BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  ness to an atomic nucleus equals that of a proton to a large city.

  Planes, like shadows upon a flat wall, which have the two dimen-

  sions of length and width.

  Solids such as spheres or cubes have three dimensions. An actual sphere or cube is sometimes said to require four dimensions because

  it continues to endure. That it persists and perhaps even changes

  means that something “else” besides the spatial coordinates is part

  of its existence, and we call this time. But is time an idea or an

  actuality?

  Scientifically, time appears to be indispensable in just one area—

  thermodynamics, whose second law has no meaning at all without

  the passage of time. Thermodynamics’ second law describes entropy

  (the process of going from greater to lesser structure, like the bot-

  tom of your clothes closet). Without time, entropy cannot happen or

  even make sense.

  Consider a glass containing club soda and ice cubes. At first,

  there is definite structure. Ice is separate from the liquid and so are

  the bubbles, and the ice and liquid have different temperatures. But

  return later and the ice has melted, the soda has gone flat, and the

  contents of the glass have merged into a structureless oneness. Bar-

  ring evaporation, no further change will occur.

  This evolution away from structure and activity toward same-

  ness, randomness, and inertness is entropy. The process pervades

  the universe. According to nearly all physicists, it will prevail cos-

  mologically in the long run. Today, we see individual hot spots like

  the Sun releasing heat and subatomic particles into their frigid envi-

  rons. The organization that now exists is slowly dissolving and this

  entropy, this overall loss of structure, is on the largest scales a one-

  way process .

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  In classical science, entropy does not make sense without a

  directionality of time because it is a non-reversible mechanism. In

  fact, entropy defines the arrow of time. Without entropy, time need

  not exist at all.

  But many physicists question this “conventional wisdom”

  regarding entropy. Instead of the act of structure-loss and disorga-

  nization representing a concrete directionality to time, it can just

  as well be seen as a demonstration of random action. Things move.

  Molecules move. They do so in the here-and-now. Their motions are

  haphazard. Before long, an observer will notice the dissipation of the

  previous organization. Why should they then assign arrows to it?

  Shouldn’t we regard such random entropy as an example of the non-

  essentiality or reality of time, rather than the other way around?

  Say we have a room full of oxygen, and an adjacent one filled

  with pure nitrogen. We open the door and come back a week

  later. Now we find two rooms, each with a well-mixed combina-

  tion of both gases. How shall we conceptualize what happened? The

  “entropy” view says that “over time” there was a loss of the original

  neat-and-tidy organization and we now have a mere randomization.

  It is not reversible. It demonstrates the one-way quality of time. But

  the other view is that the molecules just moved. Movement is not

  time. The natural result is a mixing. Simple. Anything else is just

  human imposition of what we consider to be order.

  Seen this way, the resultant entropy or loss of structure is only

  a loss in our own minds’ way of perceiving patterns and order. And

  boom, there goes science’s final need for time as an actual entity.

  Time’s reality or lack thereof is certainly an ancient debate. The

  actual answer may be mind-bendingly more complex because there

  may be many planes of physical reality, which, like even our purely

  subjective sense of time, may appear to operate on some levels (for

  example, biological life) but be nonexistent or irrelevant on others

  (for example, the quantum realm of the tiny). But the bottom line is

  always appear.

  As an interesting side note, physicists looking into the time issue

  in the past two or three decades have realized that just as all objects

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  must have shapes, if time existed it would need a direction of flow.

  This has given rise to the issue of an “arrow of time” that can alter its

  course. Even Stephen Hawking once believed that if and when the

  universe starts to contract, time would run backward. But he later

  changed his mind, as if to demonstrate the process. In any event,

  time running backward (though ultimately a non-starter) was not as

  screwy as it may have initially seemed.

  We protest because we think that it means effect would precede

  cause, which never can make sense. A serious car accident would

  become a macabre affair where injured people instantly heal without

  a blemish while their wrecked vehicle leapt back while uncrinkling

  and repairing itself seamlessly. This is not only ridiculous, it doesn’t

  accomplish any purpose, such as, in this case, instruction in the

  evils of using a cell phone while driving.

  The usual answer to this objection is that if time ran backward,

  everything including our own mental processes would operate in the

  same new direction as well, so we’d never notice anything amiss.

  Such endless unanswerables and seeming absurdities come to

  a blissful end, however, when time’s nature is seen for what it is—a

  biocentric fabrication, a biologic creation that is solely a practical

  operating aid in the mental circuitry of some living organisms, to

  help with specific functioning activities.

  To understand this, consider for a moment that you are watch-

  ing a film of an archery tournament, with Zeno’s arrow paradox in

  mind. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the

  arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly,

  the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at

  the image of an arrow in mid-flight, something you obviously could

  not do at a real tournament. The pause in the film enables you to

  know the position of the arrow with great accuracy—it’s just beyond

  the grandstand, twenty feet above the ground. But you have lost all

  information about its momentum. It is going nowhere; its velocity is

  zero. Its path, its trajectory, is no longer known. It is uncertain.

  To measure the position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock

  in on one static frame, to put the movie on “pause” so to speak.

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  Conversely, as soon as you observe momentum, you can’t isolate a

  frame—because momentum is the summation of many frames. You

  can’t know one and the other with complete accuracy. Sharpness in

  one parameter induces blurriness in the other. There is uncertainty

  as you home in, whether on motion or position.

  At first it was assumed that such uncertainty in quantum theory

  practice was due to some technological insufficiency on the part of

  the experimenter or his instruments, some lack of sophistication in
<
br />   the methodology. But it soon became apparent that the uncertainty

  is actually built into the fabric of reality. We see only that for which

  we are looking.

  Of course, all of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric

  perspective: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates

  events—the still frames—of the spatial world. The mind animates

  the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a

  series of still pictures—a series of spatial states—into an order, into

  the “current” of life. Motion is created in our minds by running “film

  cells” together. Remember that everything you perceive—even this

  page—is actively, repeatedly, being reconstructed inside your head.

  It’s happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the

  wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is

  an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could

  stop its “motor” for a moment, you’d get a freeze frame, just as the

  movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momen-

  tum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial

  states; the same thing measured with our scientific instruments is

  called momentum. Space can be defined as position, as locked in a

  single frame. Thus, movement through space is an oxymoron.

  Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position

  (location in space) belongs to the outer world and momentum (which

  involves the temporal component that adds together still “film cells”)

  belongs to the inner world. By penetrating to the bottom of matter,

  scientists have reduced the universe to its most basic logic, and time

  is simply not a feature of the external spatial world. “Contemporary

  science,” said Heisenberg, “today more than at any previous time,

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  has been forced by nature herself to pose again the old question of

  the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes, and to

  answer it in a slightly different way.”

  The metaphor of a strobe light might be helpful. Fast flashes of

  light isolate snapshots of rapidly moving things—like dancers in a

  disco. A dip, a split, a snap becomes a still pose. Motion is suspended.

  One still follows another still. In quantum mechanics, “position” is like a strobe snapshot. Momentum is the life-created summation of

  many frames.

  Spatial units are stagnant and there is no “stuff” between the

  units or frames. The weaving together of these frames occurs in the

  mind. San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge may have

  been the first to have unconsciously imitated this process. Just before

  the advent of movies, Muybridge successfully captured motion on

  film. In the late 1870s, he placed twenty-four still cameras on a race-

  track. As a horse galloped, it broke a series of strings, tripping the

  shutters of each successive camera. The horse’s gait was analyzed

  frame by frame as a series. The illusion of motion was the summa-

  tion of the still frames.

  Two and a half thousand years later, Zeno’s arrow paradox

  finally makes sense. The Eleatic School of philosophy, which Zeno

  brilliantly defended, was right. So was Werner Heisenberg when he

  said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There

  is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with

  definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into

  being depending upon the actions of the observer.

  Those that assume time to be an actual state of existence logi-

  cally muse that time travel should be valid as well—and some have

  misused quantum theory to make this case. Very few theoreticians

  take seriously the possibility of time travel or of other temporal

  dimensions existing in parallel with ours. Aside from the violations

  of known physical law, there’s this little detail: if time travel were

  ever possible, so that people could journey into the past, then—

  where are they? We’ve never been faced with tales of unexplained

  people arriving from the future.

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  Even time’s seeming rate of passage varies in perception and def-

  initely alters in actuality. We point telescopes to places where we can

  see a more lethargic unfolding of time à la relativity, and also observe places as they existed billions of years ago. Time’s makeup seems as

  strange and elusive as that of sausages.

  Let’s try to clarify one common alteration in the passage of time

  with a simple thought experiment. Pretend you’re blasting off from

  Earth, looking out your rocket’s rear-facing window, telescopically

  observing the people near the launch pad who are applauding the

  successful liftoff. Each moment you are farther from them, so each

  moment their images have a longer distance to travel to your eyes

  and are therefore delayed, arriving significantly later than the last

  “frame” of the movie. Result: everything appears in slow motion,

  their applause dishearteningly lukewarm. Nothing speeding away

  from us can fail to appear in slow motion. And because nearly every-

  thing in the universe is receding, we’re peering at the heavens in a dreamy kind of mandatory time-lapse photography; the unfolding of

  nearly all cosmic events takes place in a false time frame.

  This was exactly how the speed of light was discovered, by a

  Norwegian named Ole Roemer, more than two centuries ago. He

  noticed that the moons of Jupiter slowed down for half the year, and,

  realizing that Earth was then moving away from them in our orbit

  around the Sun, was able to calculate lightspeed to within 25 percent

  of its true value. Conversely, those satellites would seem to speed up

  for the other six months, just as inhabitants of an alien world would

  go about their business at an accelerated fast-forward, Charlie Chap-

  lin pace as viewed by approaching astronauts.

  Superimposed on these illusory yet nonetheless inescapable dis-

  tortions is the actual slowdown of time at high speeds or in stronger

  gravitational fields. This is not merely something we can shrug off

  with facile rationalizations, like an errant spouse’s late homecoming.

  This zooms to the far end of peculiar.

  This time dilation effect is minor until one nears the speed of light, then it becomes awesome. At 98 percent of lightspeed, time travels at

  half its normal speed. At 99 percent, it goes just one-seventh as fast.

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  And we know this is true; it’s real, not hypothetical. For example,

  when air molecules high in our atmosphere get clobbered by cosmic

  rays, they smash apart like the breaking of a stack of billiard balls,

  their innards spewing earthward at nearly the speed of light. Some

  of these subatomic bullets pierce our bodies, where they can strike

  genetic material and even cause illness.

  But they oughtn’t to be able to reach us and do such villainy;

  this atomic material is so short-lived that these muons normally

  decay harmlessly in a millionth of a second�
�too quickly to be able

  to travel all the way to Earth’s surface. They manage to reach us only

  because their time has been slowed by their fast speed; an extended

  fantasy world of false time allows them to enter our bodies. So rel-

  ativistic effects are far from hypothetical; they have often brought

  poisoned offerings of death and disease.

  Travel in a rocket at 99 percent the speed of light and you’ll

  enjoy the consequential sevenfold time dilation: from your perspec-

  tive nothing has changed; you have aged a decade in ten years’ worth

  of travel. But upon returning to Earth you’d find that seventy years

  have passed and none of your old friends are still alive to greet you.

  (For the famous formula that lets you calculate the slowdown of time

  at any speed you care to consider, see the Lorentz transformation in

  Appendix 1.)

  Then the truth rather than the theory will have hit home: ten

  years can really pass for you and the rest of the crew, while at the

  same time seven decades elapse back on Earth. Abstract arguments

  then fail. Here a human lifetime has elapsed while there it’s only

  been a decade.

  You might try complaining that time is supposed to have no pre-

  ferred state—how, then, can nature determine who should age faster

  or slower? In a universe without privileged positions, couldn’t you

  claim to have been stationary while the Earth moved away and then

  came back? Why shouldn’t Earth’s inhabitants be the ones who aged

  more slowly? Physics provides the answer.

  You were the one who has lived longer, therefore the answer

  must lie with you. And it does: it was you who felt the acceleration

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  and deceleration forces of the trip. So you cannot deny that it was

  you and not Earth that made the voyage. Any paradox is nipped in

  the bud; the one who made the trip also knows who should experi-

  ence the slowing of time.

  Einstein taught us that time not only mutates, performing its

  own unique rite of passage by varying its rate of passage, but dis-

  tance contracts as well—a totally unexpected phenomenon. Some-

  one zipping toward the galaxy’s center at 99.999999999 percent of

  lightspeed experiences a dilation effect of 22,360. While this per-

  son’s watch ticks off one year, simultaneously, 223 centuries elapse

  for everyone else. The roundtrip involves a mere investment of two