os 34 pede vit ye ARTICLE BY ROBERT ANTON WILSON, THE SCIENCE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE Fre day in 1908 Ds. Sigmund Freud and Dr ‘Cart Jing were arguing about extrasensory perception. Freud: imagine him with the inevita bile cigar clenched between his ceth~ was insisting that all th Stull was nonsense, and Jun was arguing that there was something init really. although he didn't know what. As the argument heated up and the emotional energy began to crackle, there suddenly came an explosive bung from Freud's bookease There.” said Jung, “That is an example of so-called cata lytic phenomenon.” ‘Oh. come!” Proud ex claimed, “That is sheer bosh! It is not.” Jung replied firmly. feeling possessed by an intuitive conviction he could not understand. “You are mistaken, imy point, Pnow predict that in a mon report! 'No sooner had Jung spoken than the same detonation went off again in the bookese. Freud looked so aghast that Jung. who was 8 bit unsettled himself, dropped the subject at once, In his auto biography, Jung says he and Freud never discussed the incident ‘What are we to make of such a yarn? The skeptic will label it “mere coincidence” of. even more strongly. “sheer coincidence” and forget about it. This does not really satisfy anybody but the skeptic himself, and leaves most of us thinking of Ring Lardner’s immortal line: "Shur up," he explained. Purapsychologists will ofer wo alternative pseudoexplanations Some of them will say that the bangs might have been caused by something as banal as seismic tremors in the earth or traffic in the street, and the paranormal aspect of the incident was just that Jung jert Professor. And 10 prove nt there will be another loud Robert Anton Wilson, author of the “iluminati” series explains complex things with such clarity that we'll never again believe a “National Enquirer” headline. There is an explanation for spoon bending, levitation, faith healing, ov experiences, psychic phenomena and even the eyes of Laura Mars. Sorry to kill the fun. suddenly exhibited precogn tion—the ability o see ahead in time. Other parapsychologis will Suggest instead that what happened was prychokinesis (PK)-what laymen call “mind ‘over matter.” According to this theory, Jung's unconscious somehow made the sevond ex- plosion happen. Those who be Tieve in this explanation say it alo accounts For poltergeists (a German word for ghosts"), who allegedly alMict some houses with crashes and bangs for months on end, and even make the furniture My. The noisy ghost. they say. is emo- tional-psychie energy acciden: tully unleashed by one of the people living in the house. The trouble with these expl nations is that, lke coincidence, they are only words. The term recognition does. not tell us ‘what any scientist would want to knowhow Jung saw ahead in time. And the word psycho Kinesis does not tell us how Jung's mind caused the boom, But there isan explanation for it and forall the other paranor mal events you've read about: the spoon bending. the out-of-body experiences, the faith healers, even the eyes of Laura Mars. And the explanation lies in physics. out-of-body ‘Lam inclined to believe in telepathy.” Albert Einstein once said, “but T suspect it has more to do with physics than with psychology.” When Einstein said this back in the Twenties, nobody in either physies oF psychology understood what he was suggest ing. Today, ew breakthroughs in a far-out branch of physics called {quantum theory indicate that Einstein was, as usual, 50 years ahead of his contemporaries, These new discoveries seem to offer a single seientiic explana tion for all the weird events that parapsychologists have classified under such conflicting labels as ESP. direct-brain perception, clairvoyance, distant viewing, psychokinesis, out-of-body experi tence and cosmic consciousness (enlightenment) What some physicists are suggesting is that all such mystical brain functions are aspects of one phenomenon-a subatomic but ‘universal intelligence system that receives, integrates and transmits information ata level much deeper than the sensory appearances () aI | |EXPLODING TEMPERS: Jung completely baffled Freud with his extrasensory ‘of what we cal space. time and separateness. And this intelligence system, although outside space/time as we know it, manifests within space and time a electrons. atoms, molecules. cells, compli cated critters like you and me, planets, stars and whole galaxies. So what is quantum mechanics? A quantum isa unit of action, just asa foot isa unit of length or a gram is unit of weight ‘Quantum physics Bist appeared as a theory in the 1890s, when Philipp Lenard observed that light travels in distinctly timed choppy units like the beats of a drum, not in smooth, continuous waves like the singing of a violin, These distinct units ate called quanta: the single unit is a quantum: and m theory is the body of experiment and mathematics dealing with such discon: tinuous aetions, Furthermore itis now known that all subatomic events oceur in this quantum, or jumpy manner- somewhat like a miniature psychedelic light show Ir the world of large things seen by our senses is like straight line (-—), the quantum world is like a dotted line (----). Or. to mploy three artistic analogies, a painter would describe the quantum world as collage, not portrait; a musician would call st staccato, not legato: a filmmaker would say it was montage, not Tinear narrative = No cause-and-effect relationship has yet been found between next, Most physicists are convinced that there is no cause and effect on that level. I is as if law and corder function only above the atomic level: inside the atom. the surrealiss. crapshooters and anarchists have taken over the shop. ability to predict the second explosion in Freud's bookcase. If they lived today, however, both could have found the explanation in physics. tellus, For the physicists themselves, quantum mechanics has done to traditional science what Sitting Bull did to George Armstrong Custer. One of the greatest quantum physicists, Nobel laureate Enwin Schrodinger, was so distressed by his own equations that he denounced “this damned quantum jumping” (verdamnue quan ‘umspringerei) in a letter to Einstein, Science, you see, is supposed to be able to yield accurate predictions, based on the iron law of ind effec: and the breakdown of causality within the atom kes it look as if science itself may be an arbitrary human, empt to impose order on a disorderly of chaotic universe, Rising from the wreckage of causality. three lines of thought have atlempted (0 make sense of the seemingly senseless facts These are known as the Copenhagen Interpeetation, the Multiple Universe Model and the Hidden Variable Theory The Copenhagen Interpretation was devised in the Twenties by Nobel laureate Niels Bohr and named after his hometown, where he lived in the middle of the Carsherg brewery ina house given him by the crown. (Yes. Virginia the commercials are true” Carlserg is relly the oficial brewer for the King of Denmark) The breakdown of causality in quantum mechanics is expressed mathematically inthe concep ofthe collapse ofthe state vector” You don’t need to know what that means technically: Roughly. a sector is a mathematical expression telling you the direction and magnitude ofa force. It is enough to know that in ordinary (large To the ordinary citizen, everything in modern physics isasqueer scale) mechanics. the vector tells you what will happen next, and in asa three-legged duck anyway. and this lack of causality in the quantum mechanics, the slate vector tells you only what might than anything else physigists happen next. There is thus a great gaping hole between what C2science should be able to predict and what quantum theory does allow us to predict. and itis hole big enough to fy a 747 through, Bohr filled inthe hole by saying the collapse of the state vector exists only in our minds, No, that is nota misprint and, no, | am not ‘oversimplifying. Another physicist, Bryce DeWit, tells us bluntly “The Copenhagen view promotes the impression that the collapse of the state vector and even the state vector [itself] are all in the mind.” To the ordinary person who doesn’t know the state vector from Finnegan’s feet, this may not sound too alarming, but to traditional physicists, Bohr sounds like « man saying the brick wall you banged your head on is only in your mind. Bohr was aot solipsis: he didn't claim the state vector was only in his mind. But his theory does seem. atleast to his critics, to imply a kind of group solipsism-a notion that the universe known to science is not a model of the real universe but something once removed from that: a reflection of how the human mind building models ofthe real universe. As Sir Arthur Eddington, an asttonomer much influenced by Boht. states this position: “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound and elaborate theories, one afer another to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstruct ing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! I is our own.” The Multiple Universe Model jas its roots in ence fiction, and some physicists think it should have been left there, Itis, however, a logical and consistent alternative explana- tion of what the hell collapses that unpredictable state vector. Briefly: Everything that can happen to it. does happen to it This is also known as the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model. having been devised by three Princeton University. physicists: Hugh Everet, John Archibald Wheeler and Neil Graham. | don't know what they were smoking at the time, but this view holds, in effect. that if you toss a coin, it lands bovh heads and tailsin different universes. The state vector collapses every which way. as the aetwal quantum equations imply. We see only one result because we are in only one universe: but in the universe next door, another you and another I will se a different result. And there are an incredible number of such possible (and by this fundamentalist reading of quantum math, rea!) alternative universes, As Bryce DeWitt has written in Physics Today. “I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first encountering this multi- world concept. The idea of 1019+ slightly imperfect copies of ‘oneself constantly splitting into further copies... itis mot easy to reconcile with common sense.” Indeed itis not, but DeWitt and others have accepted it as the least absurd way out of the quantum Uncertainty problem. If you éan deal with the idea that in the universe next door Hitler is remembered as a popular artist who never went into Politics, and in the next universe over, John F. Kennedy decided not to go to Dallas on November 22. 1963, and lived to a ripe old ‘age, and in yet another universe, you don‘ exist because your par- fens never rnet—you can take the multiworld path out of quantum anarchy. Otherwise, it is back to Copenkagen. where the universe wwe know is inside our heads. or onward to the Hidden Variable where space and time do not really exist. The Hidden Variable Theory was started by Albert Einstein, even though he never explicitly used the term “hidden variable.” Nevertheless, Einstein was alveays annoyed by quantum luncertainty, and he attacked quantum mechanics from every angle Possible. summing up his view in the famous dictum: “God does not play dice with the universe.” In 1952, De. David Bohm. then considered the most brilliant pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer, showed explicitly that Einstein's criticisms of quantum theory are valid if there is a subquanwm level-a world below the quantum world. Bohm also showed that this subquantum world could be the hidden variable that collapses the otherwise anarchistic state vector, but only if the supposed variable functioned “nonloeally This means only if space and time do notexist as we think they do, ‘The trouble with the Copenhagen solution is that, however @» COSMIC GLUE 101 Here, briefly, are explanations of the theories that Robert Anton Wilson offers. Nothing like visual aids when you're discussing science. For a rundown on how physics explains your favorite psychi phenomena, turn to page 130. ‘THE CLASSIC QUANTUM THEORY. A quantuN—~'s a unit of action. But how can we predict in what direction an element will ‘make its quantum leaps? This theory says you can't. A will leap 10 B. and so forth, and the only certainty iS uncertainty. ‘TWE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION siaios {hat all his ‘quantum business is merely an invention of scientists trying to juslify their fat paychecks. Quantum uncertainly is a measure of ‘our own ineptness in predicting movements, [UNIVERSE MODEL Is not much help, either. This one shows us that everything that can possibly happen in A's travels to B will happen. Each instant, the universe Solis into a myriad of other slightly diferent universes, TERY is “more reassiiing All this uncertainty about quantum movements is inside our heads, ‘Out there” is a strict causality of the old sort, What is if? It's hidden (as ilustrated by the puppeteer's hands). JORDINARY CAUSALITY THEORY would Nave you believe that A [causes B which causes C, ete. Nice and tidy. The problem is trying to square this with what we know about quantum move- ments. 1 there is a causality, how come i's so random? DR.HERBERT'S COSMIC GLUE INTERPRETATION {ries [0 &x plain. This theory states that every moment in the universe is ‘caused by something which, in turn, is caused by something else, all at the same lime. Class dismissed o TALUSTRATION BY 1OHNNY LEE cy