Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (16 page)

Ever since the remotest of times, philosophers have been intrigued by object and background, like those illusions in which one can see either a fancy wine glass or two profiled faces looking at each other. It is the same way with space, objects, and the observer.

Now, space and time illusions are certainly harmless. A problem only arises because, by treating space as something physical, existing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality, or in the current obsession with trying to create a Grand Unified Theory that truly explains the cosmos.

“It seems,” wrote Hume, “that men are carried by a natural instinct or prepossession to repose faith in their senses, and that without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe which depends not on our perception but would exist though we and every creature were absent or annihilated.”

The physical qualities that the physicists
had
bestowed upon space, of course, could not possibly be found. But that didn’t stop them from trying. The most famous attempt was the Michelson- Morley experiment, designed in 1887 to resolve any doubt about the existence of the “ether.” When Einstein was very young, scientists thought this ether pervaded and defined space. The ancient Greeks had detested the notion of nothingness: being excellent and obsessive logicians, they were fully aware of the contradiction built into the idea of
being
nothing.
Being
, the verb
to be
, patently contradicts
nothing
and putting the two together was like saying you were going to walk not walk. Even before the nineteenth century, scientists, too, believed that something had to exist between the planets, or else light would have no substance through which to fly. Although earlier attempts to demonstrate the presence of this supposed
ether
had proved unsuccessful, Albert Michelson argued that if the Earth was streaming through the ether, then a beam of light traveling through the medium in the same direction should reflect back faster than a similar beam of light at right angles to the direction of Earth’s flight.

With the help of Edward Morley, Michelson made the test, with the apparatus attached to a firm concrete platform floating atop a generous pool of liquid mercury. The multiple-mirror device could be readily rotated without introducing unwanted tilt. The results were incontrovertible: the light that traveled back and forth
across
the “ether stream” accomplished the journey in exactly the same time as light traveling the same distance up and down the “ether stream.” It seemed as if the Earth had stalled in its orbit round the Sun, as if to preserve Ptolemy’s natural Greek philosophy. But to renounce the whole Copernican theory was unthinkable. To assume that the ether was carried along with the Earth also made no sense at all and had already been ruled out by a number of experiments.

Of course, there was no ether; space has no physical properties. “Knowledge,” Henry David Thoreau once said, “does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.” It took several years for George Fitzgerald—using not heaven but the rapture of properly applied logic—to point out that there was another explanation for
the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. He suggested that matter itself contracts along the axis of its motion, and that the amount of contraction increases with the rate of motion. For instance, an object moving forward would be slightly shorter than it was at rest. Michelson’s apparatus—indeed, all measuring devices, including the human sense organs—would adjust themselves in the same way, contracting as they were turned into the direction of the Earth’s motion.

At first, this hypothesis suffered from the lack of any credible explanation—always a deficiency in science if not in politics—until the great Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz invoked electromagnetism. Lorentz had been one of the first to postulate the existence of the electron, leading to its discovery in 1897 as the very first subatomic particle, and still one of only three deemed to be fundamental or indivisible. He was considered by many theoretical physicists, including Einstein, as the leading mind among them. It was Lorentz’s belief that the contraction phenomenon was a dynamic effect, and that the molecular forces in an object in motion differ from those from an object at rest. He reasoned that if an object with its electrical charges were moved through space, its particles would assume new relative distances from one another. The result would be a change in the object’s shape, which would contract in the direction of its motion.

Lorentz developed a set of equations that later became known as the Lorentz transformation (or Lorentz Contraction—see Appendix 1) to describe events taking place in one frame of reference in terms of a different one. This transformation equation was so simple and beautiful that it was utilized in its entirety by Einstein for his 1905 Special Relativity theory. Indeed, it embodies the whole mathematical essence of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, not only succeeding in quantifying the contraction hypothesis, but also presenting, before the invention of the relativity theory, the right equation for the increase in mass of a moving particle.

Unlike changes in length, the change in mass of an electron can be determined from its deflection by a magnetic field. By 1900,
Walter Kauffman had verified that an electron’s mass increased just as predicted by Lorentz’s equations. In fact, subsequent experiments show Lorentz’s equations to be well-nigh perfect.

Although Poincaré had discovered the relativity principle, and Lorentz the formula for change, the time was ripe for Einstein to reap this harvest. It was in this special relativity theory that the full implications of the space-time transformation laws were laid out clearly: clocks really do slow down when they move, and very much so when they move at velocities that approach the speed of light. At 586 million miles per hour, for instance, a clock would run half as fast as when at rest. And at the speed of light—670 million miles per hour—a clock would stop completely. The actual, everyday consequences of this may seem perceptually ungraspable, for nobody is sensitive enough to detect the extremely minute changes that occur in clocks and measuring rods at the level of ordinary life. Even in a rocket hurtling through space at 60 million miles per hour, a clock would only slow by less than 0.5 percent.

The equations in Einstein’s theory of relativity, building on the equations of Lorentz, predicted all the remarkable effects of motion at high speeds. They described a world that few could imagine, even at a time when the prevailing fiction included fantastic works from fertile minds such as H.G. Wells, the author of
The Time Machine
.

Experiment after experiment appear to bear Einstein’s ideas out. His equations have been checked, cross-checked, and counterchecked. In fact, there are whole technologies that depend on them. The focusing of the electron microscope is one. The design of the klystron, the electronic tube that supplies microwave power to radar systems, is another.

Both relativity and the biocentric theory presented in this book (which prefers the dynamic “compensatory theory” suggested by Lorentz) predict the same phenomena. It is not possible to choose one theory over the other based on the observational facts. “One must choose relativity over the compensatory [biocentric] alternatives,” wrote Lawrence Sklar, one of the world’s leading philosophers of science, “as a matter of free choice.” But it is not necessary
to jettison Einstein in order to restore space and time to their place as means by which we animals and humans intuit ourselves. They belong to us, not to the physical world. There is no necessity to create new dimensions and invent an entirely new mathematics to explain why space and time are relative to the observer.

However, this equi-compatibility does not pertain to all natural phenomena. When applied immediately to spaces of a submolecular order of magnitude, Einstein’s theory breaks down altogether. In the relativity theory, motion is described in the context of a four-dimensional continuum of space-time. Therefore, using it alone, it should have been possible to determine both position and momentum or energy and time simultaneously with unlimited accuracy—a conclusion that wound up being inconsistent with the limits imposed by the uncertainty principle.

Einstein’s interpretation of nature was designed to explain paradoxes accrued by motion and the presence of gravitational fields. They make no philosophical statement about whether or not space or time exists absent an observer. They would work as well if the matrix of the traveling particle or bit of light were a field of consciousness as in a field of total nothingness.

But no matter how we regard mathematical conveniences for calculating motion, space and time remain properties of the perceiving organism. It is solely from the viewpoint of life that we can speak of them, despite the popular view of space-time of special relativity existing as a self-sustaining entity having independent existence and structure.

Moreover, it is only with considerable hindsight that we now realize that Einstein merely substituted a 4D absolute external entity for a 3D absolute external entity. In fact, at the beginning of his paper on general relativity, Einstein raised the same concern about his own theory of special relativity. Einstein had ascribed objective reality to space-time independent of occupation of whatever events happen to take place in its arena. His concern—abandoned because he could not take it further—would no doubt resonate with him today if he were alive. After all, his one consistent spiritual viewpoint, repeated
over and over, was that “there is no free will,” the invariable consequence of which is a universe that is self-operating, and on down that slippery slope we go until dualism and ego-independence, and isolated compartments for consciousness and an external cosmos, become untenable. In truth, there can be no break between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone.

Einstein’s work, as it stood, was superb for calculating trajectories and determining the relative passage of the sequencing of events. He made no attempt to elucidate the actual nature of time and space, because these cannot be explained by physical laws. For that, we must first learn how we perceive and imagine the world around us.

Indeed, how do we see things when in fact the brain is locked inside the cranium, inside a sealed vault of bone? That this whole rich and brilliant universe comes from a quarter-inch opening of the pupil, and the faint bit of light that gains entry thereby? How does it turn some electrochemical impulses into an order, a sequence, and a unity? How can we cognize this page, or a face, or anything that appears so real that very few ever stop to question how it occurs? Obviously, it is outside traditional physics to discover that these perpetual images that surround us so vividly are a construction, a finished product hovering inside the head.

“After having in full confidence begun with it [epistemology],” wrote Albert Einstein, “I quickly recognized what a slippery field I had ventured upon, having, due to lack of experience, until now cautiously limited myself to the field of physics.” What a statement—and written with the benefit of wisdom and hindsight nearly half a century after he had already formulated his special theory.

Einstein might as well have attempted to construct a castle without knowledge of the mass of materials or of their fitness for this purpose. He believed in his youth that he could build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side—the living. But Einstein was not a biologist or a medical doctor. By inclination and training, he was obsessed with mathematics and equations and particles of light. The great physicist spent the final fifty years of his life searching in vain for a Grand Unified Theory that would tie together
the cosmos. If only, after leaving his office in Princeton, he would have looked out upon the pond and watched the schools of minnows rise to the surface to behold that vaster universe of which they too were an intricate part.

Einstein’s relativity is fully compatible with a much more flexible definition of space. Several threads in physics indeed imply that a rethinking of space is necessary to move forward: the persistent ambiguity of the observer in Quantum Theory (QT), the nonzero vacuum energy implied by cosmological observations, and the breakdown of general relativity on small scales, to name a few. To this we may add the unsettling fact that space as perceived by
biological
consciousness remains a domain apart, and remains one of the most poorly understood natural phenomena.

To those who assume Einstein’s development of special relativity necessitates the reality of external, independent “space” (and likewise assume the reality of an absolute separability of objects, what quantum theory calls
locality
, and rest the concept of space on this basis) we must emphasize once again that to Einstein himself, space is simply what we can measure using the solid objects of our experience. Rather than spend half a dozen pages here with a more technical exposition of how relativity’s results are equally obtained without any need for an objective, external “space,” see Appendix 2, which describes special relativity’s postulates in terms of a fundamental field and its properties. Doing so, we have unseated space from its privileged position. As science becomes more unified, it is to be hoped that we can explain consciousness as well as idealized physical situations, following the current threads of quantum mechanics that have made it clear that the observer’s decisions are closely linked to the evolution of physical systems.

Although consciousness may eventually be understood well enough to be described by a theory of its own, its scaffolding is clearly part of the physical logic of nature, that is, the fundamental
grand unified field. It is both acted on by the field (in perceiving external entities, experiencing the effects of acceleration and gravity, etc.) and acts on the field (by realizing quantum mechanical systems, constructing a coordinate system to describe light-based relationships, etc.).