by Colin Wilson
Not so, said Einstein. Something’s got to give. And that something is time—or rather, space-time (for in the theory of relativity, space and time no longer have separate identities). For a train travelling at such a speed, space-time would distort in such a way that light would be found to travel at its usual speed.
In Einstein’s theory, the ether also becomes unnecessary, for the negative results of the Michelson–Morley experiment are now explainable as a distortion of space-time. This, of course, still leaves the question of what light waves are ‘waving’ in. But, since Einstein thought light consisted of particles, that question did not arise. And, once quantum theory began to talk about ‘wave mechanics’, the question had been forgotten . . .
What Hotson is arguing is that the old ether theory made more sense. Lorentz thought the Michelson–Morley experiment failed because matter itself is made of waves, which contract in the direction of motion, and Michelson and Morley’s apparatus would contract enough to nullify the result—a notion that is consistent with quantum theory. As it was, Einstein dispensed with the ether and declared that all motion is relative. In the nineteenth century, physicists talked about some basically fixed reference point against which all motion could be measured—Ernst Mach, for example, suggested the stars. In 1869, Carl Neumann suggested calling the fixed reference system ‘the body alpha’. Einstein threw all that into the bin, and said that all reference systems—trains, planets, stars—are equivalent.
Hotson argues that this was a fundamental error. He cites, for example, E. W. Silvertooth’s 1989 ‘Michelson–Morley’ experiment with a revolving laser apparatus, which showed that the wavelength of light varies with its direction, and which also registered the fact that the solar system is moving towards the constellation Leo. But, according to Einstein, it should make no difference if you measured the speed of light on a roller coaster moving at 10 million miles an hour—all reference systems should give exactly the same result.
Einstein went on to create the General Theory of Relativity, in which gravity is regarded as a warp in space. I have to admit that, as a teenager, I found it hard to understand this explanation, which was apparently proved in the eclipse of 1919 when light rays were shown to bend in the sun’s gravitational field. But, if light consists of particles as well as waves, I felt, that is what you would expect. I was gratified to find that Hotson expresses the same doubts.
After that, he moves on to zero-point energy. When Dirac’s mathematics appeared to reveal an antiparticle called the positron, and it was subsequently detected in the laboratory, he suggested the existence of a great sea of energy pervading empty space—in effect, a sea of ‘shadow electrons’. Now and then, something boosts the energy of a shadow electron so it becomes real, and leaves a kind of hole in empty space, called a positron.
This also answered the question of why electrons do not lose all their energy and collapse in on the nucleus of the atom. That basic level is already occupied by this vast sea of energy.
Hotson goes on to cite experiments that seem to show that Einstein was wrong about the speed of light. In 1921, the physicist Walter von Nernst predicted that light should lose tiny amounts of energy to the ether as it travelled through it. And, a few years later, Edwin Hubble noticed that light from the most distant stars is redder than that from closer stars. This ‘red shift’ seemed to show that the stars were moving away at a tremendous speed—the most distant at 13 percent of the speed of light. It looks as if the universe was exploding. But, if Nernst was correct, then light loses energy naturally as it travels long distances—particularly through ‘empty space’ that is seething with zero-point energy. As Hotson remarks, if your mother calls you out of the window, and her voice sounds faint, you do not assume she is travelling away from you: you assume her voice is attenuated by distance or the wind.
So, argues Hotson, the whole notion of the Big Bang becomes unnecessary. Some of the ‘background hiss’ of microwaves—particularly the higher frequencies—that astronomers believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang can also be explained as a consequence of zero-point energy, which makes a hiss in all microwave receivers; while, in a book called The Big Bang Never Happened, Eric Lerner points out that cosmic dust and microfilaments of plasma absorb and retransmit microwaves at a lower frequency.
On these basic assumptions, Hotson goes on to develop a bold theory of ‘virtual quantum reality’, which has something in common with Bohm’s idea of the holographic universe. Unfortunately, discussing it in detail would take up more space than I have available.
Since Hotson quoted Hal Puthoff as his authority on zero-point energy, and I had corresponded with him back in the days when he was testing Uri Geller, I wrote to Hal to ask for his paper on ZPE. In reply, he sent me a dozen or so papers and popular articles that made me aware that I had been absurdly ignorant of an important development in modern physics.
Quantum theory led physicists to predict that particles would arise spontaneously in the vacuum, but would disappear before they could violate the uncertainty principle. This continuous appearance and disappearance of particles explains why the zero-point vacuum is often referred to as zero-point fluctuation.
The papers answered one obvious question: is there any proof that the zero-point energy exists? The answer is yes. If two metal plates are placed very close together, some force draws them into contact. This is because many waves in the zero-point vacuum are the wrong size to fit between the plates, so the radiation pressure outside is greater than inside, and pushes the plates together. It is known as ‘the Casimir force’.
The physicist Willis Lamb noted another effect of the zero-point energy. When electrons jump from one orbit to another, it shows up in the frequency lines of the spectrum. Lamb noted a slight shift in frequency, due to the fact that electrons were ‘jiggled’ slightly in their orbit by zero-point energy (which produces a kind of jitter—or vibration).
In the early 1980s, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov made the startling suggestion that the ZPE might be the true cause of gravity. As the two plates are drawn together by the Casimir force, it looks as if they are being pulled by gravity. In Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (1969), Puthoff writes:
A particle sitting in the sea of electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations develops a ‘jitter’ motion . . . When there are two or more particles, they are each not only influenced by the fluctuating background field, but also by the fields generated by the other particles, all similarly undergoing jitter motion. The coupling between particles due to these fields produces the attractive gravitational force.
Puthoff went on to develop the mathematics of the notion that not only gravity, but also the force we call inertia, is due to the jitter motion. Inertia is the tendency of things at rest to remain at rest, and of things in motion to remain in motion. You experience it if you try to move a heavy table, which takes a great push to get it started.
We take that so much for granted that Galileo was the first to notice it. But Newton realised that it was a real problem, like gravity. It is easy to suppose that it is the force of gravity that makes it hard to push a table, but that cannot be so, for if you take a bucket of water, and swing it in an arc above your head, the water will stay in the bucket even though gravity should pull it downward. This is inertia.
In 1993, Puthoff, together with his colleagues Bernhard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda, produced a paper called ‘Inertia as a zero-point Lorentz force’, arguing that inertia could also be due to zero-point energy, which resists the acceleration of energy through it. It came to the attention of Arthur C. Clarke, who used it in his novel 3001 (1997), in which interstellar travel is accomplished by something called the SHARP drive, the letters standing for Sakharov, Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff. Clarke explains that Puthoff and his colleagues answered the question, ‘What gives an object mass (or inertia) so that it requires an effort to start it moving?’ by saying that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena resulting from interaction
with the zero-point-energy field.
One zero-point-energy theorist, Timothy Boyer, has even developed a classical version of zero-point-energy physics, which he calls stochastic electrodynamics (meaning random), and has reproduced many results so far thought to require quantum mechanics, and is steadily adding new ones. So it looks as if quantum theory is still in a bewildering state of flux, and that anyone who dared to predict where it would go next would be insane.
If we look back to the science of the late nineteenth century, the present state of affairs seems unbelievable. Who could have foreseen that so much chaos could spring out of Planck’s suggestion that energy might come in packets? From the perspective of the 1890s, it looked as if science had solved most of the major problems and would soon clear up the few that remained. Geology had shown that Earth was millions of years old, and the theory of evolution had explained how man came on the scene. The cathode-ray tube had led to the discovery of X-rays, then of the electron. Hertz had discovered radio waves and Bell invented the telephone.
All this explains why T. H. Huxley felt he could not ‘get up an interest’ in psychical research; it seemed totally irrelevant. Science would achieve the millennium without these remnants from a superstitious past.
A century later, scientists were still inclined to dismiss the paranormal as a superstition. At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1979, John Wheeler called for the paranormal researchers, whom he called ‘pseudos’, to be ‘driven out of the temple of science’. Yet it was this same John Wheeler who suggested that the universe does not exist until we observe it, and whose student Hugh Everett argued that there must be billions of parallel universes—ideas that Huxley would have regarded as even more outrageous than a belief in ghosts and spirits.
We have encountered this notion of parallel realities elsewhere in this book—such as Vallee’s comment that ‘the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us’, or Air Marshall Dowding’s suggestion that UFOs ‘could be creations of an invisible world coincident with the space of our physical Earth . . .’. John Keel believes that UFOs ‘move into our spatial and time coordinates’ by ‘gearing down from the higher frequencies’, and into our colour spectrum. Again and again, there is the suggestion that some other reality exists on a level that is somehow parallel to ours, but on a different vibration rate.
Now this suggestion was first made, as far as I know, by a retired Cambridge don named T. C. Lethbridge, who had been keeper of the Anglo-Saxon Antiquities Museum. As an archaeologist, Tom Lethbridge had soon recognised the curious fact that a dowsing rod can not only detect underground water, but buried artefacts. This sounds absurd; for while we can believe that our bodies possess some natural device, inherited from our remote ancestors, for detecting water, it is far harder to understand why a forked twig should respond to solid objects. But Lethbridge found that it did, and used it constantly in his archaeological work for detecting potsherds, bronze artefacts and agricultural implements.
He also found that a pendulum—a piece of string with some sort of bob at the end—would do just as well. And, when he retired to Devon in 1957, the eccentric old lady who lived next door told him that the pendulum would respond to different substances according to the length of the string. Being incorrigibly scientific by temperament, he lost no time in conducting a long series of precise experiments.
What he did was to take some specific substance—like copper—and dangle over it a pendulum whose string was wound around a pencil, and could be lengthened or shortened. When the length of the string reached thirty and a half inches, the pendulum went into a circular swing. Silver was twenty-two inches, gold twenty-nine, tin twenty-eight. When he tried it in his back yard, it soon located a small copper tube. He discovered that truffles respond at seventeen inches, and used it to locate a truffle in his garden.
He wondered if these various substances give off some distinct vibration, which is picked up by the body, like a radio signal. But he finally came to agree with Sir William Barrett, the founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and Prof. Charles Richet, another eminent psychical researcher, that it is the mind of the searcher to which the pendulum responds, and the mind that somehow ‘picks up’ the substance by somehow tuning in to it.
Now it is worth pausing to look at this a little more closely. I am not a particularly good dowser, yet even I know that a dowsing rod or pendulum responds as precisely as an ammeter does to a current. Any good dowser can detect, say, coins hidden under a carpet. What is more odd is that, if he places a mixture of copper and silver coins under the carpet, he can pick out which is which; if he ‘tunes in’ to copper, his rod will ignore the silver coins, and vice versa.
Even more odd is the ability of some people to hold an object in their hands and ‘sense’ its history. It was discovered (and exhaustively investigated) in the nineteenth century by Prof. Joseph Rodes Buchanan, who labelled it ‘psychometry’, and it has since been the subject of hundreds of investigations by paranormal researchers. This is obviously simply a more sophisticated version of the ability that enables a dowser to respond to silver or copper coins.[5]
Lethbridge soon realised that the pendulum was simply responding to some unknown power of the mind. In which case, it ought to respond to thoughts as well as things. He tried it, thinking clearly of such notions as love, anger, jealousy, even evolution, and found that the pendulum again responded to each at a distinct rate. It responded to ‘death’ at forty inches, which seemed to be the pendulum’s limit.
Sometimes, several substances—and ideas—shared the same vibrational rate, so that at ten inches the pendulum responded to graphite, milk, fire, the colour red and the direction east. But each item was characterised by the number of times the pendulum gyrated in a circle.
What would happen if he extended it beyond forty? He tried and found that it simply started all over again, merely adding forty to all the previous ‘rates’. There was one difference. Held over a piece of copper—for example—it would not react directly above it, but slightly to one side. Why? Lethbridge speculated that, since forty was the ‘rate’ for death, the pendulum might be registering some realm beyond death where, for some reason, objects register as slightly displaced—like a pencil appearing bent in a glass of water. (People who have experienced OBEs often report that they find themselves above and slightly to one side of their bodies—as in the case of Beth Collings mentioned on p. 214. )
Beyond eighty inches, the same thing happened. All the rates were repeated plus eighty. Lethbridge concluded that there were probably any number of ‘parallel realities’ which could be detected if the pendulum could be made long enough.
These realities, Lethbridge came to believe, exist parallel with our own. They are around us all the time, but undetectable because they are on different vibrational rates. He cites an Indian tribe who believe that invisible people live among us.
It was not until The Legend of the Sons of God, the last of the ten books published in his lifetime (he died in 1971), that Lethbridge wrote about UFOs. He had seen a UFO as early as 1931—a typical ‘ball of light’; driving through a heavy rainstorm, he glanced down a lane, and saw a shining disc or globe, about three feet across, descending towards the road. Since it was raining heavily, he drove on without stopping. The reports of post-1947 UFO sightings led him to conclude that Earth has probably been visited by ‘aliens’ in the remote past, although he speculated that they may have been from ‘another dimension’, separated from us by its vibration rate. (We may recall Linda Porter’s comments to Linda Howe: ‘There are countless different worlds/dimensions occupying the same space without being aware of one another, because of having their own individual octaves’.)
Lethbridge knew little about physics; if he had, he would have realised that his own speculations were converging with those of modern science. We now know that there is no such thing as matter—only energy. Zero-point-energy theory tells
us that there is no such thing as empty space, only surging tides of energy. But quantum theory tells us that there is one more vital component in the universe, mind, and that mind seems to be able to somehow freeze waves into particles, or energy into matter. Mind does not seem to be part of the energy system, but somehow separate from it and above it, as indicated by the fact that Lethbridge found that the pendulum responded to different vibration rates, but that, where an abstraction was concerned, he had to clearly envisage it in his mind before the pendulum responded. His unconscious mind was reaching out and looking for something, and, when it had found it, caused his muscles to respond and the pendulum or dowsing rod to move.
In the same way, when he was dowsing for archaeological artefacts with a dowsing rod, the rod would respond to what he was looking for, and not to other things. It was the mind that selected, then tuned in, to the vibration, just as a radio tunes in to a station.
This also implies that human beings are continually bathed in moving tides of energies, which they can select, and, to some extent, control.
We have all noticed how some people leave us feeling drained, while others seem to revitalise us; this seems to indicate that, without even being aware of it, human beings can exert some kind of unconscious control over vital energies, and possess some of the powers once attributed to vampires.
So even our science is beginning to point towards a strange new conception of the universe: as vast tides of energy, inhabited by minds that can tune in to it, and exert some control over it. This energy somehow carries information, which explains how a psychometrist can ‘sense’ the history of an object.
It is clear that modern man has almost no conception of his power to tune in to these energies. Thousands of years of left-brain dominance have left him completely out of touch with them. And the extraordinary growth of science and technology has encouraged a feeling that he is merely a pawn in a game that is too big for him to understand. In the meantime, our culture has developed an overwhelmingly pessimistic tinge which has been characteristic of the past two centuries.