Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

Page 147 of 151

Page 147 of 151
Jacques Vallee - Dimensions - A Casebook of Alien

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abandoned. In 1957 Hugh Everett and John Wheeler of Princeton University proposed a "Many Worlds Interpretation" (MWI) of quantum mechanics. Under that concept, the universe can be viewed as constantly branching through alternate realities. In recent years, new lines of speculation proved even more fruitful. They assumed an even greater number of dimensions. The most interesting results were produced by the superstring theories, which came into being in the 1970s. The belief today among many theoretical physicists involved in superstring research is that the universe evolved from a ten-dimensional string that was unstable. In the words of Taku and Trainer, "Six dimensions have curled up, leaving our four-dimensional universe intact." Over the decades we can expect this new line of speculation to be challenged, expanded, improved. Paranormal phenomena like UFOs can provide valuable material to this fundamental debate. Another interesting facet of the UFO phenomenon concerns information theory. According to modern physics, and in particular to Brillouin, Bagor, and Roghstein, information and entropy are closely related. The relationship has been expressed clearly by Brillouin: Entropy is generally regarded as expressing the state of disorder of a physical system. More precisely, one can say that entropy measures the lack of information about the true structure of the system. No information can be obtained in the course of a physical measurement, then, without changing the amount of entropy in the universe, the state of disorder of the cosmos. Now the physicist is faced with a new challenge: how to define disorder. And the task, as R. Schafroth has pointed out, is not easy: Some scientists pile up papers and books on their shelves in apparent disorder, yet they know perfectly how to find the document they want. If someone restores the appearance of order, the unfortunate owner of these documents may be unable to locate anything. In this case it is obvious that the apparent disorder was in fact order, and vice versa. Speculating on the relationship between these physical quantities, French physicist Costa de Beauregard wrote, "It must be in the nature of probability to serve as the operational link between objective and subjective, between matter and psychism." He points out that, in precybernetics physics, observation was regarded as a process without mystery, requiring no explanation, whereas free action, on the contrary, was "regarded as a physical impossibility and a psychological illusion." In modern physics these ideas have been revolutionized. Most theories advanced to explain paranormal phenomena borrow the standard concepts of space and time dimensions from physics. These concepts seem obsolete to me. They are not appropriate for understanding telepathy, or the moving of objects at a distance, or ghosts, or UFO abductions. I have always been struck also by the fact that energy and information are one and the same thing under two different aspects. Our physics professors teach us this, yet they never draw the consequences of that teaching. Perhaps it is proper to shake from our theoretical ankles the chains of spacetime. Space and time coordinates derive their convenience from graphic considerations. The theory of space and time is a cultural artifact. If we had invented the digital computer before inventing graph paper, we might have a very different theory of the universe today. The remarkable story of Cardan's dialogue with the two sylphs who disagreed about the nature of nucleus of an atom. This elegant theory, however, raised more questions than it solved and had to be “ae Information, Occasions, Spacetime