Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
NICK: Oh! The Pleasure Dome Project. Yeah, I would sum up my feelings in that area this way. It's to take the metaphor of inner space seriously--that there is an Inner space, and that for some reason, some accident of biology and evolution, each of us is restricted to this tiny little cave in inner space. But there's this vast area that we could explore, including telepathic union with other caves, and even going into other non-human areas of mind. To me, quantum physics suggests this--that there is this potentia out there which we could basically surf. We do play with a little bit of it each day, but we could probably expand the area of possibility further. It's like we're living in a little tiny bay, and we could go out into the ocean. That's the possibility, I think, that quantum physics suggests to me. That someday we'll be able to go outside our own little bays, and go out into the great ocean of mind.
RMN: And voyage the quantum uncertainty, that sounds nice.
NICK: Yes, surfing in the quantum sea. There is something in quantum theory called the Fermi sea, which is the area of possibilities for electrons, all the possible spaces, the momentum and position spaces, that electrons can occupy. A metal's Fermi sea has a free surface. But an insulator has a lid on its surface so its Fermi sea of possibilities is completely full--all the way to the top. Since all possibilities are spoken for, the insulator has no new options. It just sits there, inert, and does not conduct electricity. But metals have lots of live possibilities open to them--all sorts of wave motion can occur on the surface of a metal's Fermi sea. So the reason that copper conducts electricity and polyethylene does not is related to this quantum picture of matter being made up of vibratory possibilities.
Metals conduct because their electrons possess lots of open possibilities. Insulators can be made to conduct by "doping" them--Yes that's what it's called--introducing certain impurities into the insulator which widen the realm of electron possibility. Now, if consciousness is somehow also a consequence of quantum possibility then that's one way I see of going--the literal expansion of consciousness, of getting out of our little caves. And somehow I think that quantum physics ought to help us do that. If we really did find a connection between mind and matter, and this was a quantum connection, then we'd find some way to get out of our caves, and hop into the ocean.
DJB: Nick, you do a column for
Mondo 2000
on "Fringe Science." Can you explain why you think this subject is important.
NICK: I worked awhile in Silicon Valley doing research, and we had a lot of talks there about what real research was. How could we build an environment that would encourage research? What they really wanted there was an environment that would encourage short-term, profit-making research. They didn't want a real environment for research. What I think a research environment should do is protect people for a while from practical life, from the day-to-day worries of making a living. It should also allow people to be wrong, so, you see, you're protected from the consequences of your thoughts too, and you don't have to worry. You can play around. A real playground, that's it, a giant playground, for a while.
Universities and industrial research labs should ideally provide this. They should provide playgrounds where people can mess around, without suffering the consequences of their messing around. But they don't do this in general. In general they're very timid places. People will follow fashion and profits. The industrial labs don't follow fashion so much as universities, but you gotta publish all the time. You gotta keep something going. So you're looking around and seeing what's hot, what the guys next door are doing. So fringe science is people who aren't bound by university and industrial constraints. They're just people who are out there, for their own reasons, and these people may really be a key to our next evolutionary jump. The people who are just out there possessed by, for whatever reason, some quirky notions of their own.
To my mind one of the quintessential fringe scientists is a guy named Jim Culbertson in San Luis Obispo. He was a professor at Cal Poly for many years, and he worked at Rand Corporation for a while, so he worked for both the government and the educational establishment. But his real goal has been to work out a theory of consciousness. He wrote a book in the sixties called The Minds of Robots, and he wonders how one could make robots that would have inner experience, just like us. He has this elaborate theory based on special relativity, and he's obviously been working on this for years and years and years, not listening to anybody, just off on his own little obsession. It's a beautiful kind of work--just totally out there, not connected with anything. And it may be partially right. We need more of these people, like Culbertson, off on their own trip. I would like to consider myself a fringe scientist, but I think even I'm too much affected by fashion, and by what my colleagues are doing. Although I try, I'm contaminated by the opinions of my peers, by the prevailing fashions of the avant garde.
DJB: Well, there's something to be said for networking with other people though-cross-fertilizing and sharing ideas.
NICK: Yes, it's important to have colleagues, but you have to somehow keep your independence, There's this balance between contact and independence that you have to keep. One of the ways that I currently manage to do this is by living out in the woods, and by not being connected with any institutions, except these private ones that we set up. We've had something going called the Consciousness Theory Group, which Saul Paul-Sirag and a few others started in the early seventies to ruthlessly track down the roots of consciousness. We would go anywhere, talk to anybody, or do anything to find out more about this elusive problem.
RMN: Einstein spent his life searching for a unified field theory, and many scientists are working towards the same thing. Do you think it's just a matter of time before it is discovered, and how do you think that the understanding of the unified field will effect human consciousness?
NICK: As I mentioned before, I think we're close to that. It wouldn't surprise me if the unified field were discovered in the next couple of years. Somehow this might just succeed. It would mean that we have a picture of the world that was more compact. It wouldn't take so much talk to describe what the world was made of. You could simplify it. Right now there are four different kinds of forces, and there are a hundred and some different elementary particles. However, they still come in two classes. The classes themselves are quarks and leptons basically, and the force particles. What we would be able to say then is that there is just one kind of entity, and everything follows from that. So, it would be a definite economy of description. But what else? I don't know any practical applications of this, but it'd be definitely easy to describe the world. You could just say it's just made of this one kind of stuff, and that's all--everything else is just various manifestations of this one kind of stuff.
DJB: Would it make any new technologies possible?
NICK: Probably not right away. This is all very impractical. It would still leave consciousness out in the cold. It's funny that back in the Medieval days people doing alchemy and ceremonial magic--thought of as the predecessors of science -felt that the mind was connected with what they did. They thought that one had to be in the right state of mind--you had to say prayers and incantations -r the reaction wouldn't work. It sort of mixed up the notion that chemistry, physics, and mental stuff were all together in their mind. So at some point in the development of science, scientists said, "Let's do science as though the mind didn't matter. Let's see how much science we could do that's independent of how you think. Let's forget about the mind, and let's see what we could do with this hypothesis." And, amazingly enough, with all physics--from the elementary particles all the way up to the cosmos--it doesn't seem to matter. There seems to be a lot you can do without bringing the mind into it. Seemingly.
Now, my fantasy is that we've missed most of the world. That all the stuff that physicists can explain is just a tiny amount of the real world, because there is a real world that physics is a minute part of. But, because of a certain illusion that we have, it looks as though there's an awful lot of matter around here, and not much mind. Mind is confined to little tiny elements in certain mammalian heads. But there's a lot of matter, there's galaxies and quarks, and everything all around, but not much mind. One of my guesses is that's totally wrong. There's a lot of mind, at least as much as there is matter, and we just aren't aware of it. I suspect that physics is just a very tiny part of that world.
DJB: This really ties in with the next question. Do you see the physical universe as being alive, evolving, and conscious, and if so, does this perspective, in your opinion, have any influence on how physicists approach the natural world?
NICK: It does fit right in. Up to now physics has, I think as a kind of exercise, asked how much can we explain about the world without ever bringing consciousness into it? Surprisingly, the answer is a lot! Suppose there were chemical reactions that needed to be prayed over before they worked, then physics would have to say we can't explain these reactions, because that involves the mind. Anything that involves intention, where intention is important for its outcome, is outside of physics, by definition. So, we have to call that something else. Either that, or expand the notion of what physics is once the mind begins becoming involved with the world. What I'd like to see are hybrid types of experiments.
Experiments where the mind is necessary, and where matter is also necessary, kind of a mixing of physics and psychology. But 1 don't know of any such experiments, except maybe psychokinesis experiments, and those are very unreliable. It's hard to get data.
RMN: The mind is a very unreliable thing. That's probably why physicists have nothing to do with the mind.
NICK: Yeah, unreliable, that's one way of looking at it.
DJB: What possibilities for faster-than-light and time travel do you feel offer the greatest potential for actualization, and how do you feel this will effect human consciousness in the future?
NICK: Well, I think that there are about half a dozen options for faster-than-light travel, but the two I would bet on are the space-warp, and the quantum connection. The former is based upon the ability to warp Einsteinian space-time. You can make short cuts in space-time, and essentially travel faster than light. We don't know how to do this yet, but the equations of general relativity allow it. So. it's not forbidden by physics. We may have to use black holes or something like tongs made out of black holes. It would take that kind of thing. Interestingly, when my book
Faster Than Light
came out in November of 1988, the same week it came out, there was a paper by three guys from CalTech in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article was about a way to make a time machine, using warped space-time.
It was actual instructions on how to do it. We can't do it yet--but here's, in principle, how to do it. There are these quantum worm holes coming out of the quantum vacuum. They're little connections between distant places in space-time. They're not so distant actually, as the distances involved are smaller than atomic dimensions. So you have to find out how to expand these worm holes, to make them connect larger more distant parts of space and time. But that's a detail. These worm holes are continually coming out of the quantum vacuum, popping back in again, and they're unstable. Even if you could go into one of these, it would close up before you could transverse it, unless you could go faster than light.
So, the argument was about how to stabilize quantum worm holes. The way you do that is you have to have some energy that's less than nothing, some negative energy, which is less than the vacuum. In classical physics that would be impossible--energy that's less than nothing. Every time you do something you always have positive energy. But there's something called the Casimer force in quantum physics, which is an example of negative energy. So you thread these worm holes with this negative energy, and it props them open. So then you can use these things as time tunnels.
This article was prompted by Carl Sagan's book
Contact
. Sagan got in touch with these physicists, who were experts on gravity, and asked if there was anything that he needed to know, because in his book Contact there were tunnels that go to the star Vega, I believe. You sit in this chair, you go through this time tunnel, and a few seconds later you're in Vega. That's definitely faster than light, as Vega is some tens of light years away. So these aliens have mastered this time tunnel technology. Carl Sagan asked these guys if this was possible, and they said "Well, we'll think about it." So they came up with this actual scientific paper on how one might really build a time tunnel, like Carl Sagan's. So here's a situation where science fiction inspired science.
DJB: Isn't that the case a lot, actually?