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The application of scientific discovery to our individual comprehension of the universe often lags behind the unearthing of those discoveries themselves. In 1610, for instance, Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nucius (The Starry Messenger), which detailed his observations of the heavens. He wrote of a moon with craters and mountains, spots on the sun, the phases of Venus, and moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, all impossible observations according to the prevailing Ptolemaic cosmology. As we know, for his troubles Galileo was ultimately hauled before the Inquisition and placed under house arrest until his death, and it would be many years before the old cosmology finally gave way to a newer conception of the heavens. Indeed, it is said that Galileo’s final utterance, a defiant reference to the orbit of one of Jupiter’s moons, was simply, "E pur si muove" (and still, it moves), a blunt reminder that facts sometimes have a nasty way of inconveniencing our most cherished beliefs. Because of his insistence upon observation, Galileo is considered by many to be the first modern scientist, and since his death, the rate of scientific discovery has accelerated at such a dizzying rate that today no one, scientists included, seems capable of keeping up with the deluge. The effect on human culture has been dramatic. As a people we have matured to such a degree that psychologist Clifford Anderson noted in his 1995 book The Stages of Life that "over the past century we have witnessed more collective movement along our maturational path than has been seen over the entire previous span of human history." It has been an immense leap, and that leap has transformed human culture enormously. But the "collective movement" Anderson was talking about was not so much a change in the nuts and bolts of our everyday lives as it was a transformation in the manner in which many of us think, and therefore interpret the world — a cognitive evolution. It was that shift in thinking that gave birth to the scientific method to begin with, and later the principles of democratic government and the culture of inclusion and compassion that have changed not only how we live, but how we think about one another. Whole new ways of approaching natural systems have thus evolved — thermodynamics, relativity, systems theory, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc. — and all more dynamic examples of scientific thinking. Yet the most extraordinary scientific discovery of the twentieth century, and one that embodies enormous philosophical, religious, and spiritual implications, has gone virtually unnoticed, not only by the general public, but by the scientific community itself, which, much like the old church inquisitors who confronted Galileo, still labors under a system of thought that is clearly out of line with scientific fact. This discovery is so strange that Einstein preferred not to think about it, so startling in terms of how we perceive the universe that few have been able to incorporate it into a sensible theoretical framework. It is the fact that we live in a non-local universe. Non-local, as I am using the term, has nothing to do with bus routes, labor unions, sporting events, or your favorite microbrewery. Rather, it is about the very fabric of the universe, and when we begin to come to grips with the meaning of non-locality, the ramifications that suddenly become apparent are nothing short of astonishing. So just what is it? In physics, a "non-local" effect is one that occurs instantaneously and across any distance, no matter how vast. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, non-local effects could not exist because, by definition, they would have to travel faster than the speed of light and nothing, according to relativity, could do that; a signal would simply outrun the electromagnetic fields that allowed it to exist in the first place. So it was axiomatic to modern physics that we had to live in a local universe, a world where it takes a certain amount of time and energy for information to travel from here to there, and the farther away here is from there, the greater amount of time and energy it takes to communicate. Thus, evidence in support of a non-local universe would not only require an enormous rethinking of just what the universe is all about, but also send modern physics tumbling back to the drawing board. That evidence has been in for over a quarter of a century now, but the results are so shocking that physics has been almost stunned into silence: we live in a non-local universe. How do we know? Well, this gets a little sticky, but bear with me for a paragraph or so. Irish physicist John Stewart Bell studied an earlier experimental conundrum created by the team of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen that pointed to a conceptual problem in the quantum theory as it had to do with the spin elements of two photons at a distance. According to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR), the quantum theory failed to properly explain the spin effects, and this, much to Einstein’s amusement, seemed to throw the entire quantum theory into question. John Bell used the same EPR results, but devised a constraint on the spin systems that was based upon relativity theory (local effects), which implied that a change in one photon’s spin would not affect the second photon at all. But the constraint failed because it assumed all effects to be local. In 1972, John Clauser carefully tested the EPR experiment in Berkeley, California, and the results were stunning and indisputable. We live in a non-local universe, and this is now the basic idea behind what is called Bell’s theorem. Now, one might well imagine that such a momentous discovery would have been ballyhooed world ’round, for if physics has been turned virtually upside down, why have we not heard of such a thing? Remember Galileo. In a very real sense, what Thomas Bell saw when he peered deeply into the quantum world was no different than what Galileo saw when he viewed the heavens for the first time through his telescope: a small but lethal aberration in an entire system of thought. And just as the smallest moon orbiting Jupiter ultimately led to the collapse of the entire Ptolemaic cosmology, a universe founded upon non-local effect will soon reshape not only physics, but also how we as human beings understand our place within the universe. This is neither a new nor a unique occurrence. Scientific worldviews change from time to time as evidence accumulates to the point that the old way of looking at things can no longer adequately explain the evidence. Suddenly, the old conceptual format dissolves, and a new one quickly materializes in an attempt to make sense of the new findings. Thomas Kuhn described this shift of conceptual frameworks as a movement from an old to a new paradigm, but fundamental to this process is a shift brought about by — and as an attempt to explain — evidence, not simply the elaboration of someone’s new pet theory. For the past few hundred years, Western science has been increasingly dominated by a paradigm firmly rooted in classical physics, a physics of material cause and effect. This worldview has often been classified as reductionist, because it seeks to reduce all physical phenomena, from asteroid collisions to automobile collisions, to a framework of elementary particle causation. Every occurrence, be it a meteorite impact or a home run, is thus interpreted as the meaningless product of a random particle flux. Physicist Henry Stapp, in his 1993 book Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, explains, "The universe is consequently rendered ‘meaningless’ from the perspective of man, because each human being is reduced to a mechanical automaton whose every action was preordained prior to his own existence." This physics is therefore deterministic. There is no place in this worldview for aspects of the universe such as love, consciousness, or free will. Indeed, these are considered to be nothing more than bizarre illusions created by our particles for us, merciful intoxicants that, like a stiff drink, enable us to get through the day and nothing more. But there is a fly in the ointment, for reductionist science is firmly rooted in a physics that is classic, material and local, and as such is wedded to a factual framework that has already been proven incorrect. The universe is not local, it is non-local, and because that fact cannot be sensibly juxtaposed within a reductionist science, that science will soon begin to wither and be replaced by a more comprehensive worldview. That will not happen overnight. The reductionist worldview is currently only in the opening phases of transformation, a long way from the emergence of any "new paradigm." That does not mean, however, that we need to remain wedded to an obsolete idea. The implications of non-local effects are far reaching, and suggest a plausible scientific basis for many "spiritual" phenomena (near-death experience, out-of-body experience, extrasensory perception, etc.) that previously have been dismissed as utter nonsense by a science still stuck in 18th- and 19th-century conceptualizations. Indeed, a non-local reality supports the notion of a conscious universe, a proposition long maintained by many quantum researchers, and a worldview that radically changes our ideas of what it means to be human. Reductionist science has had an enormous and positive effect upon the globe, yet it has also sucked all meaning out of life, reducing us in essence to a pack of particle-impelled robots with no true thoughts in our heads, love in our hearts, or will of our own. This will change, not because we simply want it to or because we prefer to cling to fairytales more to our own liking, but because the scientific facts no longer support such a reductionist perspective. That is a truly astonishing thought, for soon the quest for spirit and the search for scientific knowledge will merge upon the axis of truth, a truth supported by fact, yet a truth with a depth and scope never before dreamed of. So let us sharpen our pencils and open our hearts, for that ultimate spirit for which we all seem to be virtually compelled to search may well prove to be a truth far beyond humanity’s current, collective imagination, yet a truth, I imagine, that will be well worth the journey. Jim Stempel is the author of the novel American Rain; numerous works of short fiction; and articles on science, psychology, and spirituality. His book When Beliefs Fail: A Psychology of Hope can be ordered through Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, (800) 355-3222. E-mail <customerservice@swedenborg.com>. |