Essay #7: The Holographic Universe

Books such as The Tao of Physics (1975) by Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) by Gary Zukav pointed out startling parallels between modern discoveries in quantum physics and ancient beliefs of Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Serious scientists were beginning to sound like mystics, and mystics were starting to talk about quantum mechanics and subatomic particles. The so-called ‘new physics’ seems poised to bridge the world of faith with the world of science through a common belief in a fundamentally interconnected universe.

One of the most interesting notions to emerge from this shiny happy alliance was a particular model of the universe that seemed to explain not only puzzling scientific phenomena but psychic experiences as well. The holographic paradigm was so named because its central metaphor is that of the hologram – or, to be more specific, a certain very unusual feature of holograms.

Holography was invented over Easter 1947 by Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor (1900-1979), for which he received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. The discovery was an unexpected result (or serendipity as Dennis Gabor would have said) of research into improving electron microscopes at the British Thomson-Houston Company in Rugby, England.

Then in 1982, a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by Alain Aspect (1947- ) performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You most certainly did not hear about it on the evening news.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to ‘communicate’ instantaneously with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It does not matter whether they are 10 nanometres or 10 billion, billion (10^18) kilometres apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.

The problem with this feat is that it violates Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since travelling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the speed barrier and this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more far-reaching explanations.

David Bohm (1917-1994), for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

The ‘whole in every part’ nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding physical structure, organisation and order. For most of its history, Western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this analytical approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made; we will only get smaller wholes.

This holographic insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something – the same Oneness.

To enable people to visualise better what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly, and your knowledge about it, and what it contains, comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium.

And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate ‘parts’, but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these ‘eidolons’, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantom-like nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

In a holographic universe, time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

Since ‘time’ and therefore ‘speed’ are not material parts of the physical universe, but are rather human artefacts (more precisely it is information), it should therefore be handled with the utmost care.

This premise immediately makes the ‘velocity of light’ suspect. This so-called ‘constant’ is not a universal truth, but in fact, it is only a human crutch to help us to try to make sense of our physical environment.

In physics, we measure time in relation to distance (i.e. waves and wavelengths), in biology time is seen as change (e.g. growth), and in psychology time is a mere perception of the human ‘mind’. Time is not ‘real’ – it exists in our heads only. Time is an illusion, a phantasm, an eidolon, the ultimate hallucination/illusion – time is a critical distortion of our perceptions of reality!

At its deeper level reality is a sort of super-hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the super-holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past – as in a time machine.

What else the super-hologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the super-hologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be – every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of ‘All That Is’.

In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), Bohm emphasised the inadequacy of a non-holistic worldview: “Science itself is demanding a new, non-fragmentary worldview, in the sense that the present approach of analysis of the world into independently existing parts does not work very well in modern physics. It is shown that both in relativity theory and quantum theory, notions implying the undivided wholeness of the universe would provide a much more orderly way of considering the general nature of reality.”

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage – simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimetre (‘1 cc’) of film can hold as many as 10 billion (10^9) bits of information.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is an illusion (Maya), and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really ‘receivers’ floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the super-hologram. The brain is possibly “not the source of thought, but a thought amplifier.” (See Stalking the Wild Pendulum, by Itzhak Bentov, 1988)

In particular, Stanislav Grof (1931- ) feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile.

During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsulated in such a form, but also noted that the portion of the male of the species’ anatomy was a patch of coloured scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles coloured areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman’s experience was not unique.

During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States (1980) with actor William Hurt). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology.

In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations ‘transpersonal experiences’, and in the late 1960s he helped found a branch of psychology called ‘transpersonal psychology’ devoted entirely to their study.

Grof noted that if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but also to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself. The fact that it is able occasionally to make forays into the labyrinth, and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of brain – as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualisation may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as ‘reality’ – in fact, they are reality.

Even visions and experiences involving ‘non-ordinary’ reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book Gifts of Unknown Things, Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then ‘clicks’ off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if ‘hard’ reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is ‘there’ or ‘not there’ because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits, to the extent to which, we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagorical events experienced by Carlos Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo Don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Karl Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined.

Synchronicities, or meaningful, coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists.

And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality.”

Psychics and New Age types were quick to latch onto this notion. The holographic model, taken to its logical conclusion, could explain a wide range of phenomena such as precognition, telepathy, poltergeists, lucid dreaming, and near death experiences, to say nothing of religious and mystical experiences.

The theory is that our brains habitually unfold the implicate order in predictable ways, but as we can change the frequency or angle of a laser beam, perhaps we can experience other places, times, and knowledge – all equally present everywhere in the holism movement – given the right circumstances.

This was the major thrust of The Holographic Universe. Michael Talbot (1953-1992) took the holographic model well beyond what Pribram and Bohm outlined to explain a vast array of paranormal phenomena.

Ken Wilber (1949- ), who edited the book The Holographic Paradigm, takes a contrary view of the model’s viability. He thinks it is worthwhile in a limited sense, but considers it a grave mistake to apply the model too broadly, or to read too much into it. He resists, for example, attempts to equate the implicate order with God or Brahman.

Moreover, he worries about trying to understand something transcendent (or trans-mental) in mental terms. If you want to have a transcendent experience, he says, that requires the long, hard work of spiritual transformation – not simply learning to picture the world differently.

The holographic paradigm – and, for that matter, the entire movement to integrate physics and mysticism – has lost a lot of steam over the last decade or so. Pribram’s theories never found widespread acceptance; David Bohm died in 1994 without convincing many physicists of his views; and most of the prominent advocates of the model have moved on to other interests. It is not that the theory is any less interesting or plausible than it ever was, but there is just not a whole lot one can do with the notion.

Supposing the universe really was something like a hologram, what would that mean in a practical sense? In addition, how could it ever be proved or disproved? It is certainly fascinating to ponder a unified theory that explains the mysteries of physics, time, space, consciousness, and mysticism.

However, just as you cannot build muscles by studying exercise, you certainly will not master the workings of the implicate order of the Universe by reading about it.

Essay #6: Energy, The Nomad, The Divine, and a Chaotic Universe

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the first scientist to discover the relationship between, rather than the equivalence of, mass and energy (E = m.c^2, the relationship between mass, energy, and time).

In science, energy usually is considered essentially lifeless, and life is seen as a curious accident in the midst of the cosmic accident (Big Bang) that the universe commonly is considered to be.

The idea of energy is older than its name. Even in the time of Galileo (1564-1642), scientists recognised the existence of some constant quantity involved in certain physical problems. In the late 17th century Leibniz (1646-1716) gave the quantity mv2 the name of vis viva ('living force'). In 1807 Thomas Young (1773-1829) proposed the term 'energy'. Finally, in 1856 the modern term 'kinetic energy', was introduced by Lord Kelvin (1824-1907).

In Vedantic terms, the world is called, Chit-Shakti-Vilas, 'the play of Conscious-Energy' (inergy = 'intelligent energy'). This concept Chit-Shakti is a fascinating one, in that it stands for the one Reality, and yet it is made up of two words: 'Consciousness' and 'Energy'. These are the two aspects of Reality, which are familiar as Shiva-Shakti, Brahman-Maya, Purusha-Prakriti, Theos-Logos, or even ova and sperm, etc.

Chit, or Consciousness, is in other contexts called Shiva, the Absolute and formless aspect, the transcendent Godhead; and Shakti, or Energy, is the creative aspect of that one Consciousness which manifests as the multi-formed universe. They are one, but they appear to be two. The two are but complementary aspects of the same one indivisible Reality.

In this case we talk about the 'ultimate/pure energy' of organisms that make them alive, in this case Vital Energy, 'Life Force' (Eros), the Hindu’s Prana, the Chinese Ch'i, the Egyptian Akh, or the Hebrew Chiah – Spirit. This is not the scientist's E = mc^2.

God (Spirit) = Consciousness + Vital Energy.

Earlier scientific belief in the discreteness of things is starting to be replaced by the recognition of things as interrelated aspects of fields of force (the scientist’s gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force). This scientific view still is essentially materialistic, where materialism has been defined as "the denial that the most pervasive processes of nature involve any such psychical functions as sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring, or thinking". (Charles Hartshorne [1897-2000], Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers [1983:17]).

Perhaps the greatest single step in modern times in recognising atoms as psychical, rather than physical, was taken by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz held that it would not be contradictory to posit that this world is a well-related dream (Maya in Sanskrit – an illusion).

Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the law of quantum mechanics.

It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extend in every atom.

The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God.

"God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." (Freeman Dyson [1923- ], theoretical physicist and mathematian, upon receiving the Templeton Prize in 2000.)

Leibniz shares the honour with Isaac Newton (1643-1727) of perfecting the principle and mechanism of the differential calculus, though he came to it quite independently. However, he is perhaps better appreciated (outside of mathematical circles) for his daring penetration beyond the sense-world of matter in search of 'a super-physical reality', which he intuitively felt was concealed there. His researches led him to the formulation of his famous theory of the monad.

Leibniz had nothing but the very incomplete scientific equipments of the 17th century, but his marvellous insight pierced so far beneath superficial appearances that it is only within our own century that science has begun to catch up with his magnificent intuition.

There is a strong resemblance between Leibniz’s ideas and the philosophies of ancient India. Two main aspects are of special interest here in view of recent scientific discoveries are namely:

1. The illusory nature of physical matter, and
2. The fact that every particle of which the universe is composed is a living, growing entity or being.

Leibniz was a true evolutionist. He decided that 'matter' was not dead, but is the semblance or outward and visible appearance of an invisible (to us) super-physical reality composed of metaphysical or, we might say, spiritual points which he called monads.

Each monad is a distinct individual possessing its own kind or degree of consciousness and existence. Life is everywhere, rising in grades of intelligence from the most primitive monad to the ineffable glory of the 'Monad of monads', the incomprehensible Divine Unity, or One – the word monad being derived from the Greek Monas or one.

Leibniz thus believed like the ancient Hindu philosophy of Vedanta (and specifically Advaita Vedanta) that everything is One, and that the sense of the plurality of reality is only but an illusion (Maya). As the Vedanta maintains, Brahman (or the Absolute) is the only reality and the only existence.

In Vedanta, Brahman is both the material (upādāna) and the instrumental (nimitta) cause of the world; and that the self (Atman) is the agent of its own acts (karma) and therefore the recipient of the fruits, or consequences, of action (phala).

All the Vedanta schools unanimously reject both the heterodox (nāstika) philosophies of Buddhism and Jainism and the conclusions of the other orthodox (āstika) schools (Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Samkhaya, Yoga, and, to some extent, the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā).

The Vedantic conception of Brahman is held to be beyond qualities or attributes; beyond subject and object; the source of all Being; Intelligence; and Bliss. Brahman is then the efficient cause of the universe in its spiritual, mental, and physical appearances; creator and creation; doer and deed; cause and effect; the underlying truth amidst the Universe of Unreality; One; self-existent; all-there-is; all-that-has-ever-been; all-that-ever-can-be; One-and-Only; Alone, with Nothing within Itself; and Nothing outside Itself; Unique; without a Second.

Therefore, modern science, Samkhaya (Atomism), and Vedanta (non-dualism) is again on the same track after a gap of perhaps fifteen thousand years or more!

Science usually advances by successions of small steps, through a natural fog (further complicated by human faith, values, mores, presuppositions, dogma, and authority) in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts and a wider stretch of the territory can be surveyed – sometimes with startling results. Nevertheless, the compiled maps from the territory viewed must never be confused with the territory itself. Science is not reality; science is a map/model of reality.

In recent decades, however, a diversity of systems have been studied that behave unpredictably despite their seeming simplicity and the fact that the forces involved are governed by well-understood physical laws. The common element in these systems is a very high degree of sensitivity to initial conditions and to the way in which they are set in motion.

For example, the meteorologist, and father of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz (1917-2008) discovered that a simple model of heat convection possesses intrinsic unpredictability, a circumstance he called the 'butterfly effect', suggesting that the mere flapping of a butterfly's wing can change the weather.

Another simple example is the pinball machine: the ball's movements are precisely governed by laws of gravitational rolling and elastic collisions – both 'totally' understood – yet the ultimate outcome is unpredictable. Chaotic behaviour is observed daily in natural systems, such as the weather.

Chaos, in mechanics and mathematics, is the apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws, for example, systems whose state evolves with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). This is also the case in economics, for example.

Chaos theory shows us that even extremely simple mechanical system's behaviour cannot always be predicted – how then will we ever be able to predict or understand spiritual (non-physical) systems?

Our demonstrated ability to comprehend certain aspects of the physical universe, or even our confirmed capacity to manipulate these aspects, does not mean that we understand (and is acquainted with) everything in the universe – we still don't have a physical theory of everything! It certainly does mean that we cannot decide on the presence, or absence, of 'Spirit' in the universe from physical observations alone!

Is the Universe chaotic? No, it is just that we still don’t comprehend!

The Return

After several months of abandonment, I'm back to my writings, and to this blog as well of course. As an explanation, this blog was inactive for about the last five months because I was REALLY busy in the development of my thesis and finishing college for good.

If I thought that nobody read this blog before then I don't how is it now after the hiatus, but gaining fame or popularity was never the intention of this anyways, so what the hell, lets continue publishing my thoughts to the world, someone somewhere sometime might be interested, who knows.

Now, after two months since I finished college, I return. May this be a new beginning. And I promise I'll TRY to write and publish things in here more often.

Essay #5: The Chicken and The Egg

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I am delighted to report that after extensive navel contemplation, this quintessential human conundrum can be laid to rest. The answer (or answers), is revealed here.

The problem was apparently solved by a British team which included one genetic specialist, a philosopher, and a poultry farmer. Scientists and philosophers at least now finally agreed on an answer to the age-old question, ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ Here is what the team had to say:

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material (DNA) does not change during an animal's life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear sometime ago already.

So, the egg was first!

Nonetheless, wait a minute… it is not the full story.

Creationists still do not agree. According to them this age-old question really has a simple answer, namely: “According to the Creator of chickens, and the author of the Record of their origins, chickens came first. It was on the Fifth Day of Creation Week that He created ‘every winged fowl after their kind’ (Genesis 1:21) complete with the DNA to reproduce that kind. Then He blessed them, saying, ‘be fruitful, and multiply’ (v.22) using that DNA. For the chickens this meant lay chicken eggs. Problem solved.”

So, the chicken was first!

Well, I can now add that you believe whatever you like better – what a solution/irony. This is life, everyone believes whatever he or she likes, and we guard our cherished believes like an Oviraptor protecting its clutch of eggs.

When the fossil of an Oviraptor, a small Mongolian theropod, was discovered in 1923, its skull was only four inches away from a clutch of Protoceratops eggs, prompting palaeontologist Henry Osborn (1857-1935) to assign it the name Oviraptor (Greek for ‘egg thief’). For years afterward, Oviraptor lingered in the popular imagination as a wily, hungry, none-too-nice gobbler of other dinosaurs’ young. The trouble is that it was later shown that those ‘Protoceratops’ eggs were really Oviraptor eggs, and the misunderstood reptile was simply guarding its own brood!

Palaeooölogy, also palaeoology or paleoology, is the branch of oology focusing on the study of ancient eggs. Palaeooölogy has developed since 1868, when Wilhelm von Nathusius (1821-1899) described the first microstructures from modern eggshells.

Still, the story is not finished as yet. Let us therefore go back in time and consider the paleontological viewpoint. A rare fossilised dinosaur nest may shed some further light on the question of which came first, ‘the chicken or the egg’.

There is a case of a small carnivorous dinosaur that sat over her nest of eggs along a sandy river beach some 77 million years ago. When water levels rose, Mom seems to have fled, leaving the eggs.

Palaeontologists have studied the fossil nest, which contains at least five partial eggs. The nest is a mound of sand that extends about half a meter across. The nest is believed to have belonged to one of two small, carnivorous dinosaur species, and was apparently also shared with birds.

Now, as far as we know, dinosaurs were forming bird-like nests and laying bird-like eggs long before birds (including chickens).

The contents of this fossilised dinosaur nest may help resolve the age-old chicken-and-egg question, LiveScience reports. That birds evolved from dinosaurs are an accepted fact as far as palaeontologists are concerned, but the new discovery shows that the pointy-ended bird egg developed before the bird itself, palaeontologists say.

Intact nests of the small meat-eating dinosaurs, the direct ancestors of birds, are rare, only one other has been found in North America. The egg-laying pattern scientists discerned from the nest is also much closer to that of a bird than, say, a crocodile’s. “The egg came before the chicken”, one of the researchers said. “Chickens evolved well after the meat-eating dinosaurs that laid these eggs.”

The first real discovery of dinosaur eggshell was in 1859 from southern France, by Abbé Jean Jacques Pouech (1814-1892). The French eggs were thought to belong to giant birds at first, because of their large size. More complete eggs were found in 1869 by one Philippe Matheron (1807-1899). He thought these eggs belonged to a giant crocodile. In 1877, Paul Gervais (1816-1879) published the first detailed study of the eggs, and suggested that they could belong to a dinosaur.

So, chickens are birds and the fossil record seems to indicate that birds first appeared during the Jurassic period, around 145-200 million years ago. Apparently the earliest hard-shelled eggs were laid by reptiles in the Carboniferous around 300-360 million years ago. Therefore, for the moment at least, the egg came before the chicken by approximately 150 millions years.

The egg was first – the dinosaur egg that is.

Now back to the British team which included one genetic specialist, a philosopher, and a poultry farmer. Traditional genetics espoused the view that each new organism got fresh DNA from its parent, but Marcus Pembrey, working on genetic diseases of children in London, began to suspect otherwise when he found one chromosomal defect caused two very different syndromes (Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome) depending on which parent was the source of the defect.

Conventional biology has always believed that our genetic inheritance is set in stone at the moment of our conception. At that instant, we each receive a set of chromosomes from both our mother and father. Within these chromosomes are the genes: strips of coded DNA, the basic unit of inheritance. After conception, it was assumed that our genes are locked away inside every cell of the body, protected and untouched by the way you live.

Therefore, what you do in your life may affect you, but your genes remain untainted, unchanged for future generations. In classic genetics, your parents and grandparents simply pass on their genes. The experiences they accumulate in a lifetime are never inherited – lost forever as the genes pass untouched through generation after generation.

In contrast, epigenetics is the study of epigenetic inheritance, a set of reversible heritable changes in gene function or other cell phenotype that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). These changes may be induced spontaneously, in response to environmental factors, or in response to the presence of a particular allele, even if it is absent from subsequent generations.

Work on mice and the careful correlation of harvest and medical records from an isolated Swedish community shows that epigenetic effects can be passed from generation to generation.

Lamarck (1744-1829) is the pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired traits are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is disputed by Darwinian Theory.

In the history of biology, Lamarck invented the great chain of being. By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformations, he escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (evolution) which started from infusoria (an obsolete collective term for minute aquatic creatures like ciliates, euglenoids, protozoa, and unicellular algae that exist in freshwater ponds) and ended with humans.

Lamarck imagined a vast sequence of life forms extending like a series of staircases from the simplest to the most complex, impelled by ‘excitations’ and ‘subtle and ever-moving fluids’, the organs of animals became more complex and took their place on successively higher levels. This was the summary view of the relationship between physical energy and the overall organisation of life set forth in ‘Research on the Organization of Living Bodies’ (1802) and the ‘Zoological Philosophy’ (1809).

In the latter work he stated two ‘laws’ that he held to govern the ascent of life to higher stages: first, that organs are improved with repeated use and weakened by disuse; second, that such environmentally determined acquisitions or losses of organs ‘are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise’.

Thus, in a celebrated example, the forelegs and neck of giraffes have become lengthened through their habit of browsing. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ 50 years later, these views of Lamarck became the centre of interest and controversy. Lamarckism was discredited by most geneticists after the 1930s, except in the Soviet Union, where, as Lysenkoism, it dominated Soviet genetics until the 1960s.

As originally formulated, however, Lamarckism was part of an elaborate surmise about processes for whose operation Lamarck had no direct evidence.

From a lifelong, direct exposure to plants and animals, Lamarck gained an intuitive sense of the dynamic quality of life, the close interdependence of physical and vital processes upon which the modern science of biology rests.

Indeed Lamarck was the first to use the word biology, in 1802, and now he also seemed to have been correct and Charles Darwin wrong!

Consequently, in the light of modern epigenetics, it seems that genetic material does change through epigenetic inheritance during an animal's life, and it makes one wonder what else could be wrong with Darwin’s Theory.

We are back where we began!

Only the original riddle must now be rephrased: Which came first, the dinosaur or the egg? So, are we back in the hands of the British team which included one genetic specialist, a philosopher, and a poultry farmer, or are we in the hands of the Creationists? What a choice! I think now you decide, but don’t let me know – I am befuddled enough.

In conclusion: In the beginning there must have been something that laid the very first egg!

Essay #4: E=M.C^2

Between his twenty-first and thirty-eighth birthdays, A. Einstein completed a so-called revolution in science, with and I quote, “profound repercussions at many levels”. The two supposed great breakthroughs were his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and the General Theory of Relativity (1915). Special Relativity deals with high speeds (light), and General Relativity with gravity.

Einstein’s theories were ultimately derived from thought experiments, not physical experiments, and his supporters maintained that they were confirmed for their correctness time and again [?]. Einstein set out from the famous Michelson-Morley experiment (1887), which allegedly exposed an inner contradiction in 19th century physics. This experiment attempted to generalise the electromagnetic theory of light by demonstrating that the apparent speed of light was dependent upon the rate at which the observer travelled through the purportedly fixed ‘ether’ [now called dark matter and dark energy?]. In the end, no difference was found in the velocity of light, in whatever direction the observer was travelling.

However, let us start at the beginning. Ole Roemer (1644-1710) found as far back as 1676 that the speed of light (usually abbreviated with ‘c’) is finite and has a certain, quantifiable velocity. In 1849, Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau (1819-1896) published the first results obtained by his method for determining the speed of light.

Jean Bernard Leon Foucault (1819-1868) determined the speed of light with Charles Wheatstone’s revolving mirror in 1862. His measurement showed the speed of light to be 298,000,000 metre (m) per second (s) – 10,000,000 m/s less than that obtained by previous experimenters and only 0.6% off the currently accepted value.

In 1878, Marie Alfred Cornu (1841-1902) carried out a classical redetermination of the speed of light by making adjustments to an earlier method developed by Armand Fizeau in the 1840s. The changes and improved equipment resulted in the most accurate measurement taken up to that time, 299,990,000 m/s.

Again in 1878, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) had started planning for a new and precise measurement of the speed of light that was needed to account for exact values of many astronomical constants. He had already started developing a refinement of the method of Foucault when he received a letter from the young naval officer and physicist, Albert Michelson, who was also planning such a measurement. Thus began a long collaboration and friendship. In 1880, Michelson assisted at Newcomb’s initial measurement. However, Michelson had left to start his own project by the time of the second set of measurements. Michelson published his first measurement in 1880; his and Newcomb’s measurements were substantially different.

In 1881, Albert Michelson (1852-1931) conducted an experiment with the help of an apparatus that allowed measuring minute differences in the speed of light by changes in the resulting interference patterns. Michelson observed that the speed of light is always the same. In 1883, Michelson revised his measurement to a value closer to Newcomb’s. The now famous experiment has been repeated later with greater precision in 1887 by Michelson and Edward Morley (1838-1923).

Starting with Ole Roemer’s 1676 breakthrough endeavours, the speed of light has been measured at least 163 times by more than 100 investigators utilizing a wide variety of different techniques. Finally in 1983, more than 300 years after the first serious measurement attempt, the speed of light was defined as being 299,792,458 m/s by the Seventeenth General Congress on Weights and Measures. The metre is defined as the distance light travels through a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 seconds.

The Mass-Energy Equivalence Formula

In 1905, Einstein developed his Special Theory of Relativity that starts from the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum will always be measured at the same constant value, irrespective of the speed of the light source relative to the observer. From this he deduced that the speed of light represents the limiting speed for anything in the universe. In addition, Special Relativity states that energy and mass are in reality equivalents. [These were rather crazy assumptions, the speed limit of light has never been proven, and energy and mass are certainly not equivalents!]

According to ‘the Theory of Quantum Time’, time and distances smaller than Planck scales are ‘fuzzy’ because in a fundamental way they cannot be measured. The theory allows for ‘Planck-scale fluctuations in time and space’ that translate very minute variations in the speed of light. However, these variations would only be evident in light that has travelled a great distance.

In a similar way, a sprinter running one per cent faster than his opponents might win a 10-metre race by one metre, while a one per cent faster marathon runner, will finish hundreds of metres ahead of the rest of the field.

After billions (10^9) of light years, the faster components of a light wave would be far enough ahead of the slower components to make the beam’s wave front noticeably distorted, or blurred. [Remember that all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including light, were supposed to travel at the absolute speed of ‘c’ according to Einstein, but in reality it is not the case.]

Under ‘normal’ circumstances and ‘short periods’ of time, the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum is supposed to be a constant and should be the same for all frequencies and wavelengths.

The frequency (‘f’) and wavelength (‘λ’ – Greek small letter, ‘Lambda’) of a wave are related by the expression:

c = λ*f. [Where ‘c’ is an absolute value for all forms of electromagnetic radiation according to Einstein.]

Drs Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman, two astrophysicists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, tested ‘the Theory of Quantum Time’ by looking for this expected blurring in Hubble Space Telescope images of galaxies at least four billion (4 x 10^9) light years away.

Drs Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman were taken by surprise when they did not find the expected blurring. Instead, each image showed a sharp, ring-like interference pattern around the galaxy. Not finding the expected blurring suggested that time was not a quantum function and flowed fluidly at intervals infinitely shorter than Planck unit-of-time flow. [example: time is analogue and not digital!]

The findings were released in the online Astrophysical Journal Letters (March 10, 2003). Dr Lieu said, “If time doesn’t become ‘fuzzy’ beneath a Planck interval, this discovery will present problems to several astrophysical and cosmological models, including the Big Bang model of the universe.” [I really can’t say that I am surprised.]

The Big Bang theory supposes that at the instant of creation, the quantum singularity that became the universe would need to have infinite density and temperature. [Says who?] To avoid that sticky problem, theorists invoked the Planck time. [Scientists have the unshakable habit of invoking constants and more dimensions whenever their theories falter!] They said if the instant of creation was also a quantum event, when space and time were both blurry [?], then you do not need infinite density and temperature at the start of the Big Bang. [We can but only surmise that there was a Big Bang! None of us actually remembers it.]

“If time moves along like business as usual even at Planck scales, however, you have to reconcile the Big Bang model with an event that isn’t just off the scale, it’s infinite”, Lieu said.

Internationally acclaimed cosmologist Paul Davies (1946- ) of Macquarie University in Sydney took up the challenge of proving that quasar light could indeed be explained by Einstein’s famous equation (E = mc^2) that energy equals mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light (in a vacuum). Well, he could not – he failed.

Davies told Australia’s ABC Radio that he was flabbergasted when he found what appeared to be a deception at the heart of Einstein’s, theory.

“This is one of the basic laws of physics, one of the basic laws of the universe according to physicists – the speed of light (in a vacuum) should not vary, and yet the evidence seems to suggest that it might be varying”, Davies said. The work of Davies and his team, published in an issue of Nature magazine, is set to shake the cornerstone of modern physics. On Thursday, August 8, 2002, a burst of press publicity accompanied the publication of the paper Nature.

The paper suggested that the speed of light was much higher in the past and had dropped over the lifetime of the universe. These conclusions were reached as a result of the observations of University of New South Wales astronomer John Webb made in 1999 and the more recent observations of one of his PhD students, Michael Murphy.

The notion that the speed of light has been slowing over time is difficult to grasp. “It is very hard to find a mathematical scheme that can accommodate a changing speed of light”, he said. He is well aware of the implications if the notion is accepted as truth. It also affects other branches of physics, like Thermodynamics and Quantum Physics – that very basis of all our fundamental physical theories – if these observations are correct. If the best known physics equation – E = mc^2 – is wrong, even school physics textbooks would have to be rewritten. This will have a major impact on all physicists’ models of reality!

“For example, there’s a cherished law that says nothing can go faster than light and that follows from the theory of relativity.

The famous Millenium Falcon from the Star Wars Universe, was said to be the fastest ship on the galaxy due to its custom modified Hyperdrive

Maybe it’s possible to get around that restriction, in which case it would enthral all of us who condisider Star Wars fans, because at the moment even at the speed of light it would take 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, while in the Star Wars Universe there's the so called Hyperdrive, which allow to travel at speeds multiple times than that of light, crossing the galaxy in a matter of days or even hours. It’s a bit of a bore really and if the speed of light limit could go, then who knows? All bets are off.

Since a major paper by Andreas Albrecht and Jao Magueijo in 1999, and another one by John Barrow in the same issue of Physical Review D, the speed of light has already come under increasing scrutiny as a physical quantity that may be varying. These scientists are saying that if the speed of light was significantly higher at the inception of the cosmos (about 10^60 higher) then a number of astronomical problems can be readily resolved.

Well to say 10^60 is an extremely large number is an understatement of immense proportions! If we take the age of the universe to be 13.6 x 10^9 years – that is 4.3 x 10^17 seconds. The speed of light must have slowed down at a shocking rate; on average something like 2.3 x 10^42 m/s^2 – talk about g-forces!

“Einstein would have absolutely hated this”, Davies reportedly said. Einstein’s entire Special Theory of Relativity was founded on the notion/belief [not fact] that the speed of light is an absolute, fixed, universal number. Well, it is not, and Einstein without doubt would have hated to see his very famous and much loved theory go to pieces in this spectacular way! And indeed, it seems that we still have awfully deep-seated, inner contradictions in 21st century physics and cosmology. I believe that modern, physical science (Relativity and Quantum Physics) completely lost contact with reality at the beginning of the 20th century.

Essay #3: Are we aliens?

Perhaps the most fundamental and at the same time the least understood biological problem is that of the origin of life. It is central to many religious, scientific, and philosophical problems and to any consideration of extraterrestrial life.

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) was a Russian geochemist and mineralogist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry and biogeochemistry. His scientific legacy was to give us reflections on the most profound issues ever tackled by man: What is life Is life a universal cosmic phenomenon and thus much older than the Earth itself, or is it a specific feature of our planet

Vernadsky was of the opinion that an answer to this question could only be provided by the cosmos itself. According to Vernadsky, "Life is a cosmic phenomenon, rather than only a terrestrial one". In his notes written back in the years from 1917 to 1921, and published as a book 60 years later (Zhyva Rechovyna – ‘Living Matter'), Vernadsky defines living matter as an aggregate of living organisms which take part in geological processes. He figured out its characteristics, which included mass, chemical composition and energy.

Back in the 1910s, there was no firm scientific evidence available that would unequivocally show the possibility of living matter evolving from non-living matter. In fact, even today, many decades later, we still lack any proof that it is possible; neither do we have a smooth theory that would convincingly show how it could happen.

We do have an increasing amount of evidence, which suggests that the biosphere has influenced the geological processes; organic deposits in the earth’s crust and the composition of the atmosphere are clear indications of such influence.

But I am afraid that Vernadsky had the same blindside that most materialist have. He, for example, wrote in one of his letters, "Life is as much part of the Cosmos as energy and matter", but then he also had no idea about the importance of information.

Information is neither energy nor matter, it is something completely different it is sui generis. And energy is not something different from matter. In fact, energy is not something with substance, but like mass, energy is a quality of matter; energy is matter in motion, energy is movement. Where there is no matter there is no energy! Where there is no moving matter, there is no energy! Energy = Mass in motion, example of this: E = m.c^2.

There are several hypotheses of the origins of life, perhaps the most fundamental and at the same time, the least understood biological problem. It is central to many scientific and philosophical problems. Most of the hypotheses of the origin of life will fall into one of six categories:

• The origin of life is a result of a supernatural event; that is, one permanently beyond the descriptive powers of physics and chemistry. (Creation)
• Life, particularly simple forms, spontaneously and readily, arises from nonliving matter in short periods, today as in the past. (Spontaneous generation)
• Life is co-eternal with matter and has no beginning; life arrived on the Earth at the time of the origin of the earth or shortly thereafter. (Vernadsky’s view)
• Life arose on the early Earth by a series of progressive chemical reactions in a very, special, primordial soup. Such reactions may have been likely or may have required one or more highly improbable chemical events and very bizarre radiation. (Abiogenesis: not much different from spontaneous generation)
• Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory that is of the opinion that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life’s evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space.
• Hindus believe that everything including matter is alive so that there was not a separate creation act for life. Everything was created simultaneously and everything is alive. Panpsychism is the philosophical doctrine that every physical entity is conscious. Panpsychism is related but not equivalent to hylozoism (Greek hyle, matter + zoe, life), which says that every object is alive.

Vernadsky’s view is close to the third hypotheses. Toward the end of the 19th century the third hypothesis gained currency, particularly with the suggestion by Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) that life on Earth arose from Panspermia, microorganisms or spores wafted through space by radiation pressure from planet to planet or solar system to solar system (the fifth hypothesis).

Such an idea of course is surmised by many scientists to avoid, rather than solve the problem of the origin of life.

Among the oldest known fossils are those found in the Barberton area of the Mpumalanga Province in South Africa; they are dated at 3.1 billion (3.1 x 10^9) years old. These organisms have been identified as bacteria and blue-green algae (cyanobacteria).

Since the Earth is about 4.6 billion (4.6 x 10^9) years old, this suggests that the origin of life must have occurred within a few 100 million years of that time. The fossil record, in any complete sense, goes back only 645 million (645 x 10^6) years.

Earth in Hadean eon (from 4.6 to 3.8 billion years ago)

In the layers of sedimentary rock known by geological methods and by radioactive dating to be that old, most of the major groups of invertebrates appear for the first time. All these organisms appear adapted to life in the water, and there was no sign yet of organisms adapted to land. For this reason, and because of a rough similarity between the salt contents of blood and of seawater, it is believed that early forms of life developed in oceans or pools.

In Precambrian times, solar ultraviolet radiation, particularly destructive to nucleic acids, may have penetrated to the surface of the earth, rather than being totally absorbed in the upper atmosphere by ozone (O3) as it is today. In the absence of ozone, the ultraviolet solar flux is so high that a lethal dose for most organisms would be delivered in less than an hour.

Life near the Earth’s surface would have been impossible. As the amount of atmospheric oxygen and ozone increased, mostly due to plant photosynthesis, life increasingly close to the Earth’s surface would have been possible. It has been suggested that the colonisation of the land, about 425 million (425 x 10^6) years ago, was possible only because enough ozone was then produced to shield the surface from ultraviolet light for the first time.

According to Vernadsky, life then had insinuated itself between the Sun and the Earth. It diverted solar energy to its own uses and contrived more and more ways of exploiting more and more environments. Some ‘experiments’ were less successful and the lines became extinct; others were more successful and the lines filled the Earth. He concluded that evolution through natural selection directed the proliferation of a growing array of life forms throughout the biosphere.

As we see, modern science of the end of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century has adopted – and adapted – some of Vernadsky’s ideas expounded by him decades ago.

Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life’s evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. (It accepts the Darwinian account of evolution that does not require new genetic programs) It is a wholly scientific, testable theory for which evidence is accumulating.

The first point, which deals with the origin of life on Earth, is known as Panspermia (also called 'directed Panspermia'), literally, 'seeds (sperm) everywhere'. Its earliest recorded advocate was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (500-428 BC), who influenced Socrates (470-399 BC). However, Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation came to be preferred by science for more than two thousand years.

Then on April 9, 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) announced his great experiment disproving spontaneous generation as it was then held to occur.

In the 1870s, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) reinforced Pasteur and argued that life could come from space. Moreover, in the first decade of the 1900s, Arrhenius (1859-1927) theorised that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth.

According to Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), Toward the end of the nineteenth century some theorists went to the other extreme and made life eternal. The most popular theory was advanced by Arrhenius (the chemist who had developed the concept of ionisation).

In 1907, he published a book, entitled Worlds in the Making, picturing a universe in which life had always existed and migrated across space, continually colonising new planets. Life travelled in the form of spores that escaped from the atmosphere of a planet by random movement and then were driven through space by the pressure of light from the sun. (Isaac Asimov, New Guide to Science, 1984)

However, in the 1920s, Alexander Oparin (1894-1990) and JBS Haldane (1892-1964), writing independently, revived the doctrine of spontaneous generation in a more sophisticated form. In the new version, the spontaneous generation of life no longer happens on Earth, takes too long to observe in a laboratory, and has left no clues about its occurrence.

Supporting this theory, in 1953, Stanley Miller (1930- ) and Harold Urey (1893-1981) showed that some amino acids could be chemically produced from ammonia and methane. That experiment is now famous, and the Oparin-Haldane paradigm still prevails today.

Starting in the 1970s, Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (1939- ) rekindled interest in Panspermia. By careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of light from distant stars, they found new evidence, traces of life, in the intervening dust. They also proposed that comets, which are largely made of ice water, carry bacterial life across galaxies and protect it from radiation damage along the way.

One aspect of this research program, that interstellar dust and comets contain organic compounds, has been pursued by others as well. It is now accepted by some scientists that space contains the 'ingredients' of life. This development could be the first hint of a huge paradigm shift. Nevertheless, mainstream science has not accepted the hard core of modern Panspermia, that whole cells seeded life on Earth.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also broadened or generalised Panspermia to include a new understanding of evolution. While accepting the fact that life on Earth evolved over the course of about 4.6 billion (4.6 x 10^9) years, they say that the genetic programs for higher evolution cannot be explained by random mutation and recombination among genes for single-celled organisms, even in that long a time: the programs (software) must come from somewhere beyond Earth.

Hoyle, the originator of the steady state universe theory (which he later abandoned), after spending several years writing science fiction books, wrote a book with Wickramasinghe in 1979, called Lifecloud: the Origin of Life in the Universe. In the book, they first list solid evidence why it would be impossible for life to begin here on earth, and then they present their theory that life originated in living creatures feeding, breeding, and multiplying (in comets) which managed to arrive here! Science fiction writers make good evolutionary theorists. In fact, you can hardly tell the two apart when you pick up their books.

Hoyle has also come up with a theory on the origin of life which says that life on earth was seeded by colliding comets. In a book review of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s book, Lifecloud: the Origin of the Universe, Colin Pillinger (1943- ) accuses the authors of selecting their evidence and elevating speculation to fact.

For a time, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe held to this comet origin of life seeds. Their view was that, since it is impossible for life to form on earth; it must have formed in the tails of comets and gas clouds in the sky! The near absolute zero temperatures (absolute zero = -273.15 degrees centigrade) in hydrogen clouds might, it was theorised; provide better conditions for the formation of life than sand, seawater, and lightning bolts on earth.

Another theory of Hoyle’s was developed two years later: life forms continually reach the earth directly from outer space. How do they get here They ride light beams! As fast as one theory is shot down, another ‘pops up’. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe explained the light-beam theory in their 1981 book, Evolution from Space. George F Howe discusses their conjectures:

“Like their counterpart in life science, Dr Francis C Crick of DNA fame, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe seriously suggest that packets of genetic material continually enter our atmosphere from outer space, riding the pressure of light between stars. These may be mere specks of genetic code stuff (in their view), entire bacteria, or even insect eggs. Some source out there, they believe, is benevolently broadcasting these materials widely and is thus providing pre-designed systems that any forms of life may need to adapt for whatever environmental niches they may be encountering on particular planets. Where successes occur, they envision completely new blocks of genes entering the cell and producing new functions about the way a computer can be rapidly 'upgraded'.”

“Like the Darwinism that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s model is supposed to replace, cosmic evolution suffers at precisely the same points: lack of any adequate mechanism and absence of experimental supporting data. They are obviously unable to show the reader strong evidence of such genetic packages in astronomical debris entering our atmosphere. It seems this (and this alone) is the key evidence required to put this interesting origins model on some sort of scientific basis.”

Pasteur’s work discouraged many scientists from discussing the origin of life at all. Moreover, they were anxious not to offend religious feeling by probing too deeply into the subject. Although Charles Darwin (1809-1882) would not commit himself on the origin of life, others subscribed to the fourth hypothesis (abiogenesis) more resolutely, notably TH Huxley (1825-1895), and John Tyndall (1820-1893) in his ‘Belfast Address’ of 1874.

Although Huxley and Tyndall asserted that life could be generated from inorganic chemicals, they had extremely vague ideas about how this might be accomplished. The very phrase 'organic molecule' implies that there exists a special class of chemicals uniquely of biological origin, despite the fact that organic molecules have been routinely produced from inorganic chemicals since 1828.

Briefly, Huxley and Tyndall’s theory holds that all of life comes from space. It incorporates the original Panspermia in the same way that General Relativity incorporates Special Relativity. Their expanded theory can well be termed 'strong' Panspermia. It means, simply, that we might all be aliens.

It is an idea that has been around longer than Christianity, but which still struggles to gain strong support among most scientists.

However, two recent discoveries are breathing new life into the theory:

• One study, reported in the October 27, 2000 issue of the journal Science, shows that a space rock could successfully transport life between planets.
• Another group of researchers, reporting in the October 19, 2000 issue of Nature, claims to have found and revived bacteria on Earth that were dormant, in the form of spores, hiding in New Mexican salt crystals for 250 million years. Scientists called the implications of this second discovery profound, suggesting that if further study bears out the findings, it could mean bacterial spores are nearly immortal.

Moreover, if you are immortal, then what are a few billion years of interstellar travel “Until recently, Panspermia was not even regarded as a scientific hypothesis,” says Chandra Wickramasinghe, the concept’s leading proponent. “Now that has changed.”

Francis Crick (1916- ) fills the first half of his 1981 book, Life Itself, with reasons why life could not originate on our planet – and then he proceeds to suggest that it came from outer space on rockets!

“Crick proposed that life began somewhere else in the universe and evolved to a much higher technical level than is now present on earth. He next suggests these life forms are now sending rockets containing primitive life forms (perhaps bacteria or blue-green algae) throughout the universe, spreading the seeds of life hither and yonder. Crick even describes the rocket’s design and postulates the conditions necessary for successful re-entry into our atmosphere.” (Richard Tkachuck, in a book review in Origins, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1983)

"The Monolith" of Arthur C. Clarke's novels.

In Life Itself, Crick embraces an origins view called ‘Directed Panspermia', in which it is assumed that life was originally sent to earth from outer space! According to Crick, life evolved from non-life on some other planet, starting with the spontaneous generation of bacteria, and proceeding all the way to highly intelligent beings.

Cosmic Ancestry implies that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means we believe that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the past.

As the romantics maintain, we are stardust, or more practically, we are nuclear waste. At least our bodies (hardware) are. It seems that every physical thing in the universe was created at one place and then transported, or blown, to another; we are space travellers, and who knows where we are from However, where are our souls (software) from?

Essay #2: Quantum Gravity

From the atom to the galaxy, with everything in between, there is ‎unambiguous evidence of design in the universe (some call it order), there ‎are distinct laws (physical, mental, and spiritual). From Isaac Newton (1643-‎‎1727) onwards, the era of modern science, scientists have constantly ‎seen the universe as a complex machine, a well-planned, mechanical ‎contrivance. They saw design, or order, in the world around them.‎

Explanations which introduce physical, or seemingly material, ideas – forces, ‎pressures, and tensions, are of course dynamical or mechanical in their ‎nature. It is not surprising that such explanations also should have been ‎attempted from ancient times onward. Plato informs ‎us that Anaxagoras claimed to be able to explain the ‎workings of nature as a machine, he obviously was extremely deluded.

In more recent times Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Christiaan Huygens (1629-‎‎1695), and others thought that the only possible explanation of nature was ‎mechanical.‎

However, Newton engaged an ‘outside’ force (software as opposed to ‎mechanical hardware) called gravitation, although fully conscious of the ‎metaphysical consequences of this idea. Newton argued that the movements ‎of celestial bodies and the free fall of objects on Earth are determined by the ‎same attracting force. The classical Greek philosophers did not consider the ‎celestial bodies to be affected by gravity, because the bodies were observed ‎to follow perpetually repeating ascending trajectories in the sky.

Newton discovered the relationship between the motion of the moon and the ‎motion of a body falling freely on the Earth. By his dynamical and gravitational ‎theories, he explained Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) three laws of planetary ‎motion and established the modern quantitative science of gravitation.‎

Newton assumed the existence of an attractive force between all massive ‎bodies, one that does not require bodily contact and that acts at a distance.

By invoking his law of inertia (bodies not acted upon by a force move at ‎constant speed in a straight line), Newton concluded that a force exerted by ‎the Earth on the Moon is needed to keep it in a circular motion about the ‎Earth rather than moving in a straight line. He realised that this force could be, ‎at long range, the same as the force with which the Earth pulls objects on its ‎surface downward.‎

When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attacked Newton for introducing ‎these ‘occult’ qualities and miracles into natural science, Newton replied that, ‎‎“… to understand the motions of the planets under the influence of gravity, ‎without knowing the cause of gravity, is as good a progress in philosophy as ‎to understand the frame of a clock, and the dependence of the wheels upon ‎one another, without knowing the cause of gravity of the weight which moves ‎the machine, is in the philosophy of clockwork.”‎

There was a strong undercurrent of resistance to Newton’s gravitational force ‎concept when it was introduced, since it seemed to represent an almost ‎‎‘magical force’ at a time when concrete rational thought was finally beginning ‎to prevail over the superstition of the Middle Ages.‎

Today, largely as a result of the scientific acceptance of Newtonian gravity, ‎we have grown accustomed to the idea of unexplained forces reaching across ‎empty space to affect objects at a distance in some equally unexplained ‎manner, because we still do not know what gravity, or magnetism is!‎

In Newton’s time such concepts were only known in stories of myth and magic. ‎To scientists and philosophers such as Rene Descartes (1596-1650), it had ‎been a long journey for society to shake of the superstition of the past and ‎finally enter a welcome era of rational thought and debate.‎

Newton realised this fundamental problem with his theory of a gravitational ‎force, and never claimed to be able to explain it. However, the compelling and ‎rational nature of his accompanying mathematical model soon solidified the ‎force of gravity as a ‘physical reality’ and a scientific fact that continued to ‎grow in acceptance for centuries.‎ It is currently an accepted scientific law that the speed of light in a vacuum (c ‎‎= 299 792 458 metre per second) represents an absolute upper speed limit for ‎all objects and also on the speed of the propagation of all fields and all forms ‎of energy through space.

The only possible exception is the tachyon!‎ The tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle whose velocity always ‎exceeds that of light. The existence of the tachyon, though not experimentally ‎established, appears consistent with Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) Theory of ‎Special Relativity (1905), which was originally thought to apply only to ‎particles travelling at or less than the speed of light. Just as an ordinary ‎particle such as an electron can exist only at speeds less than that of light, so ‎a tachyon could exist only at speeds above that of light, at which point its ‎mass would be real and positive. Upon losing energy, a tachyon would ‎accelerate; the faster it travelled the less energy it would have.

Newtonian Gravitational Theory comes with no speed limit. A common ‎example of this is to imagine our Sun suddenly vanishing. While it would still ‎appear as if the Sun were present for roughly eight minutes as the last rays of ‎light eventually made their way to Earth at the speed of light, the gravitational ‎field of the Sun would vanish instantly. The loss of gravity from the Sun would ‎be immediately felt at any distance throughout our Solar System, and indeed ‎throughout the entire Universe.‎

Although this ‘violation’ lacks any logical justification, a resolution to this ‎conundrum can be found in Einstein’s General Relativity Theory (1916), since ‎one of the key differences with this alternate theory of gravity is that the ‎element of time is built into the equations of the model. However, this is only a ‎proposed solution since the actual speed of gravity is unknown, no direct ‎tests have ever been done to determine it.

Special Relativity Theory, for which Einstein is perhaps best known, is actually ‎a special case of the broader Relativity Theory, which was put forth by Galileo ‎Galilei (1564-1642) and further developed by Henri Poincare (1854-1912) and ‎Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928).

The work of Poincare and Lorentz on Relativity Theory is essentially a formal ‎mathematical description of the fact that objects do not possess absolute ‎motion, but only have motion relative to each other, but the propagation of ‎light through space was still unresolved.‎

Einstein consequently realised that neither Newton’s First Law of Motion nor ‎existing Relativity Theory could explain how light travels through space, and ‎so, he proposed a modification of Relativity Theory.‎

However, the question arises why it was necessary to develop a new theory ‎of gravity. The answer is that Newton’s theory violates Special Relativity, for it ‎requires an unspecified ‘action at a distance’ through which any two objects (‎such as the Sun and the Earth) instantaneously pull each other, no matter ‎how far apart. However, instantaneous response would require the ‎gravitational interaction to propagate at infinite speed, which is precluded by ‎Special Relativity.‎

In practice, this is no great problem for describing our Solar System, for ‎Newton’s law gives valid answers for objects moving slowly compared with ‎light. Nevertheless, since Newton’s theory cannot be conceptually reconciled ‎with Special Relativity, Einstein turned to the development of General ‎Relativity as a new way to understand gravitation.‎

In order to begin building his theory, Einstein seized on an insight that came ‎to him in 1907. As he explained in a lecture in 1922, “I was sitting on a chair in ‎my patent office in Bern. Suddenly a thought struck me: If a man falls freely, ‎he would not feel his weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought ‎experiment made a deep impression on me. This led me to the theory of ‎gravity.”

Einstein was alluding to a curious fact known in Newton’s time: no matter ‎what the mass of an object, it falls toward the Earth with the same ‎acceleration (ignoring air resistance) of 9.8 metres per second squared. It was ‎Galileo who first provided this very useful constant-acceleration equation for ‎falling bodies.‎

Newton explained this apparent anomaly by postulating two types of mass: ‎inertial mass, which resists motion and enters into his general laws of motion, ‎and gravitational mass, which enters into his equation for the force of gravity. ‎He showed that, if the two masses were equal, then all objects would fall with ‎that same gravitational acceleration.‎

Einstein, however, realised something more profound. A person standing in ‎an elevator with a broken cable feels weightless as the enclosure falls freely ‎toward the Earth. The reason is that both he and the elevator accelerate ‎downward at the same rate and so fall at exactly the same speed; hence, ‎short of looking outside the elevator at his surroundings, he cannot determine ‎whether he is being pulled downward.‎

In fact, there is no experiment he can do within a sealed falling elevator to ‎determine that he is within a Newtonian gravitational field. If he releases a ball ‎from his hand, it will fall at the same rate, simply remaining where he releases ‎it. And if he were to see the ball sink toward the floor, he could not tell if that ‎was because he was at rest within a gravitational field that pulled the ball ‎down or because a cable was yanking the elevator up so that its floor rose ‎toward the ball.‎

Einstein expressed these ideas in his deceptively simple principle of ‎equivalence, which is the basis of General Relativity: on a local scale, ‎meaning within a given system, without looking at other systems, it is ‎impossible to distinguish between physical effects due to gravity and those ‎due to acceleration.‎

However, then Einstein continued and lost his link with reality completely with ‎the introduction of his concept of ‘warped four-dimensional space-time’.‎ The singular feature of Einstein’s view of gravity is its geometric nature. ‎Whereas Newton thought that gravity was a force.‎

Einstein postulated that gravity arises from the shape of ‘space-time’. ‎Einstein’s space-time can be visualised as a ‘rubber sheet’ that can be ‎deformed (‘warped’). In any region distant from massive cosmic objects such ‎as stars, space-time is absolutely flat. However, the presence of a massive ‎body curves space-time, as if a bowling ball were placed on the rubber sheet ‎to create a cuplike depression or a hole. If the ball is removed, the hole or the mark that it left could be noticed, and since the surface is rubber, it would return to be flat again soon.

In this analogy, a marble placed near the depression rolls down the slope ‎toward the bowling ball as if pulled by a force. In addition, if the marble is ‎given a sideways push, it will describe an orbit around the bowling ball, as if a ‎steady pull toward the ball is swinging the marble into a closed path.‎

In this way, the curvature of space-time near a star defines the shortest ‎natural paths. In Einstein’s theory, space-time geodesics define the deflection ‎of light and the orbits of planets. Clearly note that according to Einstein space-‎time, that is space and time, warps under gravity!‎

Even ‘weirder’ still is the Quantum Theoretical concept of the graviton; where a ‎graviton is a postulated quantum that is thought to be the carrier of the ‎gravitational field. This so-called graviton is proposed to be analogous to the ‎photon of the electromagnetic field.

Gravitons are bosons (gauge), it is then proposed, like photons, would be massless, electrically ‎uncharged particles travelling at the speed of light (tachyons) and would be emitted only ‎by highly accelerating, extremely massive objects such as stars and planets. Since ‎gravitons would apparently be identical to their ‘antiparticles’, the notion of ‎antigravity is extremely questionable.‎

So, although we are familiar with the everyday effects of gravity and have ‎‎‘scientific’ models of these observed effects, we still do not know what gravity ‎is at all; its ‘physical nature’ is still completely foreign and mysterious to us, ‎even today. Therefore, all we who try to learn and understand our science, its evolution and the universe we inhabit still have some big black holes in our minds.

That’s life, we do not know everything, in fact we know very little, and ‎although we have very many theories we still do not even understand the ‎most basic facts about our physical realm. Yet, we are extremely arrogant.‎

— Jonathan Quintero