Chapter 24
Physical background
We have claimed in previous chapters that metal-bending contains
both structural and quasi-force characteristics. There are at
least two types of event on a microscopic scale: the formation
of loop dislocations and the destabilization of grain boundaries;
one is distinguishable by hardening and the other by softening
of the metal.
The action in metal-bending occurs in bursts of strain, which
can extend radially around the person of the metal-bender; the
unconscious mind of the metal-bender is believed to control the
movement of an invisible surface at which the action is concentrated.
The recorded strain signals appear to be randomly orientated,
and concentrated by 'psychological' or 'observational' factors
in a 'region of action'.
Why is paranormal metal-bending such a challenge to scientists?
Because it is difficult to be fitted into current physics in any
simple way. In order to explain why this is so, we must devote
some pages to summarizing the physical background of the material
world, as physicists at present understand it. I have space to
describe the background only in outline; therefore the level of
the description cannot be high, and an apologetic profile must
be exhibited at the start!
The basis of human thought is philosophical, and even in philosophy
there are strongly polarized viewpoints, described in old-fashioned
terms as materialism (reality only of the material world), idealism
(reality only of mind, or of God), and dualism (reality both of
the material world and of mind). To a non-professional philosopher
like myself, it appears that at present materialism is in the
ascendant, albeit termed 'central state materialism', in which
the reality of both mind and matter are admitted, but in a central
material state.
Science is often regarded as the experimental study of the material
world; but in reality science must be regarded as a method of
study rather than a corpus of knowledge. The method can be summarised
as follows: observation and measurements, experiment and confirmation
of experiment, formulation of hypothesis, data analysis, rejection
or acceptance of hypothesis and its conversion to theory, prediction
and verification of prediction of events and quantitative observables,
dissemination of findings and acceptance of part responsibility
for their application.
It is maintained that the scientific method can be applied to
the study of non-material things, if such exist. The psychological
sciences use the method in the study of such things as consciousness
or human emotions. The method can also be applied to psychic phenomena,
which are apparently a mixture of material and non-material things.
I take the view that the material side of psychic phenomena must
conform at least in part to causality and to the laws of physics.
In the physical or temporal absence of an active psychic subject,
material phenomena reduce to the laws of physics; but in his presence
they may be modified in certain ways. These modifications are
themselves subject to study by the scientific method, and that
is what I am trying to do.
Newton spoke of physics as the 'study of the causes of sensible
effects'. Physics is, classically, based on Newtonian mechanics
in Euclidean space, in which velocity, or change of distance with
time, is linked by simple algebra to mass, force and time, and
the concepts of energy and momentum are derived. Energy, momentum
and mass are conserved; they cannot be destroyed or created from
nothing, although in Einstein's developments they can be interchanged.
Matter possesses mass, and can be split up into a variety of different
particles, electrons, protons, and so on, each with its own mass.
The structural arrangements of these particles are by now well
known, but each particle is in continual motion; the motions,
which are according to Newtonian mechanics, define temperature
and can give rise to electromagnetic radiation; their collisional
interactions define heat transfer.
The forces by which particles interact with each other are four-fold;
first, the 'electromagnetic interaction' which is responsible
for holding atoms together into molecules, whether they are ordinary
inorganic or organic chemical compounds, or biomolecular: second,
the very much more powerful strong interaction, which is
responsible for holding the particles within the atomic nucleus
together, and which can be released as nuclear energy; it is only
the outside layer of the atoms, the electrons, and not the nuclei
which are involved in forming and re-forming chemical compounds.
The third interaction is the gravitational, which is unbelievably
weak compared with the first two; but since it is stronger for
larger masses, and can work over very large distances, it is the
interaction which ultimately dominates on an astronomical scale.
The fourth is the so-called weak interaction, which is
responsible for certain types of nuclear process, and which, since
the discovery of 'neutral currents', turns out only to be a particularly
weak type of electromagnetic interaction.
Immediately we see that if we were to claim a new force to be
involved in paranormal physical phenomena, this would be inconsistent
with the observations of physics.
However, it is not only atomic particles which have their existence
in the physical world; there are also force fields and wave motion.
The concept of interactive force carries with it the concept of
interactive vector fields of force permeating space. A particle
subject to these interactive forces, finding itself in such a
region of space, experiences a force whose magnitude and direction
are appropriate to the field in that space. The most obvious examples
of this concept are electrostatic or electric fields, magnetic
fields and gravitational fields. Great philosophical difficulty
was once experienced in trying to find an answer to the question
of why this should be so. The physicist long ago got used to acceptance
of the observational fact that it is a convenient and realistic
concept; we shall see that in quantum field theory it is these
fields which are fundamentally uniquely real.
Pairs of these fields, for example the electric and the magnetic,
are coupled together in such a way that the temporal change of
one produces the other, and vice versa. This gives rise to the
movement of the fields in space, together with their time-variation
at any point in space; this type of movement is that of a wave;
it is the fields which move, not the matter through which the
wave passes (as with the waves on the surface of water, which
appear to travel while a cork on the water surface mostly goes
up and down).
A movement of electrically charged particles gives rise to a wave
which travels in space at a very high speed: c = 3 X 108 m/sec,
and is known as a light wave. Light shows all the properties of
waves, such as interference, diffraction, standing waves and heterodyning.
The frequency of electromagnetic radiation determines its nature;
the lowest frequencies are radio waves, then come infrared radiations
which we know as radiant heat; then there are visible light, ultraviolet
radiation, X-rays and gamma-rays. Since the fields due to these
waves can cause the movement of particles very remote from the
source of the wave, it is clear that the wave carries energy with
it, and the particle whose movement originally generated the wave
must lose energy. The temporal variation of the magnitude or the
frequency of the waves (modulation) can carry information as well
as energy.
One approach to the explanation of paranormal phenomena, both
ESP and physical, has been the proposal that the brain is capable
of emitting radiation, presumably of a hitherto unknown type,
which carries the necessary energy with it. Since spherical waves
attenuate with increasing distance and are scattered by obstacles,
obvious experiments to test this hypothesis suggest themselves.
But if the psychic quasi-force is of an unknown type, it will
not necessarily be transmitted as a wave; none of the usual characteristics
of wave motion has in fact been found. Perhaps the radiation could
simply be electromagnetic waves, but in a frequency band as yet
undiscovered. As each new frequency band is opened up and its
properties understood, the probability of this being so becomes
less and less. I recall that in 1947, when I was a research student,
'thought waves' were supposed by some to be the very microwaves
with which I was experimenting daily.
Submillimetre radiation, very soft X-rays (XUV) and now very low
frequency radio waves (ELF) were thought by some to be possible
candidates. After all, the minute electric potentials produced
by the brain (EEGs) do show time-variation in precisely the ELF
frequency region. Unfortunately ELF waves can carry information
only at a very low rate (cycles per second must exceed bits per
second) and occasionally telepathic reception is known to be very
much faster than this rate although of course it is not reliably
so. There are precise distance effects for ELF wave transmission,
but apparently none for telepathy. Certainly, ELF waves will not
bend metal, and indeed electromagnetic waves in general can bend
metal only by melting it diathermically. So it is fairly clear
to the majority of physicists that if there are such things as
psychokinetic phenomena their explanation must be sought outside
conventional electromagnetic theory and classical physics.
At the beginning of the present century there were reported a
whole series of physical experiments which led to the introduction
of entirely new concepts, and which showed classical physics to
be only a limited and inadequate way of regarding material reality.
It was shown by Planck that energy E exists only in packets, known
as quanta, whose magnitude are proportional to the frequency v
of the radiation (E = hv) where h is the Planck
constant. Not only is energy possessed by each packet but also
momentum p = hv/c.
At that time it was also found, as had been predicted by Einstein
in his special relativity theory, that the mass m of a particle
increases with its velocity v, being given by: m = mO/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
where c = 3 * 10^8 m/sec is the speed of electromagnetic radiation,
mO is the mass of the particle when it is at rest; if it could
travel at exactly the speed of light, its mass would be infinite.
Electromagnetic radiation, being unable to travel except at speed
c, and having no rest-mass, nevertheless possesses momentum p
= h/lambda (since c is the product of frequency and wavelength,
c = nu* lambda). Thus radiation has the properties of a particle,
as well as those of a wave; radiation is now also a shower of
'photons'. The photons can, as it were, all occupy the same space
at the same time, whereas massive particles such as protons cannot
do so. There exist two classes of particle, 'bosons' and 'fermions'.
In another series of experiments, material particles were shown
to have properties similar to those of wave radiation; and it
was also shown that mass m could be converted into radiative energy
E, according to the Einstein relation E = mc^2.
Thus material particles ceased to be conceptuaised as very small
billiard-balls and could with greater accuracy be regarded as
waves confined by the constraints of the interactions to certain
regions of space. Against this background, modern quantum theory,
which is the cornerstone of twentieth-century physics, was formulated
by Schrodinger, Heisenberg and others. A 'wave equation' is used
in this theory to calculate with precision the probabilities of
occurrence of atomic physical events. Many thousands of experimental
findings conform to these probabilities, but individual events
cannot be predicted; they are regarded as random, but within the
framework of the probabilities, which can be precisely calculated.
Thus the complete mathematical description of the event is impossible
unless a large number of such events are considered. The individual
event ceases to be precisely predictable. Such an event can be
precisely measured, even if it is unpredictable, but there are
also limitations on what can be measured. If the momentum p is
accurately measured, then the position s is indeterminate,
and vice versa; the product of uncertainties is the Planck constant:
h bar = delta p * delta s. Similarly, energy E and
time t are mutually indeterminate: h bar= delta e * delta
t, with h bar= h/2pi.
Material reality is described in terms of electronic and other
'wave functions', which extend through space, even though the
probabilities of finding any electrons outside the usual small
atomic dimensions (10^-8 cm) become very small. Nevertheless,
these wave functions are 'non-local' - they are not bounded in
the way that particles are; and as far as photons are concerned,
they are hugely non-local. Yet at any moment the wave function
can collapse and give all its energy into a tiny region whose
position is not only unpredictable, but is controlled by the experimenter
himself, in that he has controlled the environment of the photons.
This collapse, the so-called 'collapse of the state vector', raises
great conceptual difficulties in the quantum theory of measurement.
Consider a weak isotropic electromagnetic radiation source emitting
one photon per second. The radiation will travel, in all directions,
a distance of 3 * 10^8 m (many earth diameters) in this time.
A huge sphere is filled with weak radiation during this period.
Now suppose that around the entire surface of this sphere an experimenter
arranges an array of photomultiplier detectors; only one detector
will be activated by this radiation; and there is no way of knowing
which one. Dramatically, the sphere of radiation collapses to
a tiny point at an unpredictable part of the universe. The same
behaviour could be anticipated for the emission of an isotropic
electron wave, or pure 's-wave' electron. Thus it can be claimed
that as quantum theory stands at present, the universe is in principle
indescribable by causal laws.
However, there is worse to come! Not only are there whole arrays
of strange particles in modern physics, including the neutrino,
with zero charge and zero rest-mass, but there is also a complete
duplication of these particles in the realm of anti-matter. As
a result of quantum electrodynamical theory, Dirac postulated
that space was entirely and uniformly populated by a sea of electrons
of negative mass, and therefore negative energy. When sufficient
positive energy is contributed to one of these by a collision,
it can become a real electron with positive energy. Thereby a
hole is left in space, with positive energy and positive charge
- the so-called 'positron', or 'anti-electron'. When this hole
attracts or collides with an electron the two mutually annihilate,
releasing their energy as photons. The same applies to other anti-particles,
many of which have been observed in experiments. A different approach
to anti-matter was proposed by Feynman, who held that the positron
was an electron moving backward in time. He represented these
conversion processes in the form of diagrams (Feynman diagrams)
in which one axis represents time, the other space.
Quantum electrodynamics, or quantum field theory, differs from
quantum mechanics in assigning reality not only to the particles
of finite mass and to photons and other bosons, but to the fields
themselves. The interaction between two particles is considered
to arise from the exchange of large numbers of 'virtual' photons
between them. The field, consisting of these virtual photons,
is quantized - that is, canonical commutation relations are assigned
between the position operators and their conjugate momenta. The
particles, previously considered to be independently real and
giving rise only to fields, are now reduced to the role merely
of acting as sources of the real fields. Their particle-like quality,
once taken as irreconcilable with their wave-like quality, is
now considered to be only a relatively unimportant part of it.
Such things as the electromagnetic radiation which accompanies
the movement of charged particles can be understood only with
the aid of quantum electrodynamics. Procedures such as gauge transformations
can be applied to electrodynamical equations; these lead to very
powerful results, such as the necessity of charge conservation,
the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions,
and the classification and understanding of the new quantum numbers,
isospin, baryon number and, more recently, charm, in the new strange
particles which form the subject of high energy physics.
Up to the present it has not been proved possible to unify the
gravitational field with the other fields - an ambition which
occupied the later part of Einstein's life. However, the gravitational
field becomes centrally important in astrophysics, in stellar
objects where the density of matter is so great that ultimately
no escape from the gravitational fields is possible, even for
photons. Nothing can emerge from within the critical radius of
such a 'black hole'.
But the existence of anti-matter does make it possible for black
holes to emit radiation. The black hole is a gravitational collapse
of matter, which according to the theory of general relativity
eventually produces a singularity of space-time, where the concept
of space-time as a continuum, together with the laws of physics,
break down altogether; since the inward motion of the matter exceeds
the velocity of light, no communication with the interior of the
black hole was believed to be possible and, as far as we outside
are concerned, the interior is physically unknowable.
However, according to the Dirac theory, empty space is filled
with pairs of virtual particles which come into existence at some
point in space-time; these particles move apart, return and annihilate
each other. But at the edge of a black hole one particle may fall
into it, leaving the other to escape and appear as radiation apparently
emitted from the black hole.(74) The in-falling particle, if an
anti-particle, would appear to be a particle travelling backwards
in time from the singularity. It appears at the edge to have been
scattered by the gravitational field, forming a particle travelling
forwards in time. One can regard the radiation from a black hole
as having come from singularity and quantum-mechanical tunneling
out of the black hole. Since black holes continually radiate by
the annihilation mechanism, they continually decrease in mass,
reaching eventually the Planck mass c^1/2G^1/2 h bar^1/2~=10^-5
g, where G is the gravitational constant. Finally they explode.
The 'tunneling' process is well known in atomic and nuclear physics;
a particle located within a potential barrier and bounded by a
certain region of space has a calculable probability of appearing
outside the barrier and escaping; no energy is required for tunneling.
One might regard the tunneling phenomenon, which is a very well
known consequence of quantum theory (and is not necessarily associated
with black holes), as a sort of electronic or atomic teleportation.
Indeed, the speculation might be made that tunneling is of primary
significance in metal-bending. However, the probability of tunneling
decreases exponentially with increasing height and width of energy
barrier as well as with mass of the particle, so that it would
indeed be small for the transport of: an atom through the crystal
lattice, unless some 'mental intervention' were postulated.
Some brief discussion of space-time will be of relevance to our
ideas about telepathy and precognition. A diagram somewhat similar
to the Feynman diagram is used to represent what is known in relativity
theory as the 'light-cone'. We have seen that mass increases as
the velocity of light is approached, and since the infinite mass
cannot be reached the velocity of light can never be exceeded.
This is equivalent to the statement that a diagram can be drawn
in the manner of Figure 24.1a in which material reality must lie
within the shaded region; this region is known as the light-cone.
Nothing material outside the light cone can be known to us. The
origin of the graph is here and now: this point in space, at the
present moment. Light proceeds along the surface of the cone,
but matter can proceed only within it, along single straight or
curved lines. Lines drawn within the shaded area of Figure 24.1a
represent reality as physics knows it at present. There can be
discontinuities in lines if we seek to represent certain types
of transition of a particle on this diagram. All lines are broadened
due to quantum mechanical uncertainty.
Some parapsychological phenomena might demand that the diagram
have a waist, as in Figure 24.1b. This representation would allow
a multiplicity of happenings now to lead to the same situation
in the future. If existence is continuous in time, then logic
does not permit of closed loops, which would represent such situations
as a man killing his own mother and thereby preventing his own
birth. Another possibility within this diagram is that of superluminal
signals travelling faster than the velocity of light. These are
represented by lines less steeply sloping than the surface on
the cone in Figure 24.1a.
Figures 24.1c and d represent worlds in which discontinuities
in time and space play a large part. Existence is possible simultaneously
only in the future and in the past in Figure 24.1c; and in 24.1d
a parallel universe system merges into a single universe in the
future. About the parallel-universe interpretation of quantum
theory we shall have more to say in the next chapter.
Figure 24.1 Possible light-cones: (a) The normal light-cone
of Minkowski 4-space. (b) A waisted light-cone allowing superluminal
signals (e.g. non-locality in the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky experiment).
(c) and (d) Possible light-cones allowing parallel universe, quantum-mechanical
tunneling etc.
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