The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Legend has it that the sun always shines on the heads of Princeton alumni, not simply through life but on the day they actually graduate. The local folklore was that even when rain was forecast, it somehow held off until after the commencement exercise was finished. Roger Nelson enjoyed attending the graduation day with his wife every year and had on more than one occasion remarked on the good weather. He now began to wonder whether this was more than simple coincidence. The FieldREG studies had left him with questions about how this type of field consciousness might operate in real life. It occurred to him that the collective wishing of the entire university community for a sunny day might actually have an effect in chasing rain clouds away.

  He gathered together all weather reports for the past thirty years and examined what the weather had been like before, during and after the Princeton graduation. Mainly he was looking for the daily rate of precipitation. He also examined the weather of the six towns surrounding Princeton, which were to act as controls.

  Nelson’s analysis showed some strange effects, as though some collective umbrella surrounded Princeton just on the day its students graduated. In the thirty years, 72 per cent (or nearly three-quarters) of graduation days had been dry, compared with only two-thirds (67 per cent) of days in the surrounding towns. In statistical terms, this meant that Princeton had some magical dry effect around graduation time and was drier than usual, whereas all the surrounding towns were as wet as they should be around that time of year. Even on the one day when there’d been a flood of 2.6 inches of rain in Princeton, curiously the rain had held off until the ceremony had finished.15

  Nelson’s study of the weather in Princeton was only a tiny gauge of whether people could produce a positive effect on their environment. For twenty years, the Transcendental Meditation organization had systematically tested, through dozens and dozens of studies, whether group meditation could reduce violence and discord in the world. It was the contention of the founder of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that individual stress led to world stress and that group calm led to world calm. He’d postulated that if 1 per cent of an area had people practising TM, or the square root of 1 per cent of the population were practising TM-Sidhi, a more advanced and active type of meditation, conflict of any variety – rates of shootings and other crime, drug abuse, even traffic accidents – would go down. The idea of the ‘Maharishi’ effect was that regularly practicing TM enables you to get in touch with a fundamental field that connects all things – a concept not unlike the Zero Point Field. If enough people were doing it, the coherence would prove infectious among the entire population.

  The TM organization had elected to call this ‘Super Radiance’ because just as superradiance in the brain or in a laser creates coherence and unity, so meditation would have the same effect on society. Special groups of yogic flyers have assembled all over the world, carrying out special ‘meditation intensives’ targeted at specific areas of conflict. Since 1979 a US Super Radiance group ranging in size from a few hundred to more than 8000 has gathered twice a day at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, to attempt to create greater harmony in the world.

  Although the TM organization has been ridiculed, largely because of the promotion of the Mararishi’s own personal interests, the sheer weight of data is compelling. Many of the studies have been published in impressive journals, such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Mind and Behavior, and Social Indicators Research, which means that they would have had to meet stringent reviewing procedures. A recent study, the National Demonstration Project in Washington DC, conducted over two months in 1993, showed that when the local Super Radiance group increased to 4000, violent crime, which had been steadily increasing during the first five months of the year, began to fall, to 24 per cent, and continued to drop until the end of the experiment. As soon as the group disbanded, the crime rate rose again. The study demonstrated that the effect couldn’t have been due to such variables as weather, the police or any special anti-crime campaign.16

  Another study of twenty-four US cities showed that whenever a city reached a point where 1 per cent of the population was carrying out regular TM, the crime rate dropped to 24 per cent. In a follow-up study of 48 cities, half of which had a 1 per cent population which meditated, the 1 per cent cities achieved a 22 per cent decrease in crime, compared with an increase of 2 per cent in the control cities, and an 89 per cent reduction in the crime trend, compared with an increase of 53 per cent in the control cities.17

  The TM organization has even studied whether group meditation could affect world peace. In one 1983 study of a special TM assembly in Israel, which tracked the Arab-Israeli conflict day by day for two months, on days when the number of meditators was high, war deaths in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent, and local crime, traffic accidents and fires all decreased. Once again, confounding influences such as weather, weekends or holidays had been controlled for.18

  The TM studies, as well as Nelson’s FieldREG work, in their own small, preliminary way, offered hope to an alienated and Godless generation. Good might well be able to conquer evil after all. We could create a better community. We had the collective capacity to make the world a better place.

  Radin was being a bit facetious when he came up with the idea. He and Nelson had been at Freiburg at a conference in late 1997, and the talk had been about whether they ought to bring some physiological measurements like EEG into studies using REGs. ‘Why not look at Gaia’s EEG?’ Radin remarked at one point.

  Nelson immediately pounced on it. As an EEG reads the activity of an individual brain, by attaching electrodes over its surface, so they might be able to take readings of the mind of Gaia, as many people liked to refer to the world. James Lovelock had coined the name, after the Greek goddess of the earth, with his hypothesis that the world is a living entity with its own consciousness.19 Perhaps they could set up a network of REGs dotted all over the world. The world EEG would be run continuously, taking a constant temperature of the state of the collective mind. When they were searching for a name for it, another colleague of Nelson’s came up with ‘ElectroGaiaGram’, or EGG. Nelson liked the term ‘noosphere’, coined by Teilhard de Chardin to reflect the idea that the earth was encased in a layer of intelligence. Although Nelson would develop this idea into the Global Consciousness Project, a project at Princeton but separate from PEAR, EGG was the name that stuck.

  If it was true that fields generated by individual consciousnesses can combine during moments of like-mindedness, Nelson wished to see if the collective reaction to the most stirring events of our time would have some sort of common effect on highly sensitive gauges such as REG machines. The O.J. Simpson trial had been a first attempt at this, running machines in different places and comparing the results.

  Nelson began with a small group of scientists, who turned on their REG machines in August 1998. He eventually gathered together a network of forty scientists running REGs all over the globe. The project generated a tidal wave of data. Continuous streams of data pouring out of them were sent over the Internet, to be matched with dramatic moments in modern history – the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, and the near impeachment of Bill Clinton; the Paris crash of Concorde and the bombing of Yugoslavia; floodings and volcanic eruptions and the New Year’s celebrations of Y2K.

  Even before EGG started it had its first real test in prototype form, when the world’s most beloved princess was suddenly killed in a Paris tunnel. Data recorded before, during and after the Princess of Wales’ funeral was compiled and compared with the official schedules of events. During all the public ceremonies for Diana, the machines had veered off their random course, an effect that was 100 to 1 against chance.20

  However, when Nelson looked at similar data taken during the funeral of Mother Theresa soon after, there had been no untoward effect on the machines. Mother Theresa had been ill and her death had been expected. She was elderly and had lived a full and productive life. Clearly, the tragedy
of the young and troubled princess captured the heart of the world, and the REGs had picked it up.21 American elections and even the Monica Lewinsky scandal didn’t seem to stir the world. But New Year’s celebrations, major disasters and tragedies sent a shiver through the collective spine that duly showed up on the machines. Not surprisingly, one of the most profound effects was felt during and immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.22

  These initial results left Nelson and Radin with many tantalizing questions. If there was such a thing as a world mind, perhaps little flashes of inspiration in it could account for the most monstrous and magnificent moments in human history, or maybe negative consciousness was also like a germ that could infect people and take hold. Germany had been depressed in every sense after the First World War. Could this dispiritedness have affected the Germans on a quantum level, making it easier for Hitler, that most intoxicating of speakers, to create a kind of negative collective, which fed on itself and condoned the grossest of evils? Had a collective consciousness been responsible for the Spanish inquisition? The Salem witchcraft trials? Did collective evil also create coherence?

  And what of man’s greatest achievements? Could a sudden gust of inspiration occur in the world mind? Could some coalescence of energy be responsible for the flowering of art or higher consciousness in a certain age? For the ancient Greeks? The Renaissance? Was creativity also infectious, accounting for the explosive creativity in Vienna in the 1790s and the burgeoning of British pop music in the 1960s? The Zero Point Field provided a likely explanation for certain unexplained physical synchronicities – such as the scientifically verified coming together of menstrual cycles among women in close proximity.23 Could it also account for emotional and intellectual synchronicity in the world?

  It was the first inkling that group consciousness, working through a medium such as the Zero Point Field, acted as the universal organizing factor in the cosmos. But so far, with the technology to hand, Nelson had only the first glimmers of evidence, a tiny deviation from random activity. All he could do thus far was measure a single pebble or at best a handful of sand – the quantum effect of an individual or a small group on the world. One day, he might have the capacity to measure the effect of the entire beach, for that was the ultimate point. The beach should only be measured in its entirety. The sand of the entire shore is indivisible.

  Twenty-five years after Edgar Mitchell had experienced collective consciousness viscerally, scientists were beginning to prove it in a laboratory.24

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Zero Point Age

  IN A DRAB LITTLE corner classroom at the UK’s University of Sussex on a frosty day in January 2001, a group of sixty scientists from ten countries had crowded together to try to work out exactly how they were going to fly 20 trillion miles into deep space. NASA had had a few Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshops in America and this was to be the international equivalent: one of the first independent workshops ever held on propulsion. Indeed, it had attracted an impressive audience of physicists from the British government, a NASA marshal, various astrophysicists from the French Laboratoire D’Astrophysics Marseilles and the French Laboratory of Gravitation, Relativity and Cosmology, professors from American and European universities, and some fifteen representatives of private industry. This was just a seed meeting, not a true scientific conference, mainly to start the ball rolling – a precursor to the international conference to be held December 2001. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable air of expectancy around the room, tacit acknowledgment that each person present was perched on the very frontier of scientific knowledge and might even be witness to the dawning of a new age. Graham Ennis, the conference organizer, had lured representatives from most of the major British newspapers and science magazines by dangling before them the prediction that in five years’ time we’d be building our own small rockets with WARP drives to keep satellites in their correct positions.

  However distinguished the audience, the greatest deference was reserved for Dr Hal Puthoff, by now in his early sixties, a bit thinner but still with his thatch of greying hair, who’d spent nearly thirty years trying to determine whether you could harness the space between the stars. To a handful of the younger members of the audience, Hal had become something of a cult figure. A young British government physicist called Richard Obousy had stumbled across Hal’s Zero Point Field papers during his university studies, and been thunderstruck by their implications, so much so that they’d influenced the course of his own career.1 And now he was faced with the prospect of both meeting the great man and preceding him on the podium with a small introductory talk on manipulating the vacuum – a warm-up act to the day’s main attraction.

  To any outside observation, this was something more than a frivolous exercise, a batch of technocrats playing at constructing the ultimate technotoy. It was clear to every scientist in the room that the planet had, at most, fifty years of fossil fuel left and humans were facing a climate crisis as the greenhouse effect slowly turned our world into a gas chamber. Looking for new sources of energy wasn’t just necessary to power spaceships. It was also vital to power earth and maintain it intact for the next generation.

  Experiments making use of the most outlandish of new ideas in physics had been going on covertly for thirty years. Rumors abounded about secret testing sites at places like Los Alamos with billion-dollar ‘black’ budgets that NASA or the American military continued to hotly deny. Even British Aerospace had launched its own secret program – code-named Project Greenglow – to study the possibility of turning off gravity.2

  Loads of other possibilities, all resting on solid, proven physics, might provide for new methods of space-flight propulsion, said Ennis, who was presiding over the first day. You could: control inertia, so that you could move large things such as spacecraft with small forces; use one of a number of nuclear fusion techniques, which would require tremendous pressure and temperature; employ a radioactive fission reactor, as the Russians had done; use tethers, which would extract electrostatic energy; employ matter – antimatter effects, where the reaction of matter meeting its opposite number creates energy; change electromagnetic fields; or rotate superconductors. At a NASA congress in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they’d been exploring the possibility of a spaceship creating its own wormhole, much as Carl Sagan had imagined in Contact.3 A number of private companies, including Lockheed Martin, were enthusiastic and had lent their support. This could have all sorts of practical everyday applications on earth. Imagine, for instance, if you could turn off gravity and levitate patients. You could make bedsores a thing of the past.

  Or you could try something even more outlandish. You could try to extract your energy from the nothingness of space itself. The ‘ZPF’, scientists agreed, represented one of the best possible scenarios – a ‘cosmic free lunch’, as Graham Ennis liked to put it, an endless supply of something from nothing. After physicist Robert Forward of Hughes Research Laboratory in Malibu, California, wrote a paper about it, theorizing how you might conduct experiments,4 physicists were beginning to believe that it may be possible to get to it and, more importantly, get energy out of it.

  During his talk the following day, Hal Puthoff explained that, in quantum mechanical terms, if you were going to attempt to extract energy from The Field, you’d have several choices. You’d need to decouple from gravity, reduce inertia or generate enough energy from the vacuum to overcome both. The US Air Force had first recommended that Forward do his study to measure the Casimir force, the quantum force between two metal plates caused by partially shielding the space between them from zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum and so unbalancing the zero-point energy radiations. Forward, an expert in gravitational theory, was given the assignment by the Propulsion Directorate of the Phillips Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base, which has the task of launching research into twenty-first-century space propulsion.

  They had proof that vacuum fluctuations could be altered usin
g technology. However, Casimir forces are unimaginably small – a pressure of just one hundred-millionth of an atmosphere on plates held a thousandth of a millimeter apart.5 Bernie Haisch and Daniel Cole published a paper theorizing that if you built a vacuum engine of an enormous number of such colliding plates, each would generate heat when they finally come into contact and give you power. The problem is that each plate creates, at most, a half of a microwatt’s worth of energy – ‘not much to write home about’, said Puthoff.6 You’d need tiny systems running at a very high rate for it to work on any level.

  Forward thought that it was possible to do an experiment on altering inertia by making changes in the vacuum. He recommended four such experiments to be carried out to test this concept.7 Scientists working in quantum electrodynamics had already shown that these vacuum fluctuations could be controlled once you manipulated the spontaneous emission rates of atoms. It was Puthoff’s view that electrons get their energy to whiz around the nucleus of an atom without slowing down because they are tapping quantum fluctuations of empty space. If we could manipulate that field, he said, we could destabilize atoms and extract the power from them.8

  It was theoretically possible to extract energy from the Zero Point Field; even in nature scientists had conjectured that this was exactly what was happening when cosmic rays ‘power up’ or energy is released by supernovas and gamma-ray bursters. There were other ideas, such as the spectacular conversion of sound into light waves, or sonoluminescence, where water, bombarded with intense sound waves, creates air bubbles which rapidly contract and collapse in a flash of light. The theory in some quarters was that this phenomenon was caused by zero-point energy inside the bubbles, which, once the bubbles shrank, converted into light. But Puthoff had already tried all these ideas in turn and felt they held little promise.