The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Vortices

  The Bridge Between the Natural and the Supernatural?

  In 1839 a gray-bearded professor read a paper entitled “An Essay on the Figure of the Earth” to the Royal Society in Edinburgh; it exhibited a high order of mathematical ability, and its author had been awarded a gold medal by Edinburgh University. But the professor who read it was not, in fact, its author; the actual author was a boy of fifteen named William Thomson, and he was not allowed to read his own work because it might have embarrassed the learned audience to be lectured by a fresh-faced teenager. In due course, William Thomson went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of his day, the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the recognition that the universe is “running down”), of “absolute zero”, and of the moving coil galvanometer. He was also instrumental in laying the first trans-atlantic cable and in bringing Bell’s telephone to Britain. At the age of sixty-eight he was made Lord Kelvin, and the absolute scale of temperature still bears his name.

  Yet if Kelvin had been asked what he considered his most important achievement, he would undoubtedly have replied: the vortex (or whirlpool) theory of atoms – a theory that has now been totally forgotten. In fact, most of his contemporaries would have agreed; the 1875 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica carries a two-page entry on his vortex theory of atoms, written by the eminent mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The idea had come to Kelvin in 1867, in a flash of inspiration, and only a few weeks later, he delivered a paper on his theory to the same Royal Society in Edinburgh that had listened to his first paper twenty-eight years earlier.

  Kelvin had been a child prodigy; the son of James Thomson, a Belfast professor of mathematics, he had started attending his father’s lectures at the age of eight and had entered the University of Glasgow (to which his father had moved) at the age of eleven. A trip to Europe at the age of sixteen had introduced him to Fourier’s book on the mathematical theory of heat; from then on, he was determined to become a physicist – or, as they called it in those days, a “natural philosopher”.

  The dazzling idea that struck him in 1867 seems to have developed from his observation of smoke rings. A simple way to create these is to introduce smoke into a box that has a round hole in one of its sides. If you give the opposite side of the box a vigorous slap (particularly if that side is made of some soft material like toweling), a smoke ring will shoot out of the hole. But if you try to stop the smoke ring with your hand, it will not dissolve like a bubble, as you might expect. It will simply bounce off your hand like a rubber ball. If you make two smoke rings collide head on, they vibrate from the impact like two charging bulls meeting head on, then bounce away from each other. In short, they behave like solid objects.

  In 1803 an English chemist named John Dalton had suggested that matter is finally made up of tiny hard balls called “atoms”, which are indivisible. He had borrowed the idea from the Greek philosopher Democritus but had backed it up with highly convincing evidence. Dalton’s theory had led to a number of important breakthroughs in physics and chemistry, such as the recognition of how atoms fuse together to form molecules – so that two atoms of hydrogen, for example, combine with one of oxygen to form water.

  That still left many problems. For example, why are atoms of hydrogen and oxygen quite different? You would think that if the universe were made up of primordial particles, all those particles would be the same.

  Kelvin went on to explain that “vortices” of energy can form different substances because there can obviously be many different types of vortices – different sizes, speeds, and so on. Within ten years or so most physicists accepted Kelvin’s view that atoms are vortices; it simply seemed to make sense. In 1882 a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Cambridge scientist, J. J. Thomson (no relation to William Thomson), won a prize for a paper on the motion of vortex rings. Yet fifteen years later, Thomson’s discovery of the electron apparently made Kelvin’s vortex theory obsolete. Kelvin himself intensely disliked the “new physics” that arose from the study of the disintegration of radioactive particles and declined to believe that atoms could fall apart.

  The discovery of the electron led to quantum physics, to the theory of relativity, and, eventually, to the “discovery” of subelectronic particles like quarks – all of which seemed to make the vortex theory doubly irrelevant.

  In 1968 a twenty-year-old science student at Kelvin’s old university, Belfast, went to see his professor of zoology, Dr G. Owen. The student’s name was David Ash, and he was thinking of transferring from physics and zoology to medicine. He expected some resistance and was startled when his professor showed him to a chair and then strode about the room delivering a diatribe on the way young men believe everything their elders tell them. All they cared about, he complained, was getting a degree and a good job. Learning for the sheer joy of learning had vanished.

  When Ash left the professor’s study, he was fired with sudden determination. He would stop thinking about a career and devote himself to real learning – to inventing theories and exploring ideas for the sheer joy of it. Fortunately, his father, Dr Michael Ash, was the author of some highly unorthodox theories of medicine and raised no serious objection. After a period as a science teacher, Ash became a consultant on nutrition and alternative medicine and devoted all his spare time to developing his own unorthodox theories of the nature of matter, based on an idea that he called “primordial spin” – or vortices. He had come across the idea in a physics textbook printed in America in 1904 that championed Kelvin’s “outmoded” idea. In due course, Ash joined forces with a young science graduate, Peter Hewitt, to argue these ideas in a book entitled Science of the Gods – which, in spite of its catchpenny title, is a serious attempt to create a theory of the nature of matter that can transcend the serious limitations of contemporary science.

  One of the most irritating of these limitations must be obvious to any reader of this book: that science seems incapable of dealing with certain fundamental mysteries of human existence. You and I have no idea of where we were a hundred years ago and where we shall be a hundred years hence. It is a real question, and it is as important as anything we could ask; yet science regards it as a pseudoquestion. Neither can modern science deal with such mysteries as precognition – glimpses of the future – second sight – glimpses of things that are happening elsewhere – or out-of-the-body experiences. If it humbly admitted that these are at present beyond its range, there would be no problem. But it insists that these problems do not exist, that they are simply a sign of human gullibility and self-deception. Yet anyone who has taken a serious look at these problems knows this to be escapist nonsense.

  In the 1870s a group of British scientists and philosophers decided to form a society that would study claims about ghosts and life after death; in 1882 it was launched under the title The Society for Psychical Research. Most of its members – scientists like J. J. Thomson, literary men like Tennyson and Mark Twain, and statesmen like Gladstone – were skeptics but were willing to admit that there was something here that needed explaining. Lewis Carroll wrote: “That trickery will not do as a complete explanation of all the phenomena . . . I am more than convinced”. He thought that perhaps spirits could be explained as some unknown natural force “allied to electricity”. By the 1890s the Society had made important investigations of ghosts, out-of-the-body experiences, and telepathy and had proved beyond all doubt that – as Carroll suspected – they could not be explained as trickery. But at that point they got stuck. All their hopes of turning the “paranormal” into a science melted away like ghosts at cockcrow. And, more than a century later, the position is still unchanged. As far as science is concerned, the paranormal does not exist – or is, at best, a kind of crank fringe activity.

  That is why David Ash and Peter Hewitt are asking one of the most important and relevant of all scientific questions: can some new approach provide science and the paranormal with a common foundation?

  In the third ch
apter of their book, they raise the question of “the key to the supernatural”. Energy, they say, is the prime reality. But is our physical universe the only reality? If matter and light are two forms of energy (as Einstein showed), is it not possible that there are other forms of energy, so-called nonmaterial forms? To anyone interested in the paranormal, the answer is obviously yes. The entity known as the poltergeist has been proved to have the ability to make solid objects pass through walls (so that, for example, in one case a picture fell out of its frame without either breaking the glass or the sealed cardboard at the back of the frame). Neither matter nor light can pass through solid walls; ergo, some other form of energy must exist.

  If, as Kelvin believed, matter is made up of “vortices” or whirlpools, what are these whirlpools in? Ash replies that the very question is based on a misconception. Before Einstein, scientists believed that light was a vibration in the “ether” – an unknown fluid that pervades all space. Two physicists named Michelson and Morley showed that the “ether” does not exist. Light seems to be “pure movement”, not a movement in something. A simple illustration might clarify this idea. Suppose I toss a book across the room – as I am always tossing books from my worktable onto the camp bed that serves as a halfway house to the bookshelf, while the book is in motion, it remains in every way the same book; a tiny Martian scientist sitting on it would detect no difference whatever. Yet its motion is undoubtedly real. You must regard its motion as a kind of invisible additive. Now try to imagine this invisible additive on its own. It is impossible, of course; but that does not prove that it cannot exist. When you look at the night sky you cannot imagine space going on forever; yet common sense tells you it does, even beyond the edge of the universe. Ash is suggesting that, just as energy is more “fundamental” than matter, so “pure movement” is more fundamental than energy.

  So why should energy be restricted to the speed of light? Ash writes: “If movement could have a faster speed, it would give rise to a completely different type of energy”. This he calls super-energy. (In fact, physicists have suggested in recent years the possibility of a particle called the tachyon, which is faster than light.)

  According to Ash: “Objects of super-energy would share the same form as things in our world, but their substance would be entirely different”. They would actually coexist with our physical world but would be, under normal circumstances, undetectable. And this, Ash suggests, could be the explanation of ghosts, poltergeists, “miracles” (like those of the Hindu guru Sai Baba, who can “materialize” objects out of thin air), precognition, and all other so-called paranormal phenomena.

  The skeptic will ask: does Ash’s suggestion bring us any closer to understanding the paranormal? In a sense, yes, it does. Most scientific theories begin as an attempt to explain some puzzling phenomenon, such as thunder and lightning. The super-energy theory can certainly help to explain a wide variety of “paranormal” phenomena.

  Let us begin with an extremely simple one: dowsing. A “diviner” can hold a forked twig in his hands and detect underground water. This can be explained in purely electrical terms. Moving water produces a weak electric field, and men – and animals – seem to have an inbuilt sensitivity to this field – obviously part of our survival mechanism.

  A Cambridge don named T. C. (“Tom”) Lethbridge, who was also an archaeologist, often used his own dowsing abilities to detect buried objects. He also discovered that a pendulum – a weight on a piece of string – worked just as well as a dowsing rod – the pendulum would swing in a circle over things he was looking for. He then made another discovery that sounds absurd but that all dowsers will verify: that he could “ask the pendulum questions” and that it would reply in the negative or affirmative by swinging back and forth or in a circle. The theory advanced by scientists – like Sir William Barrett – is that the unconscious mind knows the answer and causes the muscles to make the pendulum move in a circle or a “swing”.

  During his Cambridge days, Lethbridge used the pendulum to explore a giant Celtic figure cut in a hillside but now buried beneath the turf.28 And after his retirement to an old house in Devon, he continued his investigations into the “power of the pendulum”. Instead of a short pendulum, he tried a pendulum made of a long piece of string, which he was able to shorten or lengthen by winding it round a stick. His first experiment was to place a silver dish on the floor and then to hold the pendulum over it and carefully unwind the string. When it reached 22 inches, it went into a circular swing. He tried it over copper; this went into a circular swing at 30½ inches. He now tried the 30½ -inch pendulum in his garden and soon unearthed a small copper tube with it.

  So far, Lethbridge was merely “proving” that different metals caused the pendulum to respond at different lengths. He next proved to his satisfaction that all substances have their characteristic “rate” (length of the pendulum swing): oak (11 inches), mercury (12½ ), grass (16), lead (22 – the same as silver), potatoes (39). Many substances, of course, “share” a rate with others, but Lethbridge found that the weight “circled” a distinct number of times for each – for example, sixteen times for lead and twenty-two for silver.

  Now certain that he was on to something of scientific importance, he became more ambitious. One of the strangest and most absurd phenomena connected with the pendulum is “map dowsing”. It sounds preposterous, but a good dowser can locate water by swinging his pendulum over a map. At this point we have to leave “scientific” explanations behind, and fall back on ESP (extrasensory perception) or on the powers of the unconscious mind. Lethbridge reasoned that if the pendulum is equally at home with an abstraction like a map, it should be at home with abstractions in general – love, anger, evolution, death. It ought, for example, to have a different rate for male and female. He and his wife, Mina, tried throwing stones against a wall; then he tested them with the pendulum. Those Mina had thrown reacted at 29 inches, those Lethbridge had thrown at 22. These, it seemed, were the “rates” for male and female.

  Other stones – sling stones from an Iron Age fort – showed a reaction at 40 inches. Could it be that the stones had been thrown in the course of battle, and 40 was the rate for anger? Lethbridge set his pendulum at 40 inches and thought of something that annoyed him; it immediately began to swing in a circle.

  So Lethbridge had established, at least to his own satisfaction, that emotions and ideas, as well as substances, caused the pendulum to react at a definite rate. The rate for death was 40, and this was also the rate for black, cold, anger, deceit, and sleep – obviously connected ideas. When he drew a circle divided into 40 compartments, and placed each quality or object in its appropriate compartment, he found that “opposite” qualities occurred where you would expect to find them: safety at 9, danger at 29, pleasant smells at 7, unpleasant smells at 27, and so on.

  In a moment of idleness, he tried placing the substances at their appropriate distance from the centre – sulphur at 7 inches along line 7, chlorine 9 inches along line 9, and so on – then joined up the dots with a line – which was, of course, a spiral. Spirals (vortices) seem to play an important part in most primitive religions; they are found carved on rocks all over the world. The vortex obviously embodies some important primitive idea. And now, looking at his own spiral, it struck Lethbridge that a spiral can go on indefinitely. Why should the “dowsing spiral” stop at 40?

  So Lethbridge proceeded to experiment with the pendulum extended beyond 40 inches. And he discovered that every substance now reacted at its “normal” rate, plus 40; sulphur at 43½ , silver at 62, and so on. There was one small difference. If he held a 43½ -inch pendulum over a heap of sulphur, it reacted most strongly slightly to one side of the heap; the same applied to everything else he tested. It was as if, in this realm beyond 40, energies were slightly diffracted, like a stone at the bottom of a fish tank that appears slightly to one side of its proper position.

  When the pendulum was extended beyond 80, all the same effects occurred again,
including the “diffraction effect”. And when it was extended beyond 120, it was the same all over again.

  Lethbridge’s deduction from these observations may sound totally arbitrary, although in his books he makes it sound reasonable enough: that since 40 is the “rate” for death, then the pendulum beyond 40 is reacting to a level of reality “beyond death” and to yet another level at 80, another at 120, and so on, possibly ad infinitum. (He found it impossible to test a pendulum at more than 120 inches because it was too long.)

  One of the oddities that Lethbridge observed is that in “our” world – below 40 – there is no “rate” for time; this is presumably because we are in it, and so time appears “stationary”, as a stream would to a boat drifting along it. At the second level – beyond 40 – time “registers” at 60 inches but – oddly enough – seems to have no forward motion. (I do not profess to understand what he meant.) Then, in the world beyond 80, time disappears again.

  Lethbridge concluded that many “worlds” coexist on different “vibration rates”. We cannot see the world “beyond 40” because it moves too fast for us, so to speak, just as you cannot read the name of a station if the train goes through it too fast. But some people – “psychics” – are better at reading fast-moving words, so to speak, and keep catching glimpses of the next level of reality.

  Lethbridge is of interest in this context because he did not begin as an occultist but as an archaeologist trained in scientific method. The notion of “other realities” forced itself upon him little by little, as a result of experiences that he found hard to explain. He always declined to go further than the facts would allow, but the facts often forced him to go further than he wanted. Personal experience convinced him, for example, of the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and what he called “ghouls” – unpleasant sensations associated with certain places where tragedies have occurred. Yet he preferred to believe that these could be explained in terms of “tape recording” – “imprints” of human emotions on some kind of electrical field.