PA: psi /04
Caleb Roy
Mrs. Baxley
CAII
7 February 2004
PSI
Evidence suggests that there could be a connection between psychic phenomena, Para-normality, and quantum physics. There is an enormous amount of energy bound up in the debate of the supernatural. Does it exist, what is it like, what can it do, and can it be harnessed? This is hardly a small topic, there are many routes one may take which all lead to equal possibilities. Chiefly, there are two, the first being the skeptic’s route, a skeptic finds only what he is looking for. He will gladly quarrel about things he does not know because the topic at hand is irrational. There is then, the conspiracy theorist, this group goes looking for the irrational, the insane, and sets out on crusades to prove it. He is desperate but excited; he may be onto something big. These two are opposites in every way, neither are always right, neither are always wrong, and neither care too much for the facts.
The facts however, are the single completely objective things in this universe, and because of that, most people are content to live without them. They enjoy their opinions. Then there is the question of having an open mind. Does such a thing even exist? No, there simply is not time to be open-minded. This goes hand in hand with defining the boundaries between what is rational in our minds, and what is not. The line is different for every person. So when the facts get involved, people feel threatened because they might be wrong, and that they might be shamed and thus, issues such as these are quietly left alone. Controversy is not a challenge for the timid. Primarily, controversy is addressed by those who have less to lose; or by those who are insanely bold.
As I said, there are is evidence that suggests that the realm of the supernatural, could be closer than we all thought, and though quantum physics sounds terribly complicated and complex, it is really quite simple.
The Pyramids did not build themselves. Psychic tales have been around for centuries, spanning every culture and civilization and religion and cult. Most of it has a great deal to do with faith and destiny. There simply isn’t a place out there where everything has been explained. Mankind in all his audacity and ambition has set out on a quest to discover what cannot be explained because he is fascinated by what he cannot control. There is telepathy; somehow, someone knows things they can’t possibly know. Maybe two people have a special connection that allows them to communicate without words, maybe it is as simple as knowing when someone is in trouble or saying “I know what you mean.” On the simplest level, telepathy is emotion, and emotion, like sound, travels. If you have ever so much as seen a person who is upset and felt their pain that the exact same thing, you’ve just had a telepathic experience, a mild one, but just the same.
Every single thing we do and see is translated into trillions of minute changes in emotion. For example: you would feel differently about this paper if the font was different, even though the paper is the same paper and the size was the same and you could still read it, you would have a very minute change in the way that you felt. This is how we encounter the world. As children grow and learn new things and see all that they see they develop a world perspective, are we to be an optimist or a pessimist, are we to be shy or courageous, we I be a skeptic or a conspiracy theorist. How do you feel about those things? People develop strong feelings about their loved ones and their homes. All of these things are embodied is subtle emotions that travel.
How can children learn language and words without knowing what their teachers mean when the words are said? You can’t point at love and say, “That there is love, son.” You can’t point at hate and say, “This is hate, steer clear from it now.” Not everything is going to have an example. So how do we learn anything? “I know what you mean, I understand, I get it!”
Telekinesis: moving objects with one’s thoughts. This is one topic that no one seems to be able to touch. It simply can’t be done right? Have you ever seen it happen? I’ve never seen it happen, oh well. It must not exist.
Did you know that scientists cannot figure out why you can hold this paper in your hands? The most sophisticated minds in the world and they don’t know how it works. The thing is, you are about 90 percent empty space. Your atoms are spread pretty thin even for being a solid. The same goes for the paper. It almost doesn’t exist. The problem is, with all that empty space, how do the two stop each other? In every simulation and in every test the result is always the same, the chances that every single atom in your hand lines up perfectly with all the atoms in this paper and hold enough resistance to keep from passing right through each other are astronomical and that isn’t even what happens. They cannot find a single reason why you can’t walk you 90 percent empty space right through your wall, except for this- they’ve tried it and it does not work. (MOODY 1) Now how irrational does it sound?
I have a friend named Ryan Boyer; he was vacationing in Hawaii and was allowed to see something incredible. He was asked to examine a golf club, any hinges or grooves or anything like that? After thorough examination he concluded no. He gave it back to the man who had given it to him. The man held it upright, gripped it tightly and them quickly pulled his hand away. The golf club did not bend over. It corkscrewed. It spun and twisted and then went back to being a regular old golf club.
The ancient Egyptians were powerhouse builders; either that or they had a serious amount of slaves. The pyramids, one of the few remaining Seven Wonders of the World, were built several thousand years ago. We cannot figure out how they did that either. The structures stand in the middle of the desert, sand is everywhere and the earth is moving constantly, be it tectonic, or be it simple erosion. The great pyramids, are perfect, the measurements from side to side to top to bottom are EXACT. They are all perfect shapes. This is technology we have a hard time duplicating today. Even after the land around them has shifted and the winds have driven the sands from beneath them, and the weight of the giant structures have sunk them into the ground, they retain a perfect geometry. How does one construct these things? Which is more plausible? That a team of five to ten slaves pushed a for ton rock up an incline most people have trouble walking alone without several breathers and water bottles to the top of a pyramid with flawless dimensions? Or is there the possibility that something else was at work? This civilization was not a stupid one. They had batteries; they made them from the citrus in grapes. What good is a battery without something to power? There is no evidence of fire being used to light the long dark tunnels of the pyramids, if there had been fire, there would be smoke. Smoke is composed of hydrocarbons, these little buggers stick to just about anything, they are the residue that remains when something is burnt. If there had been any fire in the pyramids, there would be hydrocarbons on the walls and ceiling. Guess what? No hydrocarbons. The hieroglyphs on the walls, they were not carved with a hammer and chisel and then painted with berries and dye. There are no scratch marks where the glyphs would have been cut, there is no fading of the paint that has been on the walls exposed to the same elements as everything else in over four thousand years.
Be careful what you think can and cannot be possible. Ancient civilizations are peppered with these anomalies, native tribes in Africa and Australia have ornate drawings and paintings on the walls of their caves, detailing star systems and cosmic phenomena we are only just discovering with the help of the HUBBLE telescope. The skeptic might assume they either built a very large telescope or were just a good guess. The extremist would consider that the tribes at one time, long ago, had space travel.
Everyone has something that simply cannot be explained. Most people have things that cannot be explained and they pass most of them off as random coincidence but are they? The fledgling study of quantum physics may have an answer. I am a firm believer that everything has an explanation. Everything has a reason, and if I have to dive into quantum physics to find it, so be it.
Quantum theory began several years ago when a company of scientists began an experiment with photons and a detector plate. They fired a single photon at the plate, nothing registered. They fired another, nothing happened, they fired a third time. The detector plate registered 12 photons, even as only three total had been fired. Photons were coming from somewhere between the gun and the detector plate. They simply appeared from nowhere, and struck the plate, whereas the first two photons fired, appeared to simply vanish. In quantum theory (note theory, nothing in this world is concrete), there is a property known as quantum foam. It means essentially that the universe does not flow in strait lines, it foams. It bubbles and ripples and does all kinds of interesting things, at least at the subatomic level. In the foam and bubbles there are wormholes, tiny tunnels that go… somewhere, zillions of them. Some of the very few things that are small enough to pass through them include gravitons, electrons, and photons. Well that could explain where the first two photons went off two, but where did the other eleven come from? This is a theory that is known as the multiverse. Put simply, the universe is not alone. Surely you’ve heard of the possibility of infinite universes existing side by side running parallel to each other, each almost exactly the same as the other, with only a single difference or so. It is true.
When a scientist fires a photon at a detector plate and it simply does not go anywhere. Quantum Physicists have concluded what everyone agrees is impossible; the thing entered a wormhole into another universe. Meanwhile in an unlimited number of other universes, scientists are firing their photons at their detector plates and losing them into wormholes and poof! Here they are in our universe slapping our detector plates and giving us readings that just aren’t possible! It isn’t just us out here!
There is another experiment that took place in 1807 is famous among quantum scholars called “The Two Holes Experiment.” British scientist Thomas Young shone a single wavelength of light through two holes and found on the other side exactly what was expected, a Venetian blinds pattern in which the waves of light passing through the holes interfere with each other much like dropping two stones in a pond and having the ripples interfere with one another. There was nothing abnormal about that. However, modern day physicists are discovering that light and waves may be more than they are at first, all cracked up to be. They have found that light often times acts not as a wave, but as a particle (black holes pulling in light due to immense gravity for example), and that these particles act not as other particles do. When electrons were used in the same experiment fired by a gun onto a detector screen designed so that every electron fired ignites a single pixel on the screen in proportion to the location it struck when it made contact with the detector. The unusual thing is, when thousands and thousands of electrons were fired at once, they understandably interfered with each other causing the same classic interference pattern. But when they were firing one by one, nothing changed, they still seemed to interfere with each other. The first electron struck in such a way that it seemed to be effected by the second, as if they had bumped into each other on the way over even as the second was still sitting in the gun. The second struck in such a way that it was affected by the first and the third and all the other electrons that were to be fired causing the same interference pattern as when they had all been fired at once.
This intrigued the scientists because Not only are the electrons leaving and arriving as particles, but somehow traveling as waves (as if each electron passes through both holes in the experiment and interferes with itself), but they seem to “know” the past and the future as well. If thousands of electrons traveled together through the experiment, it might be easy to understand that they could jostle one another into an interference pattern. But only one electron passes through the experiment at a time, and somehow chooses its place on the screen on the other side so that the pattern that gradually builds up is the classic interference pattern. This is irrational, but at the same time it is fact.
But where is the connection? How does this have anything to do with psychic phenomena? First and most directly, this theory is my own though I have thought long and hard about it and it ties in perfectly with everything that has been proven. Paratography, when one takes a picture and the film exposes something that isn’t there. This is possibly the most popular tangible (whether or not you believe in Photoshop as the singular reason for all strange pictures) form of paranormal occurrence since its investigation. The flash on your camera is made of a special bulb that beams out 100 percent raw photon energy. If we are truly one universe in an assortment of many, then it could be logical to say that when the flash goes off and the photons are released that some of them if not most of them don’t stick around in this universe. They often go elsewhere possibly bounce off of something in that universe, and if its lucky enough to pass back through the quantum foam into our universe again, then your camera will see something that isn’t really there. You see an image from another world. That is a possibility.
When it comes to psychics and telekinesis, the issue becomes a bit more complicated, and the discussion is picked up by retired army physicist Evan Harris Walker, who actually wrote the book on the Quantum-Psychic connection (at least the first to get the idea published). His book: “The Physics of Consciousness,” claims that modern physics have a very real effect on reality, and that the “far edges” of quantum theory might help to explain willing a desired event to occur, may actually become a factor in the outcome. (WALKER 2)
Suppose you worry about something incessantly, according to research, it becomes more and more likely to happen. This would explain a number of old sayings and such as “bad things come in threes” when the mood is set- keeping with the emotion of things- more bad things tend to happen in sort of a psychic snowball effect. But how exactly does this happen? The nature of atoms allows them to (for very small moments) to exist in a “twilight state” in which they are allowed to occupy more than one place simultaneously (VERGANO 3). “Atoms can work in this way. In 1996 for example, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., trapped a single beryllium atom in two places at once with a series of laser pulses.” (VERGANO 4)
The most popular analogy is that of Schrodinger’s-Cat. Schrodinger proposed placing a single cat in a chamber with a vial filled with aerosol toxins. There would then be a small radioactive substance placed in the chamber that had the possibility of decaying 50/50. The chamber would be closed and sealed. If the isotope decayed then a small hammer would break the vial and release the toxins killing the cat, if it did not, then the cat would live. Due to the fact that even quantum theory could not predict the fate of the cat because all the odds were exactly equal, all the atoms in the chamber would enter into the twilight state described above; being in two states at once, one living cat, and the same cat- dead. Only when the chamber was opened and someone looked to see would the two states collapse into one, a live or dead cat (VERGANO 5). As we’ve already seen, atoms can in fact do just what Schrodinger proposed, whether or not they actually do remains to be proven.
So what of the supernatural? The great unknown that fewer and fewer people are convinced of day by day. What of ghosts and spirits and angels and demons? Personally I have seen them, and I am not nor ever have been on hallucinogens. This is where we retreat back into Paratography. Our universe that plausibly exists alongside an infinite others contains beings and people just like all the others, but we run on a frequency much like that of a radio station or a TV channel. Perhaps the universes are all created by the same atoms existing in more than one state at once, these different states contain unique properties that as it turns out allows them to interact more easily with atoms in their own states. Basically, atoms in universe A have primary contact with atoms in universe A. The same goes for B, C and the entire alphabet cycled a zillion times in a thousand languages twice, or however many there is. If they are all composed of the same atoms, and interact congruently with each other according to their own states, and there are a lot of people with flashes on their cameras taking pictures of things that aren’t there, ghosts and spirits could be beings from that other universe. Just like you and me, depending on whether this all sounds sufficiently rational to you which I’m sure it does not, these people running on another parallel of this universe are exacting the very properties on our universe that scientists know we should be but are not. When one sees a ghost walk through a wall, it is because he or she and wall have something in common, ninety-percent empty space. The only difference is, he or she is in another universe and running on a different frequency that the wall, which allows him or her to pass, clean through it without the atoms colliding. When you tune in a station to your radio, it doesn’t mean the other stations no longer exist, they are still there, but you cannot hear them, in fact they just pass clean through the radio without causing a sound. Does the same go for angels and demons? Personally, I believe so. But that delves greatly into personal experience, and that, is another story.
To put it concretely, energy and matter are two curious buggers. No one knows completely everything about them, but what quantum physicists are finding is more and more the kind of thing that one would classify as- irrational, implausible, impossible, and insane. It just goes to show the universe doesn’t answer to mankind. Or does it? It depends on whom you chose to be. Skeptic? Or does it suddenly seem less irrational than it did before?
