The Forbidden Universe (43 page)

The idea was given a dry run with the television coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral in August 1997, which obviously had the advantage of being both global and live. Using twelve REGs, they found deviations of 100 to 1 against chance in their output. Cannily, they used Mother Teresa’s
funeral a few days later as control. This was also broadcast live, but the peaceful death of an old lady, however much respected, carried little of the raw emotion associated with the demise of a glamorous young princess and mother in horrifying circumstances. This time they found no effect.

Encouraged by these preliminary results, the Global Consciousness Project was created in 1998, funded by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where Radin is a senior researcher, and headed by Roger Nelson of Princeton University. The Institute of Noetic Sciences is the
California-based
research institute founded in the 1970s by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. (‘Noetics’ comes from the Greek
nous
, the faculty of ‘inner knowing’, which has no exact equivalent in English. The word is liberally sprinkled throughout the Hermetic texts.)

There is now a network of some 65 REGs – nicknamed ‘eggs’– located all over the world, from large American cities to remote Pacific islands, connected by the Internet. All the REGs do is continually churn out their counts, one per second, day in, day out. The data from each egg is downloaded every five minutes to a server in Princeton, which is accessible to any interested party. The results are then analysed for periods of non-randomness, either from individual or all eggs, which are then compared to world events. Conversely, when major news events occur, the REG data is examined for signs of non-randomness.

One of the most elegant aspects of this set-up is that because the data from all the eggs has to be grouped together, put through a series of statistical analyses and then plotted on graphs before any anomalies can be noticed, it isn’t readily apparent just from the streams of numbers that anything interesting has happened. The analysts can’t bias the results even by subconscious selection of the data. Dates and times of all the major global events – both
pre-planned such as sporting fixtures and awards
ceremonies
or random occurrences like major disasters – which happen within a particular period can be listed from an independent source such as the annual review of a news service. The data from the eggs during that period can be analysed independently, and then the two compared for correlations. And the calculations can be checked on request.

The results have been unequivocal. The periods of anomalous non-random output coincide with times of major global events. Dean Radin demonstrated this most vividly in 2001, when the REGs’ output deviated from pure chance many times, but one day above all stood out for the sheer size of the deviation … 11 September, when the eyes of a horror-struck world were riveted on television footage of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers and its sickening traumatic aftermath. Likening the sharp peaks and troughs on the graph to the ringing of a bell, Radin wrote that, ‘in metaphorical terms, our bell rang more loudly on this day than any other day in 2001’.
²⁵

Even more compelling evidence that the REGs were measuring something real came from a more detailed analysis showing that it wasn’t just the amalgamated data from all the eggs that ‘rang the bells’; all the individual eggs around the world rang that day. As Radin declared: ‘
Something
, perhaps changes in mass attention, caused the random data to behave in a dramatically non-random way on 9/11, whereas it behaved normally on other days’.
²⁶

Inevitably, critics claim that the apparently striking results of the Global Consciousness Project are due to methodological flaws in analyzing the data. But given the sheer amount of accumulated information from the last decade, it is hard to see the results as demonstrating
anything
other than a real effect. Human consciousness really does seem to have a tangible effect on the material world.

So given the enormous implications, why isn’t this ‘global coherence effect’ much more widely known? Probably because to non-scientists its significance might be hard to grasp and even seem rather dull. After all, this is not exactly moving mountains by the power of mind alone. The experiments show that the focused attention of millions of people is needed to cause just tiny fluctuations in a few REGs – which is not even in the same league as one dramatic spoon-bending.

What exactly do these results tell us? The Global Consciousness Project team use them to support the idea of the evolution of a planetary consciousness – the noosphere, a term borrowed from Teilhard de Chardin. However, that may be extrapolating way too much from the current data. It is true that such an effect is exactly what Teilhard and others would have predicted, and it may indeed turn out to be a sign of the emergence of a global consciousness. But right now the evidence simply doesn’t stretch that far.

What can be said at the moment is that the network of REGs is not being
deliberately
influenced by the massed minds of the people on the planet, only a relative handful of whom even know it exists. The REGs can only be
registering
a side-effect of something else, something that people are unaware of doing. And the effect can’t be confined to the REGs; if their output is less random, the effect can only be because all and any random processes are being smoothed out in some way. When a large number of people pay attention to the same thing, for some as yet unknown reason the world becomes more ordered, particularly at the quantum level where randomness and unpredictability rule. It is not even deliberate; it just seems to be the effect that consciousness creates, simply by existing.

Perhaps what is even weirder is that this is also the thinking of certain top physicists, who propose that consciousness – human or otherwise – is literally what
keeps the universe in place. And even that consciousness created the universe in the first place.

We all know the world of quantum mechanics is
head-spinningly
weird, but it does have a clear relevance to our understanding of life, the universe, everything – and humanity’s role in all of it. And despite the implications of quantum theory being so left-field that even Einstein had problems with it, it does provide some potential clues in our search for the mind of God – or, indeed, our Great Universal Designer, GUD.

Einstein clashed, albeit in a friendly fashion, with Neils Bohr, the great champion of quantum theory, in a debate that went on for nearly thirty years. John Archibald Wheeler, who studied under both luminaries, wrote in his autobiography:

One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum mechanics is that it recognizes an intimate relationship between the mind of an observer and what happens at the quantum level. It is really just a question of how deep the relationship goes.

The classic example comes from the famous ‘
wave-particle
duality’ conundrum, the recognition that subatomic particles (in most experiments photons, the particles of
light, but it applies to all of them) sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves. Richard Feynman called the enigma ‘the mystery which cannot go away’.
²⁸

The classic demonstration of wave-particle duality is the renowned ‘double slit’ experiment, the earliest version being carried out as long ago as 1803, by the woefully
little-known
English polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829). The scientist, physician, philologist and Egyptologist disproved the prevailing view, established by Newton, that light was made up of particles, by demonstrating it was really  a wave. By shining a single beam of light through two narrow slits onto a screen, Young showed that bands of light and dark appeared. Such interference patterns are only explicable if light moves in waves: the light passes through both slits and, just like water in similar circumstances, the two waves emerging from each slit either cancel each other out or reinforce each other to produce the interference pattern.

However, when quantum theory came along a century later, physicists realized that light ought to be made up of particles after all. Young’s interference patterns were not initially too much of a problem, since photons en masse could work in waves, just as sand can be made to ripple in a wave-like fashion. The real difficulties began when even just a single photon at a time was fired at the screen and the same interference patterns built up.

The results were totally counter-intuitive. If one slit is closed and a beam of light shone through the other then – as expected – just a single sharp line appears on the screen. If the slit is closed and the other opened, then again a single line appears in a different place on the screen. But if both slits are open at the same time, you get the interference patterns – even when just a single photon is involved. The photon seems to be interfering with itself, so to speak. As Paul Davies comments: ‘It’s almost as if the photon can be in two places at once, that is pass through both slits.’
²⁹

It gets odder. The outcome – whether light behaves as a wave or particle – depends on how the photon is detected after passing through the slits. When a light-sensitive screen such as a photographic plate is used, the interference patterns typical of a wave appear. If two telescopes or similar devices are instead trained separately on each slit, then every individual photon will be detected by only one device, showing that the particle had, as expected, passed through only one slit. But as the method of detection is chosen by the experimenter, in a sense the observer decides how he or she wants the particle to behave.

There is a more subtle but enormously significant
implication
. The difference between the two outcomes reflects the difference in the experimenter’s knowledge. When a light-sensitive screen is used to detect a photon, the experimenter has no way of telling which slit it has passed through, so it appears as if it has passed through both, giving a wave-like effect. With telescopes the experimenter
can
tell which slit the photon went through and the photon therefore obligingly acts like the particle it is supposed to be. In other words, it is not just the outcome of the
experiment
, but the behaviour of the particle itself that seems to depend on what the observer knows – almost as if it depends on the physicist to give it form. When he or she has specific information, the particle behaves specifically; when they have only vague information, the particle behaves vaguely, as if nobody had told it exactly what to do.

In the 1950s Richard Feynman came up with an
interpretation
of the double-slit experiment based on quantum mechanics that may seem bizarre – even for this strangest of disciplines – but which fits both its theory and practice. According to his interpretation a photon does not take a single path towards the target, but
simultaneously
takes every possible path – it really does go through both slits. The
potential paths of the particle represent a series of probabilities, or possibilities, known as a ‘wave function’. It is only when the particle is observed that the wave function ‘collapses’ and the particle takes on a definite position and path. As John Archibald Wheeler, who taught Feynman, explains (his emphasis): ‘Each photon is governed by laws of probability and behaves like a cloud
until it is detected
… The act of measurement is the transforming act that collapses uncertainty into certainty.’
³⁰
Put another way, until it is measured the photon ‘remains an ethereal cloud of probability precisely because it is unobserved’.
³¹

If this is correct it would apply to every particle in the universe, and to every property of every particle. They are all wave functions, waiting to receive specific values by being observed. Of course this doesn’t mean physicists have a special power that makes subatomic particles submit to their will. What the double-slit experiment and others reveal is the existence of an intimate, and positively spooky, connection between
anyone’s
mind and any matter in the universe.

John Archibald Wheeler (1926–2008) proposed the most
far-reaching
interpretation of the observer effect. One of the giants of theoretical physics, Wheeler studied under Neils Bohr and Einstein. During the 1930s he worked with Bohr and Enrico Fermi on the theory behind the atomic bomb before then moving on to work on the wartime Manhattan Project. He coined the terms ‘black hole’ (the existence of which he predicted theoretically) and ‘wormhole’. In the 1979
New York Review of Books
, the mathematician Martin Gardner wrote of Wheeler: