explorations of the “finite-ness” at the large end of things—the “macrocosm”—are only a beginning. Our discoveries of “finite-ness” on the small end of things—the “microcosm”—result in even more challenging and bizarre strangeness.
The Microcosm
Do you have “faith” in the chair you’re sitting on? Why are you confident it will hold your weight? It may seem solid enough, but suppose someone told you that essentially there was nothing there…that its ostensible firmness is the result of an electrical simulation creating only an illusion of “solid-ness”…
The molecules of the materials that make up the chair you’re sitting on are collections of atoms (which, of course, we’ve never seen since they are smaller than a wavelength of light). Yet, let’s try to comprehend the substance of what we are talking about: Again, let’s attempt a simple illustration.
The simplest atom is that of hydrogen, which can be visualized as a nucleus (of one proton) encircled by a single electron.
This sketch is, of course, not scale. It is useful, however, for us to attempt to gain an appreciation for the relative sizes involved. The hydrogen atom is approximately 0.00000001 centimeters in diameter, usually abbreviated as 10-8 cm. The nucleus, consisting if a single proton, is approximately 0.0000000000001 centimeters in diameter, usually abbreviated as 10-13 cm. In linear terms, that’s a ratio of 10-8/10-13 which means that the diameter is 105, or one hundred thousand times the size of the nucleus!
That may be a bit too abstract for most of us. Let’s try to picture making a “model” of this. Let’s take a golf ball to represent the nucleus; our “electron” would have to be over a mile, or eighteen football fields, away!
But that’s just the linear differential. To represent this in terms of area, we would need square that distance: length times width. To represent this volumetrically (length times width times height), we need (105)3 or 1015, a numerical relationship which is virtually impossible for us to grasp! It is the same relationship that one second would have to 30 million years!
So as I confidently trust that my chair will hold my weight, and yet you might insist that there really “isn’t anything there,” you would be closer to describing the actual reality by that same physical relationship: the ratio of a mere second to 30 million years!
As atoms bond to other atoms to make up a molecule, it is their electrical relationships that create the ostensible solidity (or liquidity) that we sense in the apparent reality around us.
As we explore further the nature of the tiny particles that create the illusion of our reality, it gets worse. The world of “smallness” has its own, most peculiar, boundaries.
If we take any length, we assume that we can divide it in half. We could retain a half, and then divide it again, discarding the remainder. We take the remaining half, and divide it again, discarding the remainder. We naturally assume that we could—at least conceptually—do this forever, dividing ever smaller remainders, etc. However, we would discover that when we reach a defining minimum—known as the “Planck length” 10-33 cm.—we would encounter any attempts to divide that remainder would result in a property known as “non-locality”: being connected to everywhere at once!
It has now been proven that all “non-local” particles throughout our apparent universe are somehow intimately, directly, connected simultaneously: negligible “travel time” is involved between them![xii]
Everything we encounter: length, mass, energy, even time—are all composed of indivisible units, commonly designated “quanta.” This field of study is called “Quantum Physics” and its philosophical implications can be shattering to our presuppositions about our “reality.” We now discover that the physical reality that surrounds us is only a virtual simulated reality—made up of indivisible, electrically charged particles: in fact, we exist within a digital electrical simulation!
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO:
HAS OUR WORLD COME UNDER THE SWAY OF AN ANCIENT ENCHANTRESS? JONATHAN CAHN EXPLAINS ASTONISHING EMERGENCE!
Hyperdimensional Implications?
One of the growing concerns, at the very frontier of our physical sciences, is the discovery that some of the “constants” of physics appear to be changing! The pursuit of measuring these ostensible changes is far more challenging than might first appear. One of the implications of such changes is that “Our universe may be but a shadow of a larger reality.”[xiii] We will designate that “larger reality” the Metacosm.[xiv]
Dr. Einstein, while grappling with the nature of space and time, made history by recognizing that we live in four dimensions: three spatial dimensions plus time. The reality that time is a physical property—which varies with mass, acceleration, and gravity, among other factors—is not only what led to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, it was a discovery that totally alters our understanding of our own existence. We no longer are restricted to the myopia of Euclidean geometry of only three dimensions.
Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time is curved by the presence of matter, producing a universe whose geometry is Riemannian rather than Euclidean, in which bodies travel in geodesics (shortest paths) which are the curved orbits interpreted by Newton as a result of some attractive force.
(It is interesting, and not without its own significance, that the Apostle Paul listed the four dimensions in his Epistle to the Ephesians.)[xv]
It was tragic that Dr. Einstein went to his death frustrated that he was unable to reconcile his theories with light and other factors. If he had applied his fundamental insight by reaching to yet higher dimensions, he might have discovered what Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein (and, subsequently, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills) uncovered in the following years by going to five and higher dimensional equivalents. Kaluza noticed that when he solved Albert Einstein’s equations for general relativity using five dimensions, then James Clark Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism simplified elegantly.
Current assumptions among the quantum physicists today is that we live in (at least) ten dimensions—four are directly discernable, but six are only inferable indirectly since they are “curled” in less than the shortest wavelengths of light.
(It is also rather provocative that Nachmonides, an ancient Hebrew sage writing in the thirteenth century, concluded, from his study of the text of the Book of Genesis, that our universe has ten dimensions; however, only four of them are “knowable” and six of them—in his words—were not directly “knowable.” We have spent many millions of dollars on atomic accelerators to arrive at an equivalent conclusion.)
(It is corollary study to discover how the biblical text anticipates virtually all of our current technologies and predicaments; but that’s another series for another time. There are some biblical scholars that attribute the fracturing of our ten-dimensional universe into 4 + 6 as a result of the curse in Genesis 3 which will be restored in Revelation 21. But that, too, is a topic for another time.)
It is difficult to identify practical examples of hyperdimensional excursions outside the conceptual regions of advanced mathematics. For example, a tesseract is a four-dimensional cube, unraveled into three dimensions. The only place I have found an actual use of one is in Salvador Dali’s painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus). (I was startled to discover that he had the advanced mathematical insight so appropriate for that application!)
Encounters with hyperspaces—spaces with more than three dimensions—may involve phenomena which we call “paranormal” or “supernatural.” Paranormal events may be the result of trans-dimensional interactions. Metaphors reign where mysteries reside.
Such themes have become popular in our entertainments, such as science fiction movies (Thirteenth Floor; Matrix; et al) where the participants discover that they are simply “program units” within a simulated virtual environment. However, it is disturbing to discover that we, too, are apparently in an equivalent predicament: being a pawn in a virtual reality, being caught in a game played by others from outside our own existence.
This puts an unusual premium on the tools and resources we need to evaluate our true condition, and to gain a glimpse into our own destiny. It translates our academic interest into a prerequisite for survival. How does one calibrate or evaluate trans-dimensional events from inside “the box”?
The Margins of the Metacosm
Does the “Paranormal” lie within the margins between the “Metacosm” and the virtual reality established by the digital simulation?
Which of apparent phenomena are trans-dimensional events? Why should we be surprised by trans-dimensional phenomena when we get glimpses of them in cloud chambers of the physicists? How much of our discounted history is the record of trans-dimensional events? How much of our understanding will rely on competence in hyperspatial constructs and characteristics? How will our Euclidian presuppositions limit our horizons when encountering Riemannian geometry? What are the tools to discern between insights and discoveries and the deceits and illusions?
Upon serious reflection, it becomes even more urgent: Is the “metacosm” a docile place, or is it the theater of a larger cosmic warfare? Are we the pawns or the prize? What are our resources? What are our risks? Is one of the principle weapons deceit? Delusions with their own agenda?
As we peruse the subsequent entries of this series, let’s blindfold our prejudices from the myths of the past, and let’s approach these areas with a humility borne of a broader perspective. Let’s, indeed, take a peak outside and look beyond the comfort of the four-dimensional playpen we’ve been confined to…but let’s also appreciate the risks.
There may be an enormous amount of information available if we are to have the perceptions to gain a valid perspective. But the stakes may be far more significant than we suspect, and they also may preempt our most cherished priorities.
“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Good hunting.
UP NEXT: The Spirit of Nosferatu and October’s Children of the Damned
[i] The time this author spent in the affiliated environment between this employer, UCLA, and the E-ring of the Pentagon, left an enduring legacy that impacted his subsequent thirty-year career among twelve public boardrooms of America.
[ii] Deterministic rather than stochastic algorithms.
[iii] Macrocosm/microcosm is a Greek compound of μακρο- (“macro-“) and μικρο- (“micro-“), which are Greek respectively for “large” and “small,” and the word κόσμος kósmos which means “order” as well as “world” or “ordered world.”
[iv] Such as galaxy NGC 4319 and its companion Markarian 205.
[v] Halton Arp (Edwin Hubble’s assistant, a long-time observer at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson telescopes: his photographs contradict the Big Bang theories).
[vi] Robert Burnham Jr., Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System (Dover, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1978).
[vii] Donald E. Scott, The Electric Sky: A Challenege to the Myths of Modern Astronomy (Portland, OR: Mikamar Publishing, 2006).
[viii] Not to be confused with the Large Hadron Collider project which we will discuss later.
[ix] GEO 600 is capable of detecting gravitational waves in the frequency range 50 Hz–1.5 kHz. Construction on the project began in 1995.
[x] Reported in New Scientist, January 15, 2009.
[xi] He garnered significant sympathetic support: Roger Penrose of Oxford, the creator of the modern theory of black holes; Bernard d’Espagnat of the University of Paris; leading authorities on foundations of quantum theory; and Brian Josephson of University of Cambridge, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics.
[xii] Alain Aspect is the physicist who performed the key experiment that established that if you want a real universe, it must be non-local (Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”). Aspect comments on new work by his successor in conducting such experiments, Anton Zeilinger and his colleagues, who have now performed an experiment that suggests that “giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.” “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007; “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007: also, The Journal of Scientific Exploration (Issue 21-3) by Professors Richard Conn Henry and Stephen R. Palmquist.
[xiii] “Are our constants constant?” The Scientific American, June 2005.
[xiv] Meta- (from Greek: μετά = “after,” “beyond,” “with,” “adjacent,” “self”), is a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
[xv] Ephesians 3:18.
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