BIOCENTRISM Read online

  How Life and Consciousness are the Keys

  to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

  RobeRt Lanza, MD, with bob beRMan

  B E N B E L L A B O O K S , I N C .

  Dallas, TX

  Copyright © 2009 by Robert Lanza, MD, and Robert Berman

  Illustrations © 2009 by Alan McKnight

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

  manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  BenBella Books, Inc.

  6440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 503

  Dallas, TX 75206

  www.benbellabooks.com

  Send feedback to [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-1933771-69-4

  Proofreading by Stacia Seaman

  Cover design by Todd Michael Bushman

  Text design and composition by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Printed by Bang Printing

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  perseusdistribution.com

  To place orders through Perseus Distribution:

  Tel: 800-343-4499

  Fax: 800-351-5073

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Significant discounts for bulk sales are available. Please contact Glenn

  Yeffeth at [email protected] or (214) 750-3628.

  To Barbara O’Donnell on the occasion of her ninetieth year

  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to thank the publisher, Glenn Yeffeth,

  and Nana Naisbitt, Robert Faggen, and Joe Pappalardo for their

  valuable assistance with the book. We would also like to thank

  Alan McKnight for the illustrations and Ben Mathiesen for his help

  with the material in the appendix. And, of course, the book wouldn’t

  be possible without the help of our agent, Al Zuckerman.

  Various portions of the material in this book appeared separately

  in the New Scientist, the American Scholar, the Humanist, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Yankee magazine, Capper’s, Grit, the World & I, Pacific Discovery, and in several literary magazines, including the Cimarron Review, the Ohio Review, the Antigonish Review, the Texas Review, and High Plains Literary Review.

  v i i

  contents

  Introduction

  1

  1. Muddy Universe

  3

  2. In the Beginning There Was . . . What?

  11

  3. The Sound of a Fal ing Tree

  19

  4. Lights and Action!

  25

  5. Where Is the Universe?

  33

  6. Bubbles in Time

  41

  7. When Tomorrow Comes Before Yesterday

  47

  8. The Most Amazing Experiment

  61

  9. Goldilocks’s Universe

  83

  10. No Time to Lose

  95

  11. Space Out

  111

  12. The Man Behind the Curtain

  129

  13. Windmil s of the Mind

  135

  i x

  x

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  14. A Fall in Paradise

  143

  15. Building Blocks of Creation

  147

  16. What Is This Place?

  153

  17. Sci-Fi Gets Real

  163

  18. Mystery of Consciousness

  169

  19. Death and Eternity

  185

  20. Where Do We Go from Here?

  195

  Appendix 1: The Lorentz Transformation

  199

  Appendix 2: Einstein’s Relativity and Biocentrism

  201

  Index

  209

  About the Authors

  213

  IntroductIon

  Our understanding of the universe as a whole has reached a dead

  end. The “meaning” of quantum physics has been debated

  since it was first discovered in the 1930s, but we are no closer

  to understanding it now than we were then. The “theory of every-

  thing” that was promised for decades to be just around the corner

  has been stuck for decades in the abstract mathematics of string the-

  ory, with its unproven and unprovable assertions.

  But it’s worse than that. Until recently, we thought we knew what

  the universe was made of, but it now turns out that 96 percent of the

  universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, and we have

  virtually no idea what they are. We’ve accepted the Big Bang, despite

  the increasingly greater need to jury-rig it to fit our observations (as

  in the 1979 acceptance of a period of exponential growth, known as

  inflation, for which the physics is basically unknown). It even turns

  out that the Big Bang has no answer for one of the greatest mysteries in

  the universe: why is the universe exquisitely fine-tuned to support life?

  Our understanding of the fundamentals of the universe is actu-

  ally retreating before our eyes. The more data we gather, the more

  we’ve had to juggle our theories or ignore findings that simply make

  no sense.

  1

  2

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  This book proposes a new perspective: that our current theories

  of the physical world don’t work, and can never be made to work,

  until they account for life and consciousness. This book proposes

  that, rather than a belated and minor outcome after billions of years

  of lifeless physical processes, life and consciousness are absolutely

  fundamental to our understanding of the universe. We call this new

  perspective biocentrism.

  In this view, life is not an accidental by-product of the laws of

  physics. Nor is the nature or history of the universe the dreary play

  of billiard balls that we’ve been taught since grade school.

  Through the eyes of a biologist and an astronomer, we will

  unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly man-

  aged to confine itself. The twenty-first century is predicted to be

  the century of biology, a shift from the previous century dominated

  by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning

  the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science,

  not with imaginary strings that occupy equally imaginary unseen

  dimensions, but with a much simpler idea that is rife with so many

  shocking new perspectives that we are unlikely ever to see reality

  the same way again.

  Biocentrism may seem like a radical departure from our current

  understanding, and it is, but the hints have appeared all around us

  for decades. Some of the conclusions of biocentrism may resonate

  with aspects of Eastern religions or certain New Age philosophies.

  This is intriguing, but rest assured there is nothing New Age about

  this book. The conclusions of biocentrism are based on mainstream

  science, and it is a logical extension of the work of some of our great-

  est scientific minds.

  Biocent
rism cements the groundwork for new lines of investiga-

  tion in physics and cosmology. This book will lay out the principles

  of biocentrism, all of which are built on established science, and all

  of which demand a rethinking of our current theories of the physical

  universe.

  1

  muddy unIverse

  The universe is not only queerer than we suppose,

  but queerer than we can suppose.

  —John Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927)

  The world is not, on the whole, the place described in our

  schoolbooks.

  For several centuries, starting roughly with the Renaissance,

  a single mindset about the construct of the cosmos has dominated

  scientific thought. This model has brought us untold insights into

  the nature of the universe—and countless applications that have

  transformed every aspect of our lives. But this model is reaching the

  end of its useful life and needs to be replaced with a radically differ-

  ent paradigm that reflects a deeper reality, one totally ignored until

  now.

  3

  4

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  This new model has not arrived suddenly, like the meteor impact

  that changed the biosphere 65 million years ago. Rather, it is a deep,

  gradual, tectonic-plate-type alteration with bases that lie so deep,

  they will never again return whence they came. Its genesis lurks in

  the underlying rational disquiet that every educated person palpably

  feels today. It lies not in one discredited theory, nor any single con-

  tradiction in the current laudable obsession with devising a Grand

  Unified Theory that can explain the universe. Rather, its problem is

  so deep that virtually everyone knows that something is screwy with

  the way we visualize the cosmos.

  The old model proposes that the universe was, until rather

  recently, a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other,

  obeying predetermined rules that were mysterious in their origin.

  The universe is like a watch that somehow wound itself and that,

  allowing for a degree of quantum randomness, will unwind in a

  semi-predictable way. Life initially arose by an unknown process,

  and then proceeded to change form under Darwinian mechanisms

  that operate under these same physical rules. Life contains con-

  sciousness, but the latter is poorly understood and is, in any case,

  solely a matter for biologists.

  But there’s a problem. Consciousness is not just an issue for biol-

  ogists; it’s a problem for physics. Nothing in modern physics explains

  how a group of molecules in your brain create consciousness. The

  beauty of a sunset, the miracle of falling in love, the taste of a deli-

  cious meal—these are all mysteries to modern science. Nothing in

  science can explain how consciousness arose from matter. Our cur-

  rent model simply does not allow for consciousness, and our under-

  standing of this most basic phenomenon of our existence is virtually

  nil. Interestingly, our present model of physics does not even recog-

  nize this as a problem.

  Not coincidentally, consciousness comes up again in a com-

  pletely different realm of physics. It is well known that quantum

  theory, while working incredibly well mathematically, makes no log-

  ical sense. As we will explore in detail in future chapters, particles

  seem to behave as if they respond to a conscious observer. Because

  m U d d y U N i v e r s e

  5

  that can’t be right, quantum physicists have deemed quantum the-

  ory inexplicable or have come up with elaborate theories (such as an

  infinite number of alternate universes) to try to explain it. The sim-

  plest explanation—that subatomic particles actually do interact with

  consciousness at some level—is too far outside the model to be seri-

  ously considered. Yet it’s interesting that two of the biggest mysteries

  of physics involve consciousness.

  But even putting aside the issues of consciousness, the current

  model leaves much to be desired when it comes to explaining the

  fundamentals of our universe. The cosmos (according to recent

  refinements) sprang out of nothingness 13.7 billion years ago, in a

  titanic event humorously labeled the Big Bang. We don’t really under-

  stand where the Big Bang came from and we continually tinker with

  the details, including adding an inflationary period with physics we

  don’t yet understand, but the existence of which is needed in order

  to be consistent with our observations.

  When a sixth grader asks the most basic question about the uni-

  verse, such as, “What happened before the Big Bang?” the teacher,

  if knowledgeable enough, has an answer at the ready: “There was

  no time before the Big Bang, because time can only arise alongside

  matter and energy, so the question has no meaning. It’s like asking

  what is north of the North Pole.” The student sits down, shuts up,

  and everyone pretends that some actual knowledge has just been

  imparted.

  Someone will ask, “What is the expanding universe expanding

  into?” Again, the professor is ready: “You cannot have space without

  objects defining it, so we must picture the universe bringing its own

  space with it into an ever-larger size. Also, it is wrong to visualize

  the universe as if looking at it ‘from the outside’ because nothing

  exists outside the universe, so the question makes no sense.”

  “Well, can you at least say what the Big Bang was? Is there some

  explanation for it?” For years, when my co-author was feeling lazy, he

  would recite the standard reply to his college students as if it were an

  after-business-hours recording: “We observe particles materializing

  in empty space and then vanishing; these are quantum mechanical

  6

  b i o C e N T r i s m

  fluctuations. Well, given enough time, one would expect such a fluc-

  tuation to involve so many particles that an entire universe would

  appear. If the universe was indeed a quantum fluctuation, it would

  display just the properties we observe!”

  The student takes his chair. So that’s it! The universe is a quan-

  tum fluctuation! Clarity at last.

  But even the professor, in his quiet moments alone, would won-

  der at least briefly what things might have been like the Tuesday

  before the Big Bang. Even he realizes in his bones that you can never

  get something from nothing, and that the Big Bang is no explana-

  tion at all for the origins of everything but merely, at best, the par-

  tial description of a single event in a continuum that is probably

  timeless. In short, one of the most widely known and popularized

  “explanations” about the origin and nature of the cosmos abruptly

  brakes at a blank wall at the very moment when it seems to be arriv-

  ing at its central point.

  During this entire parade, of course, a few people in the crowd

  will happen to notice that the emperor seems to have skimped in his

  wardrobe budget. It’s one thing to respect authority and acknowl-

  edge that theoretical physicists are brilliant people,
even if they do

  tend to drip food on themselves at buffets. But at some point, virtu-

  ally everyone has thought or at least felt: “This really doesn’t work.

  This doesn’t explain anything fundamental, not really. This whole

  business, A to Z, is unsatisfactory. It doesn’t ring true. It doesn’t feel

  right. It doesn’t answer my questions. Something’s rotten behind

  those ivy-covered walls, and it goes deeper than the hydrogen sul-

  fide released by the fraternity rushers.”

  Like rats swarming onto the deck of a sinking ship, more prob-

  lems keep surfacing with the current model. It now turns out that

  our beloved familiar baryonic matter—that is, everything we see,

  and everything that has form, plus all known energies—is abruptly

  reduced to just 4 percent of the universe, with dark matter constitut-

  ing about 24 percent. The true bulk of the cosmos suddenly becomes

  dark energy, a term for something utterly mysterious. And, by the

  way, the expansion is increasing, not decreasing. In just a few years,

  m U d d y U N i v e r s e

  7

  the basic nature of the cosmos goes inside out, even if nobody at the

  office watercooler seems to notice.

  In the last few decades, there has been considerable discussion

  of a basic paradox in the construction of the universe as we know it.

  Why are the laws of physics exactly balanced for animal life to exist?

  For example, if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more

  powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and life

  to develop. If the strong nuclear force were decreased 2 percent,

  atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together, and plain-vanilla hydrogen

  would be the only kind of atom in the universe. If the gravitational

  force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) would not

  ignite. These are just three of just more than two hundred physi-

  cal parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that

  it strains credulity to propose that they are random—even if that is

  exactly what standard contemporary physics baldly suggests. These

  fundamental constants of the universe—constants that are not pre-

  dicted by any theory—all seem to be carefully chosen, often with

  great precision, to allow for the existence of life and consciousness

  (yes, consciousness raises its annoying paradoxical head yet a third

  time). The old model has absolutely no reasonable explanation for