by Robert Lanza
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“Excuse me, ma’am, you okay?”
“Yes,” said Bubbles. “I’ll be all right. Is she—is my mother—
home?”
“Your mother doesn’t live here anymore,” said the new owner.
“Why are you telling me that? It’s a lie.”
After some squabbling, the new owners called the police, who
took Bubbles to the station and notified my mother to fetch her, that
she might be taken to the clinic for her shots.
Despite all that had happened to her, Bubbles was still a very
pretty woman, who often drew whistles from the boys in town. But
whether she was afraid of the dark or simply got lost, it was not
uncommon for her to disappear for a day or two. She was found
sleeping in the park once, quite distressed, her hair hanging down
in her face. Her clothes were torn, of which she knew as little as we
did. But I recall that she was pregnant around a year or two later,
and I can only understand that someone may have taken advantage
of her again. How well I remember her looking at me in silence and
embarrassment, holding the baby in her arms. The infant’s hair was
as red as a maple’s in autumn. He had a very cute face and, I thought,
did not look like anyone we knew.
I am uncertain whether I was glad or sorry when at times Bub-
bles lost even the memory of where she lived. So it was when she was
found one night wandering naked in a nearby park. A guard deliv-
ered Bubbles to the door of my father’s condominium, announcing,
“Your daughter, Mr. Lanza.” My father took her inside and warmed
her some coffee in a kettle and supplied her needs graciously. Per-
haps this story would have had a different ending if only he had
showered her with this kind of affection forty years ago.
This tale of Bubbles and her relation to me is one that has a
thousand variations, told by very many families, of mental illness,
delusion, tragedy, interspersed with joyous times. At the twilight of
life, reached too quickly by us all, we reflect on our loved ones and
it always carries an aura of the unreal, a dream-like nature. “Did
that really happen?” we wonder when a particular image comes to
mind, especially of a dear one who has long departed. We feel as if
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we are in a waking reverie, a hall of mirrors, where youth and old
age, dream and wakefulness, tragedy and elation, flicker as rapidly
as frames of an old silent movie.
It is precisely here that the priest or philosopher steps in to offer
counsel or, as they might call it, hope. Hope, however, is a terrible
word; it combines fear with a kind of rooting for one possibility over
another, like a gambler watching a spinning roulette wheel whose out-
come determines whether or not he will be able to pay his mortgage.
This, unfortunately, is precisely what science’s prevailing mecha-
nistic mindset comes up with: hope. If life—yours, mine, and Bub-
bles’s (who is still alive today, under assisted care)—originally began
because of random molecular collisions in a matrix of a dead and
stupid universe, then watch out. We’re as likely to be screwed as
pampered. The dice can and do roll any which way, and we should
take whatever good times we’ve had and shut up.
Truly random events offer neither excitement nor creativity. Not
much, at any rate. With life, however, there is a flowering, unfolding,
and experiencing that we can’t even wrap our logical minds around.
When the whip-poor-will sings his melody in the moonlight, and it
is answered by your own heart beating a bit faster in awed apprecia-
tion, who in their right mind would say that it was all conjured by
imbecilic billiard balls slamming each other by the laws of chance?
No observant person would be able to utter such a thing, which is
why it always strikes me as slightly amazing that any scientist can
aver, with a straight face, that they stand there at the lectern—a con-
scious, functioning organism with trillions of perfectly functioning
parts—as the sole result of falling dice. Our least gesture affirms the
magic of life’s design.
The plays of experience, even seemingly sad and odd ones like
that of my sister Bubbles, are never random, nor ultimately scary.
Rather, they may be conceived as adventures. Or perhaps as inter-
ludes in a melody so vast and eternal that human ears cannot appre-
ciate the tonal range of the symphony.
In any event, they are certainly not finite. That which is born
must die, and we will leave for a later chapter whether the nature of
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the cosmos is of a finite item with dates of manufacture and expira-
tion, like cupcakes, or whether it is eternal. Accepting the biocentric
view means you have cast your lot not just with life itself but with
consciousness, which knows neither beginning nor end.
when tomorrow
comes Before
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yesterdAy
I think it is safe to say that no one understands quan-
tum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you
can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?”
because you will go “down the drain” into a blind
alley from which nobody has yet escaped.
—Nobel physicist Richard Feynman
Quantum mechanics describes the tiny world of the atom and
its constituents, and their behavior, with stunning if proba-
bilistic accuracy. It is used to design and build much of the
technology that drives modern society, such as lasers and advanced
computers. But quantum mechanics in many ways threatens not
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only our essential and absolute notions of space and time but all
Newtonian-type conceptions of order and secure prediction.
It is worthwhile to consider here the old maxim of Sherlock
Holmes, that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In this chapter,
we will sift through the evidence of quantum theory as deliberately
as Holmes might without being thrown off the trail by the prejudices
of three hundred years of science. The reason scientists go “down
the drain into a blind alley,” is that they refuse to accept the immedi-
ate and obvious implications of the experiments. Biocentrism is the
only humanly comprehensible explanation for how the world can be
like that, and we are unlikely to shed any tears when we leave the
conventional ways of thinking. As Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
put it, “It’s an unpleasant thing to bring people into the basic laws of
physics.”
In order to account for why space and time are relative to the
observer, Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to
the changing warpages of space-time, an invisible, intangible entity
that cannot be seen or touched. Although this was indeed success-
ful in showing how objects move, especially in extreme conditions
ing that space-time is an actual entity, like cheddar cheese, rather
than a mathematical figment that serves the specific purpose of
letting us calculate motion. Space-time, of course, was hardly the
first time that mathematical tools have been confused with tangi-
ble reality: the square root of minus one and the symbol for infin-
ity are just two of the many mathematically indispensable entities
that exist only conceptually—neither has an analog in the physical
universe.
This dichotomy between conceptual and physical reality con-
tinued with a vengeance with the advent of quantum mechanics.
Despite the central role of the observer in this theory—extending it
from space and time to the very properties of matter itself—some sci-
entists still dismiss the observer as an inconvenience, a non-entity.
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In the quantum world, even Einstein’s updated version of New-
ton’s clock—the solar system as predictable if complex timekeeper—
fails to work. The very concept that independent events can happen
in separate non-linked locations—a cherished notion often called
locality—fails to hold at the atomic level and below, and there’s
increasing evidence it extends fully into the macroscopic as well. In
Einstein’s theory, events in space-time can be measured in relation
to each other, but quantum mechanics calls greater attention to the
nature of measurement itself, one that threatens the very bedrock of
objectivity.
When studying subatomic particles, the observer appears to
alter and determine what is perceived. The presence and methodol-
ogy of the experimenter is hopelessly entangled with whatever he is
attempting to observe and what results he gets. An electron turns
out to be both a particle and a wave, but how and, more importantly, where such a particle will be located remains dependent upon the
very act of observation.
This was new indeed. Pre-quantum physicists, reasonably
assuming an external, objective universe, expected to be able to
determine the trajectory and position of individual particles with
certainty—the way we do with planets. They assumed the behav-
ior of particles would be completely predictable if everything was
known at the outset—that there was no limit to the accuracy with
which they could measure the physical properties of an object of any
size, given adequate technology.
In addition to quantum uncertainty, another aspect of modern
physics also strikes at the core of Einstein’s concept of discrete enti-
ties and space-time. Einstein held that the speed of light is constant and that events in one place cannot influence events in another
place simultaneously. In the relativity theories, the speed of light
has to be taken into account for information to travel from one par-
ticle to another. This has been demonstrated to be true for nearly a
century, even when it comes to gravity spreading its influence. In a
vacuum, 186,282.4 miles per second was the law. However, recent
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experiments have shown that this is not the case with every kind of
information propagation.
Perhaps the true weirdness started in 1935 when physicists Ein-
stein, Podolsky, and Rosen dealt with the strange quantum curiosity
of particle entanglement, in a paper so famous that the phenomenon
is still often called an “EPR correlation.” The trio dismissed quantum
theory’s prediction that a particle can somehow “know” what another
one that is thoroughly separated in space is doing, and attributed
any observations along such lines to some as-yet-unidentified local
contamination rather than to what Einstein derisively called “spooky
action at a distance.”
This was a great one-liner, right up there with the small handful
of sayings the great physicist had popularized, such as “God does
not play dice.” It was yet another jab at quantum theory, this time at
its growing insistence that some things only existed as probabilities,
not as actual objects in real locations. This phrase, “spooky action
at a distance,” was repeated in physics classrooms for decades. It
helped keep the true weirdnesses of quantum theory buried below
the public consciousness. Given that experimental apparatuses were
still relatively crude, who dared to say that Einstein was wrong?
But Einstein was wrong. In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell pro-
posed an experiment that could show if separate particles can influ-
ence each other instantaneously over great distances. First, it is
necessary to create two bits of matter or light that share the same
wave-function (recalling that even solid particles have an energy–
wave nature). With light, this is easily done by sending light into a
special kind of crystal; two photons of light then emerge, each with
half the energy (twice the wavelength) of the one that went in, so
there is no violation of the conservation of energy. The same amount
of total power goes out as went in.
Now, because quantum theory tells us that everything in nature
has a particle nature and a wave nature, and that the object’s behav-
ior exists only as probabilities, no small object actually assumes a
particular place or motion until its wave-function collapses. What
accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it in any way. Hitting it
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with a bit of light in order to “take its picture” would instantly do
the job. But it became increasingly clear that any possible way the experimenter could take a look at the object would collapse the
wave-function. At first, this look was assumed to be the need to, say,
shoot a photon at an electron in order to measure where it is, and
the realization that the resulting interaction between the two would
naturally collapse the wave-function. In a sense, the experiment had
been contaminated. But as more sophisticated experiments were
devised (see the next chapter), it became obvious that mere knowl-
edge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to cause the wave-function to collapse.
That was freaky, but it got worse. When entangled particles are
created, the pair share a wave-function. When one member’s wave-
function collapses, so will the other’s—even if they are separated by
the width of the universe. This means that if one particle is observed
to have an “up spin,” the other instantly goes from being a mere
probability wave to an actual particle with the opposite spin. They
are intimately linked, and in a way that acts as if there’s no space
between them, and no time influencing their behavior.
Experiments from 1997 to 2007 have shown that this is indeed
the case, as if tiny objects created together are endowed with a kind
of ESP. If a particle is observed to make a random choice to go one
way instead of another, its twin will always exhibit the same behav-
ior
(actually the complementary action) at the same moment—even
if the pair are widely separated.
In 1997, Swiss researcher Nicholas Gisin truly started the ball
rolling down this peculiar bowling lane by concocting a particu-
larly startling demonstration. His team created entangled photons
or bits of light and sent them flying seven miles apart along optical
fibers. One encountered an interferometer where it could take one
of two paths, always chosen randomly. Gisin found that whichever
option a photon took, its twin would always make the other choice
instantaneously.
The momentous adjective here is instantaneous. The second pho-
ton’s reaction was not even delayed by the time light could have
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traversed those seven miles (about twenty-six milliseconds) but
instead occurred less than three ten-billionths of a second later, the
limit of the testing apparatus’s accuracy. The behavior is presumed
to be simultaneous.
Although predicted by quantum mechanics, the results con-
tinue to astonish even the very physicists doing the experiments.
It substantiates the startling theory that an entangled twin should
instantly echo the action or state of the other, even if separated by
any distance whatsoever, no matter how great.
This is so outrageous that some have sought an escape clause. A
prominent candidate has been the “detector deficiency loophole,” the
argument that experiments to date had not caught sufficient num-
bers of photon-twins. Too small a percentage had been observed by
the equipment, critics suggested, somehow preferentially revealing
just those twins that behaved in synch. But a newer experiment in
2002 effectively closed that loophole. In a paper published in Nature
by a team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and
Technology led by Dr. David Wineland, entangled pairs of beryllium
ions and a high-efficiency detector proved that, yes, each really does
simultaneously echo the actions of its twin.
Few believe that some new, unknown force or interaction is
being transmitted with zero travel time from one particle to its twin.
Rather, Wineland told one of the authors, “There is some spooky
action at a distance.” Of course, he knew that this is no explanation
at all.
Most physicists argue that relativity’s insuperable lightspeed