The Field (44 page)

I must especially thank Dean Radin for educating me in statistics, Hal Puthoff, Fritz Popp and Peter Marcer for what amounted to a course in physics, Karl Pribram for an education in brain neurodynamics and Edgar Mitchell for sharing the most up-to-date developments.

I am also grateful to the following, all of whom I spoke or corresponded with: Andrei Apostol, Hanz Betz, Dick Bierman, Marco Bischof, Christen Blom-Dahl, Richard Broughton, Toni Bunnell, William Corliss, Deborah Delanoy, Suitbert Ertel, George Farr, Peter Fenwick, Peter Gariaev, Valerie Hunt, Ezio Insinna, David Lorimer, Hugh MacPherson, Robert Morris, Richard Obousy, Marcel Odier, Beverly Rubik, Rupert Sheldrake, Dennis Stillings, William Tiller, Marcel Truzzi, Dieter Vaitl, Harald Walach, Hans Wendt and Tom Williamson.

Although scores of books and papers contributed in some way to my thoughts and conclusions, I am indebted to Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (New York: Harper-Edge, 1997) and Richard Broughton’s Parapsychology: The Controversial Science (New York: Ballantine, 1991) for their compilation of evidence for psychic phenomena; Larry Dossey, whose various books were highly useful for evidence of spiritual healing; and Ervin Laszlo, for his fascinating theories of the vacuum in The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdisciplinary Unified Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1995).

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the team at HarperCollins, particularly my editors, Larry Ashmead and Krista Stroever, for their sage advice and courage in backing this project. I am especially grateful to Andrew Coleman, for his painstaking subediting of the manuscript. I am also indebted to my team at What Doctors Don’t Tell You for their support. Julie McLean and Sharyn Wong in particular offered vital aid at the eleventh hour, and Kathy Mingo’s unfailing assistance enabled me to juggle home and work. My PR consultant, Pavel Mikoloski, has been a tireless champion of the 2008 edition.

I owe a special thanks to Peter Robinson, my UK agent, and Daniel Benor, my international agent, for taking up the project with such enthusiasm. I should also particularly like to thank my agent in America, Russell Galen, whose dedication and unflagging belief in this project has been nothing short of astonishing.

Special mention must be made of my children, Caitlin and Anya, through whom I daily experience The Field firsthand. As ever, this book owes its largest debt to my husband Bryan Hubbard, for helping me to understand the true meaning of this book and also the true meaning of interconnection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
YNNE
M
CTAGGART
is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books, including the bestseller
The Field
and
The Intention Experiment
(www.theintentionexperiment.com). As cofounder and editorial director of What Doctors Don’t Tell You (www.wddty.com), she publishes health newsletters that are among the most widely praised in the world. She is also editor of Living the Field, a course that helps to bring the science of
The Field
into everyday life. Her company holds highly popular conferences and workshops on health and spirituality. She has become a well-respected international authority on the science of spirituality and speaks and holds regular seminars and master classes in America, Europe, and other countries around the world.

McTaggart is also author of
The Baby Brokers
:
The Marketing of White Babies in America
(the Dial Press) and
Kathleen Kennedy
:
Her Life and Times
(the Dial Press/Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK).
The Field, The Intention Experiment
, and
What Doctors Don’t Tell You
each have been translated into dozens of languages.

She and her husband, WDDTY cofounder Bryan Hubbard, live and work in London with their two daughters.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

NOTES

Unless otherwise indicated, all information about the scientists and the details of their discoveries was culled from multiple telephone interviews conducted between 1998 – 2001.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1
D. Reilly, ‘Is evidence for homeopathy reproducible?’
The Lancet
, 1994; 344: 1601 – 6.

PROLOGUE: THE COMING REVOLUTION

1
M. Capek,
The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics
(Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1961): 319, as quoted in F. Capra,
The Tao of Physics
(London: Flamingo, 1992).

2
D. Zohar,
The Quantum Self
(London: Flamingo, 1991): 2; Danah Zohar provides an excellent summary of the philosophical history of science before and after Newton and Descartes.

3
I am indebted to Brenda Dunne, manager of the PEAR laboratory in Princeton, for first enlightening me about the philosophical interests of the quantum theorists. See also W. Heisenberg,
Physics and Philosophy
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), N. Bohr,
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), and R. Jahn and B. Dunne,
Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World
(New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987): 58 – 9.

4
Interview with Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, Amsterdam, October 19, 2000.

5
Indeed, in determining which of the scientists merited inclusion, I have had to make certain arbitrary selections. I chose American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and his work on human consciousness, when I could as easily have chosen Oxford professor Roger Penrose. Only for reasons of space have I omitted pioneers into electromagnetic cell communications like Cyril Smith.

CHAPTER ONE: LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

1
For an account of Dr Mitchell’s voyage, I have relied on E. Mitchell,
The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds
(G.P. Putnam, 1996): 47-56; M. Light,
Full Moon
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); a visit to an exhibition of lunar photographs (London: Tate Gallery, November 1999); personal interviews with Dr Mitchell (summer and autumn 1999); T. Wolfe,
The Right Stuff
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1980); and A. Chaikin,
A Man on the Moon
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 355-79.

2
Mitchell,
Way of the Explorer
: 61. Dr Mitchell’s results were published in the
Journal of Parapsychology
, June 1971.

3
Francis Crick likened the brain to a TV set, as quoted in D. Loye,
An Arrow Through Chaos
(Rochester, Vt: Park Street Press, 2000): 91.

4
Nonlocality was considered to be proven by experiments conducted by Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris in 1982.

5
M. Schiff,
The Memory of Water: Homeopathy and the Battle of Ideas in the New Science
(Thorsons, 1995).

CHAPTER TWO: THE SEA OF LIGHT

Detail on the U.S. oil crisis was compiled from articles appearing in the
London Times
, Nov. 26 – Dec. 1, 1973.

1
H. Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’,
New Scientist
, July 28, 1990: 52 – 5.

2
J. D. Barrow,
The Book of Nothing
(London, Jonathan Cape, 2000): 216.

3
A simple equation showing energy for harmonic oscillators would be represented as H
. The 1/2 stood for the zero-point energy. When renormalizing, scientists would just drop the 1/2. Communication with Hal Puthoff, December 7, 2000.

4
The Zero Point Field is included in stochastic electrodynamics. But in ordinary classical physics, it is usually ‘renormalized’ away.

5
T. Boyer, ‘Deviation of the black-body radiation spectrum without quantum physics’,
Physical Review
, 1969; 182: 1374 – 83.

6
Interviews with Richard Obousy, January 2001.

7
R. Sheldrake,
Seven Experiments That Could Change the World
(London: Fourth Estate, 1994): 75 – 6.

8
R. O. Becker and G. Selden,
The Body Electric
(Quill, 1985): 81.

9
A. Michelson and E. Morley,
American Journal of Science
, 1887, series 3; 34: 333 – 45, cited in Barrow,
Book of Nothing
: 143 – 4.

10
Quoted in F. Capra,
The Tao of Physics
(London: Flamingo, 1976).

11
E. Laszlo,
The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdisciplinary Unified Theory
(Singapore: World Scientific, 1995).

12
A. C. Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’,
Ad Astra
, May/June 1996: 13 – 5.

13
B. Haisch, ‘Brilliant disguise: light, matter and the Zero Point Field’,
Science and Spirit
, 1999; 10: 30 – 1. Elsewhere, Dr Haisch has made numerous interesting speculations about the connection between Creation and the Zero Point Field and refers to the ZPF as a ‘sea of light’. For the agnostic, the theory is that the random background fluctuations of the vacuum are residual energy left over from the Big Bang. See H. Puthoff,
New Scientist
, July 28, 1990: 52. Particle physicists theorize that the universe was created as a false vacuum, with more energy than it ought to have had. When that energy decayed, it produced an ordinary quantum vacuum, which led to the Big Bang and produced all the energy for mass in the universe. See H. E. Puthoff, ‘The energetic vacuum: implications for energy research’,
Speculations in Science and Technology
, 1990; 13: 247 – 57.

14
H. Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation-determined state,’
Physical Review D
; 1987, 35: 3266 – 70.

15
Interview with Bernhard Haisch, California, October 29, 1999.

16
J. Gribbin,
Q is for Quantum: Particle Physics from A to Z
(Phoenix, 1999): 66; H. Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’: 52.

17
Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen’. Also, conversations with Hal Puthoff, July 20, and August 4, 2000, and Benhard Haisch, October 26, 1999.

18
H. E. Puthoff ‘Source of vacuum electromagnetic zero-point energy’,
Physical Review A
, 1989: 40: 4857 – 62; also reply to comment, 1991; 44: 3385 – 6.

19
H. Puthoff, ‘Where does the zero-point energy come from?’,
New Scientist
, December 2, 1989: 36.

20
H. Puthoff, ‘The energetic vacuum: implications for energy research,
Speculations
in Science and Technology
, 1990; 13: 247-57.

21
Ibid.

22
In the Zero Point Field, Puthoff also found an explanation for the cosmological coincidence first discovered by British physicist Paul Dirac. This showed that the average density of matter – the average pull between an electron and a proton – has a close relationship to the size of the universe – measured by the ratio of the size of the universe to the size of an electron. Puthoff found that this was just related to the density of Zero Point Field energy. See
New Scientist
, December 2, 1989.

23
Various conversations with Hal Puthoff, 2000 and 2001; also H. Puthoff, ‘On the relationship of quantum energy research to the role of metaphysical processes in the physical world’, www.meta-list.org.

24
Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’.

25
S. Adler (in a selection of short articles dedicated to the work of Andrei Sakharov), ‘A key to understanding gravity’,
New Scientist
, April 30, 1981: 277 – 8.

26
B. Haisch, A. Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Beyond
E
=
mc
²
: A first glimpse of a universe without mass’,
The Sciences
, November/December 1994: 26 – 31.