"The Door To Impossible Things" part 1

Chapter 1

An Introduction

Ever wonder what the heck makes the world work? I mean, what's going on behind the scenes? I grew up thinking science had all the answers. I even became an engineer because I was convinced that everything could be boiled down to ones and zeros, facts and fiction, provable and not provable. However I slowly accumulated a multitude of experiences where I found science seemed not to apply.

This book is an account of how I used various bits of information accumulated over my life so far to make better sense of it all.

The idea here isn't to give the reader a predigested meal such as a mother bird gives to a chick. It is more along the lines of showing you where the worms are hiding so you can feed yourself.

I present myself as an example of how an otherwise normal somewhat left brained person might be convinced that there is something magical going on behind the scenes. I propose to show you how I approached this journey in order that you might decide if the journey is worthwhile for yourself.

This book is for those who are open-mindedly looking at the reality that we experience and are trying to decide what is real and what is illusion. If you are a hardcore skeptic this book probably won't resonate with you because although you profess objectivity, your requirements for proof may be so stringent that in the end you are not really open-minded at all. If, when exposed to some fantastic story, you find yourself immediately suggesting that the story teller was: looking for attention, or trying to make a buck, or part of a conspiracy or delusional, or whatever, you may want to take a closer look at your bias to see if you are really open-minded enough to consider a non-mainstream explanation.

Honestly think about it: Would you be one of those calling for Galileo's head when he proposed that we are not at the center of our solar system? At that time, most level-headed scientifically minded people, including the leading scientists of the day, did not even want to consider his radical and for then, outlandish theory. These were people who considered themselves reasonable and open-minded, but were generally not open to considering something that departed so far from their belief system.

Now don't worry, I believe in proof and validation too, but I think we occasionally need to suspend disbelief long enough to consider a different theory. Some have referred to this as being able to accept a “provisional belief”. By which we mean, being able to accept an idea for long enough to understand its implications, and to compare them to the real world data before making a judgment. This is the type of objective thought process takes to really be open minded.

So if you are thinking what goes on in Church is mostly empty ritual, but on the other hand there seems like something going on in the world that we can't explain, or perhaps for reasons beyond your conscious mind you have a feeling that there is something more waiting to be uncovered for you, read on. I think I may be able to help you plot a course through the miasma.

In this book you'll find a mix of math, psi, logic, physics, religion, metaphysics, philosophy, and such, all jumbled together. From this I have assembled what for me was sufficient to answer my nagging questions and finally to assemble a rough picture of how things actually work. If you find all this unconvincing, there may at least be enough here to get you to question the conventional wisdom and perhaps lead you on your own process to figure out the nature of things.

This book touches on quite a wide range of subject matter. One approach would have used detailed citations and covered every detail of each topic in order to make sure the reader was provided the most detailed understanding of each assertion made. Although comprehensive, this sort of assembly would have presented a tremendous chore to the reader. I have waded through similar material on the individual topics and I felt that combining that level of detail on this range of subjects within a single volume would make it almost unapproachable.

Consequently, I chose to provide enough information at each step to give the reader a good understanding of my point while not trying to attempt a proof. I'm afraid it will be up to you, dear reader, to do the additional investigation to fill in the blank spots, and to attain a level of “proof” sufficient for you. I have tried to provide enough bibliographical and other references to suit this purpose.

Section 1

The old man and the boy

On new year's eve in 1952 he stood looking at his grandson asleep in bed: the young boy slept with the covers pulled tightly up to his chin in order to keep out the winter's chill. With Robert's three brothers asleep nearby the jolly white haired man patiently watched and waited until Robert awoke with a start. As the boy lay there and the man stood at the foot of his bed, they quietly talked about some of the happenings of the day. It was mostly about trivial little things like the farm's horses and his schoolwork, but the boy and his Grampa enjoyed the easy chat as always. At some point the old man said he would be leaving for a long time but that everything would be fine and he should not worry. The child listened, and after short while, fell back into a deep peaceful sleep.

In the morning young Robert entered the kitchen warmed by the old pot bellied stove and while smelling the wood smoke and steaming coffee he asked his mother where Grampa was going. Astonished, she looked at her husband and back to the boy and asked why he would ask such a thing.

As the boy finished telling his story his mother sat, quietly staring into her cup of coffee wondering how to respond.

This conversation has occurred many times throughout the centuries with only minor changes. A person is visited by a beloved family member and informed that they will be leaving and not to worry. Only to find out later that the journey called death had already begun, some hours or perhaps just moments before. I read all about an almost identical account just yesterday (Dec 2012).

In this particular case the gray haired man was my great grandfather talking to his grandson, my uncle, Bob. Only moments before he was found standing at the foot of my uncle's bed, he had been killed in a car accident coming home from work as a night watchman on new year's eve. As most of these stories recount, the person being visited had no way of knowing the extraordinary nature of their conversation until sometime later.

How can this sort of occurrence be explained? Could it be real?

Many “scientific” thinkers will posit such explanations as: in his sleep, the boy could have overheard the terrible early morning conversation about the accident, or perhaps he heard a late night siren and correctly guessed at it's source, or maybe it was just a coincidence. Whichever explanation is chosen this time, the logical skeptic would often rather believe anything than consider the possibility of such an odd mystical event really occurring, because we are taught in science class that these things are simply impossible. The fact that this sort of thing has happened uncountable times with a wide variety of circumstances that defy logical explanation doesn't deter the ardent disbeliever.

If you were to take time with the skeptic and discuss the root of their disbelief, you might be told that it is because as humans we are separate individuals located at a distance and as-such have no connection with each other whatsoever. No connection that is, other than the known forces such as gravity and the possibility of “objects” such as light or sounds or smells, or fields of other sorts emanating from one and traveling to the other.

You would then be told the same story most any high school science student has been taught, and which Newton and those before him had developed hundreds of years ago. Sir Issac theorized a “billiard ball” universe where individual objects stood apart from each other and could only effect one another by directly interacting (touching) or by causing other “billiard balls” to travel to and impact another object. This model of separateness has been basis of all major scientific models of the universe ever since, and to many it remains so to this day.

The main changes in the theory over the decades are mainly that the objects keep shrinking in size as man improves his ability to build larger and more powerful machines to smash matter into smaller and smaller bits. The newest machine being the Large Hadron Collider located at the lab called CERN on the boarder of France and Switzerland. As of 2012 the smallest and newest bit of stuff that has been discovered is the Higgs boson, aka: the “god particle”.

The basic belief of most people today have at its core, the fact that we exist in a universe where only “local” actions are possible. Locality refers to the inability of distant objects to affect each other without any direct intervening local action such as gravity etc. Such non-local forces might even violate the oft referenced speed of light. Although the most advanced scientific theories currently acknowledge non-locality as an inseparable part of quantum theory, the average person has not yet accepted this as a part of their understanding.

Scientific doctrine now says the final irreducible size of matter may not even be an object at all, but rather a vibrating “string” of energy. However this doesn't change the fact that people generally still feel that each individual unit of stuff, whether a particle or an energy wave, stands alone and is unaffected by other “distant” units.

Quantum mechanics stands out as exposing perhaps the most famous of many strange behaviors of our reality. It may be most notable because it seems to straddle the the worlds of science and the mystic. Although it has become one of the world's most successful scientific theories, most people are either 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.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This book is about my personal journey to figure out what makes our universe tick. The idea is not to convince you, dear reader, of anything. No,,, there are thousands of books and speakers and YouTube videos that purport to do that. The problem these days is not a lack of information, but rather an overabundance of it. How to find that one critical piece of straw cleverly hidden in the haystack? Where, and for what, should you be looking? Perhaps the question for you is: whether you should you even be looking at all.

What I am offering is an account of my journey through a labyrinth that has been navigated for eons by uncountable curious searchers. I have attempted to illuminate the paths and the blind alleys I have encountered which we can re-trace together, like following a trail of breadcrumbs that I and others have dropped along the way. If, as is often the case, your personal journey is destined to follow a different route, the specific details of our search together may not be the point at all. Rather the lesson for you may be only to discover that the journey is worthwhile. Further, perhaps some of the signposts that we come across and resources we uncover may help you find that loose piece of thread that, once tugged, unravels your own amazing mystery.

As for me, I have discovered some amazing things in my journey but I won't share those thoughts until later.