The Greatest Challenge facing Science Today

Hint: It's not quantizing General Relativity

                “I grant you ample leave
To use the hoary formula ‘I am’
Naming the emptiness where thought is not;
But fill the void with definition, ‘I’
Will be no more a datum than the words
You link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’
That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.
Resolve your ‘Ego,’ it is all one web
With vibrant ether clotted into worlds:
Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’
Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,
Is stripped from naked Being with the rest
Of those rag-garments named the Universe.
Or if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong
You make it weaver of the etherial light,
Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time—
Why, still ’tis Being looking from the dark,
The core, the centre of your consciousness,
That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,
What are they but a shifting otherness,
Phantasmal flux of moments?—”

— George Eliot

Conventional scientists will tell you that physics is the most fundamental of the sciences; that physics can, in theory, explain all of chemistry, and chemistry can explain life; that the greatest challenge confronting science today is that the foundation of physics rests on two incompatible theories: Einstein’s theory of gravity, AKA General Relativity cannot be reconciled with the Standard Model of particle physics, AKA Quantum Mechanics.

I would contend that we know enough about life to say that there are many abilities of living things that will never be reduced to physics and chemistry, thus life must be included at the foundation in our scientific understanding of the Universe. I would add that the Big Bang paradigm which has (since 1965) been our fundamental understanding of the Universe and its history has now been stretched to the breaking point by observations, first of the accelerating expansion in 1997, and since 2023 by observations of the very early Universe by the Webb Space Telescope. The Big Bang is no longer tenable, and we need a cosmological framework for understanding observations of high redshift objects.

And the greatest challenge facing science today is not to reconcile GR with QM, but rather to expand our understanding of physics to be compatible with results from 150 years of research in parapsychology, without sacrificing the predictive accuracy of present-day physics in the realms where it agrees well with experiment.

Even more fundamental: the foundational methodology of science since Roger Bacon depends on three assumptions that are called into question by observations since his time:

1. The past causes the future, but the future can have no effect on the past.

2. There is an objective reality, independent of who is looking at it. Thus, the experimenter can be separated from the experiment. If you do an experiment and I do the same experiment, faithfully replicating your methods, we should get the same result.

3. The universe obeys fixed laws which are the same everywhere and for all time. (I call this the “zeroth law of science“.)

We have evidence that all three of these assumptions are violated. So we are called not just to new scientific paradigms but new rules for what constitutes scientific investigation.

1. Bell’s Theorem, from the physics community, tells us that an observer’s choice of what to observe has an effect that can be backward in time on what others observe. Why doesn’t this phenomenon run afoul of the grandfather paradox? Because, even though one can prove that this influence is happening, it is always masked by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, so that the statistical pattern seen by Observer 2 is always the same, no mater what Observer 1 does — even though the mix of different individual results within that statistical pattern is a different mix depending on what Observer 1 does.
   
   In lab experiments, feeling the future is well-documented, though it tends to be a weaker effect than telepathy. For example, in lab experiments where a subject is exposed to a random series of pictures on a screen, his skin will begin to sweat and his heartbeat rises a few seconds before each time that he is shown a violent ot sexually titillating image.
   
   

2. Again, standard quantum mechanics is front-running the science of magic. Reality is co-created by something objective (a wave function) and choices under the observer’s control (what to observe). John Wheeler (one of the great physicists of the 20th century) likens the situation to a game of 20 questions, in which the person responding to the questions doesn’t think of a target ahead of time, but instead makes sure that each of the yes/no answers that he offers in response to the questioner is consistent with all previous responses. In the end, the target that emerges is a product of the respondent (nature) and the questioner (experimenter).
   
   In PSI research, the magic goes deeper than this. There is an “experimenter effect” commonly observed. Results of the experiment turn out one way if I do the experiment and a different way if you are doing the same experiment. And it is not only PSI experiments that behave this way. It is a familiar experience to every bench scientist that biology results are often unreproducible, in that different laboratories doing the same experiment report incompatible results.
   
   

3. Science sees its job as discovering the laws that govern the behavior of things (particles, fields, living beings) in our tangible world of space and time. What if there are no laws — can we still do science? No laws? Certainly there are regularities, and science has had a 200-year run discovering and codifying them. But exactly halfway through that time (1925) it was discovered that the laws are not deterministic but statistical on the smallest scale. Quantum mechanics has come to terms with the fact that physical predictions are statistical averages for many quanta, and that physics is incapable of predicting the detailed behavior of individual particles. Beyond this is the problem that science has not yet come to terms with. There are all sorts of patterns within the range of behaviors that QM regards as purely random. There are correlations with time of day and phases of the moon that are real head-scratchers. The largest correlations are with intentions and beliefs of the people doing the experiment, and those around him. And as described above (macro PK) there are “miracles” which seem to be understandable only as rare and isolated exceptions to the laws of physics.
   
   

This latter facts mean that we all must soften our expectations around “reproducibility”. Rules for experimentation in the science of the paranormal are only now being written.

I think that our greatest challenge as scientists is to create a new scientific paradigm combined with new modes of scientific investigation. In this present age of converging crises, this abstract and foundational goal might also be our most important challenge as a human culture.

Personally, I am highly motivated to participate in brainstorming and collaborating toward creation of a new scientific paradigm and a new scientific culture. I offer the following as a possible beginning, the best first step that I am able to conceive from my present vantage.

In classical quantum mechanics, half the information necessary to predict the future of a system is in the wave function as reported by any observer, and half is purely random i.e., utterly unpredictable and uncorrelated with anything else in the universe. (This is a statement of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle*.)

I propose that there is nothing random in the “missing information” that constitutes this second half. The “missing” information is some combination — to be determined by future research — of

• Correlations with entangled particles elsewhere

• Consciousness of

  • Individuals who focus on the situation

  • Animals, plants, deceased and disembodied spirits

  • Collective entities that are difficult for us to conceive

• Intentions, conscious or unconscious, of any of the above three

• A destiny or Dao or Akashic path toward which our world must tend

It is natural to ask: what determines which part is “known” and which other part is subject to consciousness, intention, and the Dao? The answer comes straight from classical QM and it is an important clue: The observer gets to choose! Whatever the observer chooses to observe, that is the half of the information that is known. What is more, the very choice of what to observe can be made in such a way that it moves the system along a path from the present quantum state to a different state that the observer may choose. (This is called the Inverse Quantum Zeno Effect.)

How important is the IQZE in real life? Do conscious observers assert their will and change reality principally through IQZE or through the second half of “missing” information? These might be accessible questions in starting to build a new scientific paradigm from the hypothesis I’ve proposed.

— — — —

* Some people are familiar with a formulation of the Uncertainty Principle which says that to the extent the position of a particle is known, its momentum is unknown. This can be generalized to pairs of conjugate variables. In multi-particle situations (everything in real life) the known variable is something about the entire configuration of particles, and the conjugate variable is the Fourier transform of that variable in 3N-dimensional space.