BIOCENTRISM
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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