Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Time
September 2003
by Professor Alek Samarin
When I see a person (and even perceive an object by touch, smell, etc.), I seem to recognise various manifestations of a human being, but in reality I perceive a cloud of atoms and sub-atomic particles, which in themselves only come into being as a result of our consciousness, as, for example, seen by a theoretical physicist David Bohm [Ref. Quantum Implications in Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order, Edited by Hiley and Peat, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987 ; also Ref. Karl Pribram “Languages of the Brain”, Wadsworth Publishing, Calif., 1977].
Also quoting from Carlos Castaneda: ”Tales of Power”, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1974, page 100: “We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description [and I would call it a deception – A.S.] that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime”.
And another quotation from Michael Talbot: “The Holographic Universe”, Grafton Books, London, 1991, (page 46) : “ One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world…”, and (page 47): “The constant and flowing exchange between the two orders explains how particles, such as electron in the positronium atom, can shape-shift from one kind of particle to another…” “..It also explains how a quantum can manifest as either a particle or a wave…”, and (page 54): “For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is ‘out there’ is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world…. , (page 55): “According to Pribram this does not mean that there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? ‘Both are real to me’, says Pribram, ’or, if you want to say, neither of them are real'”.
Time is an integral part of the stationary Time-Space Continuum. What we perceive as a “movement of time” is in reality a movement of various physical, mental etc. processes in time (or more correctly in the Time-Space). We perceive this movement in a form of a swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock, or as the vibration of atoms in a caesium atomic clock, in the planetary movements or in the firing of nerve impulses and in the extremely complex processes occurring in our brain.
This is how our notion or our illusion of what we perceive as the “rate of flow of time” is created. Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel in his book: ”Man, the Unknown”, Penguin Books, N.Y., 1948, distinguishes manifestations of time as physical, inner, intrinsic, physiological and psychological. It is, of course, not the time which is altered, but the various courses of events which move through the stationary time at different rates. This phenomenon is particularly dramatic in the so called Near Death Experiences, such as reported by Drs. E. Kubler-Ross, R.A. Moody and K. Ring, among many others. In the state of clinical death, the condition which Germans call scheintod, some patients apparently experience total recall of their entire lives in, as they describe it, “an instant”. Quoting from Kenneth Ring, “Life at Death - a Scientific Iinvestigations of the Near-Death Experiences”, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, N.Y., 1980, (page 245): “In this state, there is no time, there is an immediate perception of the past, present and future as if on the present moment”. To me it is apparent, that it is not the ‘rate of flow of time’ that has changed, but the ‘rate of a person’s mental progression through time’.
Thus, in the Time-Space Continuum we move through time, just as we move through space, but of course in one direction only. The past, the time which we have journeyed through no longer exists for us. It is in deaths hands. The future may or may not happen, as we ourselves may no longer exist, without any precognition as to when and how it is likely to happen. But happen it surely will. And the present, that instant moment of transition from the not yet existing (and possibly not ever existing) future to the non-existing past only manifests itself as a fiction. For as soon as we can think of this illusive, ever sliding from the future into the past moment, by stating: “Now!” - it is already gone, lost forever in the past. That, which we are attempting to catch as “present” is always instantly disappearing in the “past”. It is apparent to me, that in reality there exists neither the past, nor the future for us, and the present is intangible, illusive, continuously melting into the past. People say: “time goes”. But in reality “Time stays – we go”!
Aleksander Samarin 2nd December 2006 12:00 PM
Personal perception of the Space-Time Continuum
by Professor Aleksander Samarin, FTSE
17th of October 2006
“Das Pergament, ist das der heilge Bronnen,
Woraus ein Trunk den Drust auf ewig stellt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Selle quillt”.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)
The essence of the above stanza I translated into English thus: -
“Old parchments do not quell the thirst for inspiration,
The key to knowledge is not in modern wit,
For those who seek esprit of comprehension
In own intellect shall find self-conceit”. A. S.
Equations of the classical (Newtonian) physics do not have a preferential, specific direction of progression in time; they work – be it only in theory – as well for a process moving backwards through time, as they do for those sequences which move forwards in time.
The first exception to this rule was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as it was formulated by Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906) in 1877. This law is statistically based, and states that there is an extremely high degree of probability that the entropy (or the degree of disorder) of a system will increase, as the duration of the process increases. For example: rust does not convert spontaneously into pure metal, broken cap does not mend itself on its own accord, etc., etc.
Thus, in practice, the increase in entropy will almost without exception proceed forwards in time.
The mathematical foundation of the Theory of Relativity was formulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864 – 1909) in his treatise “Raum und Zeit” in 1907. Minkowski was Einstein’s teacher of mathematics at the University in Zürich and thus was able to assist Einstein in the mathematical expressions of the physical concepts of the Theory of Relativity.
Quoting from his “Raum und Zeit” (“Space and Time”): “Von Stund an sollen Raum für sich und Zeit für sich völlig zu Schatten herabsinken, und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit hewahren”, i.e. “From now on the Space by itself and Time by itself must become unreal (literally – ‘be immersed into shade’) and only some form of their unity can retain the right to exist”.
It is obvious to me therefore, that any process, such as the movements of matter or energy, which can be manifested either as velocity and acceleration, or as physical, chemical and biological change, or as a mental activity of the brain, must progress for certain duration in the space-time continuum. These actions therefore are the events which reveal themselves merely as a process in time, and not as a movement, a “flow” of time!
The main difficulty I have with the concept of “flowing” time is as follows – if we say that something moves, the deduction is that it moves relatively to something else. But what is this something else that time is supposed to move relative to?
On the other hand, movements in space and time are easier for me to perceive. For example, I can see that something moves through space if it varies in the spatial position in time. It seems then that if something moves through time, by analogy, it must vary in its temporal position in space. However, accepting the Minkowski’s concept of the indivisibility of space-time, I would conclude that if something moves in time then it varies in its temporal position in the space-time continuum.
Duration of a given process in time can be measured by a clock. Originally clocks were designed to match a uniform, periodical astronomical process, such as movements of the planets in our solar system. In the twentieth century these devices were replaced for scientific measurements by the more reliable atomic clocks, the workings of which were based on the extremely uniform process – on the frequencies at which atoms absorb radiation.
For a caesium atom this process in time corresponds to the frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hz, with the estimated variation of less that one part in ten billion. Even more accurate than the caesium clock is the hydrogen master clock, estimated to measure the rate at which hydrogen atoms absorb radiation to the accuracy of one second in 1,700,000 years.
The Michelson-Morley experiments in the 1880-s had challenged the suppositions of the addition or subtraction of all relative motions professed in classical physics, by proving that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative movements.
These developments led to the concept of space contraction, first proposed by the Irish physicist George FitzGerald (1851 – 1901) in 1889, and then independently developed and extended by Hendrik Lorentz (1853 – 1928) of the Netherlands in 1904. His mathematical formulae, known as the Lorentz transformations describe the increase in mass, shortening of length and of the dilation of a process in time (the latter terminology is mine) that are the feature of a moving body, but only apparent and experimentally quantifiable at the extremely high velocities.
The Lorentz transformations were subsequently employed by Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity, stating that the speed of light is indeed a universal constant, and that the relative motions of different observers result in, what he called the time dilation. As mentioned before, my perception of this phenomenon is that it represents the dilation of a process in time, and not the dilation of time.
For example, two atomic clocks, one of which is left on Earth and the other placed on the space-rocket traveling at a very high velocity, will record different rates of frequencies, or different rates of a process in space-time. The clock on the rocket will record the dilation of frequencies resulting in the difference between the recorded period in time on Earth and on the spaceship. Should there be an astronaut on the spaceship, his or her aging process will be slower relative to that of all the humanity on Earth.
I am convinced that all living creatures were able to develop in the process of evolution two types, of what I call, intrinsic clocks. These inherent clocks can be classified as physiological and psychological. In human species they correspond to our attainment of the rates of physiological changes, and to our awareness of the rates of psychological processes, which we experience while we are in the states of consciousness of our existence.
The rate of aging process (as was shown above in the space-travel example) is relative. Chronological age does not always correspond to the rate of the physiological ageing. Classical example of this phenomenon is progeria – human disorder with all the characteristics of premature aging process. It is an autosomal recessive condition (humans have 22 pairs of autosoms, involved in transmitting all generic traits and conditions, other than those that are sex-related), with the first symptoms generally appearing in children between 18 and 24 months of age. The condition manifests itself by the limited growth, alopecia (partial or complete lack of hair) and then with the development of arthrosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases. Children become gray-haired, with wrinkled skin, and usually die around thirteen, fourteen years of age.
Our psychological clock becomes evident first of all in our perceptions of the durations of pleasant in opposition to unpleasant events. For example, waiting in pain and discomfort in a crowded hospital emergency room may seem as a never ending experience. Tedious tasks appear to drag on and on ad nauseaum. There is an old saying: “Watched kettle never boils”. By contrast, all our pleasant experiences are usually over, just as we begin to enjoy them.
The psychological clock also changes its rate, as we get older. For a child the process of waiting for a birthday celebration is long and anxious experience. At the old age, as we grow to be older and older, birthdays seem to come and go at an alarmingly faster and faster rate.
The functions of intrinsic clocks are particularly impressive in the mental activities of human brain during the so-called near-death experience, or NDE. The phenomenology of NDE is complex, and usually includes not only physiological, but also psychological and transcendental categories. Most clinically dead patients, who were subsequently returned back to life, often experience such subjective impressions, as being outside the physical body (out-of-body experiences), transcendence of ego, and other similar transcendental occurrences.
One very frequent near-death experience is the rerun of a very large part of life events. For the medical personnel attending the patient in the state of NDE this event (for example the absence of a pulse) usually lasts not more that a minute or two, but for the clinically dead person the process of his or her life review must be of a relatively exceedingly long duration, which to me indicates an extremely fast progression of mental activities in time.
Scientific research into NDE comes from the disciplines of medicine, psychology and psychiatry. Some see this phenomenon as an afterlife experience. Others believe that it may be caused by a flood of endorphins (the neuropeptides composed of many amino acids and acting on the central and the peripheral nervous system to reduce pain) to the part of the brain associated with emotions. Yet others think that falling oxygen levels at NDE might cause electrical discharges in the hippocampal fissure and in this way affect the temporal lobe, associated with memory, and consequently cause the recall of life events. There are many other possible explanations, all of which are beyond the definitive experimental verification.
For me the important aspect of the life review occurrence, regardless of whether it is material or transcendental episode, is that it represents an extremely rapid mental process in the space-time continuum, as opposed to the “standard clock rate” of this event for all the medical personnel or anyone else, for that matter, who is observing the patient.
However, the most definitive verification of my personal perception of the Space-Time Continuum most likely originates in the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, or QED. The theory of QED, which represents a functional integral formulation of Quantum Mechanics, was developed by Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988), an achievement for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Feynman developed a way to characterize the behavior of subatomic particles, using pictorial tools, known as Feynman diagrams. In the graphical representation of calculations in the quantum field theory the lines represent interacting particles, and the mathematical terms correspond to each line as well as vortex – the meeting of the lines.
The four dimensional Minkowski’s space is characterized in the Feynman diagrams by the Cartesian coordinates. The three dimensional space is “compressed” into an abscissa (the horizontal direction) and time is shown as an ordinate (vertical direction). Feynman diagrams can be visualized as a kind of “bookkeeping device”, which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in the space-time, particularly the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts – positrons.
Feynman was an enthusiastic and very prominent promoter of his inimitable view of QED. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” are perhaps one of his most forceful and yet accessible dissertations for anyone with the interest in this subject. Feynman’s views on Quantum Physics, based on the above lectures were published in 1990 by “Penguin Books” under the title: “QED – the Strange Theory of Light and Matter”.
Following is just one extract from this publication: Figure 63 on page 97:
In the example © Feynman writes, and I quote: “… the electron emits a photon, rushes backwards in time to absorb a photon, and then continues forwards in time”.
This “strange but real possibility” of a process moving backwards in space-time continuum was subsequently explored by Feynman with his former Professor of
of physics at the University of Texas at Austin – John Archibald Wheeler. Together they developed a theory of electrodynamics based on waves traveling forwards and backwards in the space-time continuum.
In my opinion, not only this theory contradicts the concept of the “flow of time”, but it also opens up the notion of retro-causality. Obviously, future is unlikely, at least on the macro scale, to directly influence the past. However, there is a possibility that retro-causality may have resulted in the fundamental laws governing the Universe “fine tuning themselves”, by the flow of information back through the space-time continuum, since the creation of space-time, energy and matter in the event known as the “Big Bang”.
It also provides an interesting review of the possibilities and the fundamental nature of some aspects of parapsychology, and particularly those of precognition and clairvoyance. It may even justify some of the much criticized scientific research in parapsychology by such eminent psychologists as William James (1842 – 1910), and particularly the concepts of Joseph Banks Rhine (1895 – 1980).
However, in my view, the problem with precognition and clairvoyance is that there are too many charlatans, who make a living from this profession, by preying on people in anguish and distress. I clearly remember a notice in one of the local newspapers by the clairvoyant society, which shall remain anonymous. The note contained the following message: “The XYZ Clairvoyance Society informs its members that the next meeting is called off due to the unforeseen circumstances”.
September 2003
by Professor Alek Samarin
When I see a person (and even perceive an object by touch, smell, etc.), I seem to recognise various manifestations of a human being, but in reality I perceive a cloud of atoms and sub-atomic particles, which in themselves only come into being as a result of our consciousness, as, for example, seen by a theoretical physicist David Bohm [Ref. Quantum Implications in Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order, Edited by Hiley and Peat, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987 ; also Ref. Karl Pribram “Languages of the Brain”, Wadsworth Publishing, Calif., 1977].
Also quoting from Carlos Castaneda: ”Tales of Power”, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1974, page 100: “We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description [and I would call it a deception – A.S.] that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime”.
And another quotation from Michael Talbot: “The Holographic Universe”, Grafton Books, London, 1991, (page 46) : “ One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world…”, and (page 47): “The constant and flowing exchange between the two orders explains how particles, such as electron in the positronium atom, can shape-shift from one kind of particle to another…” “..It also explains how a quantum can manifest as either a particle or a wave…”, and (page 54): “For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is ‘out there’ is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world…. , (page 55): “According to Pribram this does not mean that there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? ‘Both are real to me’, says Pribram, ’or, if you want to say, neither of them are real'”.
Time is an integral part of the stationary Time-Space Continuum. What we perceive as a “movement of time” is in reality a movement of various physical, mental etc. processes in time (or more correctly in the Time-Space). We perceive this movement in a form of a swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock, or as the vibration of atoms in a caesium atomic clock, in the planetary movements or in the firing of nerve impulses and in the extremely complex processes occurring in our brain.
This is how our notion or our illusion of what we perceive as the “rate of flow of time” is created. Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel in his book: ”Man, the Unknown”, Penguin Books, N.Y., 1948, distinguishes manifestations of time as physical, inner, intrinsic, physiological and psychological. It is, of course, not the time which is altered, but the various courses of events which move through the stationary time at different rates. This phenomenon is particularly dramatic in the so called Near Death Experiences, such as reported by Drs. E. Kubler-Ross, R.A. Moody and K. Ring, among many others. In the state of clinical death, the condition which Germans call scheintod, some patients apparently experience total recall of their entire lives in, as they describe it, “an instant”. Quoting from Kenneth Ring, “Life at Death - a Scientific Iinvestigations of the Near-Death Experiences”, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, N.Y., 1980, (page 245): “In this state, there is no time, there is an immediate perception of the past, present and future as if on the present moment”. To me it is apparent, that it is not the ‘rate of flow of time’ that has changed, but the ‘rate of a person’s mental progression through time’.
Thus, in the Time-Space Continuum we move through time, just as we move through space, but of course in one direction only. The past, the time which we have journeyed through no longer exists for us. It is in deaths hands. The future may or may not happen, as we ourselves may no longer exist, without any precognition as to when and how it is likely to happen. But happen it surely will. And the present, that instant moment of transition from the not yet existing (and possibly not ever existing) future to the non-existing past only manifests itself as a fiction. For as soon as we can think of this illusive, ever sliding from the future into the past moment, by stating: “Now!” - it is already gone, lost forever in the past. That, which we are attempting to catch as “present” is always instantly disappearing in the “past”. It is apparent to me, that in reality there exists neither the past, nor the future for us, and the present is intangible, illusive, continuously melting into the past. People say: “time goes”. But in reality “Time stays – we go”!
Aleksander Samarin 2nd December 2006 12:00 PM
Personal perception of the Space-Time Continuum
by Professor Aleksander Samarin, FTSE
17th of October 2006
“Das Pergament, ist das der heilge Bronnen,
Woraus ein Trunk den Drust auf ewig stellt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Selle quillt”.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)
The essence of the above stanza I translated into English thus: -
“Old parchments do not quell the thirst for inspiration,
The key to knowledge is not in modern wit,
For those who seek esprit of comprehension
In own intellect shall find self-conceit”. A. S.
Equations of the classical (Newtonian) physics do not have a preferential, specific direction of progression in time; they work – be it only in theory – as well for a process moving backwards through time, as they do for those sequences which move forwards in time.
The first exception to this rule was the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as it was formulated by Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906) in 1877. This law is statistically based, and states that there is an extremely high degree of probability that the entropy (or the degree of disorder) of a system will increase, as the duration of the process increases. For example: rust does not convert spontaneously into pure metal, broken cap does not mend itself on its own accord, etc., etc.
Thus, in practice, the increase in entropy will almost without exception proceed forwards in time.
The mathematical foundation of the Theory of Relativity was formulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864 – 1909) in his treatise “Raum und Zeit” in 1907. Minkowski was Einstein’s teacher of mathematics at the University in Zürich and thus was able to assist Einstein in the mathematical expressions of the physical concepts of the Theory of Relativity.
Quoting from his “Raum und Zeit” (“Space and Time”): “Von Stund an sollen Raum für sich und Zeit für sich völlig zu Schatten herabsinken, und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit hewahren”, i.e. “From now on the Space by itself and Time by itself must become unreal (literally – ‘be immersed into shade’) and only some form of their unity can retain the right to exist”.
It is obvious to me therefore, that any process, such as the movements of matter or energy, which can be manifested either as velocity and acceleration, or as physical, chemical and biological change, or as a mental activity of the brain, must progress for certain duration in the space-time continuum. These actions therefore are the events which reveal themselves merely as a process in time, and not as a movement, a “flow” of time!
The main difficulty I have with the concept of “flowing” time is as follows – if we say that something moves, the deduction is that it moves relatively to something else. But what is this something else that time is supposed to move relative to?
On the other hand, movements in space and time are easier for me to perceive. For example, I can see that something moves through space if it varies in the spatial position in time. It seems then that if something moves through time, by analogy, it must vary in its temporal position in space. However, accepting the Minkowski’s concept of the indivisibility of space-time, I would conclude that if something moves in time then it varies in its temporal position in the space-time continuum.
Duration of a given process in time can be measured by a clock. Originally clocks were designed to match a uniform, periodical astronomical process, such as movements of the planets in our solar system. In the twentieth century these devices were replaced for scientific measurements by the more reliable atomic clocks, the workings of which were based on the extremely uniform process – on the frequencies at which atoms absorb radiation.
For a caesium atom this process in time corresponds to the frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hz, with the estimated variation of less that one part in ten billion. Even more accurate than the caesium clock is the hydrogen master clock, estimated to measure the rate at which hydrogen atoms absorb radiation to the accuracy of one second in 1,700,000 years.
The Michelson-Morley experiments in the 1880-s had challenged the suppositions of the addition or subtraction of all relative motions professed in classical physics, by proving that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of their relative movements.
These developments led to the concept of space contraction, first proposed by the Irish physicist George FitzGerald (1851 – 1901) in 1889, and then independently developed and extended by Hendrik Lorentz (1853 – 1928) of the Netherlands in 1904. His mathematical formulae, known as the Lorentz transformations describe the increase in mass, shortening of length and of the dilation of a process in time (the latter terminology is mine) that are the feature of a moving body, but only apparent and experimentally quantifiable at the extremely high velocities.
The Lorentz transformations were subsequently employed by Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity, stating that the speed of light is indeed a universal constant, and that the relative motions of different observers result in, what he called the time dilation. As mentioned before, my perception of this phenomenon is that it represents the dilation of a process in time, and not the dilation of time.
For example, two atomic clocks, one of which is left on Earth and the other placed on the space-rocket traveling at a very high velocity, will record different rates of frequencies, or different rates of a process in space-time. The clock on the rocket will record the dilation of frequencies resulting in the difference between the recorded period in time on Earth and on the spaceship. Should there be an astronaut on the spaceship, his or her aging process will be slower relative to that of all the humanity on Earth.
I am convinced that all living creatures were able to develop in the process of evolution two types, of what I call, intrinsic clocks. These inherent clocks can be classified as physiological and psychological. In human species they correspond to our attainment of the rates of physiological changes, and to our awareness of the rates of psychological processes, which we experience while we are in the states of consciousness of our existence.
The rate of aging process (as was shown above in the space-travel example) is relative. Chronological age does not always correspond to the rate of the physiological ageing. Classical example of this phenomenon is progeria – human disorder with all the characteristics of premature aging process. It is an autosomal recessive condition (humans have 22 pairs of autosoms, involved in transmitting all generic traits and conditions, other than those that are sex-related), with the first symptoms generally appearing in children between 18 and 24 months of age. The condition manifests itself by the limited growth, alopecia (partial or complete lack of hair) and then with the development of arthrosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases. Children become gray-haired, with wrinkled skin, and usually die around thirteen, fourteen years of age.
Our psychological clock becomes evident first of all in our perceptions of the durations of pleasant in opposition to unpleasant events. For example, waiting in pain and discomfort in a crowded hospital emergency room may seem as a never ending experience. Tedious tasks appear to drag on and on ad nauseaum. There is an old saying: “Watched kettle never boils”. By contrast, all our pleasant experiences are usually over, just as we begin to enjoy them.
The psychological clock also changes its rate, as we get older. For a child the process of waiting for a birthday celebration is long and anxious experience. At the old age, as we grow to be older and older, birthdays seem to come and go at an alarmingly faster and faster rate.
The functions of intrinsic clocks are particularly impressive in the mental activities of human brain during the so-called near-death experience, or NDE. The phenomenology of NDE is complex, and usually includes not only physiological, but also psychological and transcendental categories. Most clinically dead patients, who were subsequently returned back to life, often experience such subjective impressions, as being outside the physical body (out-of-body experiences), transcendence of ego, and other similar transcendental occurrences.
One very frequent near-death experience is the rerun of a very large part of life events. For the medical personnel attending the patient in the state of NDE this event (for example the absence of a pulse) usually lasts not more that a minute or two, but for the clinically dead person the process of his or her life review must be of a relatively exceedingly long duration, which to me indicates an extremely fast progression of mental activities in time.
Scientific research into NDE comes from the disciplines of medicine, psychology and psychiatry. Some see this phenomenon as an afterlife experience. Others believe that it may be caused by a flood of endorphins (the neuropeptides composed of many amino acids and acting on the central and the peripheral nervous system to reduce pain) to the part of the brain associated with emotions. Yet others think that falling oxygen levels at NDE might cause electrical discharges in the hippocampal fissure and in this way affect the temporal lobe, associated with memory, and consequently cause the recall of life events. There are many other possible explanations, all of which are beyond the definitive experimental verification.
For me the important aspect of the life review occurrence, regardless of whether it is material or transcendental episode, is that it represents an extremely rapid mental process in the space-time continuum, as opposed to the “standard clock rate” of this event for all the medical personnel or anyone else, for that matter, who is observing the patient.
However, the most definitive verification of my personal perception of the Space-Time Continuum most likely originates in the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, or QED. The theory of QED, which represents a functional integral formulation of Quantum Mechanics, was developed by Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988), an achievement for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Feynman developed a way to characterize the behavior of subatomic particles, using pictorial tools, known as Feynman diagrams. In the graphical representation of calculations in the quantum field theory the lines represent interacting particles, and the mathematical terms correspond to each line as well as vortex – the meeting of the lines.
The four dimensional Minkowski’s space is characterized in the Feynman diagrams by the Cartesian coordinates. The three dimensional space is “compressed” into an abscissa (the horizontal direction) and time is shown as an ordinate (vertical direction). Feynman diagrams can be visualized as a kind of “bookkeeping device”, which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in the space-time, particularly the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts – positrons.
Feynman was an enthusiastic and very prominent promoter of his inimitable view of QED. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” are perhaps one of his most forceful and yet accessible dissertations for anyone with the interest in this subject. Feynman’s views on Quantum Physics, based on the above lectures were published in 1990 by “Penguin Books” under the title: “QED – the Strange Theory of Light and Matter”.
Following is just one extract from this publication: Figure 63 on page 97:
In the example © Feynman writes, and I quote: “… the electron emits a photon, rushes backwards in time to absorb a photon, and then continues forwards in time”.
This “strange but real possibility” of a process moving backwards in space-time continuum was subsequently explored by Feynman with his former Professor of
of physics at the University of Texas at Austin – John Archibald Wheeler. Together they developed a theory of electrodynamics based on waves traveling forwards and backwards in the space-time continuum.
In my opinion, not only this theory contradicts the concept of the “flow of time”, but it also opens up the notion of retro-causality. Obviously, future is unlikely, at least on the macro scale, to directly influence the past. However, there is a possibility that retro-causality may have resulted in the fundamental laws governing the Universe “fine tuning themselves”, by the flow of information back through the space-time continuum, since the creation of space-time, energy and matter in the event known as the “Big Bang”.
It also provides an interesting review of the possibilities and the fundamental nature of some aspects of parapsychology, and particularly those of precognition and clairvoyance. It may even justify some of the much criticized scientific research in parapsychology by such eminent psychologists as William James (1842 – 1910), and particularly the concepts of Joseph Banks Rhine (1895 – 1980).
However, in my view, the problem with precognition and clairvoyance is that there are too many charlatans, who make a living from this profession, by preying on people in anguish and distress. I clearly remember a notice in one of the local newspapers by the clairvoyant society, which shall remain anonymous. The note contained the following message: “The XYZ Clairvoyance Society informs its members that the next meeting is called off due to the unforeseen circumstances”.
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