Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (26 page)

It leaves us with only two things:
time
and
substance
. If we turn inward to examine the content of our consciousness, we see that
space is not a necessary part of the equation. It is meaningless to claim that our consciousness has any physical extent of its own. We know that our state of consciousness changes (otherwise, thought would not be fleeting), so it makes sense to propose the appearance of time, because change is what we normally construe as time.

From a physical standpoint, the substance of consciousness must be the same as the substance of external reality, which is to say the grand unified field and its various low-energy incarnations. One of these incarnations is the vacuum field, because truly “empty space” has now been relegated to the compost heap of science history.

In addition, we may propose the existence of light or, more generally speaking, a persistent, self-propagating change in the grand unified field. From this point forward, to simplify the language of this discussion, we’ll simply refer to the grand unified field as
field
. The term
light
should be taken to include all massless, self-propagating disturbances of this field.

Einstein spoke of light and space. We may start with light and time with equal validity; the first proposition, after all, is simply a statement that space and time are related to each other through a fundamental constant of nature, the speed of light. Thus, if we propose the existence of a field and light propagating through the field, we can recover a definition of space that does not depend in any way on physical, rigid rods. Einstein uses this definition himself frequently in his work:
where
t
is the time required for a light pulse emitted by the observer to reflect off an object and return to the observer. In this case,
c
is just a fundamental property of the field that must eventually be measured; it need not be given any physical units as yet. Rather, we rely on the idea that the field has a constant property related to the propagation of light that introduces a delay in the propagation of light from one part of the field to another.
Distance
is thus defined simply as a linear function of the delay.

This definition is only practical, of course, if the observer and the object are not in relative motion. Fortunately, the state of rest can be defined easily enough by insisting that a sequence of distance measurements by this method be statistically constant. If we presume a configuration of the field with at least one observer and several objects (which are also composed of field, naturally), then the observer may define a spatial coordinate system as follows:

So we see that Einstein’s first postulate may be sensibly replaced by the following statements:

Note that this construction of distance does not require any
a priori
assumption of space. We merely assume the existence of field and that certain parts of it may be distinct from other parts. In other
words, we assume the existence of multiple entities in (and of) the field that may communicate by means of light (which is also a property of the field).

The second cornerstone of special relativity is the idea of inertial motion. Now that the concepts of spatial coordinates and velocities have been deduced from the assumptions of field and light, it is straightforward to define inertial motion as a property of the relationship between two entities (the observer and some external object). An object is in inertial motion with respect to an observer if its time delay is a linear function of time, that is:

We are discussing two different measures of time here: the distance is defined by the time delay Δ
t
, while
t
is the total time elapsed since beginning the measurement process. It is interesting to note that the distance
d
and speed
v
of an object can only be properly defined by a series of
discrete
measurements of time delay.

The demand that the laws of physics be identical for all inertial observers is equivalent to the requirement that the field be Lorentz invariant. There are a number of ways of expressing this, but the simplest is to define the space-time interval Δs:

The deltas are somewhat pedantic because every observer naturally defines his or her own position as zero under this system.

The invariance of Δs may be thought of as the demand that multiple observers agree on the properties of the field and external reality. To complete special relativity, it suffices to show that two observers can agree on Δs regardless of their relationship, provided that each is in inertial motion with respect to the other.

From this point, all the well-known results of special relativity follow. The end result is that we have shown that special relativity
does not require the concept of rigid, objective space to function; if we start with the presumption of a unified field, then it is enough to propose that disturbances in the field provide a self-consistent relationship between its various parts.

It may seem a pointless exercise to take space out of the postulates in this manner; after all, distance is a very intuitive concept while quantum fields are not. Consciousness clearly has a natural tendency to interpret the relationships between itself and other entities in terms of space, and no one can argue against the practical advantages of this construction. However, as indicated in the introduction, the mathematical abstraction of space has been falling short in modern theories. In the effort to force general relativity and quantum field theory together, space has been multiplying and compacting, quantizing and even disintegrating altogether. Empty space, once considered a triumph of experimental science (and ironically, one of the great results supporting special relativity), now looks like a misconception unique to twentieth-century science.

The question may arise as to the dynamic mechanism of compensatory phenomena. Looking at the structure of matter, we know that electrons orbit atomic nuclei thousands of trillions of times per second, and that nuclear particles spin about billions of trillions of times per second within the nucleus. We also now know that the nuclear particles themselves are made up of smaller particles called quarks. To date, physicists have peeled through five levels of matter—the molecular, atomic, nuclear, hadronic, and quark level. And although there are some scientists who think that the series may stop here, it is just conceivable that as the particles get smaller and smaller, and spin more rapidly, matter dissolves away into the motion of energy. In fact, evidence suggests that there may be structure within quarks themselves—structure that had, until now, been presumed not to exist.

Poincaré hinted that the explanation may be contained in the dynamics of this structure. The odd effects of motion on measuring rods and clocks follows logically from the fact that matter consists of energy moving about in a multiplicity of configurations, particles orbiting within particles; and because energy is invariable in its velocity (that is, light velocity), such composite
structures cannot change their speed without changes first occurring in the object’s internal configuration. Poincaré and Lorentz were right: measuring bodies and clocks are not rigid. They really do contract, and the amount of this contraction must increase with the rate of motion.

Consider an object accelerated to the speed of light. We see at once that it can only reach this speed if its internal energy travels along a straight line. Mechanically this is achieved by foreshortening, for the more an object shortens, the lesser the fraction of motion “tied up” in internal movements along the axis of the object’s motion. Hence, at the speed of light, the components of a clock cannot be viewed as moving with respect to one another. A clock cannot engage in the dance of timekeeping. Timekeeping must stop. The construction of a simple right-angled triangle, plus an equally simple use of Pythagoras bears this out: if there were any movements within the clock, its components will have traveled through space faster than the speed of light. It also follows that mass varies in proportion to the foreshortening fraction, for as Lorentz has shown, the mass of such a particle such as an electron is inversely proportional to its radius (or volume variation). Indeed, all of these changes can with but little difficulty—using high-school level mathematics—be shown to vary in accordance with the equations of Lorentz and Poincaré, the equations that embodied in the whole theory of special relativity.

Thus, space and time can be easily restored to their place as forms of animal-sense perception. They belong to us, not to the physical world. “If,” wrote Emerson, “we measure our individual forces against hers [Nature’s], we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us in their highest form.”

Advaita Vedānta

Alpha, as constant

Anthropic principle

Aristotle

Bacon, Francis

Baryon

Bell, John

Bell’s theorem

Berkeley, George

Big Bang

Biocentrism

1
^st
principle of

2
^nd
principle of

3
^rd
principle of

4
^th
principle of

5
^th
principle of

6
^th
principle of

7
^th
principle of

And the cosmos

And eastern religions

And fundamental questions

And space

Future tests of

Logical limits of

Biswas, Tarun

Born, Max

Cambrian sea

Carbon

Casimir effect

Chalmers, David

Complementarity

Consciousness

Constants, table of

Copenhagen interpretation (of quantum theory)

Dark energy

Dark matter

Darwin, Charles

Decartes, René

Dennett, Daniel

Dicke, Robert

Dimensions

DNA

Double-slit experiment:
see
two-slit experiment

Einstein, Albert

And EPR correlations

And free will

And locality

And quantum theory

And relativity

And space-time

Eiseley, Loren

Electricity

Electromagnetic energy

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Entropy

EPR correlations

Extra dimensions

Feynmann, Richard

Field and Stream
magazine

Filippenko, Alex

Four forces, the

Gisin, Nicholas

God

Goldilocks principle

Grand Unified Theory (also Theory of Everything)

Gravitational force

Gravity

Haldane, John

Harvard University

Hawking, Stephen

Heisenberg, Werner

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

Heraclitus

Herschel, William

Hoffman, Paul

Hoyle, Fred

Hubble, Edwin

Hume, David

Inflation

Intelligent design

Interference pattern

KHCO
₃

Kuffler, Stephen

Language

Limitations of

Leslie, John

Libet, Benjamin

Light

And color

Behavior of in double-slit experiment

Perception of

Polarized

Nature of

Speed of

Linde, Andrei

Locality

Lorentz, Hendrik

Lorentz Transformation

Luria, Salvador

Magnetism

Many worlds interpretation (MWI)

Mars

Michelson, Albert

MIT

Morley, Edward

Muybridge, Eadweard