When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor's house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O'Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.
We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we're usually referring to change. But change isn't the same thing as time.
To measure anything's position precisely is to "lock in" on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can't isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it's 20 feet above the grandstand. But you've lost all information about its momentum. It's going nowhere; its path is uncertain.
Numerous experiments confirm that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a fundamental concept of quantum physics. However, it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world. Remember, you can't see through the bone surrounding your brain; everything you experience is woven together in your mind. So what's real? If the next image is different from the last, then it's different, period. We can award change with the word "time," but that doesn't mean that there's an invisible matrix in which changes occur.
At each moment we're at the edge of a paradox described by the Greek philosopher Zeno. Because an object can't occupy two places simultaneously, he contended that an arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight. Thus, motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time (motion) isn't a feature of the outer, spatial world, but rather a conception of thought?
An experiment published in 1990 suggests that Zeno was right. In this experiment, scientists demonstrated the quantum equivalent of the adage that "a watched pot doesn't boil." This behavior, the "quantum Zeno effect," turns out to be a function of observation. "It seems,"said physicist Peter Coveney, "that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing". Theoretically, if a nuclear bomb were watched intently enough -- that is, if you could check its atoms every million trillionth of a second -- it wouldn't explode. Bizarre? The problem lies not in the experiments but in our way of thinking about time. Biocentrism is the only comprehensible way to explain these results, which are only "weird" in the context of the existing paradigm.
In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal intuition. They're tools of the mind and thus don't exist as external objects independent of life. When we feel poignantly that time has elapsed, as when loved ones die, it constitutes the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. That, to us, is time. It belongs with us.
New experiments confirm this concept. In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment that showed that within pairs of particles, each particle anticipated what its twin would do in the future. Somehow, the particles "knew" what the researcher would do before it happened, as if there were no space or time between them. In a 2007 study published in Science, scientists shot particles into an apparatus and showed that they could retroactively change whether the particles behaved as photons or waves. The particles had to "decide" what to do when they passed a fork in the apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. It turns out what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle had behaved at the fork in the past. Thus the knowledge in our mind can determine how particles behave.
Of course, we live in the same world. Critics claim that this behavior is limited to the quantum world. But this "two-world" view (that is, the view that there is one set of laws for quantum objects and another for the rest of the universe, including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year, researchers published a study in Nature suggesting that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of ions were coaxed to entangle, and then their properties remained bound together when separated by large distances ("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it) as if there were no time or space. And in 2005, KHCO3 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges half an inch high, demonstrating that quantum behavior could nudge into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.
In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, "There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."
That night, while lying awake at my neighbor's house, I had found the answer -- that the missing piece is with us. As I see it, immortality doesn't mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time -- past or future -- as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.
"Time and space are but the physiological colors which the eye maketh," said Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance." "But the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night."
"Biocentrism" (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
Robert Lanza, M.D.: Why You Will Always Exist: Time Is 'On Demand'
Finality of Death - Is Death the End or the Beginning?
Death - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Is this the end of death as we know it? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
in physics class.A single particle was being obseverved and dependant upon if there was an observer present or multiple observers the particles behavior changed with each senario never repeating a behavior ,even with identical circumstances. I understand that there have been elaborate innovative experiments repeated with mutiple particles and the behaviors changed ,again dependant upon mutiple factors. The conclusion although uncertain is that some force or intent is at work here which effects the behavior of the particle. My opinion is that we do have a connection with all which exists and are linked in a manner which we are on the path to understanding, (hopefully)!!!
The universal mind concept is my leading contender for a path to the unlocking of this phenomena.
We Know That Something Is Effecting The Results Of This Experiment. It Appears To Be Us.
Certainly worth a significant grant to find out why.Perhaps it will lead to enlightenment perhaps it will lead to something we do not wish to know. I feel that we absolutely need the answer no matter where it will lead us. Virginia that man is not Santa Clause, we haven't decided what to name him because he keeps changing. We'll get back to you on that one!
Some will say this experience was mere coincidence or psychological reorganization, but I never experienced that “dream” before or after that night. I cannot do justice to describing how very different this experience was from any other I have been conscious of, awake or sleeping. And I am now certain of this: the uncertainty principle applies only to the scientifically observable (at least so far) forms that we call reality. The flesh, the bone, the brain that grew from the information that met randomly in resonance at our conception, the "us" are all made of the same timeless “stuff”. We are not just the observable form that was given a name at birth.
"Life is a light that goes out; matter doing it's invariant rotation"
the teacher's enthusiasm and energy
are derived from the child he teaches.
When the harpist who plays twenty-four musical modes
finds no ear to listen, his harp becomes a burden:
no song comes to mind, his ten fingers will not function.
If there were no ears to receive the message from the Unseen,
no prophet would have brought a revelation from Heaven.
And if there were no eyes to see the works of God,
neither would the sky have revolved,
nor would the earth have smiled with fertile greenness.
The declaration lawlâka* means this,
that the whole business of creation
is for the sake of the perceiving eye
and the one who sees.
*Arabic meaning: "But for you"
--Rumi
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
This may be a more precise description of the reality of time than our perception. We can only see a fraction of time during which that time has passed. The reality is that time is an artifact of our humanity, but there is really no disconnect, just the limitation of human perception. Laplace's 2nd hypothesis, is actually an accurate description of our concept of God!
Regarding your second paragraph in quotes- that's Scientific Determinism by Laplace, yes?
Because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it is not possible to predict everything, no matter how much information is available, or how accurate the formulae are. Scientific Determinism has been dead since the 1920's, but I was unaware of it too, until I started to read Physics again recently. Quantum Physics is a real eyeopener.
The Universe doesn't work as we figured. It's random.
It's almost like a D&D game, with outcomes based on dice rolls. Feynman worked out a method to calculate probabilities for particles, based on the crazy-sounding idea that all possible histories happen simultaneously, interfering with each other.
As such, this means that I is Immortal and that I do, indeed, create time upon entering the Universe.
Peace,
Ik
I believe our loved ones are allright. They were allright a hundred years before they took form in our world and they are allright now. I don't know where they are. I feel they are everywhere,and nowhere.
I see 'death' as a sure event that will come and a mystery. I believe whatever comes next will be as natural and "right" as everything else we see in the universe.
I read of and elderly lady who said " Why I'm not worried at all about death, if there is ground there, I'll have legs and feet. If there's no ground then I'll have wings."
I would add, ' If theres nothing there then I'll be gone,and this life was a good one'
Life is never still, leaves and flowers bud grow and fade and die and reappear every year.
Waves on the ocean rise and for a little while are individual and are differant from every other wave on the ocean. Then they blend back into the ocean and new waves rise.
I have faith in the mystery. And I believe they are allright.
They are all right. They are here with us, in our hearts; they are everywhere and nowhere.
Would 'time' still continue to exist in the universe without our(or some other) consciousness marking and describing the Change we concieve as "time" passing. Or would there only exist endless Change,like the water boiling in a kettle. With no one to count the bubbles and call the change 'time' ?
I've seen nothing in my lifetime to make me believe anything sinister , or monsterous or heavenly is waiting for me on the other side of that door.
It takes no faith either way to just be honest and admit.' I don't know' . I'm still looking,but I don't know. Why should I waste any of this life fretting and worrying about what comes next.
If theres something there I'll be happy.
If nothing well speaking of time A little fruit fly would have been happy with a 10th of my life what could I complain about.
As a father I believe any father would want their family to go on with their lives and not worry about him and have a happy life.
The same way I believe my son would want us to go on and have a happy life.
I see nothing to be afraid of. So I am not afraid for them. I miss him,but I don't worry.
If this helps ,good. If not forget it, cause I don't KNOW anymore than you do.