While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.
Could the public trust bin Laden’s DNA samples? Where was bin Laden’s body? Why was the most wanted mujaheddin on Earth buried in an undisclosed location in the northern Arabian Sea? Why was the news announced mere weeks after President Obama’s campaign kickoff and just days after his birth certificate was released? Why so late on a Sunday night?
Within minutes of the news of bin Laden’s funeral at sea, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail lighted up with conspiracy theories from around the globe, asking questions, pointing out discrepancies, motives, counter-motives, coverups and counter-coverups, comparing photos and videos, voice recordings and FBI most-wanted pinup posters.
“This has not put a single of the 9/11 questions to bed,” said Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University physics professor and contributor to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Jones, along with other members of the movement, a loose coalition of people who distrust Washington’s version of the attacks, say the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition.
“As a scientist, I try to look at the evidence I can get,” Jones said.
It started with the “9/11 truthers,” who, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. They formed organizations. They held rallies. They filed many Freedom of Information Act requests.
They wrote books and studied the physics of the towers crumbling.
“I don’t know how you can have closure, when there are hundreds of contradictions to the stories that you were told. The story doesn’t end here because we are told bin Laden is dead,” said Mike Berger, who works with 911Truth.org, an organization founded to examine facts around the attack. “We are living in an endless war of trillions of dollars being spent without any responsibility.’’
Alex Jones, a radio personality out of Austin, who gives voice to the 9/11 Truth Movement and runs the Web site Infowars.com, sent out a Web headline that screamed, “Red Alert. Inside Sources: Bin Laden Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade.”
The “king of conspiracy,” as he is known by the media, pointed out discrepancies that went instantly viral. He lists FBI officials and counterintelligence leaders from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who have said for years that bin Laden was dead. Former Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik even told Jones on the air in 2002 that bin Laden had been dead for months.
“Obama just relaunched his election bid, and nabbing bin Laden is the main kickoff campaign rally. Things aren’t going well. So they are bringing back an old staple. They need a hero. It’s the Orwellian archtypical bearded scary bad guy who is going to get us, so don’t worry, the government got the bad guy,’’ said Jones in a telephone interview after his syndicated self-titled afternoon radio show. “This isn’t Elvis, man. The government lied to us about WMDs.”
But Elvis didn’t die during the Facebook era, when Web pages such as “Osama bin Laden NOT DEAD” go up instantly. “There’s something fishy in the waters where they supposedly dropped him. A picture of him dead wouldn’t have hurt,” reads an entry by one contributor.
“They saved Che Guevara’s fingertips to prove it was him,” said Ted Goertzel, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University at Camden, N.J., who has written extensively on psychology and terrorism. “But Muslim tradition says you bury the body right away. The issue is, our society goes through a traumatic event of 9/11, and this comes 10 years later, so it’s not timed very well for our national mourning or anger. But the conspiracy reaction is a way of thinking that’s much more common today, and people are accustomed to it because of the Internet. There’s no screening process. People may also be going into an automatic response.”
At different moments in American history, such as after the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the country becomes more prone to conspiracy theories because there’s so much hurt and anger, Goertzel said.
Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who became a symbol of the opposition to the war, went on her Facebook page today to broadcast her theory.
“I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid,” Sheehan writes. “Just think to yourself — they paraded Saddam’s dead sons around to prove they were dead — why do you suppose they hastily buried this version of OBL at sea? This lying, murderous Empire can only exist with your brainwashed consent — just put your flags away and THINK!”
Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won’t corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy, and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker.
Yet conspiracies do exist. In the corporate world, major companies we buy products from everyday have been found guilty of conspiring to fix prices and reduce competition. Just about any planned criminal act committed by more than one person could be considered a conspiracy, from simple murder-for-hire to the Watergate break-in.
Many conspiracy theorists go much further, though, and see a hidden hand behind the world’s major events. While some of the theories have a grain of truth to them, conspiracy theories are impossible to disprove, because the hardcore believers will find some way to rationalize away evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Eyewitnesses who dispute their conclusions are mistaken—or part of the conspiracy.
At least that's what they want you to think ...
The 9/11 Conspiracies
The evidence is overwhelming that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were indeed the result of a conspiracy. There's no doubt about it: A close (or even cursory) look at the evidence makes it clear that it was carefully planned and executed by conspirators. The question, of course, is who those conspirators were. Osama bin Laden and the crew of (mostly Saudi) hijackers were part of the conspiracy, but what about President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney? Did top Bush advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, either collaborate with bin Laden, or intentionally allow the attacks to happen? Put another way, was it an inside job? Conspiracy theorists believe so, and point to a catalog of supposed inconsistencies in the "official version" of the attacks. Many of the technical conspiracy claims were debunked by Popular Mechanics magazine in March 2005, while other claims are refuted by simple logic: If a hijacked airplane did not crash into the Pentagon, as is often claimed, then where is Flight 77 and its passengers? Are they with the Roswell aliens at Hangar 18? In many conspiracy theories, bureaucratic incompetence is often mistaken for conspiracy. Our government is so efficient, knowledgeable, and capable—so the reasoning goes—that it could not possibly have botched the job so badly in detecting the plot ahead of time or responding to the attacks. I find that hard to believe.
Princess Diana's Murder
Within hours of Princess Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, in a Paris highway tunnel, conspiracy theories swirled. As was the case with the death of John F. Kennedy, the idea that such a beloved and high-profile figure could be killed so suddenly was a shock. This was especially true of Princess Diana; royalty die of old age, political intrigue, or eating too much rich food; they don't get killed by a common drunk driver. Unlike many conspiracy theories, though, this one had a billionaire promoting it: Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who was killed along with Diana. Al-Fayed claims that the accident was in fact an assassination by British intelligence agencies, at the request of the Royal Family. Al-Fayed's claims were examined and dismissed as baseless by a 2006 inquiry; the following year, at Diana's inquest, the coroner stated that "The conspiracy theory advanced by Mohamed Al Fayed has been minutely examined and shown to be without any substance." On April 7 of this year, the coroner's jury concluded that Diana and Al-Fayed were unlawfully killed due to negligence by their drunken chauffer and pursuing paparazzi.
Subliminal Advertising
Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked. In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely. (The conspiracy was parodied in the 1980s television show Max Headroom, in which viewers were exploding after seeing subliminal messages called "blipverts.")
The Moon Landing Hoax
In the 1978 film Capricorn One, American astronauts and NASA faked a Mars landing. Though a mediocre film, it was an interesting idea, and one that would endure for decades. In 2001, Fox television aired the program "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," which rehashed many discredited "discrepancies" between the official version of the moon landing and photographs of the landing. (Curiously, they never explain why NASA would distribute photographs that would "prove" that they had faked the moon landing.) Web sites such as BadAstronomy.com have pages and pages of point-by-point, detailed refutations of the Fox claims. Of course, even if there was some credible evidence showing that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was a hoax, conspiracy theorists must also account for later moon missions, involving a dozen astronauts. And there's the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as of extraterrestrial origin… how did NASA get the rocks if not during a moon landing? Many astronauts have been offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In fact in 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted Buzz Aldrin and called him a "coward and a liar" for faking the moon landings, the 72-year-old punched Sibrel in the jaw.
Paul McCartney's Death
According to many stories and conspiracy theories that circulated in the late 1960s, Beatles guitarist Paul McCartney died in 1966. The remaining members of the Beatles—along with their manager and others—conspired to keep McCartney's death a secret, going so far as to hire a look-alike and sound-alike to take his place in the band. Well, kind of: In a case of seriously twisted logic (even by conspiracy theory standards) the conspirators in this case took great pains to keep the press and public from finding out about McCartney's demise—yet they also wanted fans to know about it, and placed clever clues in album covers and music giving details about McCartney's death. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot, and out of step with the other three. This must mean something, right? Despite public denials by the band, fans couldn't just let it be, and came together to look for more clues.
John F. Kennedy’s Assassination
John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 in a Dallas motorcade. Who killed Kennedy? Most (though not all) conspiracy theorists acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from a book depository. Beyond this fact lies a vast area of conspiracy theory that has spawned endless speculation and hundreds of books, articles, and films. Was there a second assassin, perhaps one at a nearby "grassy knoll"? And if Oswald did act alone, who gave him the orders? Activists against Fidel Castro? Organized crime bosses? A jealous husband upset with Kennedy's philandering? Though the Warren Commission report concluded that Oswald acted alone, a 1979 report by The House Select Committee on Assassinations suggested that there was in fact a conspiracy, and likely more than one shooter. In such a complex and sensational case, the conspiracy theories will live on.
The Roswell Crash Cover-Up
There is one fact that almost all skeptics and believers agree on: Something crashed on a remote ranch outside of Roswell, NewMexico in 1947. The government at first claimed it was some sort of saucer, then retracted the statement and claimed it was really a weather balloon. Yet the best evidence suggests that it was neither a flying saucer nor a weather balloon, but instead a high-altitude, top-secret military balloon dubbed Project Mogul. As it turns out, descriptions of the wreckage first reported by the original eyewitnesses very closely match photos of the Project Mogul balloons, down to the silvery finish and strange symbols on its side. The stories about crashed alien bodies did not surface until decades later and in fact no one considered the Roswell crash as anything extraterrestrial or unusual until thirty years later, when a book on the topic was published. There was indeed a cover-up, but it did not hide a crashed saucer, instead it hid a Cold War-era spying program.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a hoaxed book that purported to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and described how Christians' morality, finances, and health would be targeted by a small group of powerful Jews. The idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy is nothing new, of course, and has been repeated by many prominent people including Henry Ford and Mel Gibson. In 1920, Henry Ford paid to have half a million copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" published, and in the 1930s, the book was used by the Nazis as justification for its genocide against Jews (in fact, Adolph Hitler referred to the "Protocols" in his book "Mein Kampf"). Though the book has been completely discredited as a hoax and forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated around the world.
Satanic Cults
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a rash of child abuse cases horrified America. Children accused adults of ritual rapes, torture, and abuse, and the news media reported the sensational stories. Often the accusations included charges of Satanism. The pinnacle was Geraldo Rivera's infamous NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," which aired on Oct. 28, 1988. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. In what was the largest viewership for a documentary in television history, Rivera claimed that an organized, Satanic conspiracy was at work killing babies, murdering innocents, and conducting ghastly rituals. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said, adding that "The odds are, [they] are in your town." Rivera presented no proof; the lack of evidence was seen as proof of how well organized and shrewd the Satanic conspiracy really was. Yet little evidence supports claims about Satanic cults or conspiracies. In a 1992 report on ritual crime, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded that the rampant rumors of ritual murders, cannibalism, and kidnapping were unfounded. Phillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists "constitute the greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century."
Big Pharma
Almost everybody (except investors) loves to hate the drug companies. Drugs cost too much, drug company profits are obscene, and it seems that every few months some drug once claimed to be safe is yanked off the shelf after patients die. It's little wonder that the drug industry ("Big Pharma") is looked upon with suspicion. But some proponents of "alternative medicine" believe that drug companies actually conspire to keep people sick to reap profits. For example, Kevin Trudeau (bestselling author of “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About”) claims that important medical information is being kept hidden by a conspiracy between the medical establishment and big drug companies. According to Trudeau, "There are certain groups, including... the drug industry... that don’t want people to know about cures for diseases..." Actress and model Jenny McCarthy appeared recently on "Larry King Live," accusing doctors and the pharmaceutical industry of conspiring to suppress evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.
Kaewong Boy: 'Big Pharma' really are not interested to cure sickness & diseases. That is not where the money is. Think about it. If they cure all the sickness & all the diseases in the world, what will be left for them in the end? Nothing! And that is exactly what they are doing, one part of the business is to keep on creating new kind of bacteria & viruses while the other part is to invent & introduce the drugs to fight it to the market. It is an ongoing process with the main objective of accumulating wealth, it is never about helping us, it is never for humanity.
While humans have been a spacefaring species for more than 50 years, it's quite possible we have yet to perform that most basic of acts — sex — beyond terra firma. Yet.
Rumors have long swirled that astronauts may have hooked up in orbit, perhaps even as part of secret sex-in-space experiments run by the Russian or American governments. But those stories are likely the product of overactive — and overheated — imaginations, experts say.
A Russian space official, for example, has categorically denied any such weightless shenanigans by his countrymen, the news agency AFP reported Friday (April 22).
"There is no official or unofficial evidence that there were instances of sexual intercourse or the carrying out of sexual experiments in space," Valery Bogomolov, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Biomedical Problems, told the news agency Interfax, AFP reported. "At least, in the history of Russian or Soviet space exploration, this most certainly was not the case." [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]
What about NASA astronauts?
Bogomolov also addressed the rumors of American hanky-panky, though with considerably less authority.
"As for American space exploration, well, I just don't have the information to categorically deny that," Bogomolov told Interfax, according to AFP. "There are just anecdotal rumors, which are not worth trusting."
But those in the know say NASA astronauts have likely been as chaste as their Russian counterparts while zipping around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,164 kph). While NASA apparently doesn't explicitly forbid sex in orbit, its astronaut code of conduct calls for "relationships of trust" and "professional standards" to be maintained at all times.
"I'm not aware of an official NASA policy on this," said former astronaut Leroy Chiao, a veteran of four space missions between 1994 and 2005. "It was not discussed when I was there, it was simply understood. Nobody brought it up — it simply wasn't a consideration."
Despite the advent of mixed-gender crews in 1983, NASA astronauts seem to have behaved themselves in orbit, according to Chiao.
"As for any couple having had sex in space, I seriously doubt it," Chiao told SPACE.com in an email interview.
Chiao, who spent more than 229 days in space, explained some of his reasoning in a blog post for the tech website Gizmodo back in 2009.
"Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it," Chiao wrote. "Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens."
Other astronauts have backed Chiao's viewpoint, saying that NASA's spaceflyers have thus far been too focused on their missions to risk any romantic entanglements in orbit.
That's not to say that such entanglements don't unfold back on Earth, however, as the messy love triangle involving then-astronauts William Oefelein and Lisa Nowak demonstrates. Nowak was arrested in 2007 for allegedly attacking a woman she viewed as a rival for Oefelein's affections. She ultimately received probation.
It will happen
Sex in space will happen eventually, if it hasn't already. It's one thing for a space shuttle crew to contain themselves for a few weeks, or astronauts aboard the station to remain chaste for five or six months. But manned missions to Mars would last years, so abstinence for that long would be a tall order for most people.
And sex would likely be a natural part of life at a lunar or Mars base, especially if the aim is to one day establish a self-sustaining colony.
The rise of private spaceflight should open the door even more to sex in space. Space tourists would not be bound by NASA's code of conduct, or as restricted by the demands of a complicated mission.
And some people will probably even fly to space just to join the "220-mile-high club." Virgin Galactic, which hopes to start flying tourists to suborbital space as early as next year, has already turned down a $1 million offer from an unidentified party to aid in the production of a sex-in-space movie.
Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.
Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?
Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.
Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.
MESSING WITH THE LIGHT
Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed.
What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other.
In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms.
Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured.
All of this is now gone for keeps.
WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKS
The strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.
At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true.
The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes.
The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.
SEEKING SPACE AND TIME
Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.
According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.
To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.
All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.
There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.
UNLOCKING THE CAGE
In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.
Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects.
Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe.
At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.
Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.
Adapted fromBiocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
Kaewong Boy: The double-slit experiment proves that the world we all lives in is a world of indefinite probabilities. And what happen next is restricted only on how we perceive what reality should be. Open up your mind and be free, for this is how we are meant to be... :p
Life on Mars has been the subject of much debate and speculation that has gripped our minds since we gazed upon the stars. Many years ago, the discovery of ice in the red planet offered some clues as to whether it once had water and was able to support life sometime in the distant past.
NASA scientists recently discovered an underground dry ice lake containing more carbon dioxide than originally thought. The trapped carbon dioxide is thought to have come from the planet’s atmosphere earlier in its history when it was conducive for life on Mars to exist.
“It really is a buried treasure,” said Jeffrey Plaut, a scientist of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a report appearing in the journal Science. “We found something underground that no one else realized was there.”
The discovery was made possible through ground-penetrating radar of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter who is searching for clues of life on Mars.
Dry ice on Mars is not a new discovery, but the recent finding suggests that what is locked down there is about 30 times more than originally thought.
Scientists have often wondered where atmospheric gases capable of supporting life on Mars went and resulted to the present thin atmosphere of the planet. They speculate that some gases became trapped in dry ice as part of a seasonal cycle.
Still, even the enormous amounts of dry ice discovered will not be able recreate an atmosphere thick enough to support life on Mars, the scientists said.
The polar ice caps as well as existing canyons, gullies and river channels who have carved the surface of the planet are the other possible signs of past life on Mars.
Kaewong Boy: They did not went extinct, human beings are descendants from Mars. A long long time ago, our ancestors became too careless with technology & greed, they somehow managed to kill the life force of our once beautiful home planet. To escape certain death & extinction, they ran away from the dying planet. Some became space explorers & others went to earth to start a fresh new civilization with hope that they can guide this new generations away from being self-destructive & make the same mistakes as they did to Mars.
People are always asking me questions about fitness. Two reasons: 1) I’m an editor at the world’s largest health and fitness magazine; 2) they think I’m the other Bill Phillips.
Truth is, I’m no fitness expert, but I’ve been at the magazine long enough to play one at cocktail parties:
• “Is it better to exercise in the morning or evening?” (Exercise when you feel like it, which will reduce the chances you won’t do it at all.)
• “Which builds muscle more effectively: machines or free weights?” (Which cleans your car more effectively: a machine wash or a hand wash?)
• “Why don’t I have abs yet?” (Because you have a day job, enjoy Doritos, and aren’t a genetic freak.)
But when the questions get really tough, I turn to Adam Campbell, the Men’s Health Fitness Director. He sits right next to me. Adam understands fitness better than anyone I know.
In fact, a few years ago, I walked into his office and told him that I was hiring a personal trainer. Even though I was exercising—pushups, situps, crunches—I was still packing on pounds. That morning, I’d looked in the mirror and saw a fat guy staring back. I freaked. I needed to make big changes, quick.
“You don’t need to find a personal trainer,” he told me. “You need to find an hour.”
An hour? Adam promised that if I could make time to exercise 20 minutes a day, three days a week—while cutting my two-sodas-a-day habit—I’d be lean again in no time. My workouts were ineffective, he explained, because I was battering the same small muscles over and over. He gave me a workout that hit all my large muscle groups. When these muscles grew bigger, he said, they’d burn more calories—and I’d begin to lose weight.
He was right. Over the next six months, I dropped 20 pounds.
If you’ve looked into the mirror recently and didn’t recognize the person staring back, I’ve got good news. Adam is happy to be your personal trainer, too. I asked him what advice he’d give men and women in my situation: Working out, but not seeing results. He wrote up this list of the five biggest fitness blunders—along with the fixes you need for the results you want.
Mistake #1: You Don't Lift Weights
You’ve no doubt been told that aerobic exercise is the key to losing your gut, but weight training is actually more valuable. Three reasons:
1. Lifting protects your muscle. When people diet without lifting weights, research shows that 75 percent of their weight loss is from fat and 25 percent is muscle. That 25 percent may reduce your scale weight, but it doesn’t do a lot for your reflection in the mirror. However, if you weight train as you diet, your weight loss is more likely to be 100 percent fat. Think of it in terms of liposuction: The whole point is to simply remove unattractive flab, right? That’s exactly what you should demand from your workout.
2. Lifting boosts your metabolism. Your muscles need energy to repair and upgrade your muscle fibers after each resistance-training workout. For instance, a University of Wisconsin study found that when people performed a total-body workout comprised of just three big-muscle exercises, their metabolisms were elevated for 39 hours afterward. What’s more, they also burned a greater percentage of their calories from fat during this time, compared with those who weren’t hitting the weights.
3. Lifting torches calories. It’s considered common knowledge that jogging burns more calories than weight training. Turns out, when scientists at the University of Southern Maine used an advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, they found that weight training burns as many as 71 percent more calories than originally thought. The researchers calculated that performing just one circuit of eight exercises—which takes about 8 minutes—can expend 159 to 231 calories. That’s about the same as running at a 6-minute mile pace for the same duration.
Ladies, we’re especially talking to you on this one. Your goal is to challenge your muscles, not just go through the motions. For instance, if you can lift a weight 15 times, it’s not going to do your muscles much good to lift it for only 8 repetitions. A good way to gauge if a weight is appropriate: Note the point at which you start to struggle. Let’s say you’re doing 10 repetitions. If all 10 seem easy, then the weight you’re using is too light.
However, if you start to struggle on your tenth repetition, you’ve chosen the correct poundage.
Mistake #3: You Don’t Work Your Lower Body
To cut inches from your waist, make sure you’re working the muscles below your belt. In a Syracuse University study, people burned more calories the day after they did lower-body resistance training than the day after they worked their upper body. “Leg muscles—like your quads and glutes—generally have more muscle mass than those of your chest and arms,” says study author Kyle Hackney, Ph.D. (c), C.S.C.S. “Work more muscle during your exercise session, and your body has to expend more energy to repair and upgrade them later.” So the best approach, of course, is to hit every muscle each workout.
Mistake #4: You Don’t Watch What You Eat
You can’t out-exercise a bad diet. After all, you can eat 1,000-calorie fast food burger in just 5 minutes, but it’ll take you more than an hour to burn that many calories with physical activity. So make sure you’re not using exercise as an excuse to eat whatever you want. You may even find that regular workouts help you better follow a smart eating plan. Case in point: University of Pittsburgh researchers studied 169 overweight adults for 2 years and found that the participants who didn’t follow a 3-hour-a-week training plan ate more than their allotted 1,500 calories a day. The reverse was also true—sneaking snacks sabotaged their workouts. The study authors say it’s likely that both actions are a reminder to stay on track, reinforcing your weight-loss goal and drive.
Mistake #5: You Skip Workouts
We’re all busy, but that’s usually just a lame excuse. After all, plenty of people find time to exercise. And when was the last time you heard someone say they regretted their workout? Probably never, and here’s why: U.K. researchers found that workers were 15 percent more productive on the days they made time to exercise compared to days they skipped their workout. They were also 15 percent more tolerant of their coworkers. Now, consider for a moment what these numbers mean to you: On days you exercise, you can—theoretically at least—accomplish in an eight-hour day what normally would take you nine hours and 12 minutes. Or you’d still work nine hours, but get more done, leaving you feeling less stressed and happier with your job, another perk that the workers reported on the days they exercised.
Kaewong Boy: "exercise 20 minutes a day, three days a week". That sounds real easy until around the 3rd week or so onwards. Because that is when the brain starts compiling a list of excuses & slooowly telling you that you are much to busy to find even 5 or 10 mins a day for this until you leave it all together.
But, if you stay strong to your hope of not wanting to see "that fat man looking back at you every time you look in the mirror" then challenge yourself & stay with the course, because after the 10th week or so you will find yourself automatically finding excuses to schedule yourself for your workout & the best thing is this time you will really enjoy doing it.
Ever wonder why your pulse races and your heart beats faster and you start to sweat when you're embarrassed?
You can blame your pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, a thumb-sized region in the brain that seems to determine the size of your emotional response to, say, accidentally tripping in public or realizing that you've beamed an amorous email meant for your honey to your boss instead.
Virginia Sturm, a postdoctoral fellow at the Memory and Aging Center of the University of California, San Francisco, recently reported at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting that changes in this part of the brain can regulate how much — or little — you're shamed.
She studied the size of this particular region of the cingulate cortex in both healthy controls as well as people with neurological disorders, and correlated these measurements with an embarrassment-inducing task: listening to themselves sing the Temptations' "My Girl" karaoke-style. "The smaller the region," she says, "the less embarrassed people were."
Sturm says emotions like embarrassment are slightly different from feelings like sadness and anger, because embarrassment involves a social element. Feelings like guilt, pride, shame and embarrassment all tend to occur in the presence of others, and result largely from how we think others perceive us.
What's interesting about the region of the cingulate cortex that Sturm identified is the fact that it connects to both higher-level behavioral networks in the frontal cortex, which regulate how we interact with others, as well as to more basal functions and automatic behaviors that are less under our control, such as heart rate and breathing.
Other parts of the cingulate cortex have previously been linked to depression, and deep brain stimulation of the area has helped some patients feel less depressed.
That means that treatments that stimulate activity in this part of the brain could help increase mindfulness in people with neurological disorders that make them too uninhibited or oblivious to the effect their behavior has on others. Conversely, suppressing activity in the region can help people with outsize embarrassment responses; perhaps, rather than suffering from social awkwardness, they could be helped to interact more normally with others. "There are lots of ways this region could affect emotional behavior," says Sturm.
In any case, it's nice to know that being embarrassed is a perfectly natural response — and a biologically built-in part of being human.
