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Early 20th century physics brought us a revolution in our understanding of physical reality, particularly regarding the quantum world, relativity, time and space. Einstein, Plank, Heisenberg, and others, challenged 'truths' that had gone unquestioned by science for centuries.
We never question the notion of the arrow of time, for instance, which states that time runs from past to present to future, and never backwards, and that the past is unchangeable.
Following are two columns with revolutionary and counterintuitive concepts of time and consciousness by Dr. Robert Lanza, followed by his two videos where he explains his theories in easy to understand terms.
As an introduction, please watch this fun cartoon video explaining the bizarre world of quantum physics:
VIDEO: HOW YOU CAN CHANGE THE PAST
Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn’t Set in Stone
By Robert Lanza, MD
The author is currently Head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, and is Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. His current research focuses on stem cells and regenerative medicine and their potential to provide therapies for some of the world's most deadly and debilitating conditions. He is the author of "Biocentrism - How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe", and the recently published "Beyond Biocentrism
Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. “The histories of the universe,” said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking “depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history.”
Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions?
Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome.
Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future — and may even depend on actions that you haven’t taken yet.
Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome.
Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future — and may even depend on actions that you haven’t taken yet.
In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light “photons” knew — in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future.
They tested the communication between pairs of photons — whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first.
The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don’t before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them.
They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn’t matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.
The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don’t before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them.
They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn’t matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.
More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened.
As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off.
It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.
Of course, we live in the same world. Particles have a range of possible states, and it’s not until observed that they take on properties.
So until the present is determined, how can there be a past?
According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word “black hole”), “The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past.”
So until the present is determined, how can there be a past?
According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word “black hole”), “The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past.”
Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the “probability waves collapse.” But there’s still uncertainty, for instance, as to what’s underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there’s a probability you’ll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment.
But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are “fossils” created in the heart of exploding supernova stars.
Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. “We are participators,” Wheeler said “in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past.”
Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. “We are participators,” Wheeler said “in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past.”
Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.
Like the light from Wheeler’s quasar, historical events such as who killed JFK, might also depend on events that haven’t occurred yet.
There’s enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another.
Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality.
Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality.
According to biocentrism, space and time are relative to the individual observer - we each carry them around like turtles with shells.
History is a biological phenomenon − it’s the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment.
Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.
“We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos,” says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT.
Choices you haven’t made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah’s Ark sank. “The universe,” said John Haldane, “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
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The Arrow of Time? It's All in Our Heads
By Dr. Robert Lanza, M.D.
Have you ever wondered why we age and grow old?
In the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Brad Pitt springs into being as an elderly man and ages in reverse.
To the bafflement of scientists, the fundamental laws of physics have no preference for a direction in time, and work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time.
Yet, in the real world, coffee cools and cars break down. No matter how many times you look in the mirror, you’ll never see yourself grow younger. But if the laws of physics are symmetric with respect to time, then why do we experience reality with the arrow of time strictly directed from the past to the future?
A new paper just published in Annalen der Physik — which published Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity — Dmitry Podolsky, a theoretical physicist now working on aging at Harvard University, and I explain how the arrow of time ‒ indeed time itself ‒ is directly related to the nature of the observer (that is, us).
Our paper shows that time doesn’t just exist “out there” ticking away from past to future, but rather is an emergent property that depends on the observer’s ability to preserve information about experienced events
Wave Function Collapse
The key to the nature of time is quantum gravity. During the last century, it became clear to physicists that the world of relativity (which deals with objects at large distances) and the world of quantum mechanics (which describes reality at small distances) are incompatible with each other.
The problem of making them compatible, known in theoretical physics as the problem of “quantum gravity,” remains perhaps the largest unsolved mystery of science despite intensive efforts by some of the greatest minds of the century.
Cracking the puzzle of quantum gravity requires us to go back to the foundations of quantum mechanics, which remains as puzzling to students and experienced scientists as it was to Einstein over half-a-century ago. Perhaps the most puzzling feature among them is called “wave function collapse.”
To understand the problem, consider the light in your room. Common sense tells us that the light is either on or off, but not both at once. Yet, quantum mechanics allows such bizarre states (called “entangled”), in which the lights have been neither turned on or off. Instead, they exist in a “superposition” of the two states ‒ that is, both “on” and “off.”
Experiments confirm that entangled states exist at microscopic, scales, at the size of atoms or elementary particles. But if the laws of quantum mechanics are universal, why don’t we observe entangled states of macroscopic objects surrounding us? The famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment suggests that even cats and people can exist in an entangled state, i.e. they can be both “alive” and “dead” at the same time. If so, then why do real life cats always seem either dead or alive?
The answer, as was suggested by the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, is called “wave function collapse” or “decoherence.” The light becomes either permanently on or off – or Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead – if we, the observer, measure its state. When we measure the quantum state, we destroy its coherence.
The Arrow of Time Emerges
Einstein’s collaborator, John Wheeler (who coined the word “black hole”) argued that time itself emerges due to a decoherence of the wave function describing the universe, which is subject to the laws of quantum gravity.
However, our paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our ordinary, everyday macroscopic world. Instead, it is necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.
Our new paper suggests that the emergence of the arrow of time is related to the ability of observers to preserve information about experienced events.
For years physicists have known that Newton’s laws, Einstein’s equations, and even those of the quantum theory, are all time-symmetrical. Time plays absolutely no role. There is no forward movement of time.
Thus, many scientists question whether time even exists. Indeed, Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but that all moments are equally real.
So if the laws of physics should work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time, then why do we only experience growing older? All our scientific theories tell us that we should be able to experience the future just like we experience the past.
The answer is that we observers have memory and can only remember events which we have observed in the past. Quantum mechanical trajectories “future to past” are associated with erasing of memory, since any process which decreases entropy (decline in order) leads to the decrease of entanglement between our memory and observed events.
In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can’t go back in time without this information being erased from your brain. By contrast, if you experience the future by using the usual route “past > present > future,” you accumulate memories and entropy grows.
Thus, a “brainless” observer — that is, an observer without the ability to store observed events — does not experience time or a world in which we age.
Aging truly, is all in your head.
Source
Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter:
Related websites:
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BOOKS BY DR ROBERT LAZLO:
I read Biocentrism and I recommend it.
RELATED
AUDIO - CBC Paul Kennedy's Ideas - BIOCENTRISM by Dr Robert Lanza
Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.
"Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence, when it gives birth to conscious intelligences?", questioned the Roman philosopher Cicero. Over two-thousand years later scientist Dr. Robert Lanza responds to Cicero's philosophical query with a groundbreaking book Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death. Biocentrism is a new theory that upends everything we might assume about ourselves and the world around us. The most basic assumption Dr. Lanza's biocentric theory challenges is our fundamental understanding of the "way things are."
"Biologists describe the origin of life as a random occurrence in a dead universe, but have no real understanding of how life began or why the universe appears to have been exquisitely designed for its emergence."
Science tells us that our universe all began with a sudden explosion -- a big bang -- about 13.8 billion years ago. Dr. Lanza writes: "In this model, the universe was presented as a kind of self-operating machine. It was composed of stupid stuff, meaning atoms of hydrogen and other elements that had no innate intelligence. Nor did any sort of external intelligence rule.
Science tells us that our universe all began with a sudden explosion -- a big bang -- about 13.8 billion years ago. Dr. Lanza writes: "In this model, the universe was presented as a kind of self-operating machine. It was composed of stupid stuff, meaning atoms of hydrogen and other elements that had no innate intelligence. Nor did any sort of external intelligence rule.
"Rather, unseen forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, acting according to the random laws of chance, produced everything we observe... As for how consciousness could arise in the first place, no one even has guesses. We cannot fathom how lumps of carbon, drops of water, or atoms of insensate hydrogen ever came together and acquired a sense of smell. The issue is apparently too baffling to raise at all."
In this model the universe is regarded as objective -- existing independent of any observer -- made of matter, ruled by mechanistic laws. Consciousness -- or the observer -- is simply a part of the matter-based universe.
In this model the universe is regarded as objective -- existing independent of any observer -- made of matter, ruled by mechanistic laws. Consciousness -- or the observer -- is simply a part of the matter-based universe.
But this model not only fails to fully address the conundrum of consciousness. It also fails to answer other puzzling questions: what was there before the Big Bang? Why does the universe seem exquisitely designed for the emergence of life? Why is there something instead of nothing?
This is where Dr. Lanza's biocentric theory of the universe comes in, to show us the inherent flaw in the standard explanation for origins of the universe.
"Most people believe that there's an independent physical universe "out there" that has nothing to do with our awareness of it. This seeming truth persisted without much dissent until the birth of quantum mechanics. Only then did a credible science voice appear, which resonated with those who claimed that the universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe."
Dr. Lanza says the problem is we have everything upside down. He takes the common assumption that the universe led to the creation of life and argues that it's the other way around: that life is not a byproduct of the universe, but its very source. Or put another way, consciousness is what gives rise to our sense of there being an "out there" when, in fact, the world we experience around us is actually created in our consciousness.
As if anticipating our bemused response, Dr. Lanza writes: "But, you may protest, aren't there two worlds? The external 'real world', and then another, separate visual world in your head? No, there is only one. Where the visual image is perceived is where it actually is. There is nothing outside of perception ... but the illusion of an external world comes from language. Everyone you meet participates in the same charade. It's not malevolent, but useful, as when you say, 'Please pass the salt over there.' What purpose would it serve to ask for that salt shaker 'inside your head'? It is customary to allude to the world as existing outside of us."
Dr. Robert Lanza is a noted scientist, who has been called by U.S. News & World a "genius" and "renegade thinker", likening him to Albert Einstein. He is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Octata Chief Scientific Officer, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina.
Dr. Robert Lanza is a noted scientist, who has been called by U.S. News & World a "genius" and "renegade thinker", likening him to Albert Einstein. He is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Octata Chief Scientific Officer, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina.
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE
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VIDEO: Robert Lanza on theory of Biocentrism part 1
VIDEO: Robert Lanza on theory of Biocentrism part 2
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OTHER RELATED ARTICLES ON THIS BLOG
YOU CAN CHANGE THE PAST, SAYS PHYSICIST
It works with microscopic particles, and it's part of that mysterious quantum world
Can the past be changed by the FUTURE? Bizarre quantum experiment by Professor Kater Murch suggests time can run backwards
READ MORE
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2015/02/you-can-change-past-says-physicist-it.html
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QUANTUM TRAVEL TO THE PAST?
- SCIENTISTS MOVE PHOTONS THROUGH TIME
Could time travel soon become a reality? Physicists simulate sending quantum light particles to the past for the first time READ MORE
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2014/06/quantum-travel-to-past-scientists-move.html
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STANFORD PHYSICIST - HOW THE MIND AFFECTS ATOMIC PARTICLES AND MOLECULES READ MORE
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2014/03/stanford-physicist-how-mind-affects.html
VIDEO:
QUANTUM THEORY EXPLAINED
FULL DOCUMENTARY
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