Precognition
and Reality Part 2
by Robert Pollack
I'm not sure if
it is in the original volume, "The Teachings of Don Juan" or in a
later book
of the same series but at some point Don Juan tells
Carlos Castaneda that we never get to the present, "we are always one jump
behind". This is a short-hand way
of saying that our sensory organs are constantly taking in input from our
environment, sending this information to the brain through our nervous
system, then the brain gives us a
picture of our environment, and the amount of time it takes to do this is
finite. I gave this a great deal of thought
and wondered what if the reason that we can never get to the present is that
the present doesn't exist?
The first
metaphor I came up with is that of a moving picture. Everyone knows on an intellectual level that
there are gaps between the frames that are imperceptible to the viewer. What if the universe is actually a series of
still pictures with minute gaps between them that are synchronized with our
brains in such a way we can't perceive them?
Then I came up with a somewhat better metaphor. Let's say that you had a searchlight and
every night you would turn it on and people would stop by and look at your
light. Then one day you call Cal Tech or
MIT or some other such place and you ask them to send over their best
engineer. Then you have him or her make
a switch that will turn your light on and off a hundred times a second. (This is a number I pulled "out of my
hat". Later on I will explain how
to determine the true "flicker rate" of the universe.) So that night people gather around to look at
your searchlight. And what do they
see? A continuous beam of light. The only people who know that they are really
looking at a pulsating beam of light are you and the engineer.
Since the two
beams of light look identical to any observer, the question is what difference
does it make? Our entire technological
civilization is based on our ability to compute certain quantities. Length, area, volume, velocity and
acceleration. (I may be incorrect but no
matter how abstruse the mathematics it still comes down to finding one of these
quantities). We think of all of these quantities
as continuous variables. If in fact, I
am correct and we live in a pulsating universe that is constantly re-creating
itself, then all these variables are discontinuous, phenomenological constructs that do not exist in reality.
Let me give a
couple examples.
A) You call a
carpenter and ask him to make a shelf for you.
He takes out his measuring device (laser pointer, yardstick, etc.) and
measures three feet. He finds a board
and measures off three feet. He puts up
the shelf and it fits perfectly. There
is only one problem. At the point in
time where the shelf would be exactly three feet long, the universe doesn't
exist. So rather than being an exact
measure, we have to think of the quantity of three feet as a limit. So the board is infinitely close to three
feet in length,
but not exactly three
feet long.
B) I am driving
down the highway in Virginia and
my speedometer says I am going eighty miles an hour and the officer who pulls
me over tells me his radar gun clocked me at eighty miles an hour. I patiently explain to him that I could not
have been going eighty miles an hour because at the point where I would have
been going exactly eighty miles an
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hour, the universe doesn't exist. In fact I was going at a speed infinitely
close to eighty miles but not exactly eighty miles per hour. (Of course if I had really said that I'd
probably still be locked up in Virginia ,
rather than writing this from my home in Vermont )
So now the
question is, "what difference does it make?" For all practical purposes, none
whatsoever. But there are two places
that I know of where it does make a difference.
I have read that
physicists know that electrons change orbits but have never been able to detect
an electron traveling between orbits.
This is because they don't travel between orbits. Let's say there is an atom with 20 electrons
in three orbits of eight, eight and four electrons. What happens is, is that the atom flickers
out of existence. When it flickers back
in, it knows that is has twenty electrons but doesn't care which orbit any
particular electron happens to occupy.
So the amount of time it takes an
electron to change orbits is equal to the amount of time it takes the atom
to flicker out of, and then back into
existence.
The second place
where it matters is the "speed" of light. The measured speed of light is 186,000 miles
per second squared. If I am correct this
is a phenomenological construct, just like any other velocity, and should be
thought of as a limit, rather than an absolute value. This means that in reality, the "speed
of light" does not exist. It is
just another limit. And as we pass
through the limit of eighty miles per hour to get to the limit of eighty-five
miles per hour, we can pass through this limit to some higher velocity. Thus star travel becomes a technological problem rather than a
violation of the laws of physics.
Astronomers are
fond of telling us that when we look at the night sky we are seeing light from
stars that existed billions of years ago and which may no longer exist. If I am correct, every star we see in the sky
exists right now and should a star cease to exist, it would immediately disappear.
Before
concluding I would like to say something about space travel. If you were to ask someone the distance from New
York to Chicago
they would probably say about 950 miles.
Whether you walk, ride a bicycle, drive or fly the distance would be
about the same. However, there is a way
to go from New York to Chicago
and only travel two hundred miles. You
can get in a rocket, fly straight up one hundred miles. Stop. Wait for the
Earth to rotate underneath you, and when Chicago
is right below, fly straight down one hundred miles. Now it is quite possible that it might take
months or even years before Chicago
is right underneath you. In the meantime
more distant places like Moscow or South
Africa might only take days to get to. I have the strong feeling that if we ever
attain the technology for star travel what we will find is that stars that
appear to be relatively close might be very difficult to get to while stars and
even galaxies that seem impossibly far away, may prove fairly easy to reach.
My final
thoughts are these. If I am correct, it would be one of the great ironies of
our age that all the "objective" concepts we use to manipulate and modify our
environment are phenomenological constructs which exist only in our brains
while those "subjective" constructs which we dismiss as existing only
in our brains, such as truth,
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justice, and beauty prove to exist in reality, independently of our perceptions of them.
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