Cracking Open the Oyster: Reincarnation

Cracking Open the Oyster: Reincarnation

The topic of lucid dreaming lead me to decide that I needed to take a closer look at things that previously I would cast aside as incompatible with science. 

But where to look? And how? First of all: the possible topics are so wide ranging that one could get lost in all the myriad of details, and expert claims, and denials. And secondly, how could I as a relative newcomer, an outsider, to ANY of the relevant fields of study, compete or substantially disagree with an expert in that field? 

I have read about mediums that communicate with the dead, and the foretelling of future events, and the acquisition of impossible knowledge and incredible stories of experiences of people after coming close to death. But in all cases there was always some loophole provided by a scientific expert that I could reference, to explain it away. So there are lots of subject areas to consider, but in all cases scientific experts have already weighed in and and disproved the claim.

So where to begin with this hairball of a problem?

As you might have noticed, I like analogies, so let's try this one...

We occasionally spend time with my in-laws in Wellfleet on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. As many know, Wellfleet is known for more than their pristine beaches. It's the Wellfleet oyster that many regard as the most famous asset associated with the place.

Once a year, in October they hold the "Oyster Fest". And chief among the activities is the oyster shucking contest. These guys and gals are amazing. They can shuck an oyster in seconds, where a less experienced person may work for 20 minutes or more and never end up opening that darn shell.

You can immediately tell a neophyte "shucker" by the fact that they don't know where to stick the point of the oyster knife to open the shell. That one minuscule "sweet spot" where the two shells join is the key the whole operation. Hit the spot and you've got a chance of success. Miss the spot and you can work all you want but will probably end up with no oyster to eat, or perhaps a big mess of broken shell and a hacked up mollusk. 

So I thought about the crux of the matter, of this "thing" I was trying to understand, to uncover, to discover. What was the least common denominator of the thing? And what was the best way to get to the soft underbelly of it, the one little joint in the two shells, so that I could leverage it open and take a closer look? 

What I came up with as a good point of examination was the following question: where does experiential information get stored? Particularly, where does a person's personal and private memory go when they die? If one were to "prove" that this particular information, which existed in only one place (the brain of a particular, now dead, person) but could still be accessed in some way, we would have found the "sweet spot on the oyster". This could represent a door which could be pried open to expose a whole range of amazing topics otherwise inaccessible to me and those "scientific materialists" like me.

The key to using this approach is: it would allow me to illuminate a major point of either coincidence or departure from scientific thinking. We would either find that science's claim that experiential knowledge (personal memories) are stored in a complex biological mass of electro-chemical processes (the brain) or, that it is stored in some other place entirely. Perhaps outside of the body, or even someplace separate from the physical world all together. So where to apply this methodology?

I was always quite sure that reincarnation was one of the many examples of people convincing themselves of something they wanted to believe. Why for example do so many of the cases of reincarnation involve people in India? Could it be because the predominant religion in India (Hinduism) holds it as fact? I never took reincarnation stories seriously enough to investigate them in any way. I now find it odd that this particular subject could become the one that would be so convincing to me.

Here's what I discovered-

In 1966, a Canadian, Dr Ian Stevenson wrote a book titled “20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation”. In this book he told many stories that as the title states, “suggest” reincarnation.

http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm

Let's take a look at one of them.

http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm#swarnlata

This case is extracted from charts and commentary on pages 67 to 91 in Dr. Ian Stevenson’s classic book, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. This is the original long version written for the book by Carol Bowman called "Children's Past Lives", but due to space constraints a shorter, edited version appeared in the book. This is the original extract in its entirety.

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Sweet Swarnlata's Story

The story of Swarnlata is characteristic of Stevenson's cases: the young girl's memories began when she was 3, she gave enough information to enable Stevenson to locate the family of the deceased person she remembered (the case was "solved"), and she gave more than 50 specific facts that were verified. But Swarnlata's case was also different from most because her memories did not fade. And this is a sweet case, characterized by love and happy memories rather than by violent death and struggles between castes and families, like in so many other cases.

Swarnlata Mishra was born to an intellectual and prosperous family in Pradesh in India in 1948. When she was just three years old and traveling with her father past the town of Katni more than 100 miles from her home, she suddenly pointed and asked the driver to turn down a road to "my house", and suggested they could get a better cup of tea there than they could on the road.

Soon after, she related more details of her life in Katni, all of which were written down by her father. She said her name was Biya Pathak, and that she had two sons. She gave details of the house: it was white with black doors fitted with iron bars; four rooms were stuccoed, but other parts were less finished; the front floor was of stone slabs. She located the house in Zhurkutia, a district of Katni; behind the house was a girl's school, in front was a railway line, and lime furnaces were visible from the house. She added that the family had a motor car (a very rare item in India in the 1950's, and especially before Swarnlata was born). Swarnlata said Biya died of a "pain in her throat", and was treated by Dr. S. C. Bhabrat in Jabalpur. She also remembered an incident at a wedding when she and a friend had difficulty finding a latrine.

In the spring of 1959, when Swarnlata was 10 years old, news of the case reached Professor Sri H. N. Banerjee, an Indian researcher of paranormal phenomenon and colleague of Stevenson. Banerjee took the notes her father made and traveled to Katni to determine if Swarnlata's memories could be verified.

Using nothing more than the description that Swarnlata had given, he found the house--despite the house having been enlarged and improved since 1939 when Biya died. It belonged to the Pathak's (a common name in India), a wealthy, prominent family, with extensive business interests. The lime furnaces were on land adjoining the property; the girls school was 100 yards behind the Pathak's property, but not visible from the front.

He interviewed the family and verified everything Swarnlata had said. Biya Pathak had died in 1939 leaving behind a grieving husband, two young sons, and many younger brothers. These Pathaks had never heard of the Mishra family, who lived a hundred miles away; the Mishra's had no knowledge of the Pathak family.

The next scene in this story sounds like a plot from Agatha Christie, but is all true, extracted from the Stevenson's tabulations in Swarnlata's published case. In the summer of 1959, Biya's husband, son, and eldest brother journeyed to the town of Chhatarpur, the town where Swarnlata now lived, to test Swarnlata's memory. They did not reveal their identities or purpose to others in the town, but enlisted nine townsmen to accompany them to the Mishar home, where they arrived unannounced.

Swarnlata immediately recognized her brother and called him "Babu", Biya's pet name for him. Stevenson gives only the barest facts, but I can imagine the emotions ran high at this point. Imagine how Babu felt to be recognized immediately by his dead sister reborn. 

Ten-year-old Swarnlata went around the room looking at each man in turn; some she identified as men she knew from her town, some were strangers to her. Then she came to Sri Chintamini Pandey, Biya's husband. Swarnlata lowered her eyes, looked bashful--as Hindu wives do in the presence of their husbands--and spoke his name. Stevenson says nothing of Sri Pandey's reaction at finding his wife after twenty years

Swarnlata also correctly identified her son from her past life, Murli, who was 13 years old when Biya died. But Murli schemed to mislead her, and "for almost twenty-four hours insisted against her objections that he was not Murli, but someone else." Murli had also brought along a friend and tried to mislead Swarnlata once again by insisting he was Naresh, Biya's other son, who was about the same age as this friend. Swarnlata insisted just as strongly that he was a stranger.

Finally, Swarnlata reminded Sri Pandey that he had purloined 1200 rupees Biya kept in a box. Sri Pandey admitted to the truth of this private fact that only he and his wife had known.

Gold Fillings

A few weeks later, Swarnlata's father took her to Katni to visit the home and town where Biya lived and died.

Upon arriving she immediately noticed and remarked about the changes to the house. She asked about the parapet at the back of the house, a verandah, and the neem tree that used to grow in the compound; all had been removed since Biya's death. She identified Biya's room and the room in which she had died. She recognized one of Biya's brothers and correctly identified him as her second brother. She did the same for her third and fourth brother, the wife of the younger brother, the son of the second brother (calling him by his pet name "Baboo"), a close friend of the family's (correctly commenting that he was now wearing spectacles, which he in fact had acquired since Biya had died) and his wife (calling her by her pet name "Bhoujai"), Biya's sister-in-law--all with appropriate emotions of weeping and nervous laughter. She also correctly identified a former servant, an old betelnut seller, and the family cowherd (despite her youngest brother's attempt to test Swarnlata by insisting that the cowherd had died).

Later, Swarnlata was presented to a room full of strangers and asked whom she recognized. She correctly picked out her husband's cousin, the wife of Biya's brother-in-law, and a midwife--whom she identified not by her current name, but by a name she had used when Biya was alive. Biya's son Murli, in another test, introduced Swarnlata to a man he called a new friend, Bhola. Swarnlata insisted correctly that this man was actually Biya's second son, Naresh. In another test, Biya's youngest brother tried to trap Swarnlata by saying that Biya had lost her teeth; Swarnlata did not fall for this, and went on to say that Biya had gold fillings in her front teeth--a fact that the brothers had forgotten and were forced to confirm by consulting with their wives, who reminded them that what Swarnlata said was true.

This must have been a spectacle. Here was a ten-year-old stranger from far away--so far, in terms of Indian culture, that her dialect was distinctly different than that of the Pathaks--who acted confidently like an older sister of the household, was familiar with intimate names and family secrets, and remembered even marriage relationships, old servants, and friends. Just as amazing, her memory was frozen at the time of Biya's death; Swarnlata knew nothing about the Pathak family that had happened since 1939.

In the following years, Swarnlata visited the Pathak family at regular intervals. Stevenson investigated the case in 1961, witnessing one of these visits. He observed the loving relationship between Swarnlata and the other members of the family. They all accepted her as Biya reborn.

Swarnlata behaved appropriately reserved towards Biya's elders, but when alone with Biya's sons, she was relaxed and playful as a mother would be--behavior that would otherwise be totally inappropriate in India for a 10-year-old girl in the company of unrelated men in their mid-thirties.

The Pathak brothers and Swarnlata observed the Hindu custom of Rakhi, in which brothers and sisters annually renew their devotion to each other by exchanging gifts. In fact the Pathak brothers were distressed and angry one year when Swarnlata missed the ceremony; they felt that because she had lived with them for 40 years and with the Mishras for only 10 years that they had a greater claim on her. As evidence of how strongly the Pathaks believed that Swarnlata was their Biya, they admitted that they had changed their views of reincarnation upon meeting Swarnlata and accepting her as Biya reborn (the Pathaks, because of their status and wealth, emulated Western ideas and had not believed in reincarnation before this happened). Swarnlata's father, Sri Mishra, also accepted the truth of Swarnlata's past identity: years later, when it came time for Swarnlata to marry he consulted with the Pathaks about the choice of a husband for her.

How did Swarnlata feel about all of this? Was it confusing for her to remember so completely the life of a grown woman? Stevenson visited her in later years and corresponded with her for ten years after this case was investigated. He reports that she grew up normally, received an advanced degree in botany, and got married. She said that sometimes, when she reminisced about her happy life in Katni, her eyes brimmed with tears and, for a moment, she wished she could return to the wealth and life of Biya. But her loyalty to the Mishra family was undivided and, except for the regular visits to Katni, she went about the business of growing into a beautiful young woman, accepting fully her station in this life.

The story above describes a little girl named Swarnlata who demonstrated to her family that she had a previous life. She recounted dozens of details about her other life including the names and ages of her children and intimate details of her life that only she and her former husband knew. The facts are irrefutable . After reading the account and studying the details, Dr Almeder, PhD, Dept of Philosophy at GSU even went so far as to state: “it would be irrational to disbelieve it”.

Dr Almeder also eloquently illustrates the reason to take this sort of evidence seriously. He used the following analogy to illustrate his point of view:

Let's look at a fictitious group of 100 people who one by one jump off the Empire State building. As he describes it, the data shows that “95 of them hit the ground as one might expect they would: painfully and disastrously, but five land gently and walk away. What do you think needs to be explained? Answer: The five that landed gently and walked away.” Focusing on the 95 that crash-landed as one would expect, and chalking the remaining 5 surprising survivors as spurious data points would be utterly ridiculous. Strangely though this “scrubbing of the data” might make sense in some scientific test protocols and is what many of us have been doing all of our lives with stories that don't fit neatly into our reality frame.

I would highly recommend watching the entire video of Dr Almeder speaking on the subject. It is full of cogent and logical insights that for me, were impossible to dismiss and went to the crucial heart of the matter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hZhMDU9GcVg#!

What we have in the story of Swarnlata is a crystal clear demonstration of data that simply can not be explained with today's model of reality and more particularly with a traditional scientific understanding of human existence.

This story, and Dr Almeder's summary of its implications was the tectonic event that caused my dam to break, and which forced me to consider a more expanded view of what life really is. After-all, not to reach this conclusion would for me, be illogical and irrational. It would be ignoring too many data points.

My tipping point had been reached. Your tipping point may be different, but I contend that the examples in our world that can't be explained are so numerous that any person who is open and curious will find the example that compels them to act: to accept the fact that there are aspects of this world that just won't make sense without considering what previously may have been impossible to consider.

So why did it take me over 50 years to reach this point? Perhaps, although I was open and curious for most of my life, I wasn't actively looking. Of the dozen or so amazing unexplainable “paranormal” things I describe in these pages, I never took the time to become fully focused on them until I decided that I needed to discover what all the hullabaloo was about regarding the true nature of existence. And perhaps one doesn't actively look at these things until one is ready. I have a feeling that generally, a person isn't “ready” until they have experienced a certain amount of life.

In my journey, exposure to the Swarnlata story and it's attendant analysis was a major milestone. The oyster had been opened. For me, it was the first evidence that there really IS something going on under surface of reality. It was at this point that my journey changed from ascertaining whether there was a hidden truth to our reality, to accepting that fact and moving on to learn about the details.

The Most Important Experiment In all of Science

The most important experiment in all of science

Quantum mechanics underlies perhaps the most famous of many strange behaviors of our reality. It may be most notable because it seems to straddle the worlds of science and the mystic. Although quantum theory has become one of the world's most successful scientific theories, most people are either entirely ignorant of it, or don't understand its colossal implications. In the end, many would rather ignore it ,since it is an inconvenient truth that opens the door to what Albert Einstein once called “spooky occurrences” which he eventually acknowledged, but could never adequately explain.

Of course there are entire libraries of information dedicated to this subject, so I will not even attempt a thorough review here. Even when fully described, the actions of quantum mechanics still leave brilliant minds unclear about how things actually behave in our world. Prof. Richard Feynman once famously said “anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory doesn't understand it”.

He also said “ What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it.... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.” (Feynman, Richard P. Nobel Lecture, 1966, 1918-1988, QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter)

So we start with the fact that one of the preeminent minds of 20th century physics claimed not to understand quantum physics. What is not in dispute however is the “spooky” behavior of it, and that is what we will cover here.

Best place to start is with the double slit experiment, perhaps the most influential experiment in the history of science.

This experiment attempts to look at the smallest constituents of light to uncover their basic nature. How do they behave? We find through various experiments that sometimes these objects behave like Newtonian billiard balls: they come in individual discrete chunks (quanta), occupy distinct positions, and travel in straight lines until struck by other “billiard balls” which change their speed and direction.

Remember the rule? Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction...

However we see in other experiments that these pieces if light, these objects, behave like waves: they emanate in all directions, their “size” (amplitude) varies an an analog fashion, and they can combine with other waves to increase or decrease in size.

Long ago science had theorized that light was a wave. It travels at a fixed speed (the speed of light) and it contains all the classical properties of waves. However later-on others found out that light comes in discrete packets: quanta. So for example, if you shine a light on a detector that makes a sound when light hits it, and it is very sensitive, and if you keep turning down the light's intensity, you will eventually get to a point where individual clicks (quanta) are detected with more or less frequency as the brightness is turned down or up a little bit. The force or sound caused by each click doesn't get any lower by turning the light down further, it just clicks less often. This demonstrates that light is made of quantum units, what Feynman and others called “corpuscles”. Light is made of particles even though it seems to usually “act” as a wave.

So we ware going to create an experiment to analyze the properties of photons (the constituent “particles” of light) to see if we can learn more about whether protons are are actually “objects” acting en mass like waves or whether they are something else entirely.

The famous “Double Slit Experiment” was originally devised to study light and its odd tendency to sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. I think you'll agree that the findings were, to say the least, rather spectacular.

Lets start with a large pool of water. Stand on the edge and drop a rock into it. What do you see?

Fig 1

Fig 1 shows wave radiating in familiar pattern outward from where the rock hit the previously calm water.

Fig 2

Now in Fig 2 lets put a square edge around the pool and see what the waves do.

(fig 3 removed)

See how they combine with each other after they bounce off the walls. See how they interfere with each other? See how the multiple wave shapes combine?

Now let's place a wall in the pool with a slit cut in it to let some of the wave through. Can you imagine what you will see? Actually in Fig 4 we have shown a drawing with two slits (one left and one right), but only one of which is open at a time.

Fig 4

A wave will start from either slit and will move outward as before. No surprise here either.

When we open both slits things get more interesting. Fig 5 shows the two sets of waves moving out from the two openings. As one would expect, these waves interfere with each other. This “interference pattern” is caused by the fact that when the two waves interact you will see the sum of the two expressed as a combined wave form. So if the wave from slit A is 1 foot high and it hits the wave from slit B where it is 1 foot high, at that spot the new wave will be 2 feet high. And alternatively if the wave from A is 1 foot high and hits the wave trough from B which is 1 foot low the result will be a zero foot wave, ie: calm water at that point. So the combined “waveform” shape will be the combined version of the two waves at that particular location at that time at each particular location.

Fig 5

So using this as a model, we have a clear picture of what a wave looks like when passed through one, or two slits.

Now lets look at a similar setup to see how particles would act when going through slits.

In order to see how particles would act in a similar situation, we will use a scatter gun for our experiment this time instead of a rock dropping in the water. Like a machine gun it will shoot lots of pellets one after the other. Our gun is very inaccurate though so the pellets will kind of scatter around a bit instead of hitting one spot on the target which is located on the back of the laboratory (which is the particle analog of the glass side at back of the pool).

Fig 7 shows the somewhat random distribution of the shots and the pattern it leaves on the target.

Fig 7

Fig 8 shows what would happen if we set up a wall with a single slit opened in it. Just like in our wave experiment, the wall containing the slit will block most of the pellets but the slit in the wall will let a few pellets through. The shot pattern on the target will show an unsurprising pattern. A band of pellet marks in the general shape of and directly in the path of the open slit.

Fig 8

Fig. 9 shows that with a second slit open, a second band of pellet marks will be found on the target, just as you would expect. Notice that there is a band of impacts behind the left slit and one behind the right. The main difference between the pellets and the water waves is that with two open slits, the water demonstrates a wave-like interference pattern and the pellets show and particle-like pattern with two bands of markings. The pellets are acting as Newton would predict: as distinctly independent objects, whereas the waves are doing what waves do: interacting and combining. This all fits with what we would expect from our experiences in the world.

Fig 9

What we have shown so far is that pellets act like particles and water acts like waves, and we have shown experimentally how to see the characteristic difference between the two. Particles will tend to go through the either of the two slits and hit the target behind each opening. Waves will also go though a slit, but will then spread out in a regular arc, and if multiple slits of open they will interact and and cause a repeating and more pattern quite unlike the regular wave shape from the single slit: an interference pattern.

Now that we have tested our setup and test methods, and have learned to tell the characteristic differences, the fingerprints, of particles and wave patterns, let's get down to some real work.

We now need a new scatter gun. Instead of shooting pellets, it shoots units of light (photons). This is not a mystical device. If you take apart an old TV that uses a picture tube you will find one of these photon “guns”.

Just like before, the first experiment shoots photons at the target with no intervening slit wall in place. We see a random pattern as shown in fig 10. Once again, no surprise.

Fig 10

Then we set up a wall with a very small slit. We see in fig 11 the same “band” pattern that we saw with our single slit pellet experiment. This is different from what we would have seen with a wave. A wave would have been smeared out to both sides. Eureka! We have confirmed that photons are particles because they have the same pattern as our particle experiment and do not show the distinctive visual fingerprint of waves going through a single slit.

Fig 11

So lets finish this part of the experiment and open the second slit in our wall.

Fig 12

What we find is in fig 12. 

But wait a minute... Notice that on the target under the L and R where we would expect the two bands of particle impacts we see nothing. But now we see various bands starting in the center and occurring to the left and right. This is an interference pattern!

This characterizes photons as waves.

After running the tests over and over again we see that this is consistent. With either the left or right slot open, we see a band (particle) pattern directly behind the open slit, and with both slits open we see the interference (wave) pattern. Wow. It looks like photons can act like both particles and waves depending on the test setup. This is referred to as the wave-particle duality of light by the way.

On closer analysis, maybe somehow the two streams of particles are interacting with each other on the way to the target screen. Maybe the wave behavior is more about particle properties than something mysterious. Maybe it's about electric or magnetic fields, or maybe gravity? Or perhaps occasionally a particle hits the edge of the slit as it passes through and is diverted, kind of like how a stream of water is diverted as it comes out of a faucet and you touch your finger to it? Perhaps this could explain why the particles are “acting like waves” when they pass through two holes.

Ok, so let's back to our test setup. Let's modify the gun so that only one photon is shot every time we pull the trigger. This will guarantee that as each particle travels to the target there will be no other particles in flight that could possibly interfere with it. Maybe this will fix things and show the expected particle.

When we run the photon test again by firing millions of single photons one at a time we find the following. With no slit wall after many firings we get the same random pattern of markings as before.

With a single slit we see a single band of marks, just as we would expect. Same is true if we have a double slit but alternately cover one or the other slit.

With double slits open, when we fire over and over one photon at a time, find find something very odd. We again see an interference pattern emerge!

Think about it: if we fire one proton at a time through the one open slit and we do it over and over again, we get a band behind the slit. However if we fire one proton at a time at two open slits, each proton will do one of three things: randomly hit the slit wall, or go through either one slit, or the other. We would expect to see two bands of impact marks on the far wall. But what we see is: when we fire one proton at a time and then look, and it over an over again an interference pattern emerges! This is definitely not what we saw when we fired the pellets.

Let's look at this in detail:

One photon at a time is being shot at the target... It either hits the wall (because doesn't go through a slit at all), or goes through one slit or the other, right? If the photon is a particle, we would expect it to end up in one of the two individual bands. What could be causing a single photon in flight, going through only one of the two open slits, to be redirected so it doesn't land in the "band" behind the slit it passed through? There are no other particles in flight which could interfere with it. It makes no sense. If the photon was hitting the side of a slit, and being re-directed, it would also do so in the single slit test, and since that is not happening we can eliminate this factor.

The fact that it is creating an interference pattern says that it quite literally MUST be interacting with something because the place where the proton impacted is not in a straight line from the gun to the slit. But what? There is no other photon with which to interact.

So we have this amazing occurrence that each individual photon is acting as if it is being interfered with by other photons as if part of a wave. We understand that with a huge number of particles in flight at the same time perhaps it is possible for them to “act” as a wave. After all isn't that the case with water? Trillions of individual molecules behave en-mass as a wave. But in this case how can you explain wave behavior, when there is only one photon at a time being shot at the target?

We are scientists. We can continue to modify the experiment to figure this situation out.

Here's what we'll do. We'll put a sensor device to “watch” each slit as the photon goes through. For each time we fire, it can tell us which slit each photon passes through, and then we can look at the target and see where it lands. This way we can figure out for each individual photon we fire, what path is taken. We can then, perhaps figure our where and how the photon is being misdirected.

Once again, we start with a single slit open. We fire each photon and the sensor correctly senses it and we find it impacts just where it should: at the target behind the slit we sensed it went through. We do this first with only the right slit open and then with the only the left open and after some time and many single photons fired, we end up with two bands of spots on the target: two bands, just as before without the sensors.This is good. Seems like our sensors are working and not affecting the protons flight pattern.

Then we open the two slits and fire one photon. In this case, the sensor shows it went through the right hand slit and it strikes the target on the right hand side. Then the next photon, randomly hits the slit wall and no photon is sensed going through either slot. Again and again we fire single photons and record which slit each went through, and where each one struck the target. In every case a photon either hit the slit wall (not going through either slit) or it went through the right or left slit and on to the target. For every case where a photon goes through either slit, it ended up striking the target in a band just behind the right or left slit. So now with the two slits open, and sensors activated, the protons decide to behave like particles again? What the heck?

If you've been paying attention you may have noticed a problem here. Without the slit sensors installed, we found that with both slits open, and shooting one photon at a time, we got the "unexpected" appearance of an interference pattern: the unmistakable sign of wave behavior. Now while we are monitoring the slits with our sensors, and we run the exact same procedure, we find the two separate bands of marks on the target: the sign of a particle.

We might presume that our sensors are affecting the test. Even today, decades after these tests first took place, most in the scientific community believe that the change in behavior of the photons must be the result of the sensors interacting with the particles. (After all we posit, in order to sense something we must disturb it at least a little) The sensors must be straightening out the photons somehow and causing them fly straight to the target. Over the years scientists have played around with different sensors and different ways to detect the photons with no change. We always see the same results: sensing the photons makes them behave like particles and not sensing them makes them behave like a wave. And also remember: with one slit covered, when we use the sensor, we get the band pattern. If the sensor was somehow affecting the flight pattern of the light it would affect it in this case also, but it doesn't. 

After decades of testing and analysis, quantum science has concluded an amazing thing: the sensors are not physically interacting enough with the protons as they go through the slits to re-direct their path. Here is the current working theory of what is going on:

Since the objects we are talking about are so small as to be invisible, and without any sensors are also undetectable, they act according to probability, not according to physical movement. For the period of time after we fire the electron and before we try to detect its position, the particle is in an unknown state: it is said to be in quantum superposition.

Most quantum researchers claim that the particles don't even exist physically during this period: that in this state the photons are actually a "wave function" and not a particle at all.This state will continue until the wave function interacts with something that “collapses” the wave function and forces the particle's position to be “revealed”.

So let's follow through with this alternative (quantum) way of looking at things.

A photon is emitted from a photon gun. Because of its tiny size and our inability to determine its location without any sensors, for a time it exists only as a probability, a wave function. For the moment it exists in quantum superposition. For each photon, we could calculate the probability that it will pass through the slit and strike the target, or not.

Actually each photon, while in superposition contains a probability wave function that describes every possible path it could have taken, an infinite number of paths. The particle exists as a probability wave until it is forced to “choose” a position by an interaction with something that collapses the state.

So for example, when a proton hits the target and it is sensed by the impact with a photographic plate, it must “reveal” a position. Since this is the first time the particle has encountered anything, its location is determined by the fact that it has been a probability wave since it left the photon gun so it's impact pattern on the target will reflect this previous probability wave behavior. It will not reflect what slit it went through because while in superposition in went through neither slit, or more accurately both and neither, as it traveled an infinite number of paths (every possible path in fact) probabilistically. So its impact location on the target is determined by this combined probability wave, and not a Newtonian path through a slit, on the way to the target.

Alternatively, if a sensor had been placed at the slit, it would have identified the location of the photon as it passed through. The wave function for the photon would have then been collapsed by the detection process, ending superposition at that point. With superposition concluded, the particle would then behave as a “Newtonian particle” and travel straight to the target in the classical Newtonian fashion. In this case the photon would travel in a straight path from the slit to the target and impact directly behind behind whichever slit it passed through. It would have left a mark close to all of the other marks from other photons which were identified as having gone through that particular slit.

What the scientists are saying is that when objects can't be detected they behave according to probability, not according to "normal rules" with characteristics like mass, speed, momentum and physical location. While being expressed as a probability function (wave) objects act like wave.

What gives them the property of a wave is rather interesting. Scientists theorize that they are blinking in and out of existence (yes this is really what tiny particles like electrons are theorized to do). So imagine something moving very quickly and blinking in and out of existence. They would appear and disappear in a regular pattern which could be plotted as a waveform. Hence, this is how a particle could possibly act as a wave. And why a particle, when in superposition, can exhibit characteristics such as interference patterns rather than exhibit traditional particle behavior. Different colors of light have different energy levels and exhibit different wavelengths reflecting the fact that the electrons blink in and out a varying frequencies.

Unfortunately this quantum probabilistic behavior is so foreign to we humans that many of us refuse to believe it. It just won't sink in because it doesn't make rational sense to us. We can more easily imagine that our slit sensor is pushing the photon onto a different trajectory than to think there is some still not understood machinery that manages whether an object needs to “reveal” it's location.

To make things even stranger: many scientists contend that the mechanism at play which collapses the wave function is consciousness itself. So the wave function is not collapsed by “hitting a target” or even by the fact that a camera witnessed it, but by the fact that a conscious being became aware of the results: for example, by witnessing the camera's image. Had no conscious entity been there to witness the camera, the quantum superposition would not have been disturbed. This has been proven in many ways over the decades.

Had enough? Well let take it up one more crazy notch. There are tests that show this effect is independent of time. i.e. that an event can change the results of a previous event.

Consider the following. In recent years scientists have devised a more cunning test that doesn't involve a sensor to detect which slit was involved. This way the argument that we must be somehow physically interfering with the proton as it transits the slit, can be avoided all together. It is called the Delayed Choice Experiment. I won't describe the details here but if interested the reader should see the links I've provided.

This test does sense the slit but it does it a very clever way. Once the photon goes through the slit it goes through a splitter mirror that spawns two twin photons which go through two very different parts of the test apparatus. One part of the apparatus collects target impact location data, the other part detects slit origin ½ the time and no slit origin the other ½ the time. The "choice" to collect slit data done randomly by a special silvered mirror. The trick is the silvered mirror which makes the "choice" is located such that it is struck AFTER it's twin photon already struck the target. So the choice to determine the path of the photon is made AFTER the target has already been struck.

So after test completion one can inspect the impact data on the target and see if it was caused by a photon for which slit data is known or not.

What we find is that for those photons who were eventually identified as having gone through a particular slit, the impact pattern was two bars. For those photons who were not linked to a particular slit they showed as having an interference pattern.

The points to emphasize are:

1- The path of the photon which eventually stuck the target was never sensed in any way, so there is no way to claim that the path of travel was interfered with at all.

2- The twin photon which eventually was sensed as having gone through a slit made "its choice" to show or not show its slit data AFTER its twin already struck the target. So the decision about whether to collect slit data happened after the target location data was collected.

See the following Youtube video that does a good job illustrating this experiment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSRTvKgAs9c&list=PLD823D27CAF0732C0&index=4

It seems like magic, but it is really how our universe works.

The point of all this is to demonstrate that although you may experience our world as a clockwork mechanism where action and reaction make logical sense, you are not perceiving what is really going on. You are not seeing the true nature of things.

Here's another quick example of the impossible: it is called "quantum entanglement"

Part of the delayed choice experiment involves a single photon striking a crystal, which annihilates the original photon but emits two photons. These two photons are in a way twins. They share the same attributes. For example: like other electrons, photons have a property called spin than can be measured.

It has been discovered that these photons are linked by what is called “quantum entanglement”. What this means is, whatever property one has, the other has: like spin, although in this case their spin would always be opposite of each other.

The odd bit is this: once entangled, if the property of one changes the other immediately changes to match. So if for example if one of the two photons is directed by a mirror to the far end of the galaxy and one is kept around locally, and we were to change the spin of the local twin, the spin of the other photon which could be thousands of light-years away would change instantly. This action is immediate so it is in violation of the speed of light, which is what caused Einstein to refer to it as “spooky actions at a distance”. There is no "physical" connection between the two objects and no force or communication that interacts between them. So how can this be?

It looks like this phenomenon of entanglement may be the functioning mechanism behind the whole mystery of the double slit experiment.

 Is it possible that this mechanism also interconnects us all in some fashion? Could this be the basis of things like ESP or other psi phenomenon? Perhaps we are in some way all entangled at some quantum level?

This quantum mystery is somehow a part of the world that exists, and has been measured scientifically, but is outside of our everyday experience. Again- the point is: the world is not what you think it is.

It is important to consider this fact as we proceed and uncover other odd aspects of reality. If you find yourself having a hard time swallowing some new way of looking at existence, try reminding yourself what you just learned in these sections. Hopefully we've shown you that you don't really understand how the world works in the first place. So perhaps you should not hold so tightly to what you think you understand, and be open to other explanations that are a better fit with all the facts.

The effects shown in the double slit experiment and the effect of quantum entanglement are examples of things that shouldn't, -couldn't-, happen in a billiard ball world: a world where we are totally separate individuals which are in turn separate from the objects being tested. The data seems to show that there is something interconnecting us (possibly via consciousness itself) to everything. Unfortunately we are generally unable to perceive and therefore to discover the nature of this interconnection.

Interestingly, this sense (that there is a hidden nature tho things that is “under the surface) is exactly what many personally intuit. Perhaps this “feeling” many have is more than just a personal thought or emotion, but rather a sensation of a real thing?

Perhaps what mankind has called a “sixth sense” is in actuality just as “real” as touch or taste. Perhaps it is even more so? Perhaps touch, taste and the other senses are the illusions?

Here's where we are left after this experiment-
We have seen that there are interactions that are shown to occur that:
- violate the speed of light
- that seem not to care about time or even just the order of occurrences (chronology)
- that show interactions at great distances instantaneously
- and, most incredibly, are perhaps somehow linked to consciousness

I'll say it again: we may be seeing that not only is our world not a gigantic clockwork machine, but that it is, in fact, in some fashion connected to our consciousness!

Now, with this more informed sense of the possibilities, perhaps we can take a closer look at some of those odd things that happen in our world that seem to defy scientific explanation. Perhaps with a mind more open to oddities of how are reality actually works, we can make better sense of things. 

Limits of the Scientific Approach

The Limits of the Scientific Approach

So on and on my investigation went as I read dozens and eventually several hundred books following the literary train of thought. Over time I have discovered many things I hadn't expected.

One was something the famous physicist Richard Feynman illustrated on many occasions. He found that even the most seemingly mundane things turn out to be unimaginably complex upon close enough inspection. Like a fractal: the closer one looks at anything, the more mystery is uncovered, which invites closer inspection, which uncovers still deeper complexity and mystery. The cycle has no end. It turned out that nearly anything on which you might choose to focus your attention, can draw you down Alice's intellectual rabbit hole as long as your mind is curious enough to want to discover the deeper truth, and is open enough to accept it.

Through reading and by investigating these things further on the web my curiosity has lead me to learn a bit about a wide range of topics like:

• What are dreams?
• Time: does it even exist?
• The nature of the very small (to understand the most fundamental building blocks of things).
• The nature of the very large (to understand the overall structure of the universe).
• Was there a beginning to the universe? An end?
• Are there other dimensions? And what does that even mean?
• What is the nature Extra Sensory Perception
• The search for life outside of Earth, and more broadly the origins of life.
• What is consciousness?
• What is reality?

The list goes on, but you get the idea. I was truly astounded that, as I looked at these and many other subjects, I found that science, which had always been the bedrock of my belief system, had little to say about many of these topics. Oh, at a cursory level for the casual investigator a reasonable “scientific” explanation would always be at hand. But on deeper investigation one invariably finds that the experts run out of steam, and often resort to convoluted mathematics and esoteric mumblings at best, jeers and name calling at worst.

Given my experience with lucid dreaming, I had opened my mind to the possibility that science can be wrong and further it can actually work hard to maintain the illusion of rightness, rather than to admit its limited ability to fully understand, explain, and predict the behavior of our world.

For the record, my firm belief is that if you can't explain a principal to an average person using non-technical language, you really don't fully understand what you are talking about and therefore what you are saying is suspect. I have found that on a wide variety of topics, especially those I have listed above, the scientific responses often fit that description.

On Time

Let's take for example the topic of time: and more specifically the “arrow of time”.

For a period of a few weeks during the 1990s I investigated time. I mostly played with mind experiments on the topic. Here is a brief review.

One such mind experiment is to start by sitting quietly and experiencing time. How do you perceive it? How does it feel?

I found that time is experienced through two basic mediums: physical senses and change. I see the cat here. Then I see it there. First I hear nothing, then I here a car go by outside. So we have a combination of sensing something, and then sensing something else while comparing it to data from our memory.

So a fundamental requirement to experience time might be in the sensing. What would happen if I we eliminated all senses? Then would we experience time?

Think about it. You are floating in space far from any light source, any sound, with no ability to sense anything. Would time still exist for you? Would it have any meaning?

I concluded, yes it would. You could still think of sequences of memories. There would still be a first thought, a second and so-forth.

So the experience of time, it seems, may involve as a primary component, memory.

Imagine the floating in space experience without the ability to remember. What would it feel like then? There is no sensation of any kind, but there IS mental function: thought. Your brain/mind can think a thought, but a moment later it would think a different thought, however the two couldn't be linked or compared without memory. There would be no sequence of action since you couldn't recall earlier events to compare against.

Hmmm. Maybe memory is the key thing?

So now let's re-introduce our senses.

You are sitting at your desk, with the cat in the chair beside you and car going by outside on the street. All of your senses are working just fine but still without the capacity of memory.

You might look at the cat asleep on the chair. The cat then wakes up and walks out of the room. What is your perception? You would be ever in the present without memory. You would experience the cat in whatever state it is currently in but you would have no way to measure or even experience changes, and therefore, time.

So, somehow you decide that perhaps you could capture the “now” with a picture and a note. Would that work? Well no, because although you could read the note and understand it, as soon as you observed the cat in its new position, all the info about the picture and the note would already be lost to you. It would be like the movie Memento: where you would be chasing your tail trying to make sense of the whole, but really only being able to see the immediate now.

So the mental exercise goes on and on, and I don't want pull you the reader through the whole process, as we have lots to cover here. In the end, the understanding I reached is that time may be like the canvas on which a painting exists. At most it is a scaffold on which reality is draped. Perhaps it doesn't exist at all but is merely an artifact, a shadow, an impression left by the other things that exist in our 3D experience such as objects, senses, thoughts and memory.

What I really wanted to get into is the related question about whether time has a direction. Why for instance do things happen but never “unhappen”. Why do eggs never “unbreak”? Why do cars never “uncrash”.

Well, according to the mathematics which describe classical Newtonian physics, time can run in either direction. The equations such as s=d/t (speed equals distance divided by time) are perfectly happy running in reverse. But the world doesn't work that way. Why?

The best explanation that science has to offer is to point to the law of entropy. As freshmen in college we learned there are 4 laws of thermodynamics: 0,1,2 and 3. The second law states that the entropy (state of randomness) of a system will increase over time as long as it is not acted upon from the outside. This “law” matches all the data we have ever observed, so it must be correct. Right?

The idea here is not to prove or disprove this statement, but just to point out the following- a scientist would simply tell you that time has a particular direction because it “must”. It is forced to have a direction by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

This logical sequence of thought is based on the time honored principal in science of building conclusion on fundamental rules that are not in question. This method is a key enabler for science to progress as far as it has. If a=b and b=c then c=a, right?

Think of it: if a young scientist had to continually re-prove all of the foundational assumptions on which their new work was based, there would way less time for new work to be accomplished. The approach works, but it also fosters a state of arrogance and close-mindedness that just might be the great inhibitor of revolutionary new concepts.

A huge body of assumptions now exist in science that simply are not questioned and are not subject to open debate. This is partially why the history of science is replete with stories of whole generations of scientists holding fast to “beliefs” and core concepts beyond the time where they have been proven obsolete. Often the science elite defend what they believe is correct partly because in order to accept the new, they must discard the entire scaffolding of their mental model of the world. There are layers of defense mechanisms and personal motivations for this behavior, but let's save that for later on.

Perhaps the reason entropy works in a certain way is related to the fact that time seems to move only in one direction, but why? How? Wouldn't it be nice to understand the actual causality of why time acts this way? The mechanism of it?

Causality IS important as the following story illustrates.

While I was a young bench engineer at Computervision in Bedford MA in the 1970s I was analyzing chip failures on CAD system boards. The company needed answers and was providing an almost unlimited budget, so I had a huge array of equipment at my disposal. My tool chest included toys like: high speed oscilloscopes, multi-channel digital logic analyzers, thermo stress ovens, shock and vibration tables with arrays of stress sensors and instruments. I even employed a state-of-the-art (in 1979) infrared thermal imaging system powered by liquid nitrogen costing nearly $100,000 (almost 10 times my annual salary at the time!).

After weeks of work, the answer to the failures still eluded me. One day at lunch I discussed my findings with one of the crusty older techs and he muttered the answer between bites of his meatloaf: “we let the smoke out” he said. “What are you talking” about I inquired. With a wry smile he reminded me that in each and every case of a failure a small wisp of smoke was emitted from the chip: which was true enough. He explained that according to his observation, the boards ALWAYS worked up to the time of the smoke being seen. Ergo he informed, the problem was quite obvious: the all-important smoke was being “released”, without which the chips could not function. We needed to come up with a way to keep the smoke inside the chip, and our problem would be solved.

Of course the whole story of the “magic smoke” is an old inside joke used by electrical engineers and techs, but interestingly there was a odd semi-truth in what he said: after all, it did conform to the observational data. Unfortunately of course, causality was left completely out of the discussion. The smoke was not the source of the failure but a result of the failure. It was not the cause, but the effect.

If one pays cursory attention to observed data, one might argue the Sun revolves around the Earth. Our scientific arrogance has moved beyond that fallacy but I fear that it continues today in other forms.

Recently particle physicists have “proven” that a special tiny object called a Higgs Boson (or “God Particle”) gives other tiny objects the property of mass. Actually we can't directly see these things so we must infer their presence, and since the indirect observational data confirms that they exist we take it as proven. That's how science ends up building it's understanding of the universe. On the other hand, tell one of these same scientists that there may be an actual dimension or aspect of reality that you experience in a dream state, they will deny it due to lack of evidence. It seems like there is a certain scientific arrogance, a double standard at play.

The illusive nature of psi

The “scientific method” is the main driver behind the advancement of our current understanding of our world. It uses the principal of starting with known data and theorizing something new. Then by constructing a test and analyzing its the results one can determine if the theory is valid. The ability for others to repeat and obtain the sames results is a critical part of the method. This approach has served mankind well for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years or more.

The problems is, there are aspects of our existence that aren't repeatable on demand. In these cases this approach, that requires consistent replication of the test results doesn't work.

Psi is shorthand for the range of subjects called the “paranormal”. Quite literally we define the paranormal as those experiences that lie outside the range of normal. In practice this would include those things that are outside sciences ability to measure. Things like ESP, precognition, seeing auras, communicating with the dead, near death experiences (NDE), out of body experiences (OBE) are all examples.

Before going any further, it is first important to look at whether psi even exists in the first place. It has been decades since the offer by the once popular magician and skeptic, James Randi (“The Amazing Randi”) made his famous offer to pay anyone $1,000,000 to prove a case of psi. The fact that the prize has never been claimed is proof to many that psi is a hoax. Most inquirers however will find however that the case for psi has been long settled.

James Randi and others like him have long insisted that if a phenomena could not be demonstrated, on demand, in a controlled laboratory setting then it was not “real”, that it did not conform to the rigorous demands of proof imposed by science. Well perhaps these people are half right: these things may not conform to the rigid rules imposed by science, but perhaps this is a failing of science and not of the phenomenon.

Randi has never paid anyone the prize, but most open minded observers have seen more than enough examples to warrant a payout. Randi, like most in the skeptical community use the demand for more and more controls to be added to an experiment until it becomes impossible to reproduce. It is then claimed debunked.  

At one point in scientific history the claim that meteorites fell from the sky was refuted by science. Even when provided the actual physical object, science scoffed. After all, the assertion went, "it is implicitly obvious that rocks don't fall from the sky". Of course, what is implicitly obvious now, is not what was obvious then. We have seen this play out many times in history when the impossible became possible only through the discovery of deeper understanding of our world. The examples are too numerous and obvious to mention but of course the most illustrative case would be whether our world is round or flat, and whether Earth orbits the sun or the other way around.

The case for the proof of psi goes beyond this however. It goes to whether a particular thing can be demonstrated on-demand. Can a home run be hit on-demand? Of course not. Is it not however real? Do plane crashes happen? Have you ever personally seen one occur? Some things simply occur in such unpredictable ways it is nearly impossible to prove they exist despite the fact that reasonable people agree that they do.

And finally beyond the two factors of: growth in scientific understanding, and the difficulty of demonstrating rare occurrences, we have the fact that some processes in existence may just be too delicate to measure: too ethereal to put under the bright lights of rigid scientific inquiry and expect conclusive results. Sorry, but that just might be the way the world works.

Too touchy-feely for you? Well you might want to get used to it, because 100 years ago the delicate and truly mysterious nature of how our world really works was uncovered. It is an intrinsic part of everything that happens all around us every minute.

Ever heard of quantum mechanics?