New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Category: New Science/Consciousness

  • The Ancient Art of Memory & the Modern Science of Dreaming

    The Ancient Art of Memory & the Modern Science of Dreaming

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 10 No 4 (Aug 2016)

    I’m old enough to remember a time before we knew that birds were just a modern form of dinosaurs. Like many children in the 1970s, I thought dinosaurs were the coolest things ever, partly because they were so remote in time, so very extinct. But to later find out what palaeontologists were just then realising, that these ancient monsters were still around us everywhere, always audible outside the window, was mind-blowing and inspiring in a whole new way.

    Something similar is true of much ‘ancient wisdom’. Lore that we may assume has been long forgotten often turns out to have just morphed into something different. In some cases, it still survives in places, or in disguises, that we might least suspect. This is true of my favourite piece of ancient knowhow, one that has been centrally important in my life and learning for three decades: the astonishingly effective memorisation method practiced by scholars and orators in pre-literate, pre-Gutenberg times.

    Few know about this technique anymore, but I was lucky to read about it when I was in college at the University of Colorado in the 1980s. A lecturer recommended I read a book called The Art of Memory by Frances Yates,1 saying it was literally the most interesting book he’d ever read. That sounded like a pretty good recommendation – so I headed over to the university bookstore and picked up a copy. Reading it that evening at home, I felt like I was being initiated into a whole new way of thinking, not only about the mind and history, but also about film, visual arts, literature, psychology. It felt like an initiation, and was really one of those life-changing reading experiences.

    We speak today of the ‘reading experience’, but for people in the ancient world and Middle Ages – the time period of Yates’ study – texts were precious, rare objects, and the aim of reading, if you could read, was not to have a fleeting and diverting experience with a book before moving on to the next one. A travelling scholar studying a rare volume in the library of some wealthy patron may never get another chance to look at that book. Even a monk or priest would have very limited opportunities to read the Bible. But amazingly, learned men in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Middle Ages, actually knew many books by heart; their minds were well-organised libraries of texts that, in their studies and travels, they had the good fortune to hold and read and study. In debates, they could assemble and arrange evidence, quoting long passages by heart, without a scrap of paper in front of them.

    The method was actually easy: If you wanted to remember an idea or fact, you just needed to break the fact down into its parts, substitute each part with some other thing it called to mind for you, and then assemble those things together into an arresting little tableau or scene. To remember a whole speech or sermon, you just ‘placed’ a sequence of those images, in your imagination, along a route through a familiar or well-memorised environment like your home or public plaza. Then, when the time came to deliver your discourse, you took a mental stroll through the same space, visiting each vivid image in sequence, ‘retrieving’ the facts or ideas you had planted there.

    Here’s an example: A college student needs to learn a long list of major milestones in European history for an exam. The study handout lists names and dates and facts that might be on the test like “The Normans invaded England in 1066.” On their own, the bare facts, Normans, England, 1066, may mean little or nothing to the student – she doesn’t know what a Norman invader looks like; like most numbers, the date 1066 might as well be a random string of digits; and she has never been to England, although she has a lot of impressions from TV and magazines constantly showing Prince William and his wife and children. If she is lucky, though, our hypothetical student may have been taught the basic tricks of the art of memory by a teacher or adviser at some point: The idea is to use all her random, stupid, personal associations and make a mental picture from them.

    So, say our student is a maven of 60s rock trivia and knows the years of every Bob Dylan album like the back of her hand. The year 1066 thus might immediately call to her mind 1966, the year Blonde on Blonde was released. And while she may not know what an actual historical Norman looked like, she does have an uncle named Norman. Instead of repressing such absurd and irrelevant connections as they occur to her while she’s staring at her study handout, a clever, mnemonically-trained student will actually allow her naturally playful mind to make and even embellish those associations on the fly – allowing, perhaps, a mental image of a weirdly blond-haired version of her uncle (who in real life has black hair), wearing a cheap Darth Vader cloak and mask (i.e., ‘in Vader’; the ‘cheap mask’ instead of a full helmet allows us to see his blond hair) slicing Prince William in half with a stroke of his light sabre. For all the other events and dates on the study sheet, she creates a similarly bizarre and, yes, idiotic image, using the same principles, and then mentally plants these little dioramas at intervals along some familiar route, such as the path from her dorm to her history class.

    She will, I promise you, ace the test.

    When Yates first wrote her book (also in 1966), she took a somewhat sceptical attitude: Although there was clearly something magical about this technique, and while its famous practitioners like the Hermetic freethinker Giordano Bruno boasted amazing feats with it, it didn’t make sense to her. She assumed creating new images to remember facts would actually require more effort at memorisation, not less. But the psychological study of memory over the last half century has revealed why the ancient methods really did work a lot better than cramming stuff into our heads by rote repetition.

    Memory works by association – the linking of information not by logic but by how things look or sound alike (for instance puns and rhymes); where they fit in some arbitrary sequence like a list or a song; or even what we were doing, where we were, or how we felt when we learned about them. When searching our mental archive for information, we find what we need by quickly following trains of very personal and idiosyncratic links – like what we were eating for breakfast when we heard a particularly interesting piece of news on the radio. It’s that associative illogic that, counterintuitively, makes our memories strong, because it enables us to quickly access needed information by many alternative paths. Your cortex is a vast multidimensional net of illogical interconnections, spanning the length and breadth of your experience on earth.

    When that college student is creating an image of her uncle in a Darth Vader costume killing Prince William, she isn’t really creating anything new she needs to remember along with the historical fact of the Norman invasion; she is taking stuff already in her memory, the first associations that just naturally and effortlessly pop to mind, and hooking them to each other by slightly distorting them, the way you might attach two lengths of wire by bending the ends. It’s like a little playful mental art project. It takes little effort to concoct such images, and it takes zero effort to remember them. Because of their absurdity, they stick in mind automatically.

    The biographies of modern geniuses like Einstein show that, even when they don’t know they are doing it, they are essentially using the art of memory, treating information as toys or materials to be creatively transformed, not intimidating data to be crammed into the head by brute force.

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    The Royal Road

    Like I said, it is always exciting to learn about the wisdom of the ancients – I’ve been practicing the art of memory for decades and it has paid off in countless ways, along with the thrill of feeling like I’m privy to an ages-old secret. It is even more exciting, though, to realise this ancient wisdom is still alive in the most unexpected places. What if we are all memory wizards like Giordano Bruno, and don’t even know it? Consider: Uncle Norman attacking Prince William while wearing a Darth Vader costume is just the sort of surreal image we might encounter at night in our dreams. Is there some connection between dreaming and the art of memory?

    The strangely sensible bizarreness of dreams has led reasonable people at all times and in all cultures to assume that these nightly visions and visitations have some kind of important role to play in our lives. In 1900, Sigmund Freud famously wed the folk wisdom that dreams are symbolically meaningful with the then-new scientific study of mental process in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams.2 He argued that dreams are symbolic tableaux staging the fulfilment of our repressed wishes. It was the keystone of his big idea that the unconscious mind contains secrets that can make us ill, or at least make us confused and unhappy, until they are brought out into the light of day. Dreams, he said, were the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious.

    Freud’s theory is hard to test scientifically, though, and with the assumption that there is some secret desire being expressed, it is easy to twist Freudian dream interpretations to mean whatever the patient, or doctor, wants them to mean. The ‘wish fulfilment’ idea is also a bit of a stretch, which even Freud began to realise later in his life, when studying the dreams of war veterans: Some dreams are thoroughly unpleasant – definitely not showing us our deep desires. For these and other reasons, psychologists and brain scientists in the second half of the 20th century mostly rejected Freud and went in a totally different direction, searching for a biological basis of dreaming. In doing so, they tried hard to discredit the mystical-sounding idea that dreams contained symbolic meanings that you could interpret like a poem, or decode the way a spy might extract the hidden meaning from a cipher.

    Over the decades, brain scientists have produced many, usually pretty dull theories about why we dream – for instance, they are just random brain noise, or they somehow prepare us to deal with threats. But circumstantial evidence has accumulated gradually, from lots of different sources, that there may be an inner logic in dreams after all, and that logic has something to do with reinforcing old memories and making new ones.

    In laboratory experiments, people who have been exposed to new information remember it better after ‘sleeping on it’ than if they don’t; and studies also show that during sleep, complex material learned during the day is simplified, made easier to understand. Animal species most dependent on their parents at birth, like birds and humans and many other mammals, show much more REM sleep than species born fully able to function, like reptiles. (In other words, the more an animal needs to learn in order to survive in the world, the more its brain is active at night, and the more it dreams.) Rodent studies have shown that brain areas activated during daytime exploration and learning are reactivated during sleep. We additionally know that the hippocampus, long recognised to play a key role in making new memories, is extremely active while we slumber.

    There is also growing evidence that important episodes and upheavals in our day are metabolised at night, specifically during the roughly two and a half hours we spend during REM sleep, when we are dreaming most vividly. It thus makes sense that the vividly bizarre images in dreams could directly reflect this nightly process of memory-making. Yet, the fact that dreams are bizarre and usually don’t realistically relate to events in our daily life has been a sticking point in figuring out what their exact connection to memory might be.

    A big part of the problem is that scientists are usually too busy (and science-minded) to venture out of the science stacks in their library. It was only in 2013 that a psychologist named Sue Llewellyn at Manchester Business School realised that the ancient art of memory, well known to cultural historians, might be the missing piece of the puzzle of dreams.3 She saw that the bizarre content in dreams seems to bear the same relationship to real-life events in our lives that a scene of Uncle Norman in a Darth Vader costume attacking Prince William bears to the fact of the Norman Invasion in 1066. Dreams, she suggested, are basically just the ancient art of memory operating automatically while we sleep. They don’t literally re-present events that happened in our day; instead they show us our private associations to those events. Those associations are the new connecting material being formed nightly in our brains, linking those recent events to older, deeper priorities and older memories.

    Getting Ahead

    The new mnemonic theory of dreaming makes brilliant sense of several old commonplaces about dreams, such as why they so often involve sex, why they so often contain clever witticisms and puns, and why they are usually so hard to remember.

    Because dreams have so much sex and suggestive genital symbolism in them, Freud thought they must be basically about our repressed sexual desires. But if dreams actually serve a mnemonic function, then we might expect sexual motifs to be so prevalent simply because exciting emotions make things more memorable. This is a well-known fact about memory; in fact, sex was an important part of the ancient art of memory for exactly that reason. Most of the teachers kept quiet on this aspect of it, but one Renaissance memory teacher, Peter of Ravenna, admitted that sexy imagery was one of his trade secrets: “I usually fill my memory-places with the images of beautiful women, which excite my memory,” he said. “If you wish to remember quickly, dispose the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places; the memory is marvellously excited by images of women…”4

    In our more enlightened day, you can of course substitute ‘whatever turns your crank’ for Peter’s “beautiful virgins.” The point is not that women are sex objects, but that whatever for you is a sex object is also an ideal memory hook.

    Another common feature in dreams is brilliant wordplay, especially puns. For instance, a friend of mine once told me a disturbing dream in which she attended a dinner party thrown by her older sister, where she was horrified to see her sister’s head resting on an appetiser tray. I knew my friend was annoyed by her sister’s recent accomplishments, such as getting married and purchasing a home (neither of which my friend was close to doing), so there was nothing really mysterious about my friend’s dream image: Her sister was ahead. Her jaw dropped when I pointed this out.

    The puns in dreams often link multiple associations and enlist all our senses, not just the sounds of words. There are sight gags, as well as emotional and multisensory puns and situations that ‘rhyme’ with those in real life. Of course, witty wordplay is central to the consciously applied arts of memory too: Using Uncle Norman to stand for the Norman invaders is a kind of pun, as is putting Norman in a Darth Vader costume to make him an invader.

    Freud thought that multilayered puns helped dreams say a lot with a little – the same principle in jokes – and here the mnemonic theory is in complete agreement. Freud might have suggested that my friend’s dream image brilliantly stated the case that her sister was ‘ahead’ along with the hope that the sister’s accomplishments were nothing but a trivial prelude (an appetiser) to my friend’s own later achievements – and maybe there was a little sibling ‘death wish’ thrown in as well. The multiple trains of association radiating out from a single dream image represent multiple paths in the brain’s associative network, which keep some idea – in this case, ‘I kind of hate my sister because she’s ahead of me’ – alive and available in the dreamer’s thoughts.

    But why, if dreams’ purpose is memory, are they among hardest of our experiences to remember? We dream for about two and a half hours each night but are lucky to recall just one or two brief dreams every morning, if any. Unless you write them down, even those have usually faded by breakfast. It’s not so strange if you think about it: The thing we are supposed to remember is our memories of yesterday. Dreams make yesterday, the same way the stomach digests our meals and transforms it into the stuff of our bodies. Yesterday is more vivid to me today than it was before I slept, because of that activity of dreaming, which created and solidified the pathways in my brain that lead to those memories. Nature may not really mean us to see or remember our dreams per se, any more than it means us to see the contents of our stomach… and when we do, something may be wrong.

    I like to think of dreams as the scaffolding and cranes at a construction site: They quickly dismantle themselves – they just vanish – once the building they are constructing is finished. The same is true of the images created in the art of memory: I can rattle off my debit card number over the phone without looking at my card, and I no longer even remember the weird sequence of images I used to remember it a few years ago – something about a sailboat and a big tongue, I believe. I think there were also some naked people. (For a guide to the art of memory, including a simple system to remember strings of numbers, see my online article, “The Art of Memory: Why It Is the Coolest Thing Ever and Why You Should Learn It Today” at http://thenightshirt.com/?page_id=186).

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    Childhood’s Beginning

    Get in touch with your inner dreamer. Write down your dreams in detail as soon as you can in the morning – every person, object, and situation, and every noteworthy or odd detail you notice. Then for every noticed element, take a moment to note the first one or two things or situations that pop into mind that it reminds you of. Be honest and don’t force it. With a moment’s free association, a dream element that may seem bizarre at first glance will usually point surprisingly to a recent situation or current preoccupation in your life, and going through this process for an entire dream will reveal astonishing connections to more distant memories, popular culture, and all kinds of forgotten stuff in your mental attic. You can fill pages and pages of journal on a single dream.

    Dream-thought is so wild and brilliant, so beyond our daily button-down intelligence, that people unused to observing their dreams have a hard time accepting that their own ordinary minds could be responsible for creating these Shakespeare-worthy stories. This probably accounts for why dreams have often been felt to have divine origins, and why today many people don’t remember their dreams at all – that kind of playfulness and genius simply doesn’t fit into who we think we are or who we think we should be. But there’s no reason not to own it; it’s our brains doing it, and it is who we are.

    And don’t limit your dreamwork to dreaming. Get in the habit of making your own dreams, by practicing the art of memory. It builds flexibility and creativity and can quickly turn you into an amazing storehouse of knowledge. People will wonder how you know so much, and more importantly it coaxes that childlike brilliance of dream thought into your daily life so you can apply it creatively to situations. With just a little practice, anybody can re-learn this playful attitude toward knowledge, becoming a memory wizard in the process.

    Childhood didn’t really end, just like the dinosaurs didn’t really go extinct. It just went underground. Through dreamwork and the art of memory you can coax it to the surface very easily.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 10 No 4.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Pimlico, 1996 (1966)
    2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Avon Books, 1965 (1900)
    3. Sue Llewellyn, “Such stuff as dreams are made on? Elaborative encoding, the ancient art of memory, and the hippocampus,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 36, Issue 06, December 2013, 589-607
    4. In Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 2000, 22

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Where Does Consciousness Reside? Eben Alexander & the Brain-Mind Problem

    Where Does Consciousness Reside? Eben Alexander & the Brain-Mind Problem

    This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 9 No 3 (June 2015)

    Why has Eben Alexander’s story caught the public imagination so intensely? Admittedly, not everyone has looked favourably upon his revelations. Much of the materialistic press has groped around to find holes in his arguments (usually by casting aspersions upon his good faith), but their attempts to rebut him have been someplace between weak and nonexistent. As we shall see.

    To begin with, here is one of the most important challenges that Alexander makes to current scientific dogma: his experience strongly suggests that consciousness is not produced (or produced exclusively) by the brain.

    In the simplest possible terms, his argument goes like this. The standard scientific view says that all higher cognition – conscious, human experience – is the result of brain states. Furthermore, different parts of the brain govern different states. Higher cognition is performed mostly by the front part of the brain: the cerebral cortex. If this part of the brain doesn’t function, there is no cognitive experience.

    Alexander’s case shows something different. During his experience, his cortical areas showed no activity, according to the medical apparatus. The parts of the brain associated with higher cognition weren’t working. Thus he should have been in what he appeared to be in – a coma. So far, so good. But in this state he should have had no experience at all.

    That was not what happened. In fact Alexander went through a Dantesque journey starting with an abyssal kind of existence – what in his book he calls the “worm’s-eye view” – and ending in a sublime vision of cosmic illumination and love.

    Maybe you want to say that Alexander was only dreaming. But he shouldn’t even have been dreaming.

    Whatever metaphysical conclusions you might want to draw from his experience, the fact that he had it at all poses a strong challenge to conventional belief about the relation between mind and brain.

    Furthermore, Alexander is a neurosurgeon himself. That means he understands the neurology behind his own case – what the readouts on the machines were saying and what they meant, or should have meant.

    All of this is very difficult to explain away through any simplistic materialism. You might want to say that the brain functions in some way that is wildly different from what is now believed, but then you would have to tell us how it does work.

    Sam Harris, a spokesman for the new atheism, has challenged Alexander’s work in a 2012 blog posting. He quotes Mark Cohen, an expert in neuroimaging at UCLA, who responded thus to Alexander’s case: “Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.”

    Cohen’s statement is fascinating. Let’s look at it in more depth. Statement one: “Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway.” Very true. In fact, science hasn’t even told us what consciousness is. (Scientific attempts at defining it range from the vague to the circular to the hilarious.) Therefore you shouldn’t be too hasty to say when and how it can arise.

    Statement two: “It would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity.” Cohen is using the word “parsimonious” in a good sense. “Parsimonious” here doesn’t mean being stingy. It means being economical in a scientifically responsible way. Being translated, the sentence means, “It would be more scientifically rigorous to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity.”

    The principle behind this reasoning is Ockham’s razor. Just for fun, I’ll give it to you in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” In this context, Cohen can only mean this: we know that consciousness is connected to brain states in many or most instances. Thus it’s more economical to assume that consciousness is always brain-based than to assume that there might also be some cases (like Alexander’s) when it isn’t.

    Why is this more economical? From a logical point of view, it isn’t really. It’s only simpler because it corresponds to current preconceptions. The British philosopher Mary Midgley comments on this type of thinking: “False economy is very common among people who rely too readily on it. As we are seeing, extravagance is not eliminated merely by becoming anti-religious, and thoughts which are designed to be sternly reductive often compensate by strange, illicit expansions elsewhere. In fact when we encounter a specially harsh reduction, officially launched in the name of parsimony, our first question should be ‘and what are these savings being used to pay for?’”

    In this case they’re being used to pay for a refusal to take the question seriously.

    Cohen shows this in his third statement: “Either [Alexander’s] brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.” This comes very close to the most elementary of logical errors – begging the question, since these are precisely the things that we are trying to figure out. They also show some reluctance to look at the data in any depth.

    Granted, Cohen’s responses were probably just off-the-cuff remarks given to Harris for his blog. I dwell on them because they show how cognitive science tends to behave toward the brain-mind issue. Here’s what it’s saying: (1) Actually we don’t know how or if the brain creates consciousness (as Cohen admits). (2) We believe that consciousness is the epiphenomenon of certain brain activities. We also believe that it cannot come from any other source. (3) We do not wish to look at evidence to the contrary.

    Note the contradiction here. It is more a matter of tone and implication rather than of logic per se. It’s true that “science cannot explain consciousness anyway.” The devotees of scientific materialism admit as much. Harris writes: “I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world.”

    But something about this agnosticism doesn’t smell good. Harris goes on: “There are, of course, very good reasons to believe that [consciousness] is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind obviously is.” Suddenly we have gone from agnosticism to the “obvious” – even though it is anything but obvious that the mind is merely an emergent property of brain activity. That question is just as fraught as any of the others we are dealing with here.

    We see the same attitude in religious agnosticism. The agnostic sticks his tongue in his cheek and says, “I don’t know if there’s a God” – but he thinks, talks, and acts as if he knows there isn’t.

    Harris has his own sophisticated answer for Eben Alexander’s experience: it was a DMT trip. The psychedelic drug DMT creates a very short but intense high that makes the subject feel as if he has been zapped into other dimensions. Harris quotes psychedelic guru Terence McKenna: “Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Colour and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience.”

    Harris notes that DMT, unlike many drugs, occurs naturally in the human brain. He writes, “Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex ‘shut down’, freeing his soul to travel to another dimension.”

    It’s not clear how DMT is going to send you on a wild trip when you are in a coma to begin with. To put it another way, you can’t get drunk when you’ve already passed out.

    In short, if you are absolutely dead set against believing something, you are going to do what Harris has done here: grab at any wild possibility (that makes no reference whatsoever to the actual facts of the case) to avoid believing it – at whatever cost to logic or accuracy.

    Much of today’s discussion about the relation between mind and brain shows these symptoms. Even if the materialistic view is right, there is no reason to believe it on the basis of arguments like these.

    Here is the truth, as far as I can see it: the relationship between consciousness and brain states is still very much a matter under investigation. Most of what is said about it has to be followed with a question mark. On the basis of what is now known, it’s premature and irresponsible to say that consciousness must be accompanied by brain activity. Even assuming that it is, is irresponsible.

    Alexander’s case may not serve as definitive proof that human consciousness exists apart from the brain, but it’s an important piece of evidence that can’t be dismissed just because it sounds too mystical.

    I have heard about a certain type of crab. When the fisherman catches it, he puts it in a bucket. He doesn’t put a lid on the bucket. He doesn’t have to – even though the crab is perfectly capable of climbing out. Why? Because whenever one of the crabs tries to get out, the other crabs pull it back down.

    I can’t think of the materialistic worldview without coming back to this image over and over. Whenever someone tries to free himself from this view of reality, the others – who are happy there or at any rate believe they have to be there – try to pull him back down.

    This is a pretty bad situation if you are a crab. It is utterly ridiculous and humiliating if you are a cognitive scientist.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 9 No 3.[/alert]

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    Sources

    Sam Harris, “This Must Be Heaven”; http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/this-must-be-heaven, 12 Oct. 2012; accessed 25 March 2015

    Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, Rev. ed., Routledge, 2002

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  • Does Telepathy Conflict With Science? Many are Starting to Think Not

    Does Telepathy Conflict With Science? Many are Starting to Think Not

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Recently, journalist Steven Volk was surprised to discover that leading skeptical psychologist Richard Wiseman has admitted that the evidence for telepathy is so good that “by the standards of any other area of science, [telepathy] is proven.” Mr Volk goes on to write, “Even more incredibly, as I report in Fringe-ology, another leading skeptic, Chris French, agrees with him.”

    Mr Volk might even be more surprised to learn that back in 1951 psychologist Donald Hebb wrote this:

    Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact? [J.B.] Rhine has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue… Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioural evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it… Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is – in the literal sense – prejudice. (emphasis added.)

    Four years later, George Price, then a research associate at the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the prestigious journal Science that began:

    Believers in psychic phenomena… appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition.… This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians…. Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance.

    But Price then argued, “ESP is incompatible with current scientific theory,” and asked:

    If, then, parapsychology and modern science are incompatible, why not reject parapsychology? …The choice is between believing in something “truly revolutionary” and “radically contradictory to contemporary thought” and believing in the occurrence of fraud and self-delusion. Which is more reasonable?

    So, here we have two skeptics in effect admitting that if this were any other field of inquiry then the experimental data would have carried the day by 1950.

    Like Price and Hebb before them, both Wiseman and French hold that the claim of telepathy is so extraordinary that we need a greater level of evidence than we normally demand. Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”

    It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”: 56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

    Polls such as this suggest that most scientists are curious and open-minded about psi. This, however, does not seem to be the case in one field: psychology. In the former study only 3 percent of natural scientists considered ESP “an impossibility,” compared to 34 percent of psychologists. In fact, the most prominent skeptics of psychic abilities today – such as Wiseman, French, James Alcock, Susan Blackmore, and Ray Hyman – are psychologists. An exception is biologist Richard Dawkins, but like Wiseman and French, he is also on record as saying the existence of telepathy would “turn the laws of physics upside down.”

    Psychologist James Alcock recently wrote that the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance of the modern scientific worldview. That by itself does not mean that parapsychology is in error, but as the eminent neuropsychologist Donald Hebb pointed out, if the claims of parapsychology prove to be true, then physics and biology and neuroscience are horribly wrong in some fundamental respects.”

    But neither Alcock, Hebb, Wiseman nor French ever bother to explain how the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance” of science, or how “physics and physiology say that ESP is not a fact.” Indeed, it is rare for a skeptic to ever back up this claim with specific examples. As I show in my book Science and Psychic Phenomena, on those rare occasions they do, they invariably invoke the principles of classical physics, which have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three quarters of a century.

    However, a number of leading physicists such as Henry Margenau, David Bohm, Brian Josephson, and Olivier Costra de Beauregard have repeatedly pointed out that nothing in quantum mechanics forbids psi phenomena. Costra de Beauregard even maintains that the theory of quantum physics virtually demands psi phenomena exist. And physicist Evan Harris Walker has developed a theoretical model of psi based upon von Neumann’s formulation of quantum mechanics.

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    Ray Hyman’s 1996 argument (in the Skeptical Inquirer) that the acceptance of psi would require we “abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations” is thereby shown to be nonsense. Contrast Hyman’s statement with that of theoretical physicist Costa de Beauregard, who has written “relativistic quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme where phenomena such as psychokinesis or telepathy, far from being irrational, should, on the contrary, be expected as very rational.”

    As mentioned earlier, adherence to an outmoded metaphysics of science seems much more prevalent among psychologists than physicists. Skeptics such as psychologist Susan Blackmore are fond of saying that the existence of psi is incompatible “with our scientific worldview” – but with which scientific worldview? Psi is certainly incompatible with the old scientific worldview, based on Newtonian mechanics and behaviourist psychology. It is not incompatible with the emerging scientific worldview based upon quantum mechanics, the neurosciences, and cognitive psychology.

    Even before quantum mechanics began to supersede classical mechanics in the 1920s, many physicists were much more open to investigating psi phenomena than most psychologists seem today. An astonishing number of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century expressed interest in psychic research, including: William Crookes, inventor of the cathode ray tube, used today in televisions and computer monitors; J.J. Thomson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for the discovery of the electron; and Lord Rayleigh, considered one of the greatest physicists of the late 19th century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904.

    Of course, for their efforts in investigating these and other unusual phenomena, these men were often criticised and ridiculed mercilessly by their colleagues.

    But modern physics is very different from the classical physics of the 19th century, and it is time the skeptical psychologists realised this. The great psychologist Gardner Murphy, president of the American Psychological Association, and later of the American Society for Psychical Research, urged his fellow psychologists to become better acquainted with modern physics:

    …the difficulty is at the level of physics, not at the level of psychology. Psychologists may be a little bewildered when they encounter modern physicists who take these phenomena in stride, in fact, take them much more seriously than psychologists do, saying, as physicists, that they are no longer bound by the types of Newtonian energy distribution, inverse square laws, etc., with which scientists used to regard themselves as tightly bound…. psychologists probably will witness a period of slow, but definite, erosion of the blandly exclusive attitude that has offered itself as the only appropriate scientific attitude in this field. The data from parapsychology will be almost certainly in harmony with general psychological principles and will be assimilated rather easily within the systematic framework of psychology as a science when once the imagined appropriateness of Newtonian physics is put aside, and modern physics replaces it.

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    Sources

    J.E. Alcock, Parapsychology: Science or Magic?, New York: Pergamon, 1981
    J.E. Alcock, “Parapsychology: the Spiritual Science”, Free Inquiry, 5 (2), 1985, 25-35
    Olivier Costa de Beauregard, “Quantum Paradoxes and Aristotle’s Twofold Information Concept,” in Laura Oteri, editor, Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975), 91-102
    Olivier Costa de Beauregard, “The Expanding Paradigm of the Einstein Theory”, in A. Puharich, editor, The Iceland Papers (Amherst: Essentia Research Associates, 1979), 161-191
    Christopher Evans, “Parapsychology – what the questionnaire revealed”, New Scientist, 25, January 1973, 209
    Hyman, The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality, Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996, 24-26
    George R. Price, “Science and the Supernatural”, Science, Volume 122, number 3165, August 1955, 359-367
    Mahlon Wagner & Mary Monet, “Attitudes of College Professors Toward Extra-Sensory Perception,” Zetetic Scholar, 1979, 5, 7-16
    E.H. Walker, “The Quantum Theory of Psi Phenomena”, Psychoenergetic Systems, Vol. 3, 1979, 259-299

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  • Time, Entanglement & Consciousness

    Time, Entanglement & Consciousness

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Over the past year [2011-2012] a number of new, potentially momentous, discoveries have been made in the realms of quantum and particle physics. On the one hand, they stand to rock the very foundations of modern physics and the common-sense reality that most people live their everyday lives by. On the other hand, these same discoveries lend further support to the reality of both paranormal phenomena and the literal veracity of ancient wisdom. In particular, I am here referring to three recent announcements:

    1) In late April 2012 a research team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology reported on an experiment involving the generation of light pulses travelling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This work involved forcing a wave peak on a pulse of light to move from back to front along the light beam as the light itself was travelling at the standard speed of light, such that the pulse travelled faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.1 If refined, such a technique could possibly allow information to be sent faster than the speed of light. This work follows on the heels of a major brouhaha over another alleged instance of faster than light speeds.

    A consortium of scientists reported in September and November 2011 that subatomic particles known as neutrinos had been measured travelling faster than the speed of light while passing through 730 kilometres of rock from the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, formerly known as the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, to the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) particle detector in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy.2

    Standard modern mainstream physics theories, many based in large part on Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (first proposed in 1905), have long assumed that the speed of light in a vacuum is the upper limit of how fast anything can travel, and therefore if these experimental results are correct, some of the most basic assumptions in modern physics will need to be reevaluated.

    For months the debate raged over whether the neutrinos really were travelling faster than the speed of light; the consensus view held that there was some flaw in the apparatus, calculations, and/or analysis. Ultimately, based on carrying out further experiments, including at other labs, it was announced that “the original OPERA measurement can be attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibre optic timing system.”3 Still, given the apparently solid work on light pulses mentioned above, I personally wonder if, just perhaps, OPERA did indeed capture some superluminal (faster than the speed of light) neutrinos, even if not all neutrinos travel so fast.

    A major objection to the possibility of superluminal travel of any form is that it will upset cherished notions of time and temporal ordering (conventional thinking asserts that the past must occur before the present which must occur before the future). From our perspective, particles (including particles of light, or ‘particles’ of information) travelling faster than light might be viewed as travelling backwards in time (arriving one place before they depart from another place), or through other dimensions, and open the possibility of effects occurring before causes (although exactly what ‘before’ means in this new notion of time is open to debate). That is, the concept of retrocausality (the future influencing the present and the past), which many people (including many theoretical physicists) instinctively reject, would have to be taken seriously.

    2) In quantum mechanics the concept of entanglement occurs when particles interact and are then separated, but they are still somehow correlated (or more accurately, anti-correlated) in terms of their characteristics. Acting on one particle will result in an effect or outcome on the other particle, even if a considerable distance physically separates the particles and there is no direct conventional physical or energetic link between them. To use a crude analogy, if two different roulette wheels in two different casinos are entangled in a quantum mechanical sense, whenever one roulette wheel comes up red the other will come up black.

    Einstein referred to quantum entanglement as “spukhafte Fernwirkung” (spooky action at a distance), but it has been demonstrated experimentally numerous times, and the effects of entanglement seem to propagate either instantaneously or at a speed thousands of times faster than the speed of light (which is highly perplexing). Up until now quantum entanglement has generally been limited to very small microscopic objects, such as subatomic particles, atoms, isolated molecules, and microscopic crystalline structures. In December 2011 a group of physicists from the University of Oxford, the National Research Council of Canada, and the National University of Singapore announced the successful quantum entanglement of two macroscopic (approximately 3 mm in size) diamonds at room temperature and separated by a distance of about 15 cm.4

    3) The wave function in quantum mechanics can be viewed as a mathematical or statistical way to describe the probabilities that certain properties will occur in a system of quantum particles (and ultimately, one can argue, everything – all of the known universe – can be reduced to a system or systems of quantum particles). And ‘quantum collapse’ (collapse of the state vector) can be viewed as the ‘freezing’ of this set of probabilities into one possibility or outcome, the one observed or measured, in the ‘real world’. But is the wave function simply, or truly, just a mathematical and statistical convention describing our limited knowledge of reality (perhaps with some currently unknown ‘reality’ underlying it)? Is the wave function to be understood as a description of the state of our knowledge? Or is the wave function itself a ‘real’ entity, a distinct state of reality – that is, is there a tangible, physically real, wave? Is the quantum state a real physical property of a system and not just a statistical description of our knowledge, and does ‘quantum collapse’ correspond to a real physical process?

    In November 2011 researchers M. F. Pusey, J. Barrett, and T. Rudolph (MFP and TR are in the Department of Physics at the Imperial College London, and JB is in the Department of Mathematics at the University of London) presented a new analysis and theorem as to the meaning of the wave function in quantum mechanics.5 According to their analysis, given some basic assumptions, the wave function must have a physical reality. However, in my opinion, they have not ultimately ‘proven’ that the wave function is objectively real. Rather, they have logically limited the possible interpretations of the wave function. By my view, their analysis appears to demonstrate that unless all quantum particles (that is, in effect, all entities in the universe) are somehow related or connected to each other through both space and time, then the wave function must be a real physical object. They seem to reject the notion that everything in the universe could be connected in some manner, for it is generally assumed that although quantum entanglement occurs in some cases, not everything is entangled with everything else. Furthermore, it appears to me that one of the assumptions underlying the analysis of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph is that retrocausality (the possibility of the future affecting the past) is impossible.

    Each of these three developments in physics is important, and fundamentally paradigm shattering. The least controversial of the three is the quantum entanglement of the diamonds, for the experimental results are clear and definitive. But the entanglement of macroscopic diamonds at ordinary room temperature under ordinary conditions demonstrates, I believe, that those who have long argued that quantum entanglement (and other ‘mysterious’ quantum effects as well) is limited to the microscopic world and can have no real consequences in our everyday lives are wrong.

    Quantum Entanglement & Telepathy

    Indeed, in a general (and, I would add, rather unconvincing) way, there has long been talk in some circles that certain psychic or paranormal phenomena such as telepathy (direct mind-to-mind communication) could be due to quantum entanglement.6 Now the entangled diamonds appear to provide strong evidence that such entanglement and correlation of information is possible. In my experience telepathy tends to work best when one is in a mental state decoupled from the immediate surrounding environment, which allows the mind of one individual to couple or entangle with the mind of another individual (or individuals). Like minds in telepathic rapport, diamonds best maintain their quantum entanglement when they can be decoupled from ‘distractions’ or the entanglement is stronger than the ‘distractions’ (in the case of the diamonds, ‘distractions’ might include such phenomena as being ‘excited’ by environmental changes, like temperature or physical movement). Of course most hardcore physicists tend to dismiss telepathy as nonsense even though they accept the quantum entanglement of diamonds.

    Solid Support for Retrocausality

    The issue of anything with the ability to carry information travelling faster than the speed of light, be it particles or light pulses, is highly controversial. As the edifice of modern physics has been constructed, with so many fundamental equations dependent on the speed of light as a constant and upper limit for temporal relationships, superluminal transfer of information breaks down the conventional concept of time, the future and past become confused, and the spectre of retrocausality raises its ugly head (well, ugly for status quo thinkers!).

    Yet there is solid support for retrocausality on several fronts. A group centred in Vienna, Austria, headed by Anton Zeilinger, has experimentally demonstrated that the decision as to whether or not two particles at a quantum level are entangled or in separate quantum states can be made after the particles have been measured (and may no longer exist).7 This means that at a quantum level actions in the present or future can reach back into the past!

    However, actions reaching back into the past are not limited to a quantum level. There is now strong parapsychological support for retroactive influences on the human mind. As I briefly mentioned in a previous edition of New Dawn,8 Dr. Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University has carried out a successful series of “retroactive facilitation of recall” experiments demonstrating that the future can influence the present and the past (in the case of the studies by Dr. Bem, students studying for a test after the fact improved their performances on a test already taken – that is, classic retrocausality, or effects occurring before their causes, was demonstrated).9

    As in the case of the entangled diamonds, the experimental physical evidence – in this case light pulses travelling at superluminal speeds and actions at a quantum level reaching back into the past – helps supply a theoretical foundation for psychic or paranormal phenomena that, although well attested to by competent researchers, are generally dismissed by mainstream scientists.

    The theoretical work on the wave function of quantum mechanics dovetails, in my assessment, with that which many mystics and psychics have been espousing since ancient times: In a fundamental way we, the entire universe, all entities, are interconnected at some level (the level of interconnectedness differing among various entities) and time is not what it superficially appears to be. In my opinion the work of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph opens, at the level of quantum mechanics, the age-old argument between the ‘physicalists-materialists’ who fundamentally believe there is nothing more to reality than matter and energy, and those who believe ‘ultimate reality’ involves something more and beyond matter-like and energy-like entities as generally construed by classical physics.

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    Consciousness is Fundamental

    But what could be beyond matter and energy? One possibility is consciousness, and I believe that consciousness can be equated with thought, mind, mental constructs, information, and ultimately knowledge. And rather than being a secondary phenomenon that arises from matter and energy, at the most fundamental level consciousness may be independent of matter and energy. Max Planck (1858-1947), the originator of quantum theory and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics, stated in a 1931 interview:

    I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.10

    This is a very interesting, and powerful, statement. In these terms, the statistical or probabilistic interpretation of the quantum wave function can be viewed as a genuine description of a system in a ‘pre-matter’ and ‘pre-energy’ state that only takes on a physical reality when affected by consciousness (and simple observation will affect any quantum system).

    Returning to the analysis of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph, I believe they conclude that the quantum state and wave function are ‘real’ in a physical-material-energy sense based on several assumptions. They assume that a quantum system can be isolated from the rest of the universe, both spatially and temporally – and in particular they assume that the future will not influence the past, so an apparatus or system separated by “a sufficient time period” will not affect an earlier apparatus or system. They also assume that measuring devices respond only to the physical properties of the entities that they are measuring. If the assumptions of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph can be shown to be wrong, their work can then be interpreted to demonstrate that rather than the wave function and quantum state being physically real, there must be something more to the universe and cosmos beyond simple matter and energy.

    I interpret various lines of experimental evidence, ranging from modern physics (such as the work on faster-than-light particles and quantum effects that may be interpreted as going backwards in time) to parapsychological studies (demonstrating that the future can influence the past), as clearly falsifying the assumptions of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph. At a most fundamental level it appears there are connections throughout space and time. Just as diamonds can be entangled, nothing is truly isolated. Ultimate reality lies beyond the physical and material. What is this ultimate reality? Our best conception may be encoded in what we think of as consciousness. The mystics and sages of the ages, as well as Max Planck, were right. Consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness underlies and is the source of everything else, including all that we regard as the material universe.

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    Footnotes:

    1. Ryan T. Glasser, Ulrich Vogl, and Paul D. Lett, “Stimulated Generation of Superluminal Light Pulses via Four-Wave Mixing”, Physical Review Letters, PRL 108, 173902, 5 pages, 26 April 2012.
    2. T. Adam, N. Agafonova, A. Aleksandrov, O. Altinok, P. Alvarez Sanchez, A. Anokhina, S. Aoki, A. Ariga, et al, “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam”, article dated 17 November 2011, available from http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 and http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf (Accessed 18 November 2011). See also: Adrian Cho, “Where Does the Time Go? One experiment sees neutrinos traveling faster than light. If the result can’t be replicated, it may never be explained away”, Science, vol. 334, 1200-1201 (2 December 2011); Alex Knapp, “New Evidence Casts Doubt On Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos”, article dated 28 December 2011, available from www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/12/28/new-evidence-casts-doubt-on-faster-than-light-neutrinos/ (Accessed 20 January 2012); Clara Moskowitz, “Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Discovery”, article dated 24 September 2011, available from www.livescience.com/16214-implications-faster-light-neutrinos.html (Accessed 20 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Light speed: Flying into fantasy”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034414 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result”, article dated 18 November 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern finds same result”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Natalie Wolchover, “What Would It Be Like to Travel Faster than the Speed of Light?”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/neutrinos-faster-speed-light-2044/ (Accessed 20 November 2011).
    3. Sergio Bertolucci, “Neutrinos sent from CERN to Gran Sasso respect the cosmic speed limit”, article dated 8 June 2012, available from http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html (Accessed 19 June 2012).
    4. K. C. Lee, M. R. Sprague, B. J. Sussman, J. Nunn, N. K. Langford, X.-M. Jin, T. Champion, P. Michelberger, K. F. Reim, D. England, D. Jaksch, and I. A. Walmsley. “Entangling Macroscopic Diamonds at Room Temperature”, Science, vol. 334 no. 6060, 1253-1256 (2 December 2011).
    5. Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph, “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically”, article dated 14 Nov 2011, available from http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328 and http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1111/1111.3328v1.pdf (Accessed 19 January 20120).
    6. Note that phenomena generally regarded as “telepathic” may include a mixture of phenomena due to different causal mechanisms; thus some forms of telepathy may be the result of quantum entanglement and other forms of telepathy may be due to electromagnetic radiation, particularly in the extremely long wavelength and extremely low frequency range.
    7. Xiao-song Ma, Stefan Zotter, Johannes Kofler, Rupert Ursin, Thomas Jennewein, Caslav Brukner, and Anton Zeilinger, “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”, Nature Physics, www.nature.com/naturephysics, DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS2294, 6 pages, published online 22 April 2012; Caslav Brukner, “Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past”, press release date 23 April 2012, available from www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/uov-qpm042312.php (Accessed 8 May 2012).
    8. Robert M. Schoch, “Thoughts Have Wings”, New Dawn, January-February 2011, 11.
    9. Daryl J. Bem, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 100, no. 3, 407-425 (March 2011); abstract available from http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/100/3/407/ (Accessed 20 August 2011); author’s typescript version of the paper available from http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf (Accessed 20 August 2011).
    10. Max Planck, [Interview comments] The Observer (London), 25 January 1931; quoted in Joseph H. Fussell, “Review and Comment” on the book Where is Science Going? by Max Planck (1933), The Theosophical Path, vol. 43, no. 2, 198-213 (October 1933).

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  • Time Travel & The Multiverse – Many Worlds: Many Timelines

    Time Travel & The Multiverse – Many Worlds: Many Timelines

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Time travel has enchanted and intrigued us since the earliest days of fiction, when authors such as H.G. Wells, Samuel Madden, Charles Dickens and Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau stretched and challenged our imaginations with images and tales of men and women who invented amazing machines and devices that could take them back in time, or forward into the future. Because of the restrictions of light speed, and the paradoxes of going back to the past without damaging the future timeline, and a host of other obstacles and challenges, we, in fact, have remained stuck in the present.

    Our scientific knowledge and technological achievement has yet to catch up to the limitless dreams of our imaginations. But perhaps just because we have yet to achieve time travel in our universe, in our particular point along the cosmic arrow of time, doesn’t mean it isn’t achievable… and maybe the key is the universe itself. Are we limiting ourselves to our understanding only of the laws and possibilities of our universe, and leaving out of the equation other realities, other universes, with other laws and forces, paradoxes and limitation, possibilities and potentialities, far beyond our own?

    In 2011, quantum physicists at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by Andrew Cleland and John Martinis, designed a “quantum machine,” as they call it, that might one day lead to proof of time travel and parallel universes. Their machine, a tiny little teleporter barely visible to the naked eye, involves making a tiny metal paddle cool to its ground state, the lowest energy state permissible by the laws of quantum mechanics, and then raising its energy slowly by a single quantum to produce a purely quantum state of motion. They even were able to put the device in both states at once, so it vibrated both slowly and quickly at the same time, in another sort of Schrodinger’s Cat state of superposition. They posited that we can only see one of these potential states at once, and upon the act of observation, the state then splits into additional universes.

    Perhaps there is a plethora of multiple or parallel universes all around us, but we cannot see them.

    Wormholes could also be another possibility for teleportation, as physicist Max Tegmark suggested while attending a panel in January of 2008 at MIT to discuss the science behind the movie Jumper starring Hayden Christiansen, about a man who can teleport all over the world at will. Tegmark, asked about the science behind the science fiction, remarked that a wormhole was one possible way of getting something quickly across space-time. However, after admitting that wormholes do appear to be theoretically possible, Tegmark commented that the actual trip would be rather gruelling because of the instability of the wormhole. “It could collapse into a black hole, which would be kind of a bummer.”

    Many scientists look to the possible existence of other levels of reality, or other universes, as a way to make time travel work outside of the restrictions of light speed and paradoxes. Imagine another universe alongside our own where the laws of physics are so completely different, that what is impossible here is mundane and trivial there. Multiple worlds, even, where each is different from the other, or perhaps an infinite number of universes where many would be exactly like our own. Hey, you might even exist in some of them just the way you are right now. In others, you might be rich, famous, handsome or even a cockroach! In fact, perhaps you might even be invisible in one of them!

    But we are getting away with ourselves here. When talk turns to the multiverse and other similar concepts, it’s easy to start dreaming of science fiction worlds with every possible kind of life and all sorts of amazing machines and devices… and time travellers passing effortlessly back and forth between the past, present and future as if it were nothing more than a visit to a few Saturday morning garage sales.

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    Parallel Universes

    Parallel universes have long been a mainstay of science fiction films and stories. Parallel universes can exist individually, or grouped together as the “multiverse,” and offer the possibility of a totally different reality in which someone, or something, can exist, or hop back and forth between. The laws of nature may be different in one parallel universe as they are in another, and in respect to time travel, would provide multiple versions of the future in which someone could exist, or not exist at all. Light speed limitations may not exist in a parallel universe, and the paradoxes that keep us from travelling back in time would be null and void if we could jump into a different historical timeline.

    Two great fictional examples of a parallel universe would be “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” both of which involve some sort of portal or wormhole, such as a rabbit hole or a large piece of furniture, through which a person can enter into another realm.

    Theoretically, parallel universes may be the result of a single random quantum event that branches off into an alternative universe. This is the “Many Worlds Interpretation” or MWI, of quantum mechanics, originally formulated by physicist Hugh Everett in 1957. It posits that each time a different choice is made at the quantum scale, a universe arises to accommodate that choice, thus creating infinite new worlds popping up all the time.

    These new worlds are being constantly created and could cause problems for a potential time traveller. Physicist David Deutsch wrote in “Quantum mechanics near closed timelike curves” for the 1991 Physical Review, that if time travel to the past were indeed possible, the many worlds scenario would result in a time traveller ending up in a different branch of history than the one he departed from. Deutsch, of Oxford University, is a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, and suggests quantum theory does not forbid time travel, but rather sidesteps it, referring to the traveller’s ability to go into another universe, a parallel universe, and avoid the paradox limitations.

    Deutsch’s idea of parallel universes, the multiverse, or “shadow universes” was described in his interview with the Guardian UK in June 2010 (“David Deutsch’s Multiverse Carries Us Beyond the Realm of Imagination”) as being “co-incident with, somehow contiguous with, and weakly interacting with, this one. It is a composite, a layer cake, a palimpsest of universes very similar but not quite identical to each other.”

    The number of these shadow universes could be enormous, and Deutsch points to photon experiments that suggest possibly a trillion of them or more. He also suggests that future-directed time travel will essentially only require efficient rockets, and is on the “moderately distant but confidently foreseeable technological horizon.” When it comes to past travel, the multiverse might save a time traveller from the pesky Grandfather paradox. He uses an example of a writer who wants to go back in time with a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works and help the bard complete Hamlet. It can happen, but in the multiverse view, “the traveller has not come from the future of that copy of Shakespeare.”

    Another off shoot of the MWI is the Many-Minds Interpretation, which extends the MWI by positing that the branching off of worlds occurs in the mind of the individual observer, introduced in 1995 by theoretical physicist H. Dieter Zeh, Professor Emeritus of the University of Heidelberg and the discoverer of decoherence.

    The Many-Minds Interpretation was widely criticised and somewhat ignored, mainly because of issues involving the theory that the mind can supervene on the physical as the mind has its own “trans-temporal identity.” The mind may select one identity as its own non-random “reality,” yet the universe as a whole remains unaffected, which presents additional problems when dealing with different observers ending up with the same measured realities. The actual process by which the mind of the observer would select the single, measured state is not explained by the MMI.

    Alternate timelines, each with their own forward arrow of time and their own history, may exist then, allowing time travellers to jump into another version of history and override those pesky paradoxes. Imagine being able to jump into a timeline where you do get your dream of marrying your high school sweetheart, but, finding out she’s an evil tramp as soon as you say “I do,” you could jump back into your original historical timeline, where you didn’t marry her and instead ended up three years later marrying her sister, your true soul mate, and lived happily ever after.

    Kaku’s Three Ways to Defeat the Paradoxes of Time Travel

    Noted theoretical physicist Michio Kaku (pictured below), author of Parallel Worlds and Hyperspace, writes in his newest book, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel, of three ways around the paradoxes of time travel. The first is that you simply repeat past history and fulfil the past, and that everything you do once you are back in time was meant to happen anyway, a sort of destiny.

    This opinion is also mirrored in the views of famed physicist and superstring theory proponent Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality and The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Greene writes that outside of the quantum world, in the classical science of the grander scale, we exist static and unchanging at various locations in what he calls the “space-time loaf” of block we call space-time. These moments are unchangeable and fixed. Using a wormhole, if one were to indeed go back in time to a certain point, or date, one would find there is only one version of that date, and that your presence back in time would simply be a part of the original version of that moment. That moment has one incarnation, though. “By passing through the wormhole today and going back to that earlier time you would be fulfilling your ironclad destiny to appear at that earlier moment.” He points to the wormhole time machine itself as the culprit, with one opening or the other passing through time more slowly than the other end, but each opening is still going forward in time. Thus, there will also be a limit as to how far back in time you could travel in the first place.

    The second of Kaku’s paths around the paradoxes involves having some free will to change the past, but within limits, so that you could go back and try to kill your grandfather, but something would prevent you from doing so. The gun might lock up, or you might drop it and shoot your foot instead and end up in the hospital. No matter what, you would somehow be prevented from knocking off your Grandpappy.

    The third involves the universe splitting into two universes to accommodate the time traveller. His example offers someone going back in time to kill their parents, and in one timeline the people look like your parents, but are different because you exist in a different timeline.

    The many worlds approach could solve all the paradoxes in two ways. First, if we imagine the timeline of our universe as a line drawn on a board, then we can draw another line to represent the universe that branches off from the first. When you go back into the river of time, the river forks into two rivers, and one timeline becomes two timelines, and so on, and so on. Say you planned to kill your own father. You go back in time and you do the dirty deed. If the river of time does indeed have many forks, this would not be a problem. “You’ve just killed somebody else’s father. In that timeline, you don’t exist, but you exist because you jumped the stream,” Kaku writes.

    This idea would also solve another thorn in the side of physicists when discussing time travel: the radiation effects of entering a wormhole, which would no doubt destroy any time traveller, and also end up in a loop, the feedback becoming so strong it destroys the wormhole. “If the radiation goes into the time machine, and is sent into the past, it then enters a new universe; it cannot reenter the time machine again, and again, and again.”

    Kaku points out that the main problems involving time travel and wormholes specifically centre on the issues of the physics of the event horizon, as in the stability of the wormhole, the deadly radiation and the wormhole closing once it was entered. Solve those issues and time travel might be a piece of cake!

    Well, not a piece of cake… All physicists agree that once they come up with a Theory of Everything that unites the four universal forces of electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces, and formulate a complete theory of gravity and space-time, then time travel might be as close as finding a wormhole big enough, stable enough and open enough to get a time machine through. Not to mention the sheer amount of energy necessary to do this, which might require harnessing the power and energy of a neutron star, or finding that elusive exotic matter scientists are looking for, or a good source of negative energy, and we are far from doing any of these things.

    Oh, then there is the problem of creating the machine. And let’s not forget finding or creating a wormhole that could handle it! An interesting problem was brought up by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, author of About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution and other books. In an interview with Discovery.com called “Is Time Travel Possible?” he discussed wormholes as time machines and potential time travel tourists from the future, but with the caveat that “theoretically, it would take more than 100 years to create a 100-year time difference between the two ends of a wormhole, so there’s no way that our descendants could come back and tell us we’re wrong about this.” So, it’s all about timing, then… pun intended.

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    The Multiverse Theory

    The multiverse is the most widely mentioned theoretical “time travel paradox killer,” because it involves more than just one parallel universe, thus allowing for an increasingly possible world where the laws of physics are just right for time travel. If we can get from here to there, that is.

    There may be a massive number of other universes out there, possibly even an infinite number, or maybe just twenty or seventy. While our astronomical observations cannot at this time detect them, it is most definitely a theoretical possibility that many cosmologists and physicists are considering. These universes may or may not be like ours. In fact, they may or may not even have the same laws of physics or distribution of matter, or even number of spatial and temporal dimensions. Some will undoubtedly be “dead” and others will have life forms that we cannot recognise or even imagine. Others still may have duplicates of us living their own separate lives and timelines. Maybe, Big Bangs are going on constantly, 24/7/365 all the while creating new universes.

    The multiverse theory is not new, especially for readers of science fiction and fantasy, where other worlds beyond ours is a given. The actual term was coined in the year 1895 by psychologist and philosopher William James, and is now a mainstay of theoretical and quantum physics, as well as a part of our religious beliefs, mythological stories, and spiritual/New Age thought. The multiverse has been equated with everything from the Kingdom of Heaven of the Judeo-Christian Bible to the Akashic Field or Hall of Records or various planes of existence of more metaphysical and spiritual thought, to the multiple timelines and dimensions of paranormal and anomalous concepts.

    Cosmologist Max Tegmark took the multiverse theory to the next level by creating a classification level for potential other worlds:

    LEVEL ONE: Domains beyond our cosmological horizon – the least controversial type, what lies beyond the vantage point, yet likely has the same laws/constants, just with possibly different initial conditions than our own.

    LEVEL TWO: Universes with different physical laws/constants, other post inflation bubbles, far more diverse than Level Ones, these bubbles also vary in initial conditions as well as other seemingly immutable aspects of nature.

    LEVEL THREE: Quantum universes/Many Worlds Interpretation – exist alongside us on the quantum level where the random quantum processes cause the universe to branch into multiple copies, one copy for each possible outcome.

    LEVEL FOUR: Ultimate Ensemble – Other mathematical structures, where ALL potential alternate realities can exist, anything and everything is possible in terms of location, cosmological properties, quantum states, and physical laws and constants. These exist outside of space-time.

    Each level of multiverse has its own characteristics that separate it from the other levels, and for our purposes, the focus for time travel would be on those we humans could exist in, and possible travel between. One of the ways Tegmark differentiated the levels was by stating that in Level One our doppelgängers could live somewhere else in three-dimensional space, but in Level Three they would live on another quantum branch in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Yet, as the Many Worlds Interpretation states, likely not be able to interact once the split into another branch occurs. Those found in Level Two might be like “bubble universes” that have different physical laws and constants, and each new bubble is created by splits that occur when spontaneous symmetry breaks occur in Level Three.

    Tegmark describes these levels in detail in his book Universe or Multiverse, and states that the key question isn’t so much whether there is a multiverse, but rather how many levels it has. He admits that nature may have tricked us into thinking our vantage point was the extent of reality, a fixed view of the world around us. “Einstein taught us that space is not merely a boring static void, but a dynamic entity that can stretch (the expanding universe), vibrate (gravitational waves), and curve (gravity).”

    Many scientists refer to the multiverse as more of a “pocket universe” concept, indicating different regions in space-time that are unobservable, but still a part of our one Universe. Inflationary cosmology does state these pocket universes can be self-contained, with different laws of physics, different particles and forces and possibly even different dimensions.

    Even the popular string theory allows for potentially trillions of possible universes, each one compatible with relativity and quantum theory. Michio Kaku states in Physics of the Impossible that, “Normally communication between these universes is impossible. The atoms of our body are like flies trapped on flypaper. We can move freely about in three dimensions along our membrane universe, but we cannot leap off the universe into hyperspace, because we are glued onto our universe.” Gravity, however, can freely float into the spaces between universes. Kaku also points to one theory where dark matter, which is an invisible form of matter surrounding our galaxy, might actually be “normal” matter in another universe.

    But the question remains, can we travel back and forth between these different worlds with different laws and arrows of time? Again, theoretically, it would require a shortcut through space and time… like a wormhole… and a means of safely getting through that wormhole should it be stable and traversable. So even though the multiverse theory takes care of some of the paradoxes by offering up alternate timelines and histories in which one can both go back to the past and kill their grandfather (while not killing him at the same time), it appears as though there is still no realistic way of actually doing that.

    The multiverse also allows for alternate futures as well, and for multiple, alternate versions of “you” to exist in any number of historical timelines with different outcomes depending on the choices you make in each baby bubble universe.

    In an article titled “Riddles of the Multiverse” for PBS.org’s August 2011 Nova series, University of Southern California Professor of Physics and Astronomy Clifford Johnson was asked straight out about whether or not the multiverse could ever be “visited” by humans. His response was that we must first work out the physics of these other universes, in order to determine when and whether it makes sense to “cross over from one to the other.” He did admit it is possible the stuff we are made of, the matter and forces that make us and hold us together, may not allow us to ever leave our four-dimensional universe and go to another. Imagine doing so and well, coming undone!

    For now it seems we just don’t yet have the brainpower and technology to leap and jump between worlds, to cross timelines and experience as many pasts, presents and futures as we would like. That knowledge and technology may exist, though… out there… somewhere in time.

    Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from This Book Is From the Future: A Journey Through Portals, Relativity, Wormholes and Other Adventures in Time Travel, © 2012 Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ 800-227-3371, USA.

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