|
from
GrahamHancock
Website
These are fundamental enquiries that most people have asked themselves at some point in life.
They might have thought of these
questions in many different ways, perhaps not exactly as stated
above, but most people have wondered about the source of existence,
about a beginning and an end or an eternal continuous dynamic.
And to the extremes I pushed it:
It was a test of mind over matter, and
in every case I felt that a resonance field could be established
with the structure of reality - what athletes typically call "the
zone" - where, as best I can describe it, I felt a flow, a type of
harmony with all the various dynamics I was encountering in these
extreme situations.
I eventually came to describe this as a
feedback in the structure of space-time which included this sense of
complete integration within the wheelworks of nature that I was
experiencing as well as the self-organizing properties of the
material world which I could clearly observe everywhere in the
natural environment where highly organized and complex systems can
be found
My early interest in exploring the more mystical side of our experience led me to investigate the internal world of meditation, a world that is in complete reference to the event of consciousness, of a deep and fundamental self-discovery and exploration of the observer experiencing this reality.
Therefore, it was both an external exploration, in which I could push the boundary of my influence on the external world (what one could call the material world), as well as an exploration of how far I could push the boundary of the internal world to identify the source of the observation. And to my great surprise, the two seemed to feed back on themselves.
For instance, in those states of "the zone" during peak experiences in sporting events, nature seemed to be speaking to me beyond the receptor sites of my five senses to a deeper, more profound sense, as in a unity between my physicality and the physicality of the world around me.
Similarly, in deep meditative states and moments of rapture, a profound sense of unity with the material world around and inside of me seemed to take place.
The question then was:
In order to answer these questions appropriately, I had to conduct, on the one hand, an in-depth study of the physics of our world and, on the other hand, a study of the mores (the customs and ritual practices) of various societies that could reveal a deeper understanding of the relationship between the observer and the material world.
In my mind, both were equally important, although the task of studying both in parallel, which encompassed fields ranging from applied physics to cosmology and quantum mechanics as well as archaeology, psychology and spirituality, seemed insurmountable.
Therefore, it was with great procrastination and reluctance that I finally abandoned my professional careers in the sports industry to dedicate all of my time and energy to the studies necessary in order to begin answering some of these questions.
Still, to this day, I consider those times as some of the most wonderful, productive and mystical times of my life. I was completely free - free of telephones, appointments and interactions with the outside world. I was completely free to think whatever I wanted to think, to study whatever I wanted to study and to move wherever I wanted to move, as all I had to do was put the key into the ignition, press on the gas pedal and I was instantaneously relocating.
My home was wherever I parked, and I was fortunate enough to be in some of the most beautiful and remarkable natural environments on our planet.
From the alpine meadows of British
Columbia and Alberta, Canada, to the high deserts of the American
Southwest and everything in between, I spent many months in
communion with the natural world while in deep contemplation of its
physics and of the relationship between this physics and my
observations of it.
At the time, most of my physical activity consisted of rock-climbing, as I would typically start my morning with a sunrise climb after some time meditating or I would get out of the van at sunset for a little fresh air and a quick multi-pitch climb to get my blood flowing.
Since I was usually alone, these climbs
mostly consisted of free solos (no protective gear) where, once
again, I was free from having to worry about companions and their
well-being.
Where did they begin, and where did they end?
After all, these crystals I was climbing were part of a larger crystal, a large geode called the Earth, and the Earth was part of a solar system, and the solar system was part of a galaxy, and the galaxy was part of a cluster of galaxies, which was most likely part of a super-cluster, and so on.
Furthermore, every crystal was made out of millions and millions of molecules, and each molecule was made out of atoms, and these atoms were made out of subatomic particles, and so on.
Was it appropriate to think that the
Universe ended somewhere, whether on the infinitely large scale or
on the infinitely small scale?
My first question to myself was: expanding in what?
Surely, if the Universe were expanding, it must be expanding inside another Universe, larger than the one we are in. And then again, if that one were expanding as well, surely it must be expanding in a larger one, and so on.
There was no easy solution to the
riddle. The only thing that made sense was that the Universe was
infinitely large and infinitely small, that we lived in a continuum
of divisions, and that our world was defined by the mere fact that
we observed the Universe from a very specific scale.
The first clue had come in my teenage years, when I initially realized that for almost 100 years a chasm had existed in our physics between the mathematics and models we use for large objects, which predict a continuum that tends towards singularity and infinities (Einstein's field equations), and the quantum world of atomic and subatomic particles, which predicts linear functions of bounded states, well defined and with finite behaviors.
Yet big things are made out of small things, so,
Truly, day-to-day experience seems to point to the existence of well-defined finite boundaries.
After all, your body's dimensions are defined by what appears to be a very specific scale. The same applies to the chair you're sitting on, or the pole you're holding onto while you're reading this article on the bus on your way to work.
But wouldn't an infinite Universe have no definition, no distinct way of identifying a boundary to define all other ones?
All of this became the subject of many
years of contemplation, and the answer, interestingly, came from an
unexpected source.
I looked to find if similar concepts were present in our history of physics and the advanced physics of today, and indeed I found similarities.
As well, in mathematics, fractal theory resembled many ancient concepts and symbols and provided a perfect relationship between infinities and the boundary condition, as an infinite amount of boundaries could be embedded within a finite initial boundary (the scale at which you are observing).
As far as an omnipresent permeating
energy was concerned, it occurred to me then that maybe, just maybe,
the all-prevailing intensely energetic vacuum of the quantum world
might fit the bill.
Maybe space was permeated with all the information of all things in the space and was the great connector between all these things.
After all, from infinitely large to infinitely small, space would always be present, since even the extremely small radius of an atom still contains some 99.99999 per cent space.
Perhaps space defined matter, rather than the material world defining the space.
Einstein seemed to think so, as in his quote:
But if space were the great medium that connected all things, gathering information from all places so as to self-organize and create the complexity we observed in our natural world, then space would have to be infinitely dense - infinitely dense with information or energy.
Was this possible, and if so, was there any evidence as such?
I was probing deeper and deeper into the
physics that had been written and into the experiments that had been
performed throughout nearly 300 years of modern physical theory, and
I came across something significant.
It turned out that some of the
vibrations still existed, even when the system was brought to
absolute zero, where you would think that all the energy would be
gone. In fact, the equations showed that there was an infinite
amount of possible energy fluctuation even
within the vacuum.
This value is thought to be the smallest vibration possible, being in the order of 10-33 centimeters and having a mass-energy in the order of 10-5 grams.
The result was enormous!
The vacuum energy density, or what can be called a Planck's density, was in the order of 1093 grams per cubic centimeter of space and was quickly dubbed,
To give you an idea of how dense this value is, if you were to take all of the matter we observed in our Universe today with billions of galaxies containing billions of stars, most of which are much larger than our Sun, and we were to stuff them all into a centimeter cube of space, the density of that cube would only be 1055 grams.
This is still some 38 orders of magnitude less dense than the density of the vacuum. Many scientists thought that this figure was ridiculous, and in general it fell into obscurity.
Even today, some trained physicists are
not necessarily aware of this value. Throughout the years I've
received prompt criticism from certain physicists who either were
unaware of its existence or simply discarded it, as if the largest
energy quantity ever predicted could be completely ignored.
Casimir reasoned that if two plates were placed close enough to each other so that the longer wavelengths of the vacuum oscillations would be eliminated from between the plates and yet would still be present on the outside of the plates, then a minute gradient could be generated where there would be more pressure on the outside and less on the inside, resulting in the plates being pushed together.
However, when the distance by which the plates had to be separated to do the job was calculated, it was found that the plates had to be mere microns apart.
This was an impossible task in 1948, and
it wasn't until the early 1990s that this experimental test could be
done successfully. The result agreed very well with the calculations
done by Casimir, showing that this energy of the structure of space
itself is truly present.
Well, if so, it would have to be present
at all scales.
And it was these thoughts that eventually brought me to add a fundamental force to Einstein's field equations in order to show that space-time, in addition to curving to produce gravitation, twisted as well - like water going down the drain - to produce the spin of all organized matter from galaxies to stars and even to subatomic particles.
That twisting of space would imply that space itself was imbued with gyroscopic and Coriolis effects that needed to be included in Einstein's geometrization of space and time.
Yet if this torque really was present,
then we should be able to detect it at the cosmological level.
My budgets were quite restricted (on
average, $3,000 a year), so I would buy a very minimal amount of
food (I mostly lived on
prana - vacuum energy) but almost
every time I would buy popular science magazines to keep in touch
with the latest scientific discoveries.
And there it was: astronomers had found
evidence that the Universe was not only expanding, but was also
accelerating as it did so.
It was later removed when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe was expanding, as Einstein's equations would predict, without the fudge factor.
Now astronomers reinstated the cosmological constant in such a way as to make the Universe accelerate as it expanded. The fudge factor was back. This eventually was dubbed "dark energy", and it wasn't until very recently that it started to be associated with the vacuum energy.
For me, however, that was an easy and
obvious leap, as I had already expected that the polarized Coriolis
dynamics of the vacuum structure would produce such an effect on the
universal expansion and rotation.
Was the vacuum dividing at specific densities from extremely large to extremely small? And if the vacuum energy was essentially infinitely dense, and all scales contained vacuum - since even the atom itself (as we saw earlier) contains a large percentage of vacuum - then each of all the atoms inevitably contained enough mass-energy to be considered a black hole.
The Universe had to be black holes, from all the way up - the Universe that we're in, for example - to all the way down.
With this concept, I eventually coined
the term "black whole"
Later on, with the help of Dr
Elizabeth Rauscher and afterwards Dr Michael Hyson, we
developed various scaling graphs that supported the concept of a
fractal black hole Universe.
The first sentence of the university's communiqué asks:
So the vacuum energy was there at all
scales, although in various densities - a gradient in the
structure of space itself.
The sensation of gliding in the ocean
and the vorticular spinning hydrodynamics of the water around my
body often reminded me of our daily "swim" through the vacuum
structure and the Coriolis dynamic that was part of my views of the
physics of creation.
I called Dr Rauscher right away and discussed the simple calculations that would tell us how much of the vacuum energy was necessary for a proton (the particle at the nucleus of an atom) to be in the Schwarzschild condition, the condition of a black hole.
It took a remarkably small amount of the
energy of the vacuum to do the job, but what was notable was that
the energy it took was equivalent to the energy necessary to produce
the force typically described as the strong nuclear force, or the
strong force.
When it was found that the protons were highly charged but confined to a very small radius in the nucleus of an atom, physicists went on to invent a force that would overcome the repulsion of the electrostatic fields of these particles, and they made it exactly what it was needed to be to do the job.
Eventually it was found that the proton
seemed to have smaller constituents within it called quarks, which
were confined in an even smaller space, and so the color force had
to be invented and was thought to be infinitely strong. Now the
original strong force was seen as only a remnant of this color
force.
Furthermore, although these calculations were very rough at the time, as we were scribbling on pieces of paper and napkins, it seemed that the Schwarzschild proton, as I came to call it, nicely predicted certain measured values of the proton entity.
This was, and still is, a radical idea -
although more and more physicists are coming to these conclusions
now. Imagine all of the atoms that make up your physical body and
the entire material world around you, made out of mini-black holes
the size of a proton.
A more complete version entitled "The
Schwarzschild Proton" was eventually presented at a scientific
conference in Belgium in 2009, where it won a "Best Paper Award",
and is to be published this year.
It is a time of great changes, including fundamental changes in our understanding of the physics of our world and its relationship to consciousness.
There is a quiet revolution occurring in
physics that will modify our understanding of the atomic structure,
as many other researchers are now starting to realize that atoms may
be considered as mini-black holes 2a-d and that
the vacuum structure may be a crucial player in the existence of our
world.
Because if we understand the source of energy that generates our Universe, its forces and the mechanics under which the creation process occurs, then we can reproduce these dynamics with advanced technological means and completely transform our relationship to nature.
Such discoveries will change our world
from a society which believes that there are only limited amounts of
resources and available land - and then wars fought over them - to a
society which realizes that there is an infinite amount of energy
all around and within us, and a whole Universe to explore with the
means literally to reach for the stars.
We need only take a few moments every
day to connect with the infinite potential present at the centre of
our entire material world, which makes up our existence, and
experience its infinite nature and beyond.
Endnotes
|
