The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  As for spiritual healing, although some studies were of poor quality, a number were good enough to indicate that something interesting was going on here, and there might be something more to distant healing than just a placebo or feel-good effect. In many of the studies, patients didn’t even know anybody was attempting to heal them. Nonetheless, here was evidence that certain people could concentrate on a patient at a distance, and somehow that person would get better.

  These discoveries left me with wonder but also profoundly unsettled. All these practices were based on an entirely different paradigm of the human body from that of modern science. These were medical systems which purported to work on ‘energetic levels’, but I kept wondering precisely which energy it might be that they were talking about.

  In the alternative community, words like ‘subtle energy’ were often bandied about, but the debunker in me was left dissatisfied. Where was this energy coming from? Where did it reside? What was so subtle about it? Were there such things as human energy fields? And did they account not only for these alternative forms of healing but also for many of life’s mysteries that couldn’t be explained? Was there an energy source that we didn’t really understand?

  If something like homeopathy worked, it upended everything we believe about our physical and biological reality. One of the two – homeopathy or standard medical science – had to be wrong. Nothing less than a new biology, a new physics, seemed necessary to embrace what appeared to be true about so-called energy medicine.

  I began a personal quest to find out whether any scientists were doing work that suggested an alternative view of the world. I traveled to many areas around the globe, meeting with physicists and other top frontier scientists in Russia, Germany, France, England, South America, Central America and the US. I corresponded with and phoned many other scientists in other countries. I attended conferences at which radically new findings were presented. In the main, I decided to stick to scientists with solid credentials operating according to rigorous scientific criteria. Enough speculation had already been made in the alternative community about energy and healing, and I wanted any new theories to be firmly rooted in what was provable, mathematically or experimentally – precise equations, a real physics to grapple with and understand. As I’d looked to science to prove conventional or alternative medicine, so I wanted the scientific community to provide me with – in a sense – a new science.

  Once I began digging, I discovered a small but cohesive community of top-grade scientists with impressive credentials, all doing some small aspect of the same thing. Their discoveries were incredible. What they were working on seemed to overthrow the current laws of biochemistry and physics. Their work not only offered an explanation of why homeopathy and spiritual healing might work. Their theories and experiments also compounded into a new science, a new view of the world.

  The Field has largely resulted from interviews with all the major scientists mentioned in the book, plus a reading of their major published work. These include chiefly: Jacques Benveniste, William Braud, Brenda Dunne, Bernhard Haisch, Basil Hiley, Robert Jahn, Ed May, Peter Marcer, Edgar Mitchell, Roger Nelson, Fritz-Albert Popp, Karl Pribram, Hal Puthoff, Dean Radin, Alfonso Rueda, Walter Schempp, Marilyn Schlitz, Helmut Schmidt, Elisabeth Targ, Russell Targ, Charles Tart and Mae Wan-Ho. I received a herculean amount of help and support from each one of them in person, by telephone and through the post. Most of the individual scientists were involved in multiple interviews – many ten interviews or more. I am indebted to them for consenting to so many consultations and for allowing me to check facts laboriously. They put up with my constant intrusion and also my ignorance, and their assistance has been incalculable.

  I must especially thank Dean Radin for educating me in statistics, Hal Puthoff, Fritz Popp and Peter Marcer for what amounted to a course in physics, Karl Pribram for an education in brain neurodynamics and Edgar Mitchell for sharing the most up-to-date developments.

  I am also grateful to the following, all of whom I spoke or corresponded with: Andrei Apostol, Hanz Betz, Dick Bierman, Marco Bischof, Christen Blom-Dahl, Richard Broughton, Toni Bunnell, William Corliss, Deborah Delanoy, Suitbert Ertel, George Farr, Peter Fenwick, Peter Gariaev, Valerie Hunt, Ezio Insinna, David Lorimer, Hugh MacPherson, Robert Morris, Richard Obousy, Marcel Odier, Beverly Rubik, Rupert Sheldrake, Dennis Stillings, William Tiller, Marcel Truzzi, Dieter Vaitl, Harald Walach, Hans Wendt and Tom Williamson.

  Although scores of books and papers contributed in some way to my thoughts and conclusions, I am indebted to Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (New York: Harper-Edge, 1997) and Richard Broughton’s Parapsychology: The Controversial Science (New York: Ballantine, 1991) for their compilation of evidence for psychic phenomena; Larry Dossey, whose various books were highly useful for evidence of spiritual healing; and Ervin Laszlo, for his fascinating theories of the vacuum in The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdisciplinary Unified Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1995).

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to the team at HarperCollins, particularly my editors, Larry Ashmead and Krista Stroever, for their sage advice and courage in backing this project. I am especially grateful to Andrew Coleman, for his painstaking subediting of the manuscript. I am also indebted to my team at What Doctors Don’t Tell You for their support. Julie McLean and Sharyn Wong in particular offered vital aid at the eleventh hour, and Kathy Mingo’s unfailing assistance enabled me to juggle home and work. My PR consultant, Pavel Mikoloski, has been a tireless champion of the 2008 edition.

  I owe a special thanks to Peter Robinson, my UK agent, and Daniel Benor, my international agent, for taking up the project with such enthusiasm. I should also particularly like to thank my agent in America, Russell Galen, whose dedication and unflagging belief in this project has been nothing short of astonishing.

  Special mention must be made of my children, Caitlin and Anya, through whom I daily experience The Field firsthand. As ever, this book owes its largest debt to my husband Bryan Hubbard, for helping me to understand the true meaning of this book and also the true meaning of interconnection.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LYNNE MCTAGGART is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books, including the bestseller The Field and The Intention Experiment (www.theintentionexperiment.com). As cofounder and editorial director of What Doctors Don’t Tell You (www.wddty.com), she publishes health newsletters that are among the most widely praised in the world. She is also editor of Living the Field, a course that helps to bring the science of The Field into everyday life. Her company holds highly popular conferences and workshops on health and spirituality. She has become a well-respected international authority on the science of spirituality and speaks and holds regular seminars and master classes in America, Europe, and other countries around the world.

  McTaggart is also author of The Baby Brokers: The Marketing of White Babies in America (the Dial Press) and Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times (the Dial Press/Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK). The Field, The Intention Experiment, and What Doctors Don’t Tell You each have been translated into dozens of languages.

  She and her husband, WDDTY cofounder Bryan Hubbard, live and work in London with their two daughters.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  NOTES

  Unless otherwise indicated, all information about the scientists and the details of their discoveries was culled from multiple telephone interviews conducted between 1998 – 2001.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1 D. Reilly, ‘Is evidence for homeopathy reproducible?’ The Lancet, 1994; 344: 1601 – 6.

  PROLOGUE: THE COMING REVOLUTION

  1 M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1961): 319, as quoted in F. Capra, The Tao of Physics (London: Flamingo, 1992).

  2 D. Zohar, The Quantum Self (London: Flami
ngo, 1991): 2; Danah Zohar provides an excellent summary of the philosophical history of science before and after Newton and Descartes.

  3 I am indebted to Brenda Dunne, manager of the PEAR laboratory in Princeton, for first enlightening me about the philosophical interests of the quantum theorists. See also W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), N. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), and R. Jahn and B. Dunne, Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987): 58 – 9.

  4 Interview with Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, Amsterdam, October 19, 2000.

  5 Indeed, in determining which of the scientists merited inclusion, I have had to make certain arbitrary selections. I chose American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and his work on human consciousness, when I could as easily have chosen Oxford professor Roger Penrose. Only for reasons of space have I omitted pioneers into electromagnetic cell communications like Cyril Smith.

  CHAPTER ONE: LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

  1 For an account of Dr Mitchell’s voyage, I have relied on E. Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds (G.P. Putnam, 1996): 47-56; M. Light, Full Moon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); a visit to an exhibition of lunar photographs (London: Tate Gallery, November 1999); personal interviews with Dr Mitchell (summer and autumn 1999); T. Wolfe, The Right Stuff (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980); and A. Chaikin, A Man on the Moon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 355-79.

  2 Mitchell, Way of the Explorer: 61. Dr Mitchell’s results were published in the Journal of Parapsychology, June 1971.

  3 Francis Crick likened the brain to a TV set, as quoted in D. Loye, An Arrow Through Chaos (Rochester, Vt: Park Street Press, 2000): 91.

  4 Nonlocality was considered to be proven by experiments conducted by Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris in 1982.

  5 M. Schiff, The Memory of Water: Homeopathy and the Battle of Ideas in the New Science (Thorsons, 1995).

  CHAPTER TWO: THE SEA OF LIGHT

  Detail on the U.S. oil crisis was compiled from articles appearing in the London Times, Nov. 26 – Dec. 1, 1973.

  1 H. Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’, New Scientist, July 28, 1990: 52 – 5.

  2 J. D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing (London, Jonathan Cape, 2000): 216.

  3 A simple equation showing energy for harmonic oscillators would be represented as H. The 1/2 stood for the zero-point energy. When renormalizing, scientists would just drop the 1/2. Communication with Hal Puthoff, December 7, 2000.

  4 The Zero Point Field is included in stochastic electrodynamics. But in ordinary classical physics, it is usually ‘renormalized’ away.

  5 T. Boyer, ‘Deviation of the black-body radiation spectrum without quantum physics’, Physical Review, 1969; 182: 1374 – 83.

  6 Interviews with Richard Obousy, January 2001.

  7 R. Sheldrake, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (London: Fourth Estate, 1994): 75 – 6.

  8 R. O. Becker and G. Selden, The Body Electric (Quill, 1985): 81.

  9 A. Michelson and E. Morley, American Journal of Science, 1887, series 3; 34: 333 – 45, cited in Barrow, Book of Nothing: 143 – 4.

  10 Quoted in F. Capra, The Tao of Physics (London: Flamingo, 1976).

  11 E. Laszlo, The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations of Transdisciplinary Unified Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1995).

  12 A. C. Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’, Ad Astra, May/June 1996: 13 – 5.

  13 B. Haisch, ‘Brilliant disguise: light, matter and the Zero Point Field’, Science and Spirit, 1999; 10: 30 – 1. Elsewhere, Dr Haisch has made numerous interesting speculations about the connection between Creation and the Zero Point Field and refers to the ZPF as a ‘sea of light’. For the agnostic, the theory is that the random background fluctuations of the vacuum are residual energy left over from the Big Bang. See H. Puthoff, New Scientist, July 28, 1990: 52. Particle physicists theorize that the universe was created as a false vacuum, with more energy than it ought to have had. When that energy decayed, it produced an ordinary quantum vacuum, which led to the Big Bang and produced all the energy for mass in the universe. See H. E. Puthoff, ‘The energetic vacuum: implications for energy research’, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1990; 13: 247 – 57.

  14 H. Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation-determined state,’ Physical Review D; 1987, 35: 3266 – 70.

  15 Interview with Bernhard Haisch, California, October 29, 1999.

  16 J. Gribbin, Q is for Quantum: Particle Physics from A to Z (Phoenix, 1999): 66; H. Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’: 52.

  17 Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen’. Also, conversations with Hal Puthoff, July 20, and August 4, 2000, and Benhard Haisch, October 26, 1999.

  18 H. E. Puthoff ‘Source of vacuum electromagnetic zero-point energy’, Physical Review A, 1989: 40: 4857 – 62; also reply to comment, 1991; 44: 3385 – 6.

  19 H. Puthoff, ‘Where does the zero-point energy come from?’, New Scientist, December 2, 1989: 36.

  20 H. Puthoff, ‘The energetic vacuum: implications for energy research, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1990; 13: 247-57.

  21 Ibid.

  22 In the Zero Point Field, Puthoff also found an explanation for the cosmological coincidence first discovered by British physicist Paul Dirac. This showed that the average density of matter – the average pull between an electron and a proton – has a close relationship to the size of the universe – measured by the ratio of the size of the universe to the size of an electron. Puthoff found that this was just related to the density of Zero Point Field energy. See New Scientist, December 2, 1989.

  23 Various conversations with Hal Puthoff, 2000 and 2001; also H. Puthoff, ‘On the relationship of quantum energy research to the role of metaphysical processes in the physical world’, www.meta-list.org.

  24 Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’.

  25 S. Adler (in a selection of short articles dedicated to the work of Andrei Sakharov), ‘A key to understanding gravity’, New Scientist, April 30, 1981: 277 – 8.

  26 B. Haisch, A. Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Beyond E=mc2: A first glimpse of a universe without mass’, The Sciences, November/December 1994: 26 – 31.

  27 Puthoff, ‘Everything for nothing’.

  28 H. E. Puthoff, ‘Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force,’ Physical Review A, 1989; 39(5): 2333 – 42; also ‘Comment’, Physical Review A, 1993; 47(4): 3454 – 5.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Interview with Hal Puthoff, April 8, 2000.

  31 Energy Conversion using High Charge Density, US Patent no. 5,018,180.

  32 Interview with Bernhard Haisch, California, October 26, 1999.

  33 Robert Matthews, ‘Inertia: does empty space put up the resistance?’ Science, 1994; 263: 613. This property of the vacuum was also tested by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

  34 B. Haisch, A. Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force’, Physical Review A, 1994; 49(2): 678 – 94.

  35 B. Haisch, A. Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, paper presented at AIAA 98-3143, Advances ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit, July 13 – 15, 1998, Cleveland, Ohio; also B. Haisch, ‘Brilliant Disguise.’

  36 Haisch et al., ‘Beyond E=mc2’.

  37 A. C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey (HarperCollins, 1997): 258.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Ibid.: 258 – 9.

  40 Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’: 15.

  41 A. Rueda, B. Haisch and D. C. Cole, ‘Vacuum zero-point field pressure instability in astrophysical plasmas and the formation of cosmic voids’, Astrophysical Journal, 1995; 445: 7 – 16.

  42 R. Matthews, ‘Inertia’.

  43 D. C. Cole and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Extracting energy and heat from the vacuum’, Physical Review E, 1993; 48(2): 1562 – 5.

  44 Interview with Bern
hard Haisch, California, October 29, 1999.

  45 Interviews with Hal Puthoff, July and August 2000; also H. Puthoff, ‘On the relationship of quantum energy’. I have deliberately used a few of Puthoff’s phrases from his unpublished article to indicate his thinking at the time.

  46 Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’.

  CHAPTER THREE: BEINGS OF LIGHT

  1 F. A. Popp, ‘MO-Rechnungen an 3,4-Benzpyren und 1,2-Benzpyren legen ein Modell zur Deutung der chemischen Karzinogenese nahe’, Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, 1972; 27b: 731; F. A. Popp, ‘Einige Möglichkeiten für Biosignale zur Steuerung des Zellwachstums’, Archiv für Geschwulstforschung, 1974; 44: 295 – 306.

  2 B. Ruth and F. A. Popp, ‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur ultraschwachen Photonememission biologisher Systeme’, Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, 1976; 31c: 741 – 5.

  3 M. Rattemeyer, F. A. Popp and W. Nagl, Naturwissenschaften, 1981; 11: 572 – 3.

  4 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 22.

  5 Ibid.: preface, 2; see also R. Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (London: Collins, 1988): 83 – 5.

  6 Dawkins, Selfish Gene: 23.

  7 Ibid.: 23; ‘This, at the present time in molecular biology, is the learned soundscreen of language behind which is hidden the ignorance, for want of a better explanation.’

  8 Telephone interview with Fritz-Albert Popp, January 29, 2001.

  9 R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (London: Paladin, 1987): 23 – 5.

  10 R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1981); Sheldrake, Presence of the Past.

  11 Sheldrake has expressed the view that nonlocality in quantum physics might ultimately explain some of his theories. See Sheldrake website: www.sheldrake.org.

  12 See H. Reiter und D. Gabor, Zellteilung und Strahlung. Sonderheft der Wissenschaftlichen Veroffentlichungen aus dem Siemens-Konzern (Berlin: Springer, 1928).