Selected Correspondence Peter

Just a note with some more about theoretical scientists. I had dug out some relevant quotes but Richard was quicker to reply. I thought I would leave it but a recent meeting twigged me to post them anyway.

Vineeto and I were invited out to dinner recently, and after the meal the evening turned to an interesting discussion on life and the universe. We merrily talked of what is actual and they merrily talked of what is spiritual, so few alleys of conversation were pursued to any depth. That conversation soon dwindled, and in an attempt to inject a bit of common sense into the evening I steered the discussion back to the actual – tapping the arm of the chair to give an illustration of what is actual. The man immediately told me it was a scientifically proven fact that the chair did not exist as the essence of matter was ethereal and constantly fluctuating between here and there – pointing over there – and as such could not be actual. Needless to say I nearly fell off my chair, literally, as what I was comfortably sitting on had magically been transported, by scientific theory and this man’s belief, over to the opposite corner of the veranda.

Which only goes to prove that believing what theoretical scientists say could be a danger to one’s health – as well as one’s sanity.

So a few quotes – from the late Darryl Reanney’s book –

While his teaching background is microbiology and biochemistry he draws on a broad range of theoretical sciences to substantiate his vision in understandable form. As such, he reveals much that is usually ‘hidden’ from the lay person by scientific jargon and bewildering mathematical complexity.

Now, however, we reach the threshold of the truly mysterious, for we must look to the far reaches of physics, to the paradox-ridden realms of the very small and the very large. There await us bejewelled creatures, strange beyond dreaming, that are born of the highest faculties of the human mind. In this mirror, we will see almost nothing we recognize. Does this mean that we are abandoning reality for illusion? Not at all: we are doing just the reverse. In reaching this far into the realm of the invisible, away from the homely metaphors of everyday life, we are approaching reality. We must not complain if we find it strange. Indeed, it is this very strangeness that tells us that we are ‘on the right track’. When science was young common sense was our guide. The model of the world we built up from new discoveries was based on familiar objects – clocks, pistons, billiard balls. As science has progressed through its great conceptual revolutions – relativity, quantum mechanics, super symmetry – its discoveries have become more exotic, more remote from everyday experience. Easily recognizable images based on familiar things have given way to abstract theorems which tell of particles moving backwards in time, of a universe structured in eleven dimensions and so on. During this process, the status of common sense has been inverted: no longer our guide in the search for truth, it has become our adversary. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever – A New Future for Human Consciousness. Longman 1991, p. 138

Hard to even make a comment on that one, given that science is reaching far into the realms of the invisible – and apparently the realms of the unmeasurable – exotic imagination runs riot in the search for the truth.

Mathematics is like a fishing line which we can cast into the future by virtue of its logical coherence and predicative power. When we analyze the cargo of information it brings back into the present, we find ourselves struggling to understand concepts for which there are no words, no images, no layers of reinforced experience. What we see in these mathematical cryptograms are signals from the future which our brains, at this verbal, ego-self stage of their evolution, cannot hope to comprehend. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 140

No words for the truth as we try to interpret the signals from the future? No words to describe the truth from the further shore?

... quantum mechanics is par excellence the field of science where commonsense breaks down completely. In particular, the link between cause and effect blurs. In our everyday world of ordinary experience, we take it for granted that a ball will not move unless some force (like a kick) is imparted to it. In the micro world of the quantum, an electron on one side of a barrier can simply ‘reappear’ on the other, without physically ‘moving’ – an effect called quantum tunnelling. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 145

Now we get to the crux of the matter as to why I nearly fell off my chair – it was being ‘quantum tunnelled’ at the time. In a bid to inject a degree of common sense (?) into this I’ll risk a quote from Paul Davies about Quantum Theory.

‘The basis of this theory is that in nature there is an inherent uncertainty or unpredictability that manifests itself only on an atomic scale. For example, the position of a subatomic particle such as an electron may not be a well-defined concept at all; it should be envisaged as jiggling around in a random sort of a way. Energy, too, becomes a slightly nebulous concept, subject to capricious and unpredictable changes.’ – Paul Davies, ‘The Edge of Infinity’ ... Beyond the Black Hole. Penguin, p 90

Now, if we note the word theory and Mr. Davies words ‘ ... only on an atomic scale ..., ... may not be ..., ... should be envisaged ..., ... slightly nebulous ...,’ then I am quite happy for them to imagine, invasive and theorize for all they will, as long as the chair doesn’t fly across the room and the coffee cup becomes so nebulous that it can’t hold coffee. It is a far, far stretch from Mr. Davies description of the ‘theory of things so small that we can’t actually substantiate them’ to the fantasies of Mr. Reanney and the Mystics. They are frantically clutching at straws in order to turn the actual into an illusion, the substantial into the insubstantial, the obvious into the apparent, the material into the ethereal – in short to escape from this actual world, as evidenced by the senses into ‘another’ world of imagination.

Quantum mechanics also demolishes another commonsense concept – the idea of ‘nothing’. The quantum view of ‘nothing’ is crucial to our understanding of Genesis, which requires us to believe that ‘nothing’ is where ‘everything’ came from. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 145

It is important to remember that the vacuum is the dominant structure in physical reality – the particles of the so-called ‘real’ world are only minor blips in this ocean of incessant virtual action, with its paradoxical background of spacetime foam. Across the breadth of the cosmos, the familiar building blocks of matter are outnumbered by the infinity of come-and-go ghost particles that boil in the vacuum state.

The almost unthinkable amount of energy locked up in the quantum vacuum may turn out to be the key that unlocks the penultimate secrets of Genesis. If a bulb of vacuum contains enough energy to destroy a universe, surely something equally small must contain enough energy to create one, under the right circumstances. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 146

As the cosmos shrinks beyond atomic dimensions, the matter it contains will become dense beyond imagination and the radius of spacetime will contract towards zero. At its ultimate limit, this process leads to a spacetime singularity in which the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite, enfolding in its vanished embrace a universe of imploded matter. Like an image fading in the mind of God, reality itself dies and the sum of all things ceases to be.

Some faint hint of what this means can be garnered from an examination of Figure 7.2, which shows that an ordinary black hole is smoothly connected to the ‘flat’ spacetime structure of the surrounding universe. It is this matrix of surrounding spacetime that enables science to measure properties of black holes such as mass. However, if the cosmos is closed, everything is ‘inside’ a black hole. Thus, as the cosmos implodes inwards, there is absolutely no frame of reference to serve as a guide.

Here, then, is the Shiva of cosmology, the destroyer of worlds. Nothing can survive transit through a singularity. The spacetime fabric with its embedded ‘memories’ of past events (in which billions of human lives lie encrystallised) is annihilated. The fine structure of matter, everything which gives form to physics, is unremittingly ‘ground out of existence’. By this, I do not simply mean that it is destroyed in a physical sense, overwhelmed by the colossal tides of gravity: rather, infinitely warped spacetime sunders us completely from anything that might have gone ‘before’, just as it does from anything that might come ‘after’. The present incarnation of the cosmos can never remember its parents (if there were any) or transmit a legacy to its children (if it has any). D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, pp. 148-9

What to say? It appears that cosmology has invented the lot. The cataclysmic ‘end’ of the world, the black hole of hell, the ‘parallel’ universes as in levels of consciousness and reincarnation on a universal scale!

I guess we will soon see a rash of Past-Universe Therapies for the ‘therapeutically under-nourished’. Alan, if you ever get to this side of the world we could make a bob or two running ‘Meet the other-you’ sessions. We could connect people to their other selves that exist in parallel universes. We could issue certificates to people who could wave them at their partners or the police and say ‘It wasn’t me – It was the me that is now in a parallel universe that did it!’

Could be a winner ...

In order to bring spacetime back into the realm of physics, Hawking is forced to abandon ‘real’ numbers and use ‘imaginary’ ones. Real numbers give a positive quantity when multiplied by themselves; pure imaginary numbers give negative values when multiplied by themselves. The special virtue of imaginary numbers in this context is that they cause the distinction between space and time to disappear. This makes it possible to use Euclidean geometry to build models of the cosmos because, in this representation, time has no privileged status. <snip> Hawking defends the use of imaginary numbers on the grounds that it is ‘merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real space-time’. However, the universe we live in exists in real time. Hawking’s model predicts that in real time, ‘it [the universe] would collapse again into what looks like a singularity in real time. Thus, in a sense, we are still all doomed, even if we keep away from black holes’. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 154

Does that also mean that if somehow we could all manage to avoid living in ‘real’ time and hang out in ‘imaginary’ time we would avoid being ‘doomed’ and avoid the black hole? Having invented black holes – a mathematical supposition given credence by the discovery of some, as yet, unexplained observational irregularities in the vast depths of space, the theoreticians are indeed having a field day. I find it telling that the scientists have to resort to fanciful speculation as they approach ‘nothing’, the subatomic where mass (as in substantially evident) disappears; and when they explore the ‘vast’ – the more distant (as in substantially evident) realms of the infinite universe.

Some years ago, Stephen Hawking was elected to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair once occupied by Isaac Newton. Hawking’s inaugural lecture had the ambitious title ‘Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?’ That is, Hawking was suggesting that science was close to accomplishing its ultimate goal – the unification of all the laws of physics into one coherent, consistent framework which would define and encompass the whole of reality. Such a unified scheme would not just ‘represent’ truth in some abstract way, it would in an important sense be truth. By now, this should not surprise us. As we have seen, the homely metaphors of commonsense and everyday life offer us no guidance when we look at the bewildering cosmos in which we find ourselves. Only mathematics, in whose code nature writes her secrets, can tell us what is ‘real’. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 156

It comes as no surprise that science is firmly rooted in mysticism, shamanism and alchemy and steeped in the search for the meaning of life. It has been a bare few centuries since science has very hesitantly emerged from the control of the church in Europe. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his finding that the earth orbited the sun because it did not fit with the flat-earth version of the universe described in Genesis. Nowadays we have the ability to eliminate many hereditary diseases with the simple manipulation of genetic codes but research has been curtailed as ‘unethical’ – religion still reigns supreme. One should not meddle with ‘Mother Nature’ or God, or whatever – or there will be Hell to pay!

Well, I’m busy meddling with Mother Nature’s implanted instincts – and the rewards are extraordinary. Those who think genetic engineering is the answer to the human dilemma ignore the stranglehold that morals and ethics have on the Human Condition. Better to get on with the job yourself – neither God nor science will be of help.

Well there are a few more quotes so I will just tootle on and finish ...

As Fred Allen Wolf says in ‘Parallel Universes’:

‘The past, present, and future exist side by side. If we were totally able to ‘marry’ corresponding times each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time and we would all realize the timeless state, which is taken to be our true or base state of reality by many spiritual practices.’

Through mathematics and experiment, we have deduced the existence of a fourth spacetime dimension but we do not experience it as it is. We see it in glimpses, strangely fractured into ever-dissolving, non-dimensional planes called ‘now’.

We know this is less-than-perfect because our reality is locked into fiction – this Dali-esque ‘now you see it, now its gone’ trick-state called the present. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 203

It would seem to me that Mr. Einstein’s greatest contribution to physics is to theoretically propose ‘another’ dimension – space-time – which gave validity to the mystics ‘other’ dimension. Interestingly after the publication of his theory it was Herman Minkowski who offered a geometric picture of this new spacetime and it was only reluctantly that Albert accepted it. On my reading he seemed wary of the many extrapolations that resulted from his theory but by then Fame and Fortune were his for the basking in. Mr. Hawking recently added imaginary time to the space-time dimension and ‘Bingo’, the theoreticians have completed the scenario of the actual being illusionary – both in matter and space, as well as time.

At this stage in the evolution of our minds, our experience of reality is like that of the shadow, a limited, impoverished ghost-image projected into the three-dimensions of our present (average) mode of consciousness by the invisible (to us) four-dimensional ‘truth structure’ that lies beyond and behind it, extended in time as we are extended in space. I cannot stress too strongly that it is this four-dimensional truth structure which is the universe’s reality. What we call objective reality, our everyday commonsense world, is but a dim phantom construct of the timeless hyperstructure that exists, in or perhaps as, the ‘mind of God’, to use religious imagery. Yet, just as our present three-dimensional state of consciousness evolved from the one dimensional mode of our remote ancestors, so there is abundant evidence that the four-dimensional mode is struggling to be born in the homo sapiens species at this human moment in the cosmic story. We are almost there.

Whether a four-dimensional state of consciousness is the ultimate truth of the universe or whether beyond this lie higher states of being that extend into an infinitely rich, multi-dimensional hyperspace and hypertime we do not know. One day our descendants may. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 205

Having ‘confirmed’ that matter, space and time are illusionary we then have to evolve to a four-dimensional state of consciousness to access the ultimate truth. This theory gels so neatly with the mystical Altered State of Consciousness or Higher Consciousness as to make a mockery of theoretical mathematics, physics and cosmology.

I find it fascinating that Hawking himself recognizes that his use of imaginary time, far from being a ruse or trick, may in fact be a door to a higher order of insight. Listen to his own words:

‘This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.’ Stephen Hawking

This goes to the heart of the matter for the defining quality of the inner eye in its most highly evolved forms is that it can ‘see’ the deepest hidden structures of reality without impediment. If timeless-ness is an authentic feature of consciousness – and the evidence I have summarized in this book very strongly suggests that it is – then consciousness may just as well ‘exist’ in what the mathematicians call ‘imaginary’ time as in ‘real’ time. Indeed, it may be precisely because the ego-self lives in real time that it ‘knows’ death while it may be precisely because consciousness lives in imaginary time that it ‘knows’ eternity. D. Reanney, The Death of Forever, p. 207

And just to round off, the late Mr. Reanney managed to convince himself – with the help of theoretical science – that his consciousness is eternal. Of course, he will not be reporting back from the fourth dimension as no information can cross the space-time ‘boundary’ at a black hole or a naked singularity. Thus this theoretical (and mystical) forth-dimension will remain forever ‘unknown’ to a mortal man in his state of ‘lower’ consciousness.

Well enough twaddle – time to kick back for a coffee and couch in three dimensions.

There is a ‘high probability’ that the couch is still where I left it, and the coffee is still in the jar. There is a lot to be said for what is actual and that’s a few more words for the case for the affirmative.

I am left wondering why theoretical physicists and cosmological mathematicians feel compelled to suppose ever more complicated theories that rely on invisible virtual particles of matter such as quantum spacetime foam, new non-sequential concepts of time such as Planck-time and new imaginary dimensions to three dimensional space. It does not make sense.

Even Darryl Reanney, an authority in microbiology and microchemistry, admits that you have to leave your common sense behind in order to follow the logic of quantum physics –

Quantum mechanics is par excellence the field of science where commonsense breaks down completely. In particular, the link between cause and effect blurs. <snip> Quantum mechanics also demolishes another commonsense concept – the idea of ‘nothing’. The quantum view of ‘nothing’ is crucial to our understanding of Genesis, which require us to believe that ‘nothing is where ‘everything’ came from. <snip>

In modern physics, a vacuum is not empty – it contains spacetime. Spacetime is far from featureless. The smallest dimension at which the word ‘structure’ has meaning in contemporary physics is called the Planck length, i.e. about 1/10³⁵ of a metre. At this minute scale, the random fluctuations so characteristic of the quantum world are believed to give spacetime a highly complex ‘topology’ – a foamy texture. The nature of this spacetime foam is bizarre in the extreme. Some scientists believe that spacetime consists of a complex matrix of cross-connecting ‘wormholes’. Others liken the spacetime vacuum to a mish-mash of Planck-sized black holes jammed together. <snip> Perhaps the most starling aspect of the vacuum is that it is filled with an evanescent flux of ghostly particles called virtual particles. <snip>

It is important to remember that the vacuum is the dominant structure in the physical reality – the particle of the so-called ‘real’ world are only minor blips n this ocean of incessant virtual action with its paradoxical background of spacetime foam. Across the breadth of the cosmos, the familiar building blocks of matter are outnumbered by the infinity of come-and-go ghost particles that boil in the vacuum state. Darryl Reanney, The Death of Forever, Longman Australia, 1991, p. 145

It is apparent that this theoretical description of the universe does not make sense as it theorizes about matter and energies that are so minute as to be imperceptible to detection by any known, or any conceivable, instrumentation – i.e. you have to believe, take in good faith, what theoretical science proposes.

The reason why these theories don’t make sense in view of our everyday experience of the physical laws of nature is because those theories are purely mathematical or merely conjectural. A now-classic mathematical invention is that of cosmic Spacetime and its quantum off-spring, spacetime foam.

I will give you an example how quickly commonsense disappears when you combine space and time into a space-time continuum in mathematical calculations –

Take the following situation –

1. I am hungry now.
2. I was also hungry ten minutes ago.
3. You are also hungry now.

If you believe in a space-time continuum then space-time mathematics could well have it that you would need to order three pizzas for three hungry-people. No doubt some could argue that two real pizzas and one virtual pizza would suffice whilst others could argue that any such philosophizing would only cause the delivery to be late, thereby necessitating the need for even more pizzas for even more hungry-people.

The more I delve into the theories of cosmologists, the more gaps and blatant nonsense I find. Once I recognized that the notion of a God is the mere product of my social and instinctual identity, and that He/She/It does not exist outside of my passionate imagination, I also stopped believing in any of theories that propose a meta-physical supra-natural world.

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