An Updated Scientific World-View

2. Memory is not only in synapses. Thought is not confined to brains.

Every October, Monarch butterflies across à -- of North America turn around and fly home, up to 2,000 miles, to find the exact tree (in California or Mexico) where their great, great, great, great grandparents overwintered the previous year. How is the road map transmitted from generation to generation? Plants don't have anything that corresponds to nerves or brains, but Monica Gagliano has demonstrated that plants can learn, can store memories, can sense their environment and make decisions that have all the appearance of signal processing. Even single-celled ciliates can learn and remember. Caterpillars' nervous systems are dismantled completely in the chrysalis, yet memories of the caterpillar survive in the butterfly. Humans who receive a heart transplant can take on some of the tastes, interests, and personality traits of the heart donor. There are too many stories of young children remembering verifiable details of a past life to dismiss the possibility of reincarnation.

3. PSI research, especially the REG experiments of Jahn and Dunne

I find special significance in a series of experiments done by Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn, Dean of the Princeton University School of Engineering over a 30-year period. They showed that the conscious intent of a human can bias the results of a quantum random process. This is of special significance because it cries out to us to consider that consciousness may play a role in fundamental physics. I'll have more to say below.

James Carpenter cites evidence that psychic abilities inform our subconscious minds just as commonly as other, well-acknowledged subliminal input, but most of this information is never delivered up to the conscious mind that sits atop a far more extensive cognitive process. We who have been raised to trust our senses and our reason suppress these ubiquitous psychic messages far more thoroughly than indigenous peoples, who routinely regard extra sensory perception as part of their everyday reality.

4. Bell's Theorem is a proof that the observer participates in the creation of reality.

Swiss physicist John Bell proved (1964 original) that the known and accepted principles of quantum mechanics imply that every observer affects what is being observed, and furthermore that that effect transcends space and time. The observer affects anything that has ever interacted with what he observes, and the effect can act on the past as easily as the future. (Subsequently, it has been verified in lab experiments that real physical systems do behave in this way, so you don't even have to accept quantum mechanics to know that observers affect what they observe.
The implications of this force us to rethink the idea (fundamental to the scientific method) that there is an objective physical world, independent of the scientists who study it. Do we find a clue to the physical basis of the intention effect that Jahn and Dunne observed? Might we imagine that the Big Bang event (when, for a tiny fraction of a second, all matter was packed so tight that every particle interacted with every other) was caused in some sense by our looking out at the universe 14 billion years later?

John Wheeler describes the observer's participation in creating reality in a way that is amusing and instructive.

We think of observers as independent humans with free will, but the model of participatory co-creation raises the question, how does it come about that there is so much we can agree on in the one universe co-created by you and me and at least 7 billion other observers? Considering this question has led me to the conclusion that our consciousnesses are not really so independent as we experience them to be. This idea seems puzzling and wildly counter-intuitive, but it aligns well with the wisdom of mystics throughout the ages.)

5. QM of many-particle systems

Quantum mechanics is essentially about situations, not particles. We associate quantum physics with experiments and high-energy particles and with physics of the atom. The reality (rarely acknowledged) is that we do quantum experiments with single particles because that's all we know how to calculate. Quantum mechanics provides a prescription for calculating future probabilities based on present measurements, but that calculation is utterly intractable except in the very simplest cases. Yes, the simple Schrà ¶dinger equation (not even relativistic QM or second-quantization quantum field theory) becomes completely intractable for any system more complicated than two particles. This is different from classical mechanics. You can solve the equations of motion for 2 particles in classical mechanics with twice as much computational effort as 1 particle, and 3 particles require 3 times as much computation. But in QM, a 2 particle system is represented by a wave function in a 6-dimensional configuration space, and a 3-particle system requires 9 dimensions, etc. This is sooo different from tracking one more particle in the same 3-dimensional space. In practice, a 2-electron computation requires a billion times more computing power than a single electron, and a 3-electron computation is beyond the conceivable ability of any transistor-based computer that will ever be built. A garden variety biomolecule typically contains a few thousand electrons.

In practice, physical chemists do computations of large atoms and complex molecules all the time, but to do so they start with the fiction that electrons don't interact with one another (except through the Pauli exclusion principle) and then correct their calculation based on experimental measurements of chemical properties.

We do experiments to test quantum mechanics on systems with a single particle, isolated through careful laboratory conditions, because that's all we know how to calculate. But quantum mechanics is fundamentally a theory of systems. It applies naturally to many-particle systems, and to single particles only in idealized circumstances that only obtain in specialized laboratories. The observations that we make in everyday life measure macroscopic properties of Avogadro's numbers of particles. We cannot in practice perform quantum calculations for such systems, so we do non-quantum calculations that work well in most circumstances.

But we know there are exceptions. There are bulk quantum properties that occasionally surface, and we understand them only dimly. Superconductivity was observed for 50 years before there was a theory of it. Lasers are another bulk quantum phenomenon. Low energy nuclear reactions have been reported in dozens of laboratories around the world, but there is no accepted theory for them. They are a complete surprise to physicists who work with the standard approximations [New Scientist article ]. Evidence from a handful of experiments suggests that plants and even bacteria are able to harness nuclear physics to transmute one element into another [reviewed by C. L. Kervran ]. Biological nuclear transmutation is an observed phenomenon that defies explanation in terms of the usual approximations made by physicists when they apply quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects.

There is a small, pregnant field called quantum biology which has carefully documented a few examples of biological effects. I hold with those who speculate that life is an essentially quantum phenomenon, and that the observer effect is being harnessed continually to maintain the living state. A suggested approach to this topic derives from the

6. Quantum Zeno Effect

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