IsNewsReal Films presents "Exciting News!"
Is the divorce over?
Are spirit and science tying the knot once more?
Are the church and the laboratory saying the same thing?
Out of the misty ages of antiquity...
the quest for the divine and the quest for knowledge about the universe...
marched hand in hand.
Ancient Sumer - There was a god of astronomy...
a god of horticulture, a god of irrigation...
and the temple priests were the scribes and technologists...
investigating these fields of knowledge.
Ancient Greece- Philosophers asking the questions of why are we here...
developed the theory of the atom, celestial movements and human ethics.
Medieval Europe- The Western church arose to a position of supreme power.
Kingmaker, landowner and purveyor of the truth...
the church took it upon themselves to be the one knower of everything.
The dogma was law.
Yet science had moved forward...
and now challenged the dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.
Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo all felt the heavy hand of the church.
The tragedy!
Unable to suppress science anymore...
the church and science divided up knowledge and human endeavor.
Descartes invented dualism.
The church had the unseen...
science the seen.
And materialism was born.
An uneasy truce.
Scientists were no longer being bound...
and they reacted with a vengeance.
All the unseen is fantasy, delusion.
We are strictly little machines running in a predictable machine universe...
governed by strict, immutable laws.
The church pushed back.
Soulless scientists were condemned to hell!
Darwin countered. The creator is nothing, nowhere.
We are random mutations...
simply a carrier of D.N.A. 's relentless quest for more in a meaningless universe.
And meanwhile, both science and religion were hitting the wall.
If everything was mechanistic and God was the Holy Creator...
then what were we humans supposed to do?
Science dug ever deeper into a dead universe...
and stumbled upon and unlocked a mystery.
In tiny corners of space and time...
scientists found unfathomable energy...
and mind-numbing mysteries.
Mysteries that suggest we are all connected...
that the physical universe is essentially nonphysical.
Time and space Are just constructs of this non-materialness.
And today, renegade scientists are meeting with religious leaders.
Conferences pushing forward a meeting of science and spirit are springing up.
As the 20th century blew open the doors of a mechanistic view...
will the 21st century blow down the iron wall between the church and laboratory?
This is your IsNewsReal reporter... signing off.
The rabbit hole and how deep and how far we want to go...
is really how far, how much do you want to discover about your true nature?
Alice went down the rabbit hole, where she met the Mad Hatter.
The hatter was mad.
And the idea was, you want to get out of the rabbit hole after you've gone in.
So there's two stages to science.
There's-There's the crazy part, where you go down the rabbit hole...
and then there's the part where you check the craziness of your ideas...
against a rigorous, strict straitjacket-like process.
I think the interesting thing about science...
um, um, the interesting thing about physics...
is that it is a genuinely new and novel way...
of trying to come to grips with the world.
Um, um, I think the experimental method, which is important to physics...
is a very different business from the method of revelation...
or the method of meditation or something like that.
I don't think it's true that, for example...
adherents of, say, Buddhism...
um, um, could imagine changing their beliefs... based on the outcomes of some experiments people do with electrons.
Why this apparent rift between the church and science...
or between science and religion emerged today?
I think the roots of that are very deep...
because it probably goes back to a conviction...
that some of the books of the scriptures like the Book of Genesis,
which deals with beginnings...
is actually telling us about the origins of the world.
Now, in fact, any biblical scholar will tell you-
this is not news- that the Book of Genesis was never meant to be about the origins of the world.
But many churchmen believed that in the Book of Genesis...
you had actual sort of live news, like CNN£¬about the beginnings of creation.
And, therefore, you had many people down through the ages...
like the famous Archbishop James Ussher in Ireland in 1 650...
who calculated all the ages of the patriarchs back along...
and worked out, to his own satisfaction£¬ that the creation of the world occurred in the year 4004 B.C . on the 17th of September at 9:00 in the morning.
I think that there must be a scientific explanation for spirituality.
I don't think there's been a good one until recently.
To me, the only one that makes sense is that...
proto-consciousness, Platonic values, goodness, truth...
exist at this fundamental level of space-time geometry...
which can influence our actions if we're open to them...
and interconnects us to all other beings to the universe at large.
Science creates the stories that we live by...
and science has told us a very bleak story.
It's told us that we're some sort of genetic mistake that we have genes that use us, basically, to move on to the next generation...
and that we randomly mutate. ~~
It's said that we are outside of our universe...
that we're alone, that we are separate...
and that we are this sort of lonely mistake on a lonely planet in a lonely universe.
And that informs our view of the world.
It informs our view of ourselves.
And we're now realizing that this view...
this view of separateness£¬is one of the most destructive things.
It's the thing that creates all the problems in the world.
And we're now realizing that that paradigm is wrong, that we aren't separate.
We are all one. We're all together.
At the very nethermost element of our being, we are connected.
And so we're trying to understand and absorb what are the implications of that?
What does this really mean to me and my life?
We need a new spiritual milieu.
We need a new spiritual way of understanding the nature of what it is to be a human being.
Because the old ways, the old mythologies£¬the old monarchy, king, God... versus the old lawful scientist's way of doing everything are dead.
They need to be buried. We need a new realm, a new vision
And I think quantum physics, if anything could help us get a step up in the right direction.
I think the key aspect of the new paradigm-
at least in medicine, which is my little piece
um, is that consciousness is real and has an impact.
We have to go beyond our senses to create a new paradigm.
It may very well be that what's going on inside of you
in your brain, in your nervous system, in your nature of observation...
how memory works, how mind works-
It may very well be that what is happening there...
is some kind of observer/matter interrelationship...
which is indeed making things real for you, affecting how you perceive reality.
It's not changing the reality out there.
You know, you're not changing big chairs and big trucks and bulldozers and rockets taking off.
You're not changing those. No.
But you're changing how you perceive things
and maybe how you think about the things£¬ how you feel about things, how you sense the world.
The infinite information that the brain is processing every single second...
tells us that there's more to the world than we're perceiving
However, every single time we're immersed in an experience with our senses - seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling-
as we're immersed sensually in our reality.
We know nothing about reality
and all of our sense of so-called reality out there
is filtered through our sense organs.
The brain processes 400 billion bits of information a second...
but we're only aware of 2,000 of those
That means that reality's happening in the brain all the time.
You should try it
How do I know what I'm doing?
I and the vase are one.
Hey, it might help your work too
I live through my eyes.
I deal in reality.
Not just some nebulous, nothing, touchy-feely world of shifting whatevers.
If it's real, I want to see it.
The eyes are, in some senses, a camcorder...
because they are taking that information...
and they're storing it, but they're not- You're not really able to get it to mean anything until you actually put it all together.
So in some senses, it requires the editor's table to really put the whole thing together...
to put the movie together of what your life and your world is actually about.
If I get out of bed in the morning, okay...
and I suddenly decide, um, to take very seriously, the claim-which is surely a true claim
that I don't know for sure if my eyes are working correctly, okay?
So that for all I know, even though it looks like there's a stable floor by the side of my bed, there might be a cliff or something like that, okay?
Um, if I am unable to order those possibilities in terms of probabilities that I assign to them
then I'm not gonna get out of bed.
Seems to me I'm paralyzed in the most literal sense of the word, okay?
I'm not, um, um-
I'm gonna have no idea how to literally take the next step.
It's definitely the case that we know that my eyes might in principle be deceiving me at any moment.
We've had experience of people before, subject to hallucinations.
And even if we didn't
we don't know how to prove as a fundamental matter that our eyes never deceive us.
That's absolutely right.
But when we make the decision to get out of bed in the morning...
we are assigning probabilities to the various hypotheses
compatible with my seeing a floor by the bed.
One hypothesis is, there really is a floor there, and that's why I'm seeing it.
Another hypothesis is...
my seeing the floor is a hallucination, and there's a cliff there.
By getting out of bed in the morning...
you endorse one of those hypotheses as more likely than another.
Well, ultimate reality, I think... very frequently depends a lot on how a person perceives it
and what they actually think is£¬is the real reality of our world.
If the brain is processing 400 billion bits of information
and our awareness is only on 2,000
that means reality's happening in the brain all the time.
It's receiving that information, and yet we haven't integrated it.
But if we're given knowledge and information outside of convention -outside the box of convention-
or say we merged quantum physics and neurophysiology
and the brain is asked to contemplate£¬or we're-we're asked to contemplate on that
and examine the what-ifs and possibilities and potentials
and associate our knowns with our experience of what we know
and repeat it over and over again
the brain's gonna start to integrate two independent neuronets and it's gonna create a new vision
And that new vision's gonna be like taking a flashlight
And that new vision's gonna be like taking a flashlight and shining it from those 2,000 bits of information that have to do with our body and our environment and time
slightly over, in the dark and looking at something new.
That's called realization.
You okay? I heard you scream earlier. Was it another dream?
You were an Indian
watching Columbus's ship materialize out of thin air.
Wow!
And this medicine man kept hitting you.
Cool! That's- Hey. Maybe it was a past life
or a parallel reality, or a future life.
Get real.
Or maybe that dream was trying to tell you the truth.
I guess it just depends on what you think is real.
Maybe you should try different anxiety pills.
My pills are fine, okay? Thank you.
Well, I have to go get dressed.
I hope you feel better, Amanda.
God, Amanda. You can be such an asshole.
People ask me, why does quantum mechanics matter, given that it's all-
it's little tiny stuff, And who cares?
There are three possible answers.
From a practical point of view, it doesn't make any difference at all.
You still have to go to work, drive your car and do all the rest of it.
From a second point of view,
it actually- it infiltrates everything in the world, especially the world of electronics.
When you go to the supermarket and you do the scanning at the checkout
But I think the important part is the third one
which is essentially a philosophical issue.
Why are philosophers so passionate about deconstruction the assumptions of the world?
I finally got it. I got it as a result of looking at quantum mechanics and comparing it to classical mechanics.
They present two very different ways of thinking about the way that the world works and about what we are.
So, from a classical perspective, we are machines.
And in machines, there's no room for a conscious experience.
Doesn't matter if a machine dies.
You can kill the machine. You can throw it in the dump. It doesn't matter.
If that is the way that the world is, then people will behave in that way.
But there's another way of thinking about the world.
It's pointed to by quantum mechanics which suggested that the world is not this clockwork thing
but it's more like an organism
It's a highly interconnected organismic thing of some type which extends through space and time.
In that kind of environment,
what I think and the way that I behave has a much greater impact, not only on myself, but on the rest of the world
than it would if it was a classical world.
So, from a very basic point of view having to do with morals and ethics
what I think affects the world.
That's- I mean, in a sense, that's really the key for why a worldview change is important.
Let's talk about the subatomic world.
And then we'll talk about what it's telling us about reality.
The first thing I want to tell you about the subatomic world
is it's totally a fantasy created by mad physicists
trying to figure out what the heck is going on when they do these little experiments.
By little experiments, I mean big energy in little spaces and little pieces of time.
It gets pretty nutty at that realm of things.
And so subatomic physics was invented to try to figure that all out.
We need a new science down there. It's called quantum physics,
and it is subject to a whole range of debatable hypotheses, thoughts, feelings, intuitions...
as to what the heck is really going on.
So, on the one hand, you had a theory which from the conceptual standpoint, was profoundly puzzling
and on the other hand, from the practical standpoint
was vastly more successful than anything we had ever seen before.
This is the kind of situation that produces the tension
that all of the investigations of- foundations of quantum mechanics are feeding off of since then.
Because on the one hand, this is a- this is an acutely paradoxical, puzzling£¬conceptually confusing theory.
On the other hand, we have no option along the lines of throwing it out£¬or neglecting it
because it is the most powerful proven tool for predicting the behaviors of physical systems that we have ever had in our hands.
The universe is very strange. There seem to be two sets of laws that govern the universe.
In our everyday classical world, meaning roughly our size and timescales
things are described by Newton's laws of motion set down hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
And they work very well for billiard balls and cannonballs and gravity.
However, when we get down to a small scale£¬ when we get down to, say, the level of atoms
a different set of laws take over.
These are the quantum laws, quantum theory, quantum mechanics.
And at that level particles may be in multiple places at the same time.
They may behave as waves smeared out spatially and temporally.
They may be interconnected over great distances.
They may, um£¬be unified into one quantum state- into one state
governed by one wave function.
And the borderline, the threshold this curtain between the quantum world and the classical world is really mysterious.
It's called sometimes the collapse of the wave function
because at the quantum world, everything is in superposition and multiple possibilities.
And in the classical world, these multiple possibilities seem to collapse to particular, definite choices.
So, everything is in one particular place.
Quantum mechanics is really the play and display of information the play and display of potentiality£¬ waves of information, waves of potential electron.
And it's important, the word "potential."
This isn't the world of electrons. It's the world of potential electrons.
But you have to ask the question, "Waves of what really?"
What is the field that is waving? Is it the ocean?
No. It's a universal ocean. An ocean of pure potentiality.
An ocean of abstract, potential existence.
We call it the "unified field, " or "superstring field. "
And that's what we're made of.
Connectivity among all things is a basic constituent of the fabric of reality.
It's very difficult to wrap your mind around that.
But Erwin Schrodinger said - He's one of the founders of quantum mechanics-
that entanglement, which is this idea of this connectivity
is not just a property of quantum mechanics, it's the property.
It's the property of quantum mechanics that makes it very, very strange.
And it doesn't seem to fit in with our ordinary world our ordinary experience,
but, in fact, it actually does.
Wanna shoot some hoops?
Now, you don't have to be like that.
Come on and play.
Look, he likes you. Don't you have time for a little one-on-one?
How long has it been since you played?
Come on. You got the ball. Take a shot.
No, no, no, milady. Not from there. It's out-of-bounds.
You gotta be on the court to be in play.
Welcome to Duke Reginald's court of unending possibilities.
Court rules. You gotta sink the last one.
That hurt.
It never touched you.
Right.
And... it's not solid.
This ball. It's mostly empty.
We were all taught in school that the world is made of stuff of matter, of mass, of atoms
Atoms make up molecules. Molecules make up materials. And everything is made of that.
But atoms actually are mostly empty.
For example, if this ball were the nucleus of an atom
a proton in a hydrogen atom, for example
then the electron circling this which would describe the outer limits of that atom
would be out by that mountain over there, roughly 20 miles away.
And everything in between is empty.
In fact, the universe is mostly empty.
However, when we go down in scale, in the emptiness
we eventually come to a level the fundamental level of space-time geometry.
The fine basement level of the universe
where there's information, there's a pattern.
It's called the Planck scale. And it's the fabric of the universe.
And at that level, there's information that's been there since the big bang.
So most of the universe, even of matter, is actually empty.
Most people think that the vacuum is empty.
But for internal self-consistency of quantum mechanics and relativity theory
there is required to be the equivalent of 10 to the 94 grams of mass energy.
Each gram being E = mc^2 kind of energy.
Now, that's a huge number. But what does it mean practically?
Practically, if I can assume that the universe is flat-
and more and more astronomical data is showing it's pretty darn flat
if I can assume that, then if I take the volume or take the vacuum within a single hydrogen atom
that's about 1 0 to the minus 23 cubic centimeters.
If I take that amount of vacuum and I take the latent energy in that
there is a trillion times more energy there than in all of the mass of all of the stars and all of the planets out to 20 billion light-years.
That's big. That's big.
And if consciousness allows you to control even a small fraction of that
creating a big bang is no problem.
Organizations like NASA, British Aerospace
are all trying to tap into this incredible, unimaginably large energy sea.
And they feel if they can tap this, we can travel to different galaxies.
So they understand that in empty space, there is this unbelievable energy.
The major basic idea that quantum physics implies
which makes us understand this or even think about this new paradigm
the thing which is that there's this underground-
There's gotta be a realm of existence which cannot be ever touched on or seen
which bubbles into the existence giving rise to our understanding of the world.
The tighter physics have tried to grasp onto physical reality
to understand what it's really made of£¬ what are the core building blocks of life at the basis of it all
life, the universe, slips through your fingers.
And you come up with something that's increasingly abstract
increasingly abstract till they come to the realm of pure abstraction.
And that's what the unified field is.
It's pure abstract potential£¬pure abstract being£¬pure abstract self-aware consciousness
which rises in waves of vibration, to give rise to the particles, the people£¬everything we see in the vast universe
What makes up things are not more things
but what makes up things are ideas£¬concepts, information
And like I said, it never touches.
Another strange fact is that objects never really touch each other.
When I dribble this ball,
the atoms of the ball and the atoms of the ground never actually meet.
So nobody touches nothing.
Come on. Put your stuff down. Nobody's gonna take it.
Like I said, this is my court. It's no problem.
Well, how long has it been?
I'll be late.
The first inkling in physics that we got that time ain't what it seemed to be
uh, came with relativity.
That was the first inkling. That time was not absolute.
It was not the absolute ruler of the universe.
That God Almighty did not say, "One second, one second, one second, one second.
One meter, one meter, one meter."
You're in a gravitational field.
Your head is actually moving at a slightly faster rate than your feet.
The second law of thermodynamics says that things unwind and move forward.
So that gives an arrow of time.
But at the quantum world, in the microworld
the second law of thermodynamics doesn't seem to hold.
And things can go backwards or be timeless.
The fundamental equations of physics have a property which is referred to as time reversal symmetry
And what time reversal symmetry means is that a set of laws
which are time reversal symmetric are laws that have the following feature
For any process that's in accord with those laws the same process going backwards is exactly as much in accord with those laws.
Okay? That ought to mean that, um-
that milk jumps out of coffee as often as it dissolves into it
that people get younger-looking as often as they get older-looking
that we have the same kind of access vis-a-vis knowledge to the future as we do to the past
that by acting now we ought to be able to influence the past
All of that is wrong.
All of that, that is, comes into violent conflict
with the way we psychologically experience the world.
One of the most unpalatable ideas still
in spite of the fact that quantum physics has been around a long time
is the possibility or the notion that the future can have a causative effect on the present
We believe that the past can have a causative effect on the present.
I hold a ball. I drop it. It falls.
Cause, effect, when it hits the ground.
But could the ground be the cause of my dropping the ball in the first place?
It's only in conscious experience that it seems we move forward in time.
In quantum theory you can also go backwards in time.
And there's some suggestion that processes in the brain related to consciousness project backwards in time
For example, in the late 1970s
a neurophysiologist at University of California, San Francisco£¬ named Ben Libet did some very famous experiments.
What Libet did was to study patients who were having neurosurgery on their brains
with their brains exposed while they were awake. They were given a local anesthetic to numb the area of the skull and scalp
to access their brains, and they were awake, and Ben would talk to these people.
So, for example, what he did was
he would stimulate their little finger...
and look at the part of the sensory cortex on the opposite side
that was related to that, record from it electrically
and ask the patient when he or she felt the stimulus on the little finger.
He would also stimulate at that particular area of the cortex.
Now, what you would think, would be that if you stimulate the little finger
it takes a finite period of time to get to the opposite side of the cortex
so the patient would report it a fraction of a second later after the stimulus
And when you stimulate it directly, the patient would report it immediately.
He found just the opposite.
When you stimulated the little finger, the patient felt it immediately.
And when he stimulated directly on the cortex, there was a delay.
After sorting through all the data and repeating this over and over
Libet came to the conclusion that somehow the brain was projecting information backwards in time.
So that it did take a finite amount of time to get to the sensory cortex
but the brain projected it backwards in time
so that the conscious perception was that the stimulus was felt when the pinch actually occurred.
There have been some studies which have shown that when people are beginning to move a hand or beginning to say something
that there's actually activity in certain nerve cells of the brain even before they become consciously aware of what they're trying to do.
It seems to me I often do things and then decide later what to do but I've already done them.
I'll be late.
You can always go back in time.
What's the matter?
Remember. It's empty.
How do you know this shit?
I read Dr. Quantum comics.
Everybody thinks it's just kid stuff, but I know it's real.
It's how I do my magic on the court.
So, what they taught us in school isn't really the way it is.
And that our senses are playing tricks on us.
You just gotta wonder.
What is this reality that we find ourselves in?
Quantum physics says it's all just waves of information.
Do I believe that?
Ah, I hope so.
It's how I do my magic on the court.
Yeah. I always choose the wonder boy first.
Dr. Quantum says everybody's got it. Everybody's doing it.
And doing it constantly, each and every time we look.
And here we are, the granddaddy of all quantum weirdness:
the infamous double-slit experiment.
To understand this experiment,
we first need to see how particles or little balls of matter, act.
If we randomly shoot a small object, say a marble, at the screen
we see a pattern on the back wall where they went through the slit and hit.
Now, if we add a second slit
we would expect to see a second band duplicated to the right.
Now, let's look at waves.
The waves hit the slit and radiate out
striking the back wall with the most intensity directly in line with the slit.
The line of brightness on the back screen shows that intensity.
This is similar to the line the marbles make.
But when we add the second slit...
something different happens.
If the top of one wave meets the bottom of another wave
they cancel each other out.
So now there is an interference pattern on the back wall.
Places where the two tops meet are the highest intensity- the bright lines-
and where they cancel, there is nothing.
So, when we throw things, that is, matter, through two slits
we get this- two bands of hits.
And with waves, we get an interference pattern of many bands.
Good, so far. Now, let's go quantum.
An electron is a tiny, tiny bit of matter
like a tiny marble.
Let's fire a stream through one slit.
It behaves just like the marble: a single band.
So if we shoot these tiny bits through two slits
we should get, like the marbles, two bands.
What? An interference pattern.
We fired electrons, tiny bits of matter, through.
But we get a pattern like waves
not like little marbles.
How? How could pieces of matter create an interference pattern like a wave?
It doesn't make sense.
But physicists are clever.
They thought, "Maybe those little balls are bouncing off each other£¬and creating that pattern."
So they decide to shoot electrons through one at a time.
There is no way they could interfere with each other.
But after an hour of this, the same interference pattern is seen to emerge.
The conclusion is inescapable.
The single electron leaves as a particle
becomes a wave of potentials
goes through both slits and interferes with itself
to hit the wall like a particle.
But mathematically, it's even stranger.
It goes through both slits and it goes through neither. And it goes through just one£¬and it goes through just the other.
All of these possibilities are in superposition with each other.
But physicists were completely baffled by this.
So they decided to peek and see which slit it actually goes through.
They put a measuring device by one slit
to see which one it went through and let it fly
But the quantum world is far more mysterious than they could've imagined.
When they observed, the electron went back to behaving like a little marble.
It produced a pattern of two bands
not an interference pattern of many.
The very act of measuring, or observing which slit it went through
meant it only went through one, not both.
The electron decided to act differently...
as though it was aware it was being watched.
And it was here that physicists stepped forever into the strange, never-world of quantum events
What is matter, marbles or waves?
And waves of what?
And what does an observer have to do with any of this?
The observer collapsed the wave function
simply by observing.
We are always the observer.
But sometimes we identify with the events so much
That's why the materialist gets totally lost and thinks that we could do without the observer.
so that we even lose the aspect of the observer
The physics data tells us that the-
that an object itself is really a simplification for what's we call "out there. "
One is particularly - When we're looking at atomic and subatomic particles or atomic and subatomic matter in any form
what we find is how we go to look at it...
or what we choose to examine it with...
actually changes the properties of what we observe to be out there.
Is this the observer...
and which is so intricate to understanding the wacky, weird world of quantum particles and how they react?
Is this then the observer?
And even though we cannot have a quantum field without the observation of scientists who have gone there...
who have uncovered it layer after layer after layer.
They're all observers...
ut not one of them agree conclusively on all points in the field...
because they're perceiving the field mathematically from different angles of perception.
We don't know in quantum mechanics how to hook ourselves as observers up with the world.
We don't know how to treat ourselves as observers...
as just another part of the physical system that we're describing.
The only way we know how to do quantum mechanics as it's traditionally formulated...
is to keep the observer outside of the system you're describing.
Uh, the minute you put him in, you get all these paradoxes.
And we're forced to say things in quantum mechanics like...
"Look, the book is doing what it's doing because of quantum mechanics.
"And I see that because I'm there and I see it.
"And you'd better not try to analyze that second part of the sentence...
"in terms of applying quantum mechanics to it, because it's gonna break down."
That's why there are these two separate laws of the evolutions of physical systems...
one that applies when you're not looking at them...
the other that applies when you are.
But that's crazy.
There's no way that we're ever going to mathematize...
or put into mathematical formula...
this very act in which a conscious observer comes up with the answer.
People say, "Oh, the measuring instruments, the recorder records it.
And there it is. It's on the tape. It's recorded."
You forgot one part of the equation.
Somebody has to look at the tape.
And until somebody looks at the tape, it ain't recorded at all.
When you are not looking, they are waves of possibility.
When we are looking, then they're particles of experience.
A particle, which we think of as a solid thing...
really exists in a so-called "superposition". ..
a spread-out wave of possible locations...
and it's in all of those at once.
The instant you check on it...
it snaps into just one of those possible positions.
It's easy to generate situations...
where the equations of motion will predict...
that, say, the wave function-
the psi of a certain basketball is uniformly distributed all over the basketball court.
We don't have any idea what a state like that would look like.
Um, according to the law of quantum mechanics...
that's supposed to be a state in which it fails to make any sense...
even to ask the question, "Where is the basketball?"
That is, according to the law of quantum mechanics...
asking the question, "Where is a basketball...
whose psi is uniformly distributed over a whole basketball court?"
is the logical equivalent of asking about, say, the marital status of the number five.
Okay? It's not that you don't know the answer-
you don't happen to know whether the number five is married or a bachelor-
it's that the question somehow is radically inappropriate in the first place.
The number five doesn't have a marital status.
There's nothing there to ask about.
And similarly, a basketball whose wave function was uniformly distributed over the entire basketball court...
would not have a position that could even coherently be asked about.
Now, um, the crux of the measurement problem is precisely that...
although the Schrodinger equation predicts under certain circumstances-
circumstances which we basically know how to reproduce in the laboratory-
that basketballs should go into states like that-
states where there fails to be any intelligible fact-
um, any-any sensible question even about where they are.
And yet, when we go look- look at the basketball court in situations like that...
we invariably see either a basketball over here...
or a basketball over there£¬or a basketball over there.
The fact that we see the basketball in some specific location...
as opposed to seeing it in some science fiction state that we can't even imagine what it looks like...
where there fails to be a question about what its location is-
The fact that we always see it in some definite location...
is an explicit violation of these equations of motion.
And it's exactly there that the measurement problem comes up.
When you observe, things happen.
When you don't, they don't .
Superheroes use superposition...
with the world being potential strips of reality until we choose.
Heroes choose what they want being in many places at once, experiencing many possibilities all at once...
and then collapsing on the one.
The question is, how far down the rabbit hole do you wanna go?
Your own mind is creating multiple possibilities in your subconscious.
The superpositions of possibilities are in your subconscious.
I mean, you may be consciously aware of them, but they exist, I think...
in superposition of multiple possibilities
which after a while will collapse to one or the other.
project or plan into the future£¬or cast a thought ahead of itself.
Nice shot.
But the great, great grandaddy of wacky quantum weirdness...
is entanglement.
If time reversal symmetry destroys the notion of time...
then entanglement crushes our experience of space.
Two objects, two electrons created together are entangled.
Send one to the other side of the universe.
Now, do something to one...
and the other responds instantly.
Instantly.
So, either information is traveling infinitely fast...
or in reality, they are still connected.
They are entangled.
And since everything was entangled at the moment of the big bang...
that means everything is still touching.
Space is just the construct that gives the illusion that there are separate objects.
Are we far enough down the rabbit hole yet?
You now can see in numerous labs around the United States...
objects that are large enough to be seen by the naked eye...
and they are in two places simultaneously.
You can actually take a photograph of that.
Now, I suppose if you showed a photograph
they'd say, "Oh. Great.
"Here's this nice blob of colored light, and I see there's...
"you know, a bit of it over here and another bit-
So you've got a picture of two dots. What's the big deal?"
Superposition is pre-detection.
What I was speaking about in the film is post-detection.
Now, under normal circumstances...
a single object, once it has been detected...
is in just one position.
However, there are states of matter that have been created now...
in which objects can be in multiple positions simultaneously, not just two...
but actually, as many as 3,000 positions.
Uh, the first of these objects were called Bose-Einstein condensates.
And they are single wave functions...
meaning they are single particles...
but even though they're a single wave function...
the wave function has multiple positions.
You say, "Look right in the chamber. You can see it right there."
"I see two things there."
"No, no. That's not two things-
That's one thing. It's the same thing in two places."
The tricky point here is that it's still a single wave function.
It's not 3,000 separate wave functions.
It's one wave function.
So it's one particle.
I'm not sure that people's jaw would drop about it...
because I think-
I don't think people really believe it.
And I don't mean that people say, "Oh, you're lying," or "Oh, the scientists are confused."
I-I think it is so mysterious that you can't even understand how amazing it is.
One particle...
in 3,000 different locations.
Now, if you were to weigh one of them£¬would it weigh 1 /3,000th?
Well, you can't weigh one of them.
Why?
Because it's one particle.
It's just- It's one indivisible particle.
But if it's, uh- But if it's in different locations...
can't you put a scale under one?
No, it's inseparable.
It's not a-This is the tricky conceptual part that you-
It's not 3,000 separate parts.
Even though it looks that way?
Right.
You can look at it in that- You can't actually see the one with 3,000.
You can look at the simpler ones that are two or three or four.
And you can see the- You can see-
That's to say, if you go on- If you go onto the Web...
you'll see photographs of these.
You'll see these little dots floating in space.
These are the different parts of one object.
It's not- They're not separable, uh-
It's not four different objects, or six different objects.
It's one wave function. It's one object.
That's a real brain fart, isn't it?
'Cause when you think about it, you just...
"Wait a minute. No, no, no. They're here, here, here.
So it's obviously one, two, three."
No, and you can't pull one away from the others.
If you try to pull one away from the others...
the entire thing will just disappear.
And then, furthermore, you've seen Star Trek and whatnot.
"Beam me up, Scotty."
So it all seems sort of, "Oh, well, what does that really mean?"
But you've gotta really stop and think about what that means -
That it's the same object and it's in two places at once.
People tinker in the lab, and they get angry about things, and they have lunch...
and they go home£¬and they lead their lives...
just as though nothing utterly astounding is happening...
because that's how you have to go about it-
And yet, there's this completely amazing magic...
sitting right in front of your eyes.
Where the hell are you?
I've got a studio full of people...
but, oh, my God!
There's no photographer.
Where, oh, where can she be?
Aliens? Loch Ness monster?
Or a hot date?
We took two simple black boxes like this.
Inside is a very simple electric circuit...
with a few diodes, oscillator, EPROM£¬some resistors and capacitors.
Basically, that's it.
We wrap one in aluminum foil.
We put it in an electrically-grounded Faraday cage.
The other we set on a tabletop around which...
four very well-qualified meditators
highly inner-self-managed individuals- sit.
And they go into a deep meditative state.
They cleanse the environment.
They make it essentially a sacred space using their mind - cleansing procedures£¬and their intentions.
And then one of the four speaks the specific intention for this device.
The intention is to influence a particular target experiment.
Uh, might be to increase the pH of purified water by one full pH unit...
or to decrease the pH by one full pH unit.
We have used these devices on all of those experiments...
and have been robustly successful.
In the meditative process then, after one speaks the particular intention...
it's held various ways by the four for maybe 15 minutes.
And then, so be it. It's let go.
And then, a subsidiary intention is stated...
to seal that imprint into the device.
We take one of these devices with its aluminum foil.
We put it in a soft package. We put it in a FedEx packet.
We ship it 2,000 miles away to the laboratory we were using up in Minnesota.
And as soon as it arrives there,
it goes into its own electrically-grounded Faraday cage.
The next day, we do the same with the control.
Experiment is running. And basically...
then one just takes the device out...
sets it beside the experiment within six inches to a foot...
and turns it on for a period of time.
That's it.
Now, we learned over some period of time that there was another factor.
We found that the use of these we call them intention imprinted electrical devices-
The continued use of this...
somehow conditions a space...
to some higher level of symmetry...
and we start getting new phenomena.
That is, the devices work. That is, the pH...
which is normal, starts rising one full pH unit...
if that was the imprint, or starts dropping.
If you go one full pH unit or beyond, you're dead.
I mean, that's what it means to a human.
R.E.G. machines-random event generators- are electronic tosses of the coin.
One type of random number generator experiment...
that's been conducted many, many times hundreds of times over the past four decades or so since around the 1 960s-
has been a random generator that only produces sequences of random bits.
Zeros and ones. Like flipping coins.
And you would simply ask somebody to press a button.
It would produce 200 bits...
and you would ask them to say, "Well, try to make it produce more one bits than zero bits."
And when you take the entire body of literature...
all of the hundreds of experiments that have been done...
you can ask a single question:
Did it matter that people were trying to push it towards ones£¬or push it towards zeros?
And the overall answer is yes, it does matter.
That somehow, intention is correlated...
with the operation, with the output of these random number generators...
such that if you wish for more ones...
somehow, the generators produce more ones.
So when they talk about- in quantum physics-
being a completely arbitrary and random process...
what they're not accounting for is the extraordinary effect...
of human thought, of human intention.
When the O.J . Simpson trial was going on...
lots of people are watching television because of the courtroom drama that was unfolding.
And Radin intuited that there must be a lot of intention going on
at the time when the courtroom drama is strong
So he hired a bunch of psychologists who kept track of the courtroom drama.
At the same time, uh, Radin was studying the behavior of random number generators.
But then, uh, Radin found
that whenever the intentions were strong in the courtroom
that's when the deviation of these random number generators from randomness
becomes very high.
This leads naturally to wonder, do people-
Are people affecting the world of reality that they see?
You betcha they are.
Every single one of us affects the reality that we see.
Even if we try to hide from that and play victim
we all are doing it.
Just tell me where you are.
Okay, good. But hurry, will you, please?
Because these models are giving me a headache.
Ten minutes.
Our subway exhibit comes to us from Japan and Mr. Masaru Emoto.
Mr. Emoto became terribly interested in the molecular structure of water and what affects it.
Now, water is the most receptive of the four elements.
Mr. Emoto thought perhaps it would respond to nonphysical events.
So he set up a series of studies
For one sample of water, we drop about 5 c.c.'s onto each 50 petri dishes.
Then we take those 50 petri dishes and freeze them in a freezer at minus 25 degrees Celsius for about three hours.
We take those frozen samples into a refrigerator that is set at minus five degrees Celsius
where a microscope with a camera is set up.
There, we take photographs of each of the 50 water drops individually.
We first take photographs of water that we did not put any information in.
Then, we take the water with information
and do the same procedure just described.
We take those before-and-after photographs and compare the differences.
When we projected the feeling of love and thanks to water
it made the most beautiful crystal.
At times like this, I think water is at peace.
This first picture is a picture of water from the Fujiwara Dam.
And this picture is the same water after receiving a blessing from a Zen Buddhist monk.
Now in this next series of pictures
Mr. Emoto printed out words
taped them to bottles of distilled water
and left them out overnight.
This first photograph is a picture of the pure, distilled water just the essence of itself.
These subsequent photographs, as you can see, are each different.
This is the "Chi of Love. "
And we move along here to "Thank You. "
And you can see where he taped that to this bottle here.
But if you read Japanese, you already knew that.
Now, Mr. Emoto speaks of the thought or intent, being the driving force in all of this.
The science of how that actually affects the molecules is unknown
except to the water molecules, of course.
And it's really fascinating when you keep in mind that 90% of our bodies are water. %
Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
If thoughts can do that to water
imagine what our thoughts can do to us.
One of the most interesting experiments with random event generators...
occurred when it was really out of time.
Some of the Princeton investigators and some of the other ones
decided that they would try to see whether or not you could affect a random machine after it had run.
So they converted it- Instead of having a computer with a visual screen
they had a computerized situation that was, um, audio tapes.
And they had it with left- clicks in the left ear and clicks in the right ear.
And they already played this with nobody listening to it...
so that it already ran.
They put that in a vault,
and they then gave the tape£¬the already-run tape, to a participant and said
"Take it home. I want you to listen to it
"and I want you to make more left-ear clicks than right-ear clicks with it.
Send your intention to it."
So the person did. They handed back the tape and they played it
and, lo and behold-
and they played the one in the vault too-
and they discovered that they were both the same
and they both had more left clicks than right clicks.
So what was going on here?
Well, it wasn't as though the person who was the participant had actually affected it at the moment he was listening to it.
His thoughts and his attention had moved back down the timeline
and affected it at the moment it was generated.
Most people don't affect reality in a consistent, substantial way
because they don't believe they can.
Whatever way we observe the world around us is what comes back to us.
And the reason why my life, for instance£¬ is so lacking in joy and happiness and fulfillment
is because my focus is lacking in those same things exactly.
If we're victims, we should ask ourselves£¬"Have I a victim mentality?"
If I'm continually meeting misfortunes and accidents and tragedies
maybe it's because my mentality is basically attuned to accepting that this is the way life is, and so it happens.
Now, why can I not achieve those things?
Fundamentally, through lack of focus.
The average person loses their attention span every six to 10 seconds per minute.
When one wants to focus intent
you want to be a singleness of mind.
That's why some of the old occult teachings£¬teach people to focus on a flame
a match flame, in fact-
so that you learn to bring your attention into a very sharp channel
so that the energy density becomes greater.
The mind is structured in layers just like the universe is structured in layers
from superficial to profound.
And if we use the mind at a very superficial level of ordinary thought
we have very limited power.
We can barely move a speck of dust across a tabletop without using our hands.
So weak can consciousness be.
But at the deepest level of consciousness,
consciousness creates universes.
But we always wonder then, don't we...
when we wish for all of those-
to be able to heal with a touch
and to raise the dead
and to manifest a loaf of bread in our hand
And we always wonder why we can't do that.
But we can never ask a question
that we don't already know the answer to.
And the answer is
is because we don't believe we can do it
and it interferes with our agenda of our own personal addictions that define us.
We have never had enough time to care for anyone else
other than our own emotional addictive needs.
Hey, how was the shoot?
It sucked.
Your boss called.
He's worried about you.
Amanda, I want to thank you for letting me stay here.
I know I'm a bit much sometimes
and that it's been tough after Bob and all.
And, um... you've just been so wonderful.
I make a mess, and- Well, I clean up afterwards, but it's not really your style.
Sometimes I think you make me sane.
Me£¿
The day I make someone sane, they're in trouble.
Anyway, um...
I made you something as a thank-you gift.
Open it.
I went through your pictures and picked my favorite ones.
And it took me forever because there are so many good ones.
This-
That's for all the wonderful photos you will be taking.
I've had a strange day.
Thank you.
Why are we here?
If thoughts can do that to water...
imagine what our thoughts can do to us.
thought about what thoughts are made of
Is there a substance of thought?
This is a dream that I'm dreaming.
Just as in a dream you dream, different characters can emerge and come out to you and talk to you and meet you
it's possible to go to another level of dreaming
where you can become each of the characters that you dream.
We can go backward and forward in time.
Time is relative.
It goes backwards in time.
And then forward in time.
Time was not absolute.
Information.
Time reversal symmetry.
Of course we can go backward and forward in time.
Are all realities in the quantum field existing simultaneously
The actual event of experience
There literally are different worlds in which we live.
There's the macroscopic world that we see
There's the world of our cells. There's the world of our atoms.
The world of our nuclei.
These are each totally different worlds.
They have their own language. They have their own mathematics.
They're notjust smaller. Each is totally different
but they're complementary.
Because I am my atoms, but I am also my cells. I am also my macroscopic physiology. It's all true.
There are just different levels of truth.
The deepest level of truth uncovered by science and by philosophy
is the fundamental truth of unity.
At that deepest subnuclear level of our reality
you and I are literally one- one- one.
One
This gradually led into some notions
that there was an invisible connection between everything.
Physicists give this a name. They call it "entanglement. "
As Einstein put it, he didn't believe quantum mechanics could be true
because it required that there be spooky action at a distance.
That was his term.
What he meant is when we have our ordinary sense of the way that the fabric of reality is
it seems like these two places are absolutely in space
they're separate and never the twain shall meet.
But in fact, it's not true.
At some deeper level that we can't see with our eyes very clearly...
two places in space are the same.
They are colocated, coexisting.
So, if we imagine that common sense...
the way common sense literally meaning what your senses tell you about the world...
if that's the way the world is actually constructed
then things like psychic and mystical experience don't make any sense at all
because the whole point about psychic and mystical experience that makes them strange
is the sense there's some kind of connection between what's going on inside your head
So what this view of quantum mechanics provides
is a way of framing what these strange experiences are like.
And it reframes it from somehow magically information is getting inside my head from signals or forces or something
into a different view, which is that
in a sense your head, yes, is here
but it's also spread out- spread out through space and time.
So when I'm able to get a telepathic impression from somebody at a distance
it's not because I somehow jumped out there and got it
but because at some deep level
my head and the other person's head are colocated.
We become entangled all the time when we communicate telepathically.
Those experiences are so striking.
I literally can read your thoughts
if I become entangled with you.
And such things happen. There are distant viewing experiments.
There are even experiments now that you are seeing light flashes
and your brain potentials picks up the signature of those light flashes
what is called "evoke potential"...
that can be measured in an E.E.G. machine connected to your brain.
And I am sitting over there. No light flashes.
I cannot see you.
And, still, my brain potential,
because I am correlated with you in terms of intention
I intend to be directly communicated with your experiences.
That intention produces me- gives me the capability
of simultaneously having a similar brain potential in my brain.
It was first done by Jacobo Grinberg at the University of Mexico
and now repeated by Peter Fenwick in London.
The day should be the sunrise.
It should be the beginning of great thought.
I wake up in the morning
and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen.
Now, sometimes, because my mind is examining all the things that I need to get done
it takes me a little bit to settle down and get to the point
But here's the thing. When I create my day
and out of nowhere, little things happen
that are so unexplainable...
I know that they are the process or the result of my creation.
And the more I do that the more I build a neuronet in my brain
that I accept that that's possible gives me the power and the incentive to do it the next day
And we all create our own realities
and we do that because we are the observer.
We are each the own observer of our own reality.
And each of our individual consciousnesses
creates our own individual reality in the most amazing way.
My son, Evan, the physicist, says it's an additive thing.
If I'm holding one reality and someone else is holding another reality
I mean, it's the Super Bowl this afternoon.
And the reality that the Eagles are holding
is a different reality than what the Patriots are holding.
And only one of those realities are gonna be the real reality.
So there's some additive, and there are interference patterns.
I think if we keep quantum physics and the understanding very simple for the layperson
that our observation has a direct effect on our world.
I think if we keep it very simple, then people can get about the business
of beginning to practice the skill of observation.
See, the subatomic world responds to our observation
but the average person loses their attention span every 6 to 10 seconds per minute.
So, that doesn't leave a lot of room for our attention span.
So how can the very large respond to someone who doesn't have the ability to even focus and concentrate?
Maybe we're just poor observers.
Maybe we haven't mastered the skill of observation and maybe it is a skill.
And maybe we're so addicted to the external world
and so addicted to the stimulus and response of the external world
that the brain is beginning to work out of response instead of out of creation.
If we're given the proper knowledge and the proper understanding and given the proper instruction
we should begin to see measurable feedback in our life.
If you make the effort
to sit down and design a new life
and you make it the most important thing
and you spend time every day feeding it like a gardener feeds a seed
you will produce fruit.
We are running the holodeck.
We are collectively. It's there.
It has such flexibility
that anything you can imagine, it will create.
And you learn. I mean, your intention
causes this thing to materialize once you're conscious enough.
Yes, so what is consciousness?
What is consciousness?
Well, consciousness is a very difficult thing to define.
What is consciousness? Where does it come from?
People have been trying to explain consciousness
and trying to figure out what exactly it is
what it means for us as human beings, why we even have it.
A simple way of defining it is it has to do with awareness£¬ and in particular, awareness of the self.
That's at least how we, as human beings, have self-consciousness
so that when we look in a mirror, we recognize
that it's ourselves that we're looking at and not some other person or animal.
And do you think science will understand that better
than having to handle a hot potato called consciousness that has so much
cultish religion backwater voodoo attached to it?
Consciousness has been left out of the equations of physics
in general, as well as quantum physics
for a very simple reason
It's easier to do things that way.
I hate weddings!
A wedding?
Come on, Frank!
This is a good assignment, if you'd see it that way.
What's to see?
"I do."
They did.
Aw, God, Amanda. I mean, you live in your past.
Everything with you is about what happened.
You hate churches
you hate weddings, you hate guys.
Consciousness. We have great trouble defining it.
To me, consciousness is a by-product of spirit entering dense matter.
But we have a long, long way to grow
before we get to the stage where it is meaningful for us
to ask the question: Will we know God?
Most people think of God as that great figure in the sky
with the white beard, who's scrutinizing the human race from above.
They see us here on Earth as in some form of neutral testing ground
where we're placed by God for a period
and God watches from above
registering the scores on his laptop
as to whether we perform according to his designs or whether we're "offending him," as it's put.
An absolutely outrageous idea.
How could we offend God
the type of God that people believe in?
How could it matter so much to him?
How could it, above all, matter that he would find it so serious a situation that he could condemn us to an eternity of suffering?
These are bizarre ideas.
But, obviously, they have a great hold on the fears and the limitations and the insecurities of people
which is why religion can play so effectively whether deliberately or otherwise
on those insecurities. People fall into line very readily
when they're threatened by these cosmic sentences of everlasting punishment.
How in the Ten Commandments could we have possibly
created a mind that could transcend space and time?
No, we're too busy keeping our emotions in check
to ever dream of infinite possibilities.
And maybe that is the ultimate conspiracy.
Even though a given person may have long ago thrown off the trappings of religion
they still live in the religious mold
And they don't even know it
but their whole conception of how reality works
is all something that has been molded by religion.
So, until you get that out of your system
you can't ever make a go of an evolutionary perspective.
One of the problems with organized religions
is that there is this sense of separateness
that it's only good to be a Protestant or that people who are Catholics are the only people who know the way.
And I think now, our current understanding of quantum physics
is this understanding of complete unity.
And so that we have to derive our spirituality from a sense of unity.
This is the basic journey of spirituality
when we ask the question, "Why am I feeling separate all the time?"
Speaking of God always conjures up the idea
of the old guy with the white beard in the cloud
judging, observing, punishing, rewarding or giving commands.
Once you're on that track
you are totally off the path of spiritual evolution and development.
The great appeal of all to people
who don't want to grow up but want the great parent in the skies looking after them
is to ask Jesus to do it for me.
If only I place my trust in Jesus
he will save me from my sins and look after me and all will be well.
Well, Jesus cannot eat my lunch for me
and Jesus cannot be born for me. And neither can Jesus save me.
Because what we're talking about in this- in real terms
is not being saved by anyone
God or otherwise.
We are talking about a personal evolution.
The only reason that there is an addiction to religion is some way out of a mistake.
Does that diminish the greatness of God?
No. It actually opens the corral£¬and lets God be eternal
absolute.
The law that is given to us is the same law as given to that of those people on Sirius.
Given to us by the people in the Rose Universe or the "R" Universe.
You know, and your Hubble telescope has finally seen
galaxies of immeasurable beauty
that in our heart and in our mind
we long to engage.