by Gregg Braden
Although modern experiments continue to indicate that the field is there, we can be sure that it will never be called “ether” again. In scientific circles, the mere mention of the word conjures up adjectives ranging from “pseudoscience” to “hogwash”! As we’ll see in Chapter 2, the existence of a universal field of energy that permeates our world is being thought of in very different terms—the experiments that prove its existence are so new that a single name has yet to be chosen. Regardless of what we choose to call it, however, something is definitely there. It connects everything in our world and beyond and affects us in ways that we’re only beginning to understand.
So how could this have happened? How might we have missed such a powerful key to understanding how the universe works? The answer to this question cuts to the very core of the quest that’s created the most intense controversy and heated debate among the greatest minds of the last two centuries—a dispute that continues to this day. It’s all about the way we see ourselves in the world and our interpretation of that viewpoint.
The key is that the energy connecting everything in the universe is also part of what it connects! Rather than thinking of the field as separate from everyday reality, the experiments tell us that the mundane visible world actually originates as the field: It’s as if the blanket of the Divine Matrix is spread smoothly throughout the universe, and every once in a while it “wrinkles” here and there into a rock, tree, planet, or person that we recognize. Ultimately, all of these things are just ripples in the field, and this subtle yet powerful shift in thinking is the key to tapping the power of the Divine Matrix in our lives. To do so, however, we must understand why scientists view the world as they do today.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PHYSICS:
DIFFERENT RULES FOR
DIFFERENT WORLDS
Science is simply a language to describe the natural world, along with our relationship to it and the universe beyond. And it is only one language; there have been others (such as alchemy and spirituality, for example) that were used long before modern science ever came along. While they may not have been sophisticated, they certainly worked. I’m always amazed when people ask, “What did we do before science? Did we know anything about our world?” The answer is a resounding “Yes!” We knew a lot about the universe.
What we knew worked so well that it provided an entire framework for understanding everything from the origins of life, to why we become sick and what to do about it, to how we calculate the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars. While this kind of knowing was obviously not described in the technical language that we’re accustomed to today, it did a pretty good job of providing a useful story of how things work and why they are as they are—so good, in fact, that civilization existed for more than 5,000 years without relying upon science as we know it today.
Science and the scientific era are generally acknowledged as beginning in the 1600s. It was in July of 1687 that Isaac Newton formalized the mathematics that seem to describe our everyday world, publishing his classic work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematic Principles of Natural Philosophy).
For more than 200 years, Newton’s observations about nature were the foundation of the scientific field now called “classical physics.” Along with Maxwell’s theories of electricity and magnetism from the late 1800s and Einstein’s theories of relativity from the early 1900s, classical physics has been tremendously successful in explaining the large-scale things that we see, such as the movement of planets and apples falling from trees. It has served us so well that we were able to calculate the orbits for our satellites and even put a man on the moon.
During the early 20th century, however, advances in science revealed a place in nature where Newton’s laws just don’t seem to work: the very small world of the atom. Before then, we simply didn’t have the technology to peer into the subatomic world or watch the way particles behave during the birth of a star in a distant galaxy. In both realms—the smallest and the largest—scientists began to see things that couldn’t be explained by traditional physics. A new kind of physics had to be developed, with the rules that would explain the exceptions to our everyday world: the things that happen in the realm of quantum physics.
The definition of quantum physics is found in its name. Quantum means “a discrete quantity of electromagnetic energy”—thus, it’s the stuff that our world is made of when we reduce it to its essence. Quantum physicists soon found that what looks like the solid world to us is really not so solid at all. The following analogy may help us understand why.
When the local movie theater projects a moving image on the screen in front of us, we know that the story we’re seeing is an illusion. The romance and tragedy that tug at our heartstrings are actually the result of many still pictures being flashed very quickly, one after another, to create the sense of a continuous story. While our eyes do see the single images frame by frame, our brain merges them into what we perceive as nonstop movement.
Quantum physicists believe that our world works in much the same way. For instance, what we see as the football touchdown or figure skater’s triple axel on a Sunday-afternoon sports program is actually, in quantum terms, a series of individual events that happen very quickly and closely together. Similar to the way that many images strung together make a movie look so real, life actually occurs as brief, tiny bursts of light called “quanta.” The quanta of life happen so quickly that unless our brain is trained to operate differently (as in some forms of meditation), it simply averages the pulses to create the uninterrupted action we see as the Sunday sports.
Quantum physics, then, is the study of the things that happen on the very small scale of the forces that underlie our physical world. The difference in the ways that the quantum and everyday worlds seem to work has created two schools of thought among scientists in contemporary physics: the classical and the quantum. And each has its own theories to support it.
The great challenge has been to marry these two very different kinds of thinking into a single view of the universe—a unified theory. To do so requires the existence of something that fills what we think of as empty space. But what could occupy it?
A SUMMARY OF THE LONG ROAD
TO A UNIFIED THEORY
1687—Newtonian Physics: Isaac Newton publishes his laws of motion, and modern science begins. This view sees the universe as a massive mechanical system where space and time are absolute.
1867—Field-Theory Physics: James Clerk Maxwell proposes the existence of forces that cannot be explained by Newton’s physics. His research, along with that of Michael Faraday, leads to the discovery of the universe as fields of energy that interact with each other.
1900—Quantum Physics: Max Planck publishes his theory of the world as bursts of energy called “quanta.” Experiments on the quantum level show that matter exists as probabilities and tendencies rather than absolute things, suggesting that “reality” may not be so real or solid after all.
1905—Relativity Physics: Albert Einstein’s view of the universe upsets Newtonian physics. He proposes that time is relative rather than absolute. A key aspect of relativity is that time and space cannot be separated and exist together as a fourth dimension.
1970—String-Theory Physics: Physicists discover that theories describing the universe as tiny vibrating strings of energy can be used to explain the observations of both the quantum and everyday worlds. The theory is formally accepted by the mainstream physics community in 1984 as a possible bridge to unite all other theories.
20??—The New and Improved Unified Theory of Physics: Someday in the future, physicists will discover a way to explain the holographic nature of what we observe in the quantum universe, as well as what we see in our everyday world. They will formulate the equations to unify their explanation into one consistent story.
WHAT’S IN THE SPACE BETWEEN?
Early in the movie Contact, the main character, Dr. Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), asks her father the question that beco
mes the tagline for the rest of the movie: Are we alone in the universe? Her father’s answer becomes the touchstone for the things that are true in her life. When she finds herself in particularly vulnerable situations, such as opening herself up to romance or trusting her experience in the distant universe where she’s been transported, her father’s words become the guiding principle of her beliefs: His response is simply that if we’re alone in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space.
In much the same way, if we believe that the space between any two things is empty, then it seems like a tremendous waste as well. Scientists believe that more than 90 percent of the cosmos is “missing” and appears to us as empty space. That means that of the entire universe as we know it, only 10 percent has anything in it. Do you really believe that the 10 percent of creation we occupy is all there is? What’s in the space that we think of as “empty”?
If it’s really vacant, then there’s a big question that must be answered: How can the waves of energy that transmit everything from our cell-phone calls to the reflected light bringing this page’s words to your eyes travel from one place to another? Just as water carries ripples away from the place where a stone is tossed into a pond, something must exist that conveys the vibrations of life from one point to another. For this to be true, however, we must upset one of the key tenets of modern science: the belief that space is empty.
When we can at last resolve the mystery of what the space is made of, we will have taken a great step toward understanding ourselves and our relation to the world around us. This question, as we shall see, is as old as we humans are. And the answer, we’ll also discover, has probably been with us all along.
Our sense that we’re somehow connected to the universe, our world, and one another has been a constant, from the aboriginal history etched into the cliff walls of Australia (now believed to be more than 20,000 years old) to the temples of ancient Egypt and the rock art of the American Southwest. While that belief appears to be stronger than ever today, precisely what it is that joins us continues to be the subject of controversy and debate. For us to be connected, there must be something that does the connecting. From poets and philosophers to scientists and those who seek their answers beyond the accepted ideas of their day, humanity has had a sense that within the emptiness we call “space,” something is actually there.
Physicist Konrad Finagle (1858–1936) posed the obvious question regarding the significance of space itself, asking, “Consider what would happen if you took away the space from between matter. Everything in the universe would scrunch together into a volume no larger than a dust speck… . Space is what keeps everything from happening in the same place.”13 The pioneering anthropologist Louis Leakey once stated, “Without an understanding of who we are, we cannot truly advance.” I believe that there is a lot of truth to this statement. The way we’ve seen ourselves in the past worked well enough to get us where we are today. Now it’s time to open the door to a new view of ourselves, one that allows for an even greater possibility. It may be that our reluctance to accept just what it means for space to be occupied by an intelligent force, and for us to be part of that space, has been the biggest stumbling block in our understanding of who we are and how the universe really works.
In the 20th century, modern science may have discovered what’s inside of empty space: a field of energy that’s different from any other form of energy. Just as Indra’s web and Newton’s ether suggest, this energy appears to be everywhere, always, and to have existed since the very beginning of time. In a 1928 lecture, Albert Einstein said, “According to the general theory of relativity, space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space.”14
Max Planck stated that the existence of the field suggests that intelligence is responsible for our physical world. “We must assume behind this force [that we see as matter] the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.” He concluded, “This Mind is the matrix of all matter [author’s brackets and italics].”15
THE TALL OF EINSTEIN’S LION
Whether we talk about the cosmic gap between distant stars and galaxies or the microspace between the bands of energy that form an atom, we ordinarily perceive the space between things as empty. When we say that something is “empty,” we typically mean that nothing—absolutely nothing at all—exists there.
Without a doubt, to the untrained eye what we call “space” certainly looks vacant. But how empty can it be? When we really think about it, what would it mean to live in a world where the space between matter is truly void of anything? First, we know that to find such a place in the cosmos is probably impossible for one reason: As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If we could somehow magically transport ourselves to such a location, however, what would life look like?
To begin with, it would be a very dark place. While we could turn a flashlight “on,” for example, its illumination couldn’t travel anywhere because there would be nothing for the light waves to pass through. It would be as if we’d thrown a stone into a dried-up pond and were looking for ripples on the surface. The rock would hit the bottom, whether or not the water was there, but there would be no waves, as the ripples that would normally radiate from the impact would have no medium to move through.
For precisely the same reason, our hypothetical world would also be very quiet. Sound must also travel through some kind of medium to perpetuate itself. In fact, almost any kind of energy as we know it today—from the motion of wind to the heat of the sun—couldn’t exist because the electrical, magnetic, and radiant fields—and even the fields of gravity—wouldn’t have the same meaning in a world where space was truly devoid of anything.
Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate about what such a world would be like, since the space that surrounds us is anything but empty. Regardless of what we call it or how science and religion define it, it’s clear that there’s a field or presence that is the “great net” that connects everything in creation and links us to the higher power of a greater world.
Early in the 20th century, Einstein made reference to the mysterious force that he was certain exists in what we see as the universe around us. “Nature shows us only the tail of the lion,” he stated, suggesting that there’s something more to what we see as reality, even if we can’t see it from our particular cosmic vantage point. With a beauty and eloquence that’s typical of Einstein’s view of the universe, he elaborated on his analogy of the cosmos: “I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it [the tail] even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.”16 In later writings, Einstein went on to say that regardless of who we are or what our role in the universe may be, we’re all subject to a greater power: “Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”17
With his declaration of an intelligence underlying creation, Planck had described the energy of Einstein’s lion. By doing so, he ignited a flame of controversy that continues to burn more intensely than ever today. At the center of it, the old ideas about what our world is made of (and the reality of the universe, for that matter) have flown right out the window! More than half a century ago, the father of quantum theory told us that everything is connected through a very real, although unconventional, energy.
CONNECTED AT THE SOURCE:
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT
Since Planck offered his equations of quantum physics early in the 20th century, many theories have developed and numerous experiments have been performed that seem to precisely prove that notion.
On the smallest levels of the universe, atoms and subatomic particles do in fact act as if they’re connected. The problem is that scientists don’t know how or even if the behavior that’s observed on such tiny scales has any meaning for the larger realities of our daily lives. If it does, then the findings suggest that the amazing technologies of science
fiction may soon be the reality of our world!
As recently as 2004, physicists from Germany, China, and Austria published reports that sounded more like fantasy than a scientific experiment. In Nature, the scientists announced the first documented experiments of open-destination teleportation—that is, sending the quantum information about a particle (its energetic blueprint) to different locations at the same time.18 In other words, the process is like “faxing a document and in the process destroying the original.”19
Other experiments have demonstrated equally impossible-sounding feats, such as “beaming” particles from one place to another and bilocating. As different as each investigation sounds from the others, they all share a common denominator that implies an even greater story. For these experiments to work as they do, a medium must exist—in other words, there has to be something for the particles to move through. And herein lies what may be the greatest mystery of modern times, since conventional physics states that this medium doesn’t exist.
In 1997, scientific journals throughout the world published the results of something that traditional physicists say shouldn’t have happened. Reported to over 3,400 journalists, educators, scientists, and engineers in more than 40 countries, an experiment had been performed by the University of Geneva in Switzerland on the stuff that our world is made of—particles of light called photons—with results that continue to shake the foundation of conventional wisdom.20
