Science is broken - somewhat

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Category: Foundation

Published on Saturday, 11 February 2012 02:18

Written by Administrator

One of the hallmarks of science is it's certainty that is is right. At least the established science that we learn in school. But history has shown us that this certainty was not always justified.

First of all this author wants to disclose that he was trained as a scientist and still has the hardest time to shed his scientific mind. The most drastic attempt to accomplish this had been to walk barefoot over glowing coals. The result of that experiment was that, for about half an hour, this scientific mind had been overwhelmed and his feet were OK, but after a short recovery period it kicked in with a vengeance, and the feet developed serious blisters.

Back to the certainty - often culminating in arrogance - of science. Generally, when a new science developed, the old one could be saved by making it a special case of the new. An example for this are Newton's laws. After Einstein created his special relativity Newton's laws where still - mostly - correct, at least when dealing with speeds that were much lower than the speed of light, which is the case for pretty much everything in our daily experience.

There are cases where even science has to admit that it was wrong. One example that comes to mind was the attempt to explain the sun before nuclear power had been discovered. During this pre-nuclear time scientists, assuming the sun was composed of mostly coal, estimated the remaining time for life on earth to be in the range of a few million years - the time for all the coal to burn up. With the invention of nuclear fusion that range has increased tremendously. Today science ascertains us that the explanation of the workings of the sun through the fusion of hydrogen is correct. But, to be honest, not very long ago, scientists were just as certain that their coal - explanation was correct as well. The coal theory had no chance of saving face when it was overturned.

Let us look at another example where the certainty of science was not quite justified. Towards the end of the 19th century science became convinced that the future was fully determined. Based on Laplace's postulation of a hypothetical, all powerful being that could know the location and speed of any and all particles in the universe at one time, the location and speed of each of these particles at a later time could be calculated, thus the future could be not only predicted by actually computed. That hypothetical mind was called Laplace's demon.

This state of science lasted into the beginning of the 20th century even though there were a few observed experiments that were not explainable by this view of the world. It required some obnoxious scientists that were not content with just disregarding those annoying irregularities to break the arrogance of the established sciences. These non-conformists started to investigate a bit deeper and the result was the Heisenberg principle that explains to us that knowing the speed and location of every particle at one point in time was impossible. Heisenberg discovered that if you know the exact location of a (very small) particle you could not measure, and thus know, its speed. Similarly if the speed was known exactly, the location could not be determined.

Laplace's demon was dead. All the work Laplace did was still valid as long as the objects where big, like planets or cars or marbles, but when dealing with molecules or atoms, physical laws where just different. Similarly to the effects of the Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein, the old science could be saved because it - mostly - applied.

Just as today scientists are very confident that their theories are truly describing reality, so where the physicists of 1899 certain that they could compute the future, at least theoretical.

What does all this mean in the context of our research for inner peace and serenity?

Simply not to take that what science tell us too seriously.

This author is still enough of a scientist not to throw each and any scientific result into the fiery pit and pull out a magic wand to get his broken computer or car working again, but he also will not discard observable results - even if only by him - just because the established science tell him it could not be so.

If scientists have been wrong in the past, could it be that they are also wrong - or ignorant - today, or is our science today really so good that there is no doubt that it describes the world correctly? If, today, some scientists might appear a bit too over-confident then we would expect that there are some observations that do not fit into the current interpretation of the world.

So we have to ask: Are there such observations?

And indeed there are!

One of those misfits is (a) the radioactive particle that does not do what it's supposed to do when being watched, and the other one is (b) the wave that knows the future.

(a) An unstable, radioactive, element has a specific rate of decay and if left alone that element will nicely decay at the rate established by many observers. But if under observation in a petry dish it will be shy and don't do its job of decaying at the prescibed rate. This author has to admit that he did not verify these results personally, but the next he has seen with his own eyes.

(b) Take an electric circuit and watch the voltage with an oscilloscope. The circuit contains a switch to interrupt the circuit and throwing the switch would just change the voltage from high to low instantly.

In other words, as soon as the switch is turned to off, the voltage goes down to zero. But this is not what actually  happens. If we zoom into this image just around the moment when the switch is thrown, here is what we really see.

Before the voltage is actually turned off and goes down there is a little bit of an oscillation happening. But wait - before? How could the circuit know that it will be turned off soon, even if that soon is only microseconds?

It can't - at least not with our current explations of the inner workings of the universe. Causality seems to be broken. Entertain a little thought experiment. You make the decision to turn off the switch, shortly before you actully do it the osciallation on the wave starts and right there you change your mind. Would the oscillation now die away just leaving behind a measurement of your brief intention to turn off power? Or would the oscillaton never had happen, thus actually changing the past?

Mind-boggling, isn't it?

Does this open the door - at least a little bit - to accept that there is the possibility of behavior of the universe and the people within it, that is not currently explained by science?

How Solid is the Physical Universe

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Category: Foundation

Published on Sunday, 12 February 2012 01:26

Written by Merlin Silk

The physical universe often appears overwhelmingly solid and unchangeable. Let us look how solid it really is and develop a feel for the opportunity to change it.

Before modern physics objects we could feel and touch were just considered to be solid, but when science started to dig deep into the structure of things we learned that those material objects, like the hammer to drive in a nail, was indeed finely structured into molecules and atoms of the elements it was built from - mostly iron in case of the hammer.

For a long time the atom seemed to be the smallest building block, strongly indicated by the choice of the word atom, the Greek word for 'indivisible'.

But in the late 19th and early 20th century it was discovered that the 'atom' actually had a structure and we all know the model of an atom of the nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons in the middle, orbited by one or more electrons.

Unfortunately this picture, as we learned it in school and how we probably still imagine an atom, is very misleading because it shows the particles as solid balls of something, and we assumed that it is something solid. This turned out to be an incorrect image as, first, these little electron-balls where not really balls that circled the nucleus like the moon circles the earth, but something that sometimes appeared to be a particle but at other times it behaved as a wave. Second, the scale was way off - the diameter of the whole atom is 10- to 100-thousand times larger than the nucleus. To give an idea of that relationship imagine a sphere of 20 miles diameter - then the nucleus would be a baseball.

That means that an atom is mostly empty space. Apply that image to the five pound hammer when you miss the nail and hit your thumb. That does not feel like a lot of space (the hammer) hitting another lot of empty space (your thumb). Yet we still consider objects as solid.

If we follow along with the development of science since the early 20th century, the situation becomes even more unreal. First a structure was found in the formerly solid building blocks of the nucleus - the protons and neutrons. With these building blocks of the nucleus, the quarks, we have entered an area where a direct observation of the pieces involved is no longer possible. The only way to make observations that allows conclusions of the inner workings of an atomic particle was to throw those particles at each other with such a high force that they broke apart and then look at the fragments flying out of that collision. The second, and current, development was the investigation of the structure of those quarks. The final word on what that might be is not out yet, but one of the leading theories is that they consists of very small oscilating strings - you might have heard the word string theory.

What it all boils down to is that there is nothing solid in the 'stuff' that we consider solid. It's mostly empty space and some strong force fields concentrated in the middle and weaker ones on the outside. There does not seem to be a principle difference between the air we walk through without even noticing and the wall that stops us cold.

This is all science as it is now practiced and taught in universities and research centers. It is simplified with all the math taken out, but hopefully these facts shake up your sense of reality and allow you to see that 'reality' is not chiseled in stone and definitely can be changed.

Just in case you would like to look into this a bit more, there is this great TED talk by Professor Brian Greene, explaining - without all the math - the basic ideas behind this string theory...

How Do We Fit Into Our Body?

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Category: Foundation

Published on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 01:35

Written by Merlin Silk

After exploring the solidity of the physical universe and pondering the question how scientific science really is, we should now take a look at our role as beings consisting of body, mind and spirit and explore how we might fit into this picture.

First we take a look at the biological aspect, which means we primarily look how our body works. The building block of all known living organisms is the cell and a human body as somewhere in the range of 10 to 100 trillion of those. The exact number is unknown and this fact should give us much fodder to think. How can we not know what cells constitute us, if this body is something that we commonly consider to be the "I"? The reason for this uncertainty is simply that at every moment millions, if not billion cells die and others come into existence through the division of other cells.

In fact, the body does not appear to be a closely defined collection of material. We add substance to our body by eating, these materials are processed and supply the material for cells to grow and divide. Other cells that have reached the end of their duty cycle are washed out of the body and left behind, some of this material is flushed down the toilet but another part is just spread into the environment - sweat, dandruff, hair, dead skin cells are the reason that we have to vacuum or sweep, and have to wash these left-overs out of our clothes.

The idea about food that many of us have is simply not correct. We do not just put some material into our body and it comes out after some energy has been extracted, instead much of the material is built into our body for a while, does its job for some period of time and is then released. The following picture of our body is much more correct: it is some space, or volume, moving through life, continuously feeding new material into it as it moves through it, and at the same time leaving the same amount as a cloud behind. If we add to this the fact that we are exchanging a huge amount of material with the environment in the form of the air we breathe, it becomes clear that the idea that our body is a clearly defined object that we can identify with, is simply not correct.

Our body is in constant exchange with it's environment and it has been calculated once that there are at least a few atoms or molecules in our body that have been in Jesus's body a few thousand years ago. Also, calculating the amount of material that enters and leaves out body every day, we come to the result that every seven years we have a completely new body. The body you have today consists of nearly 100% different atom than the one you had seven years ago. This rate of renewal is even faster for the soft tissues of your body as for example your heart - you heart today is a different one than the one you had two to three years ago.

Since science learned about DNA, at least we know that our essence is carried in these strands of molecules that each of our cells contains and which gives them the ability apparently maintain our body's integrity - so that we know who we are.

Unfortunately for that point of view we now have to look for the guests we carry with us. Most of us have learned in school that there are beneficial bacteria in our digestive tract helping us to digest the food we eat. From these classes we probably kept this image in our mind of a few of those symbionts living with us. But this picture is not quite right, unfortunately. Foreign cells living in and on our body outnumber our own cells by a very high number - possibly in the range of ten to one!

The idea of our body being that one stable thing that allows us to identify ourselves gets weaker and weaker, if in this confined space that IS our body only ten percent actually carries our own DNA, and the rest are just other entities that life in harmony with our own cells but are definitely not the "I".

Let's summarize what your body actually is: it is a particularly shaped space that is filled to a big degree with water, but also contains cells, ten percent of which I consider my own because they contain my own DNA. These cells are constantly duplicating themselves, live for a little while, then die and will be eventually expelled.

Beyond this biological view, we then have to take the physical view and understand that the molecules and atoms these cells are built from, are mostly empty space with a few vibrating energy strings - possibly curled up in the very small dimensions number 4 to 10 - in the middle.

This is getting pretty wild, yes?

The question now becomes, how these cells - foreign and our own - know where to go and what role to fulfill.

As science has not, as far as this author can discern, provided an answer. Thus we have to move into the area of speculative science. Could it be that the behavior is similar to that on the very smallest scale - the strings of string theory? There we have vibrating energy fields of the smallest size creating manifesting all the particles we know from particle physics depending on the frequency of this vibration. Just as the vibration of the strings span open a space that then contains the manifestation of, for example, a quark, could it be that there is some energy or vibration that spans open the space that is then filled with the matter that we consider our body?

One observation of an instant healing did make this theory plausible. This author observed a very lively, big dog, a Collie, running around and having the best time, until, after one poorly executed jump, she came down, hit the ground the wrong way, and was lying there very still with one limb very much out of position. The owner told me later that he already saw in his mind all the trouble of getting his dog to the veterinarian, possible surgery and all the cost involved. But the dog, all of a sudden, shook her whole body violently as if getting everything back into place and ran off as if nothing had happened. Apparently this energy field, which was the dog, knew where everything was supposed to be and instantly shook everything into its proper place.

In pursuing the question what the characteristic of this energy field might be, we will have to move deeper into the speculative domain, when we explore different types of universes.