Files From the Edge (2 page)

The New Science

Human beings have always had a fascination with the supernatural. When the people of ancient cultures witnessed something they could not explain, they would attribute it to some god, spirit, or unknown elemental force of nature. Two thousand years ago, thunder and lightning frightened inhabitants of the Mediterranean and northern Europe; despite the attempts of the greatest minds of that time to find a rational explanation, not one had an answer for what caused this terrifying phenomenon. It was then said that the lightning and the thunder were beyond the understanding of mere mortals and the result of an angry god. The Greeks and the Romans called this entity Zeus and Jupiter, while the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and continental Germanic people called him Thor. Science later gave us answers and because of this knowledge, most people no longer fear the thunder and lightning of an electrical storm.

A study of the natural world is not an exact science. History has taught us that the theories and laws of the universe science has placed so high on a pedestal as being the absolute truth are shaky and changeable. Today’s scientists continue to make the same mistakes as their predecessors by holding on to outdated ideas for reasons they only know. Perhaps keeping the old ways intact gives many of the older and established professors of the academic world feelings of certainty and security.

Repeating the Same Mistakes

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science was just starting to bloom as new discoveries were being made almost every day in all disciplines from astronomy to zoology. It was in this early scientific age that William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus using a relatively new device at the time called the telescope. The era also saw the beginning of great exploration as human beings began to understand the forces of nature. Using improved instruments and logical thinking, scientists realized a supernatural being was not necessary to explain wind, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thunder, and lightning. Yet, there were still many mysteries that science could not explain—one of them was our sun.

It was common knowledge in the 1700s that our sun was very far away from Earth and that every second it produced enormous amounts of energy. A heated debate among scientists and theologians emerged to explain the sun’s energy source. No one had a definite answer as to what fuel source could produce that amount of energy for such a long period of time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coal, wood, oil, and natural gas were the only fuel sources they understood. Since most of these were fossils fuels and all of them were formed on our planet, they didn’t seem to apply to the sun.

Theories abounded, yet not one of the greatest scientific minds of the eighteenth century could offer a suitable theory to explain our sun’s energy output. When asked what powered the sun, most scientists would reply that it was beyond man’s understanding. Some even claimed that a supernatural being was responsible—an angel of fire (so to speak) who ensured the sun would continue to output heat and light uninterrupted for millions of years so humans could survive.

The scientists and philosophers of more than two hundred years ago had no knowledge of nuclear energy. They could not imagine—even in their wildest dreams and speculations—that when atoms are smashed together, a great amount of energy is released . . . great enough to power a star like our sun. Mankind would have to wait until the twentieth century before humans truly understood the power source of the sun. When nuclear fission and fusion were discovered, humans once again no longer needed a supernatural or divine being of great power to explain the energy output of our sun and other stars in the galaxy.

It’s amazing to think that today in our modern world science still adheres to the rule that if your current ideas, knowledge, and theories can’t explain something, it must not exist. Science is the pursuit of making what is unknown,
known
and
understood
. Yet, the scientists of today have forgotten their true mission and have once again turned their backs to reports of the unexplained. The human state of mind has changed little over centuries past: many modern people attribute unexplainable events to a supernatural cause just like their ancestors of a more unenlightened time. The confused and often scared people begin looking for answers to help them understand what has taken place and so look to the scientist for answers. However, scientists do not have the instrumentation or knowledge to prove or disprove the reality of strange events; they give the unexplainable very little attention and so these phenomena remain without explanation. UFOs and other forms of paranormal phenomena have no easy explanation; because they are complex, the only way we can begin to find answers is if we open our minds to ideas considered impossible by the scientific community and society at large.

Speculation is the key to discovery; if people like Galileo, Brahe, Priestly, Copernicus, and Kepler didn’t speculate and open their minds to accept new, radical ideas, modern science would never have been born. We must give up our old ideas of a finite expanding universe and consider that the cosmos is more complex than any of us could have ever dreamed, possibly with multiple parallel universes each composed of several dimensions. It is my belief that experiences mistakenly labeled as “supernatural” or “paranormal” originate from a parallel dimension or universe very close to our own. Recently, the theory of not a single universe, but a mega-universe (or “multiverse”) has received considerable attention from not only scientists, but the general public as well.

My Introduction to the Multiverse

During my early days as a student at MIT, sometime in the winter of 1977, I attended a lecture given by Dr. Philip Morrison called “How We Know What We Know in Science.” I had read Dr. Morrison’s work in theoretical physics and found his insights fascinating—I had to see and hear what he had to say in person. However, before I continue, let me give you some background information on Dr. Morrison and his contribution to our current knowledge of the state of the universe.

Philip Morrison’s title was Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the highest academic honor bestowed on a university faculty member. In my opinion, he was one of the world’s greatest physicists and an amazing teacher: Dr. Morrison could explain complex astronomy and physics theories so clearly that anyone, no matter the level of education, could understand it. He was a talented educator who spoke in complete sentences . . . and paragraphs. Dr. Morrison had a unique ability to verbally convey his thoughts and ideas to his students with crystal clarity.

If I had to describe him, I would say he was a friendly, down to earth, spirited, witty gentleman who loved science with all his heart. He once said “I teach because I was taught; my great love in life is to explain my craft.” In 1959, Dr. Morrison suggested that a scientific project be initiated to search for extraterrestrial life by listening to the universe using radio waves. For his time, this was a radical suggestion. When asked about it, he would say “I just want to know if anyone is out there. Are we alone in the universe or are there countless numbers of civilizations in the galaxy also looking up to the night sky and wondering the same thing?” When members of the media asked him if this search would ever find “aliens,” Dr. Morrison would reply: “The probability for success is hard to estimate but if we don’t look, the chance of success is zero.”

I was quite anxious to hear Dr. Morrison’s presentation so I got there more than an hour before the lecture to ensure a front-row seat in the very large auditorium at the MacLaurin Building at MIT. I really didn’t know what to expect, but as eight o’clock drew near, every seat in the house filled up. I looked around the auditorium and noticed some of the most esteemed scientists in the country were present, including the famous Dr. Carl Sagan. Dr. Morrison entered the room and began to talk, and I was very surprised that his presentation quickly turned to the topic of extraterrestrial life and suggested our current understanding of the cosmos could be very wrong. I wanted to mention this incident since it was the first time I heard a person of great standing in the scientific community talk not only about UFOs and alien civilizations, but also what was later called “string theory” and the concept of a multidimensional universe. Dr. Morrison’s two-hour presentation was amazing—later that night in my small apartment in Cambridge, I considered changing my major at MIT from chemistry to physics.

Dr. Morrison’s words rang true and still influence me to this day. He presented some amazing ideas that night—very radical for that time—but what I remember most were his closing words: “What was presented here tonight is a theory and we, as scientists, must look for further answers since what we now know about the universe is limited. However, extraordinary claims and ideas also require extraordinary evidence.” This was a saying that Dr. Morrison used since the early sixties and was later copied by scientists in many fields including Carl Sagan. In case you were wondering, I did not change my major; I was informed that there were more opportunities in chemistry than physics in the worlds of industry, research, and education.

Dr. Morrison passed over in 2005 at age 89. When he died, this world lost a great man and, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant minds since Isaac Newton. Dr. Morrison’s legacy continues to this day—he encouraged a group of young scientists (including myself) to look further for answers and not to be limited by what you have learned from your teachers.

A New Theory Reveals Another Reality

In 1976, Daniel Z. Freedman, at SUNY Stony Brook proposed an idea that the universe was connected together by a four-dimensional force he called “super gravity.”
[1]
Within five years of Dr. Freedman’s published paper on the subject, our view of the cosmos grew larger, and it was found that super gravity could not explain the correct state of the universe; a forgotten idea called “string theory” was once again taken seriously. In the twentieth century, the popular view of the geometrical design of elementary particles that make up matter was that they are small spheres, so small that more than 100 trillion of them lined up could fit on the head of a pin and still have plenty of room. However, string theory states that the building material that makes up the elementary particles are much smaller and not spheres but two-dimensional strings with a length of one billion trillion trillionth of a centimeter (very small).

String theory was originally developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a never completely successful attempt to tie all the forces in the universe together and provide the physicists with a neat package of all and everything.
[2]
In the 1960s, Dr. Geoffrey Chew, then professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered that mesons had unusual spins that could not be explained at the time.
[3]
This was later explained by Nobel laureate Dr. Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago and Dr. Leonard Susskind of Stanford University to be the relationship that would be expected from rotating strings. Dr. Chew advocated making a theory for the interactions of these trajectories that did not presume they were formed by fundamental particles, but two-dimensional strings. At first, string theory was considered (by the older, established scientific community) to be nothing more than a pipe dream invented by a group of wide-eyed scientists who allowed wild speculations to cloud their logical scientific judgment. Since the established scientific community at that time was so skeptical of the idea of strings holding the universe together, the theory was not seriously considered until the mid-1980s.

String theory is actually a theory of gravity and an extension of general relativity where vibrating strings are the glue that ties all the forces in the universe together. In string theory, all the properties of these elementary particles (which include charge, mass, and spin) come from the string’s vibration. The more frequent the vibration, the more energy and mass the particle will possess. The sequence in which a number of strings vibrate will determine if they will become neutrons, protons, electrons, leptons, or other types of more exotic particles. As with a stringed musical instrument, the wire must be stretched under considerable tension in order to vibrate at a particular frequency, in this case the force would have to be close to 1040 tons. This is one of the flaws in the theory; scientists have yet to find this great celestial tension load required for a string to vibrate.

The Guitar and the Universe

To understand string theory a little better, consider the idea of a guitar being tuned. The tension and thickness of the string will determine what musical note is produced when played. Each note produced by the string can correspond to the creation of the elementary particles that make up all
matter from the smallest atom to the largest galaxies. In string theory (as with a guitar string), the string has to be under tension in order for it to vibrate and produce a sound (energy). However, the guitar string is attached to a solid base, but the cosmological string is floating in time and space. The “base” holding the tension to the quantum string has not yet been found, but theoretical scientists are convinced of its
existence!